- The last time I checked in with Cash Savage & The Last Drinks they were thundering their way through stanzas of gothed-up country-blues like it was nobody’s business. That was back in 2016 on their fiery third full-length, One Of Us. 2018 gifts us the facetiously-titled Good Citizens, LP number four. There’s plenty that’s stormy about both records, but in surprisingly different ways.
One Of Us was a record full of themes about coming to terms with yourself: all of it, the good, the bad and the clinically psychotic. Cash & The Last Drinks both expressed it with a musical roar. For a blues band they adopted a distinctly post-rock pound: starting soft, like they were trying to explain rationally, where they were coming from and building through passion and frustration to a bullish roar!
Good Citizens has changed things up, much like the world has, in the intervening year or two. The issues of the #MeToo movement have been nigh-on inescapable and it’s understandable that Cash Savage, who identifies as LGBT and -before you even really could- married her partner Amy Middleton back in 2016 and is after all, that rarest of things, a woman in the music industry, so yeah, she's done sorting herself out and has turned her furious gaze back on the rest of the world.
The new record practically thrums with repressed anger as Cash Savage explains the issues for all the tone deaf out there. Recent single Pack Animals is as good a place to start as any. It takes issue with every bloke who comes down after the show and offers helpful advice on how to do better writing music, performing it and running a band. Mainsplaining in the music biz, who knew? Cash Savage I suppose, being as how it happens to her nearly every time she performs. “Here comes the chance for another pack animal / And all the things he thinks are wrong!” Understanding her anger is pretty easy, but the way she puts it across is a little more unexpected.
It doesn’t seethe with the slow blues burn of The Hypnotiser and it doesn’t really roar like One Of Us, instead it vibrates, like a steel cable under tension, juddering out post-punk at a greater rate-of-knots than anything I’ve heard from the band before. The guitars ring and chime and Cash’s voice doesn’t sound like she’s bellowing anger so much as chanting mantras. You’ll hear this on a reasonable number of the songs here, like opener Human, I Am, which tackles a very similar subject as it fires off lyrics in short bursts: “I know what I am / I’m not yours / .... I am human.” Found You continues the energetic pulse, although Cash has sneakily shifted on to the other topic she’s keen to spend time with on the album. A little surprisingly it’s love and Found You is a romance, if a bruised and battered one: “I used to be someone who f***ed up / Everyday smoking weed, but look at me / I still found you!”
It might seem a little unhinged to spend the record manically switching between cold anger and heart-torn love songs, but somehow it seems … touching? Fleeing from all the world's problems to the mixed consolation of love is easy to empathise with. These leaps are matched by the musical mood, as the pressure collapses into long slow tracts of folk-blues, like the tortured love of Sunday or the enervated take-down of all Australia’s self-satisfied hypocrites on the title-track.
Good Citizens is an unusual record for Cash Savage: it might be unified in its anger, but musically it heads off in some unexpected directions, none of which fans are familiar with and none of which quite match the crushing power of the band’s previous albums. A lot of its success will probably be decided in the passion of its delivery on stage, Cash Savage being a renowned live performer. So you’ll have to wait and see? Like the #MeToo movement itself, this all feels up in the air: like so much of the high hope, energy and anger hasn’t arrived at its destination yet. A line from Cash seems apt: We’re all humans...which means we’re all part of the problem. And we’re all part of the solution.” I guess that’s obvious; there’s no resolution until we all decide, good citizens and everyone else, how we're going to sort out the crap we're dealing with right now.
- Chris Cobcroft.