- The police have been an enduring muse for punk rock musicians from Black Flag to Green Day. Melbourne’s Ausmuteants are no exception to this legacy - their song We’re Cops from the 2014 album Order of Operation sets the precedent for the new album Ausmuteants …Present The World In Handcuffs which looks to take the “punk vs cop” trope to new heights.
While officially framed as Ausmuteants “dumbest album to date”, World In Handcuffs seems to stand out as their most focused and sonically mature - though how much that means depends on your opinion of their back catalogue. The band have been quick to acknowledge their own lack of good taste and self-esteem, having recorded several albums of material hinging on the fact. Yet what’s certain is that they’ve produced punk music that is uniquely humorous and faithful to the pedagogy of subtly subversive bands like The Screamers, Devo and Chrome.
World In Handcuffs presents a distinct turn from their typically split songwriting duties and self-deprecating narrative roles. Guitarist Shaun Connor takes the reigns as lead singer-songwriter while wholly embodying the identity of a stereotypical Australian police officer: white, male, heterosexual, and full of the power-driven psychopathic urges which are often seen to come permitted by the role.
The songs are all short and sweet, maintaining a powerful momentum throughout the total ten-song, sixteen-minute romp, providing a strong blend of different musical approaches and leaving little opportunity for excessive instrumentals or guitar solos. They also manage to round up a fairly comprehensive variety of different issues. There’s sanctioned abuses of power on Right To Force, a creeping absurdist portrait of intergenerational police families Born Into The Badge, a look at the normalisation and self-mythologyising of police on Just Like You, and a reflection on the collective social conditioning which allows this class of people to avoid constant, scathing public scrutiny for all their misdeeds and abuses with Find The Cop In Yourself.
The band has always had something of a misguided political will, but on World In Handcuffs they finally take aim at a worthwhile target (other than themselves). It isn’t a challenging or stylistically ground breaking concept for an album, but that’s clearly not the intention. What makes World In Handcuffs such an arresting Ausmuteants record is its bluntly humorous and easy to understand problematisation of the codified reality of police behavior. It presents a series of half-serious, surface level scenes from the life of any possible cop while not singling out any particular incidence of police activity, creating an abstraction through which a demythologised reality can be seen and understood in a variety of actual events. It further crystalises a history of anti-authoritative music and its functions, bringing them to a concise and highly self-conscious piss take of continuing structural injustice.
In a way, Ausmuteants are doing what they’ve always done – making dumb punk music - but here they have a tighter musical focus and a better sense of what thoughts and feelings they want to evoke. They have created a great critical album even cops could understand, the value of which can’t be understated.
- Jaden Gallagher.