- Grand Champion is the second album of kooky indie-rock from West Australian singer-songwriter Peter Bibby. Over recent years, Australian alternative rock has come to be led by a group of songwriters who talk-sing their way through stories inspired by the minutiae of everyday life. Paul Kelly is the spiritual ancestor of the style, and these days is like the grandfather gathering the kids around for story time. Courtney Barnett is like the larrikin spinning yarns in the pub, Wil Wagner the talkative acquaintance who always slightly overshares.
Peter Bibby fits somewhere amongst this company, but what role do we designate him? He's a bit like the stranger you sit next to on the bus looking wild-eyed and disheveled who starts ranting at you; semi-coherently but with an odd kind of charisma. He starts talking about his drug addictions, then his hatred of hippies, then it's that his girlfriend sleeps in too long. All done with a manic energy and in his strange warble of a voice.
Somewhere underneath the stoned jester persona of Peter Bibby there is a serious side - there is maybe a glimpse of class politics in Work For Arsesholes, maybe a critique of new age consumerism in Hippies. Wangaratta Gazza is an exploration of that bottomless well of gory Australian history; but even those songs are mostly seemingly for a laugh. The strength of Grand Champion is in his bizarre humour which manifests not just in the subject matter, but in his turns of phrase, in oddly creepy love songs like Palm Springs and in his vocal inflections and musical arrangements which all seem to be slightly taking the piss.
Peter Bibby's is the poetry of the school joker who never quite grew up; viewing everything with the detached eye of the outsider and through the haze of weed smoke. Grand Champion is welcome as a wildcard thrown into the pack of Australian rock music.
- Andy Paine.