Record Reviews
Jawa/Seven Songs
By René Schaefer
If Budd’s 'Jawa' is the breathless main event, 'Seven Songs' – the solo album of its bass player Craig Westwood – is its afterglow, writes RENÉ SCHAEFER.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Brisbane band Budd released two of the most brain-pulverizing albums of the ‘90s, Yakfat (1993) and Naf (1994).The spectre of grunge still loomed large in the popular imagination at the time, and a lot of bands tried to out-do each other when it came to sheer volume and brute force. There was something a bit different about Budd though. As much as they might have been inspired by the overdriven sludge riffs of The Melvins or the bass-heavy proto-stoner thump of Kyuss, they quickly asserted their own sensibilities.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The result was a band that had a truly original approach, consciously or not. For listeners weaned on the inner city art-punk of the ‘80s, their reductivist approach might even have resonated with the bludgeoning attack of feedtime or Grong Grong, but it was filtered through an appreciation for suburban metal, that was distinctly of its time.
Of course, this rehabilitation of metal, which began with grunge’s exhumation of the bloated corpse of Black Sabbath (the ground softened by the Butthole Surfers a few years earlier), has continued ever since. These days the language of metal has penetrated and cross-fertilised just about every other genre of music one cares to mention, including the experimental avant-garde. Ironic really, for a type of music that was regarded as deeply conservative, even reactionary, in its early incarnation as working class teen fodder.
So, Budd pretty much had their finger on the erratic pulse of the zeitgeist back then, but as so often happens in Australia, apart from a dedicated cult following, wider appreciation eluded them. It didn’t help that with the demise of their erstwhile record label Fellaheen in the late ’90s (once responsible for releasing albums by luminaries such as Ben Lee, Sandpit, Pavement and Guided By Voices), their records soon became obscure collectors’ items. Deprived of finding new audiences through re-issues, Budd became another footnote in the frustratingly inconsistently documented history of the Australian underground.
Well, “boo” to that! After moving to Melbourne in 2005, Budd guitarist Jeremy Finlayson roped in two good friends and contemporaries from the old days to start a new line-up of the band. Bassist Craig Westwood had been in Dern Rutlidge after making his name as a guitarist in Christbait, Australia’s hugely influential and revered grindcore pioneers. Needless to say, apart from a rabid cult following, Christbait are another band criminally neglected when it comes to critical evaluation and documentation, but that’s a story for another time. Completing nouveau-Budd was drummer Tom Jackman, formerly of Albini-loving power trio Ricaine. What a pedigree!
The idea wasn’t to revisit their past achievements, but to keep moving forward. Sporadic live shows over the last few years made that clear, as the band increasingly started to explore dynamics and atmosphere in their music. This approach forms the basis of their new album Jawa. Over its six sprawling tracks, there is a repeating sense of tension and release. It is deliberately not music for people with short attention spans.
“This is not music designed to be listened to on a crappy iPod. It demands to be heard through speaker stacks the size of walk-in freezers.”
Songs generally begin with pretty, almost funky sections in which Jackman’s jazz-influenced drumming and Westwood’s sinuous bass lines leave plenty of room for the guitarist to paint sparse, quasi-psychedelic landscapes, before the band lurches into some almighty, thundering battering ram assault. This is not music designed to be listened to on a crappy iPod. It demands to be heard through speaker stacks the size of walk-in freezers, to completely immerse yourself in the decimating volume and obliterating force of the riff.
Like all the best rock music there is something deeply sexual about this album. It might be missing the restless and excitable sex beat of pure rock’n’roll, but its throbbing intensity hits you somewhere below your pudgy gut and stays there for a while. It’s no coincidence that this kind of music appeals equally to listeners of both genders. As a metaphor for sex, math rock is too solipsistic and onanistic. Hardcore is over way too fast, leaving you with a nagging question of: “Is that all there is?” Here though, we have music that is in turns languid and aggressive, pummeling and caressing. To employ the dirt bike motif the band is so fond of, it’s about having control and letting go of control; it’s about the rush and the adrenaline, and keeping your wheels in the dirt. And it’s also heaps of fun.
If Jawa is the breathless main event, Craig Westwood’s solo album Seven Songs is the afterglow, reclining in crumpled bed sheets, flicking cigarette ash into a half-empty wine glass.
Sparse and introspective, it’s the sound of a man retreating to his shed to mess around on his electric guitar in the middle of the night, while his lover is asleep. It’s freezing outside, but the heater’s on and there are still some dregs at the bottom of the bottle of cabernet merlot, so the songs keep on coming. Westwood sings his melancholic musings in a clear, strong voice over subtly reverbed guitar and minimal tambourine percussion. At times it could almost be a Mazzy Star song that’s playing at the back of his mind.
Sitting right at the centre of the album is a fine cover of ‘Thirteen’, a song Glen Danzig wrote for Johnny Cash. Westwood’s reading is faithful, but he doesn’t try to imitate the vocal mannerisms of either artist, making the song his own in the process. For ‘People’ he slumps over the piano to play a one-fingered bass line, while ‘Ready To Die’ turns into a folk lament worthy of Leadbelly.
The clincher comes with the quietly epic ‘Breaking On The Inside’, with its gloomy piano chords and shimmering tremolo guitar fragments. It’s as forlorn a tune as you’re ever likely to hear and shows just how far Westwood has come as a writer and vocalist since torturing guitar strings in Christbait.
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