Ooga Boogas

Simply put, Ooga Boogas are the best band in the world. Or so argues PATRICK EMERY, not putting it simply at all.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The Ooga Boogas claim they don’t play the industry game. It’s one of those self-gratifying pronouncements that just about every band with a whiff of pretension to artistic independence has made over the years – frequently in the same breath that they’re metaphorically fellating every PR flack in close commercial proximity, in the vain hope of securing a glorious deal comprising studio time, a lush promotional campaign and a mountain of class A drugs.

But the Ooga Boogas are different, institutionally so. For a start, there’s the name: Ooga Boogas. Andrew Bolt and his conservative commentating brethren would have us believe that political correctness has cast a dark cloud over creativity and critical integrity – but no-one’s told the Ooga Boogas. ‘Ooga Booga’ sounds like it’s been crimped from the ethnographic notes of a 19th century colonial explorer, and used as the inspiration for a speciously humorous 1930s graphic novel.

“You can’t make that shit up unless you’re committed to the honourable cause of irony. That’s where the Ooga Boogas are, and fuck the rest of you.”

Witness the opening line of the band’s debut album, Romance and Adventure, released about five years ago: “I’m an Ooga Booga, and my cock’s made of wood/It drags on the ground/But it still tastes good.” You can’t make that shit up unless you’re committed to the honourable cause of irony. That’s where the Ooga Boogas are, and fuck the rest of you.

The Ooga Boogas launched Romance and Adventure at a pizza shop in Fitzroy on a Saturday afternoon. Who does that? In the handbook of marketing concepts, it was filed under Fucking Weird. But it was packed out, even if the sound was just what you’d expect from a small room with an extreme sonic experience limited to the patronage of late-night obnoxious patrons.

And just as the Ooga Boogas could have become the next big garage thing – presumably, taking over the mantle held by guitarist Mikey Young’s Eddy Current Suppression Ring, they disappeared from view. There were various reasons for the band’s silence, from the competing professional to the unavoidably personal, but it left a void that could never be filled, not even by the latest gaggle of floppy-haired, Beatle-boot-wearing Surf Coast garage rockers.

But in 2013 came a new album. It was released, sort of, earlier this year. The promotional material is to die for: a PowerPoint presentation, for fuck’s sake. For those of us whose professional lives remain plagued with facile, inane presentations populated with grammatically mutilated rhetorical statements and confusing pictographic metaphors, this was manna from heaven.

Then there’s the new record itself. It doesn’t have a title – the Ooga Boogas don’t play anyone’s game, except their own. But the album’s got everything: post-punk electronica, dirty-arse surf rock, elegant garage pop and everything in between. While watching the Ooga Boogas play at the Great Britain Hotel on the night of National SLAM Day, I remarked to a friend that the Ooga Boogas were the best band in the world, and I still mean it.

“Bohr would have accepted that the blend of libertarian attitudes and obfuscating corporate discourse makes this the best music in the world.”

I can’t really justify that statement objectively, but it’s true. Physicists Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein traded barbs in scientific periodicals over the pair’s differing analysis of measurement certainty: Einstein, who famously proclaimed that God doesn’t play dice, believed every event could be predicted with knowledge of the appropriate variables. Bohr disagreed; for Bohr, it was only in the act of measurement that certainty existed.

So while Einstein might take the Ooga Boogas formula on ‘Archie and Me’ – the basic surf-garage pop melody, the lyrical tales of leaving the mundane domestic and vocational world behind for a life of unadulterated hedonism – and arrive at a superficially reasonable conclusion that they were just another garage band doing the same old shit, Bohr would have accepted that the blend of libertarian attitudes and obfuscating corporate discourse (which other band has used ‘downsizing’ in a song?) makes this the best music in the world.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Ooga Boogas - Archie & Me by Aarght Records

And Bohr would be right. He’d have realised that ‘Archie and Me’ was the natural precursor to ‘Oogie Boogie II (The Hobo Shodown)’, and that that song was the a mean, lean, aerodynamically crafted and fuel-efficient garage rock track for the LPG generation. And Bohr would’ve understood that if you can’t dance to this, you’re physically unable, or psychologically on an extreme risk profile.

