AL

The debut album from Melbourne’s Bum Creek exposes the modern rock rort for what it is, writes SHAUN PRESCOTT.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] One of the crucial turning points for noise music over the past five years has been its embrace of the unfashionably florid. The resurgence of noise in the first decade of this century, and the annihilating rate at which it was dispatched, demanded that something radical occur for it to retain some kind of currency. Instead of noise being a blistering culmination of raw data and disorientation, a feverous racket of white noise, the mood that Melbourne’s Bum Creek tap into aims to co-opt and corrupt the inanities of the ever-present: video games, incidental music, elevator music, and by extension, pop music. What better way to purvey the red-hot endpoint of information overload than to blatantly incorporate the sounds we consider most vacuous? Bum Creek force these sounds to blossom into something unsettling and uncanny, but also – and most importantly - involving and lively.

On AL – their first full-length LP (not withstanding a limited run Chapter Music CD from last year) – Bum Creek wear their laughably hollow approximations on their sleeves, and with pride. The opening track ‘Bollywood’ doesn’t sound much like an Indian blockbuster, but the call-and-response, the blunted melodic flourishes, and the buoyant starry-eyed joyousness provide enough subliminal reference points to compensate for its (presumably intentional) formal emptiness. Likewise, ‘Pterodactyl’ captures a lagging, early-CGI stiltedness by wielding a series of signifiers (tribal beats, endlessly resonating keyboard tones, the assumed sound of a screeching Pterodactyl) that amount to nothing but a fabrication; a human construction. Dinosaurs didn’t play music, nor did we hear them screech, so why do we associate this sound with dinosaurs? Disney? Walking With Dinosaurs? Unquestionable scientific evidence? Bum Creek take their cues from noble attempts to approximate authenticity. Coupled with the droning vocals, the vapour-trails of reverb and feedback, it feels like something is fizzling, like a mutual understanding is imploding, like some petulant truth is rearing its ugly head. It’s funny and intoxicating.

“What better way to purvey the red-hot endpoint of information overload than to blatantly incorporate the sounds we consider most vacuous?”

AL isn’t a forcedly cerebral album though: it’s legitimately “pop”. It pursues its tact without remorse and does it in an accessible a fashion as possible. There are no headaches here. It’s rhythmic, playful and melodic, albeit unconventionally. Sure, the mangled synths in ‘Lava Shoes’ sound like some Nintendo character negotiating a hairy fire themed level, but there’s enough insinuated rhythm for it to get stuck in your head. And it’s not all about fucking with context: ‘Rick Stinger Body Board’ has a lot of tunnel wave phaser action, but on face value it’s a woozy slow dance in the Holy Balm or Excepter vein: weird, drugged 3am dance music.

But in the purest sense it’s noise. Bum Creek is a culmination of strange associative data. They aren’t offering this hubris to be unquestioningly consumed, there’s an understanding that these sounds will trigger certain images, no matter how unlikely. AL proves the ongoing relevance of noise music in an age where celebrated modern rock bands can uncritically remanufacture done-and-dusted rock motifs without question. Will we get to the point eventually where garage rock, or shoegaze, or brit-pop, becomes as inanely functional as a video game soundtrack, or an elevator ditty? Surely these constantly resurfacing motifs, dwindling gradually in power and meaning, will eventually be depleted into another weightless approximation? Arguably they already have, but hopefully groups like Bum Creek will continue to point out how hilarious the whole rort really is, in the spirit of fun.

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Bum Creek’s 'AL' is out now through Chapter Music.