THE CHATS, HIGH RISK BEHAVIOUR REVIEW: TINNIES AND TITTIES




Well, like everybody else and their brother, I first heard of young Australian drunkpunk band The Chats through their viral video Smoko in…oh fuck when was it…let me check…Jesus, 2017, that long ago already, times flies when you’re having fun and pandemics are panicking the populace.

Anyway, I loved the song, as did many others, though I suppose the idea of ‘going viral’ is not one that many bands would want right now. I followed them from song to song – Pub Feed, Identity Theft, The Clap, Dine and Dash – and loved them all. Silly, spiky, snotty garage punk with a hot snappy brattitude, from a young band upping their antics and (deliriously emptied) bar with every release. The videos for each song really complement the music, hilariously angry and sleazy slices of small-town lifeless life, done with fuck-it-all, let’s-go-for-it vitriol and developing talent.

The Chats won the virtual viral lottery, really, and have had to do something extremely difficult: grow up (as far as they can and have and will) in public, finding their own sound along the way. They have developed from Queensland nobodies to sorta-somebodies touring the UK and USA and such, hanging out with Iggy Pop and (unfortunately) Dave Grohl and other such malcontent reprobates, scarcely believing their luck. A giddy, heady, vertiginous rapid-fire ascent for three very young guys: ginger mullet-sporting singer and bassist Eamon Sandwith, Josh ‘Pricey’ Price on guitar, and Matt Boggis on drums. 


The questions are: they a one-trick pony?

Answer: No.

And is their new debut album High Risk Behaviour any good?

Answer: Absofuckinglutely.

I was waiting with baited breath (whatever the fuck that is) for this one, I admit, and I was not disappointed. I don’t buy too many albums by new bands these days – Joy as an Act of Resistance by Idles would be the last one a couple of years ago – and when I buy something I tend to get way the fuck into it, a remnant of my old unemployed zero-cash (hard) times when younger and unable to buy much music. But all the omens were good for this one, and every song they released topped the last. And then, at last, the album on CD dropped through my door, case all fucked up cos the vendor only put it in a cheap plastic bag with no cardboard backing. This cracked entry seemed somehow oddly appropriate, given the material barely contained within.



I have been listening to this album for a few dazed days, ignoring pandemic deathstats and battering round Falkirk doing deliveries for my job, front line worker, key turner worker, complete with all the tittyflash offers of no-touch sex and see-you-after-all-this pussy that entails. Chuckling, and lying. The good thing about all this madness is that the roads have been relatively empty, aside from the odd idiot impeding the delivery of food and goods to the hungry and needy and lazy middle classes who can’t be bothered making their own dinners or going shopping. This has made screaming and screeching aboot the town with the album on repeat much easier, and much more fun. Not advocating the world gets more plagues to make punksoaked driving more pleasant, but it’s a chinscratcher thought.

So what exactly is it about High Risk Behaviour that makes it an instant almost-classic, to me at least? Well, let’s get this straight away: there is nothing new here musically at all, nothing that any fan of punk music will not have heard a million times before, though not better done – mostly. The band got thrust into the world spotlight before they had had a chance to develop their own unwound sound and fury, and jumped several levels from angry mad young cunts practicing in a garage to world-known beat (‘em up) combo instantly. 

Anybody who knows the music, and listened to the two previous EPs, 
The Chats and Get This in Ya!!, would hear The Misfits and Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks and Iggy and the Stooges and Dead Kennedys (especially the Dead Kennedys) all pleasantly present and correct, both sides of the Atlantic historically sonically represented, far from Australia, the youngstars trying on their music parents’ clothes to find the right tight fit and then stretch their own sound beyond it. So it’s hardly their fault they blew up before they grew up musically or physically. It’s their own fault for being viciously funny wee cunts, and making funny sunny Sunshine Coast videos, The Monkees after a few beers and lines of speed too many.

