Rush to Relax

The cool ice cream may have melted, but on third album 'Rush To Relax', Eddy Current Suppression Ring continue their fine run of form, writes CRAIG MATHIESON.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Eddy Current Suppression Ring cut their self-titled debut album in a suburban Melbourne rehearsal room on February 25, 2006. With the release this week of their third record, the subtly expansive Rush to Relax, they’ve now delivered three stand-out albums in just four years. In an age of obfuscation as an accepted marketing strategy, they’re a band of elegantly simple proportions and bountiful yield.

Mikey Young, the quartet’s guitarist and increasingly emphatic keyboardist, writes songs that are variations on several well-honed themes. You can twin tracks, thematically or sonically, from their new record and the band’s debut – such as the jittery ‘Having a Hard Time’ and the new ‘Walked Into a Corner’ – but repeated listens show that time’s passing has made a difference. Rush to Relax has the assuredness to push further; it’s the sound of a band who are masters of the 2.30 garage jam stretching into new, sometimes arresting forms.

The one-two opening salvo is vintage ECSR: ‘Anxiety’ has a gyrating bass part and flanged keyboard effects, creating a surging rhythm for vocalist Brendan Huntley to train surf in his inimitable style, while ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’ is powered by the furious fills of drummer Danny Young. Both songs have a tense undercurrent – they’re caught up in the need to communicate what’s not easily said and the associated fear of falling short: “A little scared I might fail,” as Huntley puts it on ‘Anxiety’.

As musicians they answer that worry on the third track, the six minutes plus of ‘Tuning Out’. Cycling through a few melodic chords to undulating effect, the piece is an immaculately crafted anthem for a lone member of the new blank generation. It has two voices, ultimately in opposition, with Huntley happily negating anything the lyric can imagine (getting a receipt or selling out) before Young takes a series of extended, alternately reverb and twangy solos that at certain points would satisfy anyone’s Duane Eddy fantasies.

Underscored by Danny Young’s metronomic time keeping, ‘Tuning Out’ is a series of guitar movements that would be extravagant if Mikey Young wasn’t slashing away at his strings. It has a cumulative clarity – the song eventually levitates – but it may also mark the point where some fans side with the past over the present and “I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff” syndrome kicks in.

“It’s the sound of a band who are masters of the 2.30 garage jam stretching into new, sometimes arresting forms.”

If they do they’re missing out. The variety on this record makes for telling contrasts, none more so than the jump cut from the torrid noise and cymbal wash of the minute flat ‘Walked Into a Corner’ to seven minutes of ‘Second Guessing’. The latter begins with ripe keyboard stabs shadowed by spectral washes, before Danny Young and bassist Brad Barry lock in step. Huntley’s rant is virtually unintelligible at points, falling into the irrational as the feverish, lysergic edge builds. It’s a track of forgotten answers to unknown questions, the kind of paranoid Krautrock hallucination that Elvis Costello might have aimed The Attractions at in a 1979 rehearsal.

The record also gets out of the teenage bedroom. Both ‘Gentleman’ and ‘I Can Be a Jerk’ are ballads of sorts, relationship pledges that wear their hearts on their sleeves. The former is humble, but not without humour – at a certain point the declarations grasp at any advantage the protagonist can get. Cooking dinner, he promises “lots of veggies if you don’t eat meat”; and you wonder if the hopeful suitor’s lack of knowledge about who he’s romantically serenading is a sly way of showing how panicked, or delusional, he is. Huntley’s unadorned, sometimes awkward, vocal style has no truck with the emotional tropes common to most ballads, giving them an honest, but also unsettling, tone.

Little traps sit in several other lyrics, with Huntley’s wordplay proving to be sometimes more than handy rhymes. In the malevolent, Yardbirds-ian sneer of ‘Burn Out’ a simple kiss-off becomes a genuine condemnation: “It’s in your face, that blank expression/You’ve got a bad case of manic depression.” It’s about as tough as the next line, a salutation, is forgiving and optimistic: “But pretty soon, you’ll be alright.” If the arrangements are no longer always interested in a straightforward building of tension and the associated release, the lyrics are equally unorthodox at points; the “cool ice cream” has melted.

Still, Rush to Relax, when shorn of 19 odd minutes of closing beach sounds, clocks in at a tidy 39 minutes. It’s barely longer than Eddy Current Suppression Ring or Primary Colours, but it has more to express, which is not easy always to do (or welcome by some) when you’re the primitivist avatars of the garage-punk scene. That ambition, and the strength of execution, marks it as a third album in the classic sense, a record where much that is great about a band is redefined to expansive parameters (see Prehistoric Sounds or The Queen is Dead). “Slow down before you fall down,” are the final lyrics, repeated into distant oblivion, but at this point Eddy Current Suppression Ring are clearly and comfortably accelerating. They’re plainly on a hell of a roll.

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Rush To Relax is out today (February 15) through Shock Records.