DIY

Their friends may be having babies, but Digger & The Pussycats are still fighting for their right to party – and yours too, writes RENÉ SCHAEFER.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] This is punk rock - stripped down, fast, catchy, minimal in execution and unrelenting in its repetition of a winning formula. Like a double espresso hit first thing in the morning, DIY gets your heart going and your limbs twitching.

Digging this might not make you a useful member of society; quite the opposite, really. It will make you want to waste your time swilling alcoholic beverages in dingy dives, get involved in reckless trysts with dubious characters and take up smoking cigarillos. It will turn you into an unsavoury character, or further your unhealthy nocturnal lifestyle choices, depending on how far down the road to ruin you have already traveled. Let’s face it, you were never going to be a brain surgeon anyway (not with those unsteady hands), so you might as well stay up all night, dancing to Digger & The Pussycats, and turn up bleary-eyed and feeling like shit to your abysmal minimum wage job in the morning. Digger are for you – and me too. Let’s listen to them together.

“If you miss The Tote, Diggers’ old stomping ground, and you need a fix of that old magic, you can’t go past this record. It practically oozes essence-of-Tote.”

‘Never Looked The Same’ charges at you like a toddler on red cordial and cough syrup. It’s hyperactive power pop with a stupid overdubbed guitar solo and teen angst lyrics. A classic opener, really. ‘Dirtbag’ is a hot tub party between The Shangri-Las and The Troggs – funny and messy. By the third track, ‘Chinatown’, Sam and Andy are all glammed up in their girlfriends’ clothes and applying each other’s make up before hitting the town.

‘A-holic’ is an anthem of sorts, while ‘Breadline’ tells it like it is. It may well be the best song about financial insolvency since ECSR’s ‘Insufficient Funds’. ‘What’s It To You?’ delivers a snot-nosed garage rock rave-up that could have sprung from the febrile mind of Billy Childish if he worked cleaning toilets at some smelly Melbourne rock pub. It’s followed by ‘Red Hair’, a fine slice of real life drama, which packs more ginger fuzz than a pride of rangas at a boozed-up strip poker game. It namechecks Axl Rose and Nicole Kidman in the same line, and after a few ales you’ll sing along to it whether you’re a redhead or not.

If you miss The Tote, Diggers’ old stomping ground, and you need a fix of that old magic, you can’t go past this record. It practically oozes essence-of-Tote, an unwholesome miasma of spilled beer, cigarette ash, barbequed sausage and a whiff of urinal cakes.

As if in summation of its hedonistic agenda, the album concludes with the ironic ‘All My Friends Are Having Babies’, the ultimate test of faith for the career fuck-up, whether you’re male or female. For how long can you resist the urge to conform, get a mortgage, pop out some lovely mewling offspring and descend into the hell of suburban bliss and wage slavery?

Digger thrown down the gauntlet in this ultimate existential challenge, but they’re not about to give you the answer. They’re not philosophers, after all, just two guys who want to keep having a good time and would love it if you were having one too. That’s what mates are for.

+

DIY is out now through Spooky Records.