It feels like there has been a slew of extremely strong female-fronted punk bands coming out of Australia and New Zealand over the past five years. The obvious example would be the formidable Amyl and the Sniffers, but also worth a mention are the seemingly-short-lived Miss June, Dave Grohl and Kim Gordon's favourite band of 2021, Kills Birds, and Press Club who, with three albums under their belt now, are clearly here for the long haul.
Press Club are Iain Macrae on bass, Frank Lees on drums, Greg Rietwyk on guitars and Natalie Foster on vocals. They hail from Brunswick and, as their biography on Discogs has it:
"Their roots lay in a city in a state of flux, experiencing decay, demolition and development on a mass scale. Press Club is the musical embodiment of the attitude of a generation experiencing impermanence in every way."
2022's Endless Motion album follows on from the much loved 2018 debut Late Teens and it's equally frenetic 2019 follow up, Wasted Energy. The band toured the UK in November 2022, and word of their incendiary live show seems to have added to the buzz around them. As they told NME last year, they were forced by Covid to put aside their usual fast approach to songwriting, hence the delay in the arrival of this album.
This longer songwriting approach hasn't impacted the rawness of their music, which has always been at the more melodic end of punk in any case, but it has perhaps made them a bit more reflective while at the same time making them tighter than ever.
There are frenetic punk pogo anthems here, notably 'Glasgow', 'Endless Motion' and the fantastic 'Less These Days', but there's also more thoughtful and/or sprawl-y, stream of consciousness fare such as 'Untitled Wildlife' and 'Cancelled'.
The album begins with the breezy and euphoric guitar driven 'Eugene', which contrasts strongly with the eviscerating rant of 'Coward Street', the latter inspired by a trolling Porter received after a high profile solo TV appearance. 'Untitled Wildlife', meanwhile, has an upbeat and bouncy tune that belies the highly political lyrics as Porter sings of the wildfires of 2020 and the woeful government response to them. "We're feeling hopeless, we're feeling sad" she sings in the bridge into the chorus, adding "This sunburnt country's getting burnt to the ground". They may not have intended to write an anthem here, but they have done so all the same.
Both 'Endless Motion' and 'Cancelled' strongly reflect the sound of a band in lockdown, and the despairing howl at the end of 'Endless Motion' is very telling. 'Cancelled', meanwhile, strikes a more experimental note with the gentle tick, tick, tick used at the start and within the song perhaps reflecting time going to waste. Lyrically, it's very stream of conscious in nature, showcasing Porter's approach to writing in lockdown, where she felt stifled by the lack of stimulus and turned to journalling. At times the guitars nod to Sonic Youth at their most expansive, at other times, they go full on hardcore.
Striking a different tone altogether is 'Lifelines', which fades in with menacing drums and dark foreboding bass. Porter's vocals are drawn out snarls here, suggestive of Stooges era Iggy Pop and John Lydon in the early days of PIL. The guitars lift the song out of the darkness briefly, but it seems hellbent on returning there, with lines like "I'll never make it on my own, a new obsession every week, I'll never make it on my own, nothing sticks to me."
The tight-as-fuck 'Afraid of Everything' comes with bouncy clipped guitars and energetic drums, complemented by the initially muttered vocals. It's less demonstrative than some of the other tracks and feels more like an angsty indie punk pop anthem than a hardcore punk feast. Then, the chorus kicks in and they really let rip. Insanely catchy and highly pogo-able to, this is a song about depression and self loathing that seems to share lyrical territory to Arlo Parks' 'Black Dog' only voiced from a different perspective, that is, from within a relationship, not a friendship.
Heavy guitar riffs form the basis for 'I Can Change', coupled with melodic vocals. Of all the songs on the album, this is the most obviously rock with a capital R, and there's some lovely melodic guitar work in the middle before the drums begin to build and it kicks up a gear again.
Closing track 'Less These Days' fades in like a new dawn before seeming to stutter to a stop before re-starting, ferocious and faster than ever. While this is another of the shouty pogo punk songs that the band do so well it's also highly melodic, highly catchy, and is one of the strongest tracks on what's clearly a very high quality album.
Endless Motion is a tour de force from a band who can always be relied upon to deliver, and who should be around for some time.
No comments:
Post a Comment