- Wimps have occupied one of my favourite spaces in punk: one where any pretension or holier-than-thou mentality is left on a coat rack outside and on the inside hilarious and oddball songs replace a constant onslaught of politics. I’m not saying that sort of thing isn't warranted, lord knows, but songs that find the funny side of the most mundane or kooky stuff a band wants to conjure up can be the most refreshing anditote to all of life's seriousness. Think Henry Fiat’s Open Sore, The Evaporators, and you could even draw a connecting line back to Brisbane’s own The Stress of Leisure. That’s where Wimps work and they are better at it than most. A trio who are well versed in a variety of topics across their now five year career, they cover everything from living in a house that’s a dump to the pitfalls of being a vampire. Lyrically and conceptually they maintain quirky, highly relatable humour and they couple it with the simple, lo-fi, straight-forward garage crunch and deadpan vocals of punk rock.
This brings us to Garbage People, their newest album and the third for Kill Rock Stars. It’s a further refinement of an already well established style. Brilliant flashes and bizarre oddities are heaped together in a charming thirteen track release. Bursting out of the gates with Giant Brain, it's a meditation on the life of a humble office IT worker, aspiring to something greater than data entry by way of creating a giant brain, an omnisicient, all knowing mind…or in this case, a workplace server. It seems pretty standard Wimps fare: a majority of it bustling with guitars, bumping over a pounding rhythm section. However, once discordant electronics blur what you’re listening to, you get the sense that Garbage People will be Wimps pushing the envelope in more ways than one. These kinds of instrumental outburst continue on the following number Cave Life, where brass squeals burst through into the forefront of a song that’s about, well, living in a cave. Simultaneously, it slows down the usual upbeat jangle synonymous with many Wimp’s songs. Playing with tempo, song structure and mixing in additional instruments is a big portion of these first few tracks. The downright heinous OPP (a song about maliciously eating other people’s cheese pizza), brings bass player Matt Nyce’s vocals forward before increasingly demanding pizza order stipulations put you on the receiving end of a very demanding order indeed. Bees, a song that ruminates on the disappearance of our honey-making friends again turns to the brass section, rasping and buzzing like the titular insect before devolving into its own entity, squealing all over the place, completely out of control.
Every song has a left field lyrical approach to its topic and, in on itself, that’s a hefty percentage of why Wimps are as likeable as they are. The trio expresses, quirky, often absurd, but ultimately relatable sentiments. Procrastination, the double-edged swords of quitting things that are bad for you, Garfield’s least favourite day and suffering from insomnia are all covered here. Each theme is an island, there’s no overall cohesion to Garbage People and yeah, that's never a problem.
Musical experimentation: injecting new sounds and meddling with pace and song structure (Mope Around may be the longest guitar solo they’ve ever done), lets three chord punk cover more ground than it would normally be able to. Couple that with Wimps' lyrical knack for making arresting, deadpan monologues on any given topic that pops into their head and Garbage People is the Seattle native's best record to date. Punk doesn’t have to change the world in every song. Altering how people see the world around them by poking fun at life's little iniquities is a virtue of its own and you know what? It's a hell of a lot of fun.
- Matthew Lynch.