These days I oft times find myself haphazardly using up the last few of my eMusic downloads at the end of the month. It can be a slightly edgy, weirdly cautious business (I hate wasting things) and often culminates in my snagging another Latin collection of eager garage punk or (more often than you’d imagine) some murky new Soft Machine live set.
Well this month, I stumbled upon a new tack that I’ll employ more often. I chose at random one of my favourite labels of recent years – Trouble in Mind – and just go for it. A bit of rummaging around amongst the releases there and jackpot…
Beef Jerk
Beef Jerk are Australian and are part of the, er, burgeoning “dolewave” scene there (yes, really). And, in spite of my proverbial goldfish-like span of attention, have had the run of the car stereo for much of the week. Their debut record, Tragic, is a collection of demos that had been knocking around on the Internet for a couple of years before they decided to spruce them up and self-release them officially. TiM stepped in from there and have given it a proper release so that the inquisitive punters of the globe can get busy.
It’s a great little batch of fifteen songs that starts off promisingly (“Why are you so disagreeable? Table manners? Unbelievable”) and really kicks on from there. It’s absolutely packed full of loopy, jangly chords, dry lyrics, a few profanities and the odd sprinkling of Beefheart-ian rough sax. The songs do touch on a fair amount of everyday slacker business – caravan parks, shoplifting, drinking and general loafing round – but also take in mysterious Frenchmen, doomed fathers and flights to the seabed (“don’t forget the sunscreen lotion / fish fingers in the sun”).
I’m clearly not a musician and can only scratch my head and applaud songwriters Jack Lee and Mikey Branson’s ability to choose the right chords each time. I’m also very much impressed by the former’s prodigious ability to sing out of tune, and although press reviews frequently mention the Go-Betweens, I’d say Beef Jerk are more like another batch of Mark E Smith’s children (alright, grandchildren).
There’s not a lot of Beef Jerk around on the Internet (yet?), which could of course mean a couple of things, but I’m going to take the getting-in-at-the-ground-floor line. Fairly recently, you could actually stream the whole of the record from the band’s Bandcamp page, but until that returns (as they claim it will), you’ll have to trawl through the demos on Soundcloud or get a few tasters from YouTube.
This one’s my favourite:
(Particularly gratifying to see the pickup driver put the bin back up at the end, nice lads really…)
But this is also a great surging bugger of a song:
Partly Porpoise 