Requin: Shark | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- I remember when I first came across Sartre’s bitter, cynical dictum “Hell is other people.” At the time, call it an excess of innocence, I didn’t believe it, but the ensuing, bruising years have brought the phrase echoing back and ...there may just be something to it. Brisbane’s Requin have tumbled to that conclusion much more quickly than I ever did, or so the evidence of their recording career suggests; perhaps it’s why they broke up.

The lyric sheet of 2018’s The Noisy Miners Swoop Him is a diatribe of interpersonal confusion, doubt, suspicion and sometimes it doesn’t even make it that far, consuming itself in a fugue of purely internal, personal horror. Lyrical flurries like “How you feel? / Oh the wall's so thin / How you been? / Will you let us in? / How you feel? / Do you mind me asking? / How you been?” abound and set the skin to crawling. They find an uneasy but utterly suitable partner in Requin’s triptych of indie, math-rock and post punk: by turns shy and then by a trick of angular rhythm, suddenly, savagely snapping.

It would be unrealistic to expect the last couple of years, where we’ve been shut away from most of the human race and sandwiched in very close quarters with a select few, to have brought many sunny changes to that outlook. Thus 2021 brings Shark a record that less doubles-down on the preceding turmoil than it continues to lay it on, unabating, unrelenting, the crushing pressure of existence. Maybe there’s a touch more Thom Yorke in Fionn Richards sweetly strung-out whispers or a jazzier quality courtesy of all those sax flourishes, but what really comes across is a band that had known what they wanted to do for some time and were several degrees more refined in achieving it.

The single, Rules That Won’t Be Broken, relates in excruciating detail, the experience of a long and poisonous acquaintance, literally screaming for release: “I can’t be the same / I can’t be the same / I can’t be the same / I can’t be the same.” Like much of the record, it’s been waiting, at a nervous boil, since before the pandemic really hit, so it’s fair to say that Fionn Richards, Keeley Young and James Eyre Walker felt this way before our forced incarceration.

I’ve pushed myself into close quarters with Shark but I don’t know if it was necessary. Even passing acquaintance will get you a remarkably consistent set of lyrical snatches. Tune in now to get “With all you’ve said and all you’ve done / I’ve lost my friends, oh god, you’ve won” or then “There’s water in my mouth and what I need is air” and again “I know you will / I know you’ll make the same mistakes again / I wish I could stop letting this fall in.” Even Keeley’s pretty voice on that last one delivers condemnation. “We’ve been pushed along by our flaws” Richards glumly admits on Sober. Shark is a finely annotated psychological manual, a litany of human failings, but it is also an anti-hero, bellowing its defiance as it stands amid the ruins of all these failures.

Nick Earls once speculated, quite astutely, on whether moral panics about pop music should really be focussed on the horrendously depressing lyrics being served up in bulk to the teenagers of the world. Maybe, but it’s hard to argue with in the form of a band like Requin, serving up existential horror with such thunderous conviction. Even if that conviction wasn’t enough for them to want to continue as a band. I don’t know if the name of this record is a subtle dig at all the people they had to explain their band name to (which also means shark, in French), or whether that slightly disturbing childhood sketch of the toothy silver monster on the cover is a reflection of every face we’ll ever see, including when we look in the mirror. This being Requin, the more horrifying conclusion is probably the right one.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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