- For those with a keen eye, you’ll notice how similar of a style the Cash In The Dull Days album cover is to ones for Frenzal Rhomb, Totally Unicorn, and a slew of their striking, vivid, and slightly nauseating tour posters. Glenno of Chinese Burns Unit regularly puts his penmanship to use creating Australia’s punk iconography. The band's own new release is an unblemished contribution to the culture.
A shade over five years since their last record, Chinese Burns Unit have released another class topping melodic punk record, one that’ll be used as an example for groups in years to follow. Cash In The Dull Days parades pop punk’s best qualities: it takes you back to when the sound exploded in 1994. Although the band have traditionally armoured their pop punk with hardcore stylings, the new record displays noticeably more radio friendly tendencies. It sidebsteps the genre’s oft-negative stigma. Instead they’ve loaded up their cars and moved into the suburbs, toting tightly written, well-structured songs, retro gaming consoles and unfamiliar cigarettes analogies. Don't worry though, they prod passages to develop surprising aggression, cut with introspective humour and the Sydney kvlt pop punk crew wrap it all up in a neat nostalgia package.
From front to back, there isn’t a skippable song. Verses of brevity follow short introductory passages that are often reworked as the song’s interlude and bridges. Repurposing these musical flashes delivers something you may have missed from the constant up-tempo barrage and gives these songs their own, individual personality.
Touching on personality, every cut has its own simple, straightforward narrative. Feel Your Ghost likens missing someone to wanting to smell fruit toast and as someone who loves fruit toast, it warms my buttery heart hearing that analogy committed to record. Ageing is another topic on Cash in the Dull Days. Where Ripples in the Pond vents at prim gardens and ugly gnome statues in the suburbs, Commodore 64 begins with a sound bite which reinforces feelings of being obsolete.
As these songs rocket through their entirety, the multi-faceted chorus harmonies, a-la Bad Religion, deliver any and all do-dos. whoas, and oo-oos that one could want. Repetition is key as most of these choruses don't say much outside of the harmonies: repeating a singular word or phrase for full infectiousness. Contrasting this with more aggressive sections such as the ones that close out Stuck In and Blood Of Keith and shrill pools of feedback pocketed across these thirteen songs, it sharpens Chinese Burns Unit, gives them a definitive, stylistic edge.
Only one song on Cash in the Dull Days dares to poke its head into the more verbose side of three minutes but each song has recognisable personality thanks to being stuffed with more hooks than an episode of Escape Fishing with ET. More aggressive guitar work and roots in hardcore bleed across to push a high octane melodic punk record beyond already lofty heights. I don’t think there is much else to say save that this is a class record and you should enrol in it.
- Matt Lynch.