Down to brass tacks and brass necks: HIGH RISK BEHAVIOUR FUCKING ROCKS LIKE AN ALZHEIMER'S PATIENT ON A ROLLERCOASTER.

The album is under half an hour of shitkicking, beerdrinking, braindraining, drugsnorting, slagshagging mayhem. It’s basically a series of images of sweaty small town beertopia, sunstunned heatstroked brains and bulging angry neck veins, furious drunk punk curses howled at the uncaring conspiratorial Antipodean sky, pissed-off pissed-up young drunk cunts having a laugh and howling gales of despairing laughter at it all and more or less. 

What the fuck does that all mean? How the fuck should I know? I just went into the frowning wordcurve and went with it.

However, what it does mean is that any fan of the previous work of the band, or phlegmatic smegmatic dregtastic scumpunk in general, will fucking love this. If they have any sense that is, after insolvent years of drug and drink and solvent self-abuse. The album is by turns hilarious, sleazy, poignant, stupid as shit, drunk, punk, cunt-cranky, STD-itchy, bitchy. The hilariously angry Sandwith (who else would write a song aboot getting turned away from a club for having a mullet? Genius!) gives us a drink-drowned drifting sea of woozy boozy images of (I would imagine) the town the band come from, full of angry drunken rugger dads and smalltown hatred and skanky birds and boys and heat and heat and heat, always fucking beating meaty heat, song after song complaining about the freckleskinned young white man’s burden of living in a cunty too-hot country, sweating and fretting over the drugs and music and beer running out. Just took a sip from my own lukewarm just-bought beer on this unusually warm, locked-down Scottish day to reassure myself. Chilling thought.


As I said earlier, you can hear the band’s headspinfluences threaded through them. The major one that comes through is the Dead Kennedys, and this is no bad thing. Chats songs are not political at all, except for the frown-including The Kids Need Guns, where I would assume they’re being sarcastic aboot gun violence. In that respect at least, they’re fuck all like Jello and the crew. I got my brother Tony to buy this album as well, and he said “the guitar is magic.” He’s a big Angus Young man, Australia-ironically, so his standards are pretty fucking high. 

And he’s correct: this is a really fucking great guitar anti-hero album. Pricey is coming on like fuck in his stringslashing, and on stuff like Identity Theft he’s really advancing rapidly into different realms than would have been pissed-up possible for him round Smoko time. East Bay Ray is clearly a massive influence on him, and the DKs sound resonates and reverbs constantly through the songs, but he’s not as good as Ray, and probably never will be, cos, well, who the fuck is, except Ray himself, one of the all-time great guitartists?



The handy solo on Identity Theft is pretty much perfect. It’s not quite there style-wise, raw and ragged and jagged and dirty, but for a slutty wee cunt of a band like this that is totally fucking perfect. It can’t be too good, got to be a revving never-reversing swinging red gleaming sports car with a scratch where some horrible cunt keyed it, always seeming like it can come off the rails at any irreverent moment. Songs like Ross River, Heatstroke, Billy Backwash’s Day, and 4573 (tracks 9-12 are the best volley on the album, a part of the proceedings that never stops attacking, a perfect storm of snotty weapon trashflashery, the best brilliant songs to drive to down confused dark Scottish backroads imaginable) are like the best songs the Dead Kennedys never wrote, and coming from a huge DKs fan that is saying something. As valid as my beer-chugging, shrugging, fuck-it opinion is, that is. Cliché sera sera.

