- It seems circuit-bending was just the beginning. Meanjin / Brisbane-benders Spirit Bunny are back and they seem like ...more. The same weird electronics and unstoppably positive energy produces strangely abrasive timbres in rollicking little pop songs, but it’s just ...more! It's never less, not even with all the political pot-shots that finger-point out of every number like this was an issue of Green Left Weekly, nothing can make this band seem mean-spirited or dried up. With truly infectious enthusiasm, this is Spirit Bunny!
As I’m sure you can tell, I’ve been having a bunch of fun with the band’s second full-length Uncanny Valley, because it is a lot of fun. More fun than 2017’s self-titled debut? I reckon it is. In retrospect, though it had classics like Amen Skew to recommend it and tons more besides, it feels, by comparison, more like a proof of concept. As though a lot of the effort was spent ensuring they stuck to the ‘grit hop’ genre sticker and getting Commodore 64s with their guts rearranged to reliably spew out pop music.
Uncanny Valley even seems a bit ironic to use as a title here: this record busts out of the gate with all the immediacy you could want from an indie-pop record. Opener Paper Handshakes with its ebullient pop hooks and Joel Saunders’ flighty tenor vocals duelling with Kate Thomas’ solid backing might as well be a rather good Screamfeeder song. It’s strange, because we’ve heard all of these elements in Spirit Bunny before, but maybe tireless drummer/producer Cam Smith has decided to abandon liberal guilt, put the vocals right forward in the mix and do it as pop.
Also, how can a song so mercilessly focused on the nauseous connexion between politics, business and real-estate be this fun? Like a good episode of Utopia set to boppy synthesiser. Joel and Kate together detail the sleaze: “We’re building a city, things get in the way / To allow for progress you need to resume some space / Take a lift, ride the heights, there’s no neighbours in sight / They came from afar with gold in their eyes...” Few other celebrations of corporate greed leave me smiling like this.
One of the key successes here, for me at least, is finding the joy in many of the sad old battle standards of the liberal left. This is nowhere better expressed than the song Sunday. It’s not much more than a chorus which repeats “There’s enough room for them, their ignorance and their lack of sense.” It builds by layers to a ringing indie-pop anthem that’s only missing woah-oh-ohs to make it a total cheese-fest. As it is, it’s kind of wonderful. You know exactly what it means. It doesn’t matter how strange and awful Sky News After Dark viewers are, they will eventually walk into a tar-pit and expire, presumably yelling about plandemics as their mouths fill with oily ooze. Gosh, it’s nice to be reminded of that.
It’s not all fist-pumping choruses, however. There are studied art-pop moments like Risk Aversion, pondering how the rambunctiousness larrikinism of years past has been traded in for lives in the suburbs and, you know, not dying of liver failure.
At others the pop gets dialled back and instead the angular framework of the rhythm, the synthesisers and even guest horns courtesy of Ghost Notes’ Luke Mcallum all combine to give things a decidedly post-punk and math-rock flavour on a track like Gargamel. There’s even a big and shaggy, alternative rocker that stands distinct from everything else around it, in the six-minute Fever Attack. It’s grimly claustrophobic as the chorus wails “There’s an edge and you’re trapped upon it.” I’m not even sure what it is Spirit Bunny are taking aim at, but it feels like a Kafkaesque nightmare where the modern condition pushes you closer and closer to breaking point. I can say it makes you that much more great for the frequent pop moments. The gently delusional nostalgia referenced by closer Natsukashii is a knowing wink that we take our comfort where we can find it right now. Even if it means turning the hills we die on into pop anthems.
Uncanny Valley is a panorama of the tortured reality we’re living through. For Spirit Bunny, I can’t tell if they’ve just adjusted their perspective slightly, or had a major leap as a band - maybe both? Whatever it is, we’re living in a highly undesirable place and this high tension blend of fuzzy, arty post-punk, political bile and sweet pop, this is the music I need to see me through it.
- Chris Cobcroft.