But Bohr is a physicist, and physicists don’t do qualitative analysis without lots of confusing formulas, brown jackets and bad comb-over hairstyles. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig disappeared up his own philosophical backdoor and into the realms of insanity in an effort to identify the objective attributes of quality. How do you explain why ‘FYI’, with its Harold Faltermeyer-like ’80s synth riff and subtle nod to abbreviated workplace language, is so good, when it should be so bad? Because it is, that’s why.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Ooga Boogas - FYI by Aarght Records

The objective attributes of ‘Mind Reader’ and ‘It’s A Sign’, however, are there, albeit in an inverted form. Both are love songs of a skewed type, and both work the genre into new forms. The former is intense, passionate and slightly angry: if The Scientists’ ‘Frantic Romantic’ is the ideal adolescent love song, then this is love in your 40s, when you know it’s all complex and you still can’t stop stepping on eggshells. The latter takes its musical cues from Lou Reed’s sweet pop sensibility on ‘A Perfect Day’, and takes a narrative journey from the innocent to the salaciously explicit: “It seems to me/That we’ve got something going on/When you take your panties off/And you don’t put them back on/It’s a sign.” I’m an Ooga Booga, and you know the rest.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Ooga Boogas - It is a Sign by Aarght Records

Still, there’s a temptation to over-intellectualise this album. Ben Walker took hyper-analysis of Frank Zappa to its gratuitous extreme in Frank Zappa and the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play and arguably took the fun out of Zappa’s potty-mouthed lyrics. You can look at the Ooga Boogas’ ‘Studio of My Mind’ and make the same mistake: the driving, Krautrock-esque beat provides the soundtrack for deconstruction and disruption of institutionalised schools of thought. It exposes the tension between the contemporary drive for lateral problem-solving in the workplace and the rigid discursive structures without which the entire institution of government crumbles into a pathetic heap (in the case of this song, symbolised by the freak-out late in the track). Or maybe it’s just a fucking good song. Go figure it out yourself.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Ooga Boogas - Studio of My Mind by Aarght Records

“If the Exploding White Mice were the house band on the Titanic, this is what you’d be hearing as plunged into the icy waters of the Atlantic.”

So what’s there after you discard all the self-indulgent and largely irrelevant cultural and pseudo-scientific reference points? What about ‘Ecstasy’, a contemplative track, Lou Reed coming down after a three day amphetamine bender, all bleary-eyed and completely fucked up: the contrast between the song’s title and the underlying song hits hard, and straight to the heart. Or there’s ‘A Night to Remember’: if the Exploding White Mice were the house band on the Titanic, this is what you’d be hearing as plunged into the icy waters of the Atlantic.

Finally, ‘Sex in the Chillzone’. Not so long ago a song like this would have provoked the ire of the Catholic League of Decency, the Festival of Light and every two-bit politico-religious lobby group. It’s tawdry and titillating, sexy and satisfying. Barry White meets Remain In Light-era Talking Heads, with Marvin Gaye doing lines of coke off the production desk. It’s as subtle as a pornographic novel: “I had sex in the chillzone/You were there too/I had sex in the chillzone/I had it with you.” If Portnoy had had this to listen to, he’d spend the entire nine minutes complaining even more.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Sex in the Chillzone by Mess+Noise

The practice of music reviewing is fundamentally a conceit, a flimsily constructed facade of rhetorical masturbation that interests some and pleases few. Dressing critical analysis up in colourful semantics is fun but has the intellectual integrity of a department store window display. That much is true. But none of it changes the unassailable fact that this is the best record of the year, and the Ooga Boogas are the best band in the world.

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‘Ooga Boogas’ is out now through Aarght!/Fuse. Read the band’s Track by Track on the album.