- Drunk Mums return with their third full-length offering, Urban Cowboy, the first since 2015’s Gone Troppo. This is an assortment of three-chord foot-stompers with fist-pump inducing battle-cry lyrics: the type of hard rock that could make a celibate reverend buy a leather jacket and shower once a week.
Originally from North Queensland, the band have moved to Melbourne where they were recently spotted performing a gig on a tram… Give them a couple of years and they will be parking their tour bus on the train tracks on Melbourne Cup day.
In an age where laptop music is becoming increasingly prevalent, and ‘musicians’ seem to be competing with each other to see who can make the best Foxtel menu music, it is refreshing to hear Drunk Mums’ simple yet powerful brand of rock ’n’ roll. No horn section, no strings, no back-up Tibetan throat singers - this album is raw and captures the energy of Drunk Mums’ live. Add some “woohoo”, some applause in the background, and some Seinfeld canned laughter for good measure, and it might as well be a live album.
Channelling the spirit of punk pre-Blink 182, the album is self-produced by the band and released on their own record label, Pissfart Records - a name probably not devised with meeting-the-parents-and-her-dad-asks-you-what-you-do-for-a-living in mind. Highlights include the short and punchy Phantomb Limb, the titular Urban Cowboy and the lead single Roll With The Punches - the latter of which is an uplifting ode to “after hard times… kicking goals on the other side”.
Urban Cowboy is rounded-out with a seven-and-a-half minute epic, Ripper, which is a critique of the exploitative side of the music business (with lyrics like “we’ll make some money out of you”), conflicted by the evident zeal that Drunk Mums have for making and playing music. This is the barn-storming climax of the album’s overriding theme: hard-fought creative independence.
Behind the loose and fuzzed-out hard rock exterior is a jaded maturity and a flaunted aversity to the insidious politics of the modern music industry. You can glean this just from the titles of album’s songs, such as Rockin’ All Night, Roll With the Punches and You Got It, let alone the anthemic lyrics and hard-rocking sound. Urban Cowboy is a bold statement on the state of punk and rock ‘n’ roll in 2018 Australia.
- Harry Rival Lee.