Me talking aboot the DKs here makes it seem and sound as if The Chats are not their own band, some deranged tribute band or something. Well, this is absolutely not true. Musically, there may be some veracity to that statement, but what differentiates them from any number of other no-hoper garage blands is the very thing they seem to hate and scream aboot 24/7 365: their Australianocity. Eamon’s Sunshine Coast accent (I always like meeting Australian people, cos there’s a lot of easygoing sunshine spilling out of them – there was a time years ago in Scotland when every second barman and barmaid seemed to be on a gap year from Ozland), viciously wicked sense of humour, and his esoteric-to-foreigners grogswiller grotslut slanguage are what makes this fucking album stand out from the immune-to-originality herd. I mean, don't underestimate semi-poetic lyrics (though let's not push it) like these, cos they're immaculate and perfect:

Push bike way to town ridin' heaps fast

90Ks an hour down the Esplanade
Kicked out the pub so I'm headed to the park
Sinkin' heaps of tinnies till it gets dark


It’s a really refreshing change to not hear cunts parroting shit American ‘awesome, dude!’ slang, instead using their own parochial regional vocab. As a wordbitch, this shit gives me a fucking comprehension erection, and makes me go and look it all up out of love of new words and phrases and angry funny fire in the young degenerate next-gen hearts, just to know what the fuck they’re up to and saying. I’m not going to go into it, cos I have been working and listening and have not had enough time to dig and dip and delve into the shallow booze-swallowing depths of the album, but you know what the fuck I mean. This band and album work precisely because they are far enough away from sodomising Yank language to keep it at bay, and the introduction of a new accent and fuck-the-cunt’s-saying? vocab really help things along. And this will always be the case.

Anyway. Let’s wrap this the fuck up. I guess you can see by now that I really like the album. I don’t think there’s a bad song on it, but there are two or three I don’t like as much as the others. But so what? That’s the same for every person, and every album we listen to. I just thought I would throw down a few stray dingo thoughts aboot the album. Myself and my friend Paul (whom I got into the band) are going to see the cunts in October, unless the gig has been cancelled or postponed; not checked. We’ll see. Or not.

Cannot…fucking…wait.

In closing: I woke up early this morning and was unable to sleep. I went and got petrol and went on a highspeed drive on a short stretch of road between Falkirk (whose very limits I live on) and Linlithgow, the next town over, crap excuses prepared if I got stopped by the cops. I stored up some images as I drove fastasfuck, then sprayed them out across the page (well, monitor, but you know what I mean) when I got home, and have enclosed them below. The Chats: thanks for such a fucking great album that has really made my blood happily boil and raised my hackles. Got sick to death of eating out of the sonic trash!

4:53, 13/4/20

I needed to roadtest and taste the album. Petrolled up in Polmont, then drove out to the edge of Falkirk a mile away, through the Lathallan Roundabout, towards Linlithgow. Needed that speedy slap of roadturn black to shake off the corona blues, to fuse the tunes to something vaster and faster and wider than itself. Round the roundabout to the other side, then into the road to Linlithgow, already blasting the album, second song on since starting down the Main Road in Polmont from the petrol station, Drunk and Disorderly, banging and banging and banging, watch the white lines slowly suddenly speedily appear-disappear in the middle of the velocity-conquered road, toe the accelerator, bound into the middle of nowhere view, trees flashing by, skeletal arboreal bodies proudly emerging from winter cocoons, all shades of green and grey and mute blossoming perfection, fences and unseen sheep and sleeping bird homes, and forward and forward and forward, fuck knows what speed, 70, 80, sliproads staring in awe at the fastpast hurtling sound-trundling vehicle, mad ginger Aussie mulletskull ranting chanting screaming vocals and East Bay Ray Jr guitars and slutty muffled drumthump, skinsounds unwound, soundwounds inflicted on the sleeping consciousness of an upcoming minted Tory town, fullbeam headlight-illuminated speedsigns voooooshing past, laughed at, mocked, unheeded, unneeded, not part of the night’s current brainstrain reality, skip The Clap even though it’s good need to hear other songs before we hit the town, past the truckstop probable dogging spot, zero light reflections, no givers or takers, no movers and shakers, no earthquakers, no high-heel mirror breakers, zoom and whoosh and roar and soar and feel the brain doing elegant frenetic frenzied kinetic cartwheels of liberated pandemic inner frenzy, whiteblackwhiteblackwhiteblack snorting up the confused road markings, fuck here comes somebody towards me turn your lights down over that hill cunt swooooooosh past thank you, past the SLOW DOWN!!! town-edge flashing sign speed cameras so fucking scared suck my fucking cock, quicker than quick through at the roundabout just where Paki’s old tattoo studio in his hoose used to be and I got my Screeching Weasel tattoo in 1989, fuck this, no-go area, not tempting bored Buzzbomb-alike small-town copsuckers, too easy to see and trace and track me in Lithgy High Street, sweet treat, fuck it, turn around and bounce back towards the infinite Kerouac-like freedom of that concealed towns-connecting road, past Aldi and all of the night in front of me like the end of time and hunger itself, rattleclatterbatter of the sounds through the groundbreaking wheels of the car to send never-dissipated culture shocks through the earth and tectonic plates grinding and whining and new aesthetic continents rising up from the not-far-from-Edinburgh spoiled affluent ground, back up the hill past the SLOW DOWN!!!! sign on the other side facing away, ha fuck you make me you cunts, back up the denuded hill, past the old closed dark dank pub on the left, then no real lights, blackstorm, the horizon unfolding and peeling out in front of us like a cartoon being generated just one easy slippy unfortunate frame away from the film coming undone, and then the hellthefuckhellthefuckhellthefuckyes tracks 9-12 fuckerpunch combo, the best songs the Dead Kennedys never did, Ross River sucked me like a mozzie bite wee bisex shagging slag dag, the guitar cutting through the frightened disturbed avoiding air like a sharkfin of the death of peace forever, round and round and round I go and where I stop nobody knows fucking including me, ah fuck too soon, need tracks 11 and 12, make the right turn Clyde, left and up towards Bathgate at the Lathallan roundabout again, howling the words and leaning into the tattered frowning curve of punkstorm, fuck Bathgate, eight miles, too far, waste of petrol, only patrolling this bit of the infinite bluff to hear these needed mad sounds, pogoing going gone nowhere but right here right now, Scotland zipping and whipping and skipping by high and dry and glad to be rid of me, right okay, back down towards Polmont again, find a quick easy turnspot, parking place, here we go, then it’s fucking 4573 again and again and again all never-weak week, one of the best songs I have heard in many a jaded voyeur moon, drunk small town bitter bored hatred, competitive wanker dads and kiddy rugby frenzy, longnecks and rednecks, the same tired stinking crumbling ruin of dying western snivelisation everywhere you go and can never get gone from, uniform consumerist jackboot jackasses, I’m not gonna do your Nazi march tonight, fuck look at this you can see the pinky orange clouds over Grangemouth lit up by Petroineos battering down here up ahead under the bridge, it’s like driving into some sort of low-rent paint-peeling Dante’s Inferno by way of Zombie Creeping Flesh and that shitty cannibal food production lab at the start of the film, but so beautyfuel at night, a perfect imperfect bastard fusion of gaily dancing carcinoma clouds and Antipodean anarchaotic new album trajectories, escape velocities from mundane Falkirk realities, and now SLOW DOWN!!!! pisses the electronic cuntsign into the unobeying stampeding bullwind as I flash past it with no malice aforethought, never storebought, maybe just a couple more soundswarms before I go home, down by Aldi’s up to the left back and round and then down into the valley of deaf and turn the stereo down so I don’t wake the wankers from their eternal sleep, don’t chop the smooth jugular of their sleep-within-life as Bukoswki said, don’t cause myself any strife, copcalls, coupla-year-ago arrested welcome-to-the-neighbourhood recalls, pull into the car park sorta silent as a loudmouthed mouse, park, ratchety-pull parking brake, turn off the panting well-exercised engine, give the molested silence a break, grab my food goodies bought from the expensive petrol station, get out, lock down, lock up, sit down, spew out, it’s like what Hunter S Thompson said about The Edge…what did he say again…too late, fallen over it…

…and relax.

5:21, 13/4/2020





END



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