Clever: Hangin' Egg | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- It’s been a while since the tide of sewage that is the skuzzy, Brisbane punk scene came frothing up for really general attention. If any band deserves that attention, it’s the real cream of the froth, Clever.

Brisbane isn’t often celebrated in the storied history of guitar music, but undoubtedly one of its greatest contributions is a tradition of stumbly thunder that began with The Saints and has continued in a line unbroken and largely unnoticed, to the present day. Not that you’ll hear this record very many places, but if you do, it’s almost impossible to miss that messy legacy at work on Clever’s second full-length, Hangin’ Egg. It stretches the filthy inspiration of Ed Kuepper to ever more threadbare and structurally unstable lengths.

The four-piece of Mitch Perkins, Callum Galletly, Harry Byrne and Fred Gooch, drawn from such progenitor acts as Psy Ants, Per Purpose, Sewers and The Wrong Man, forges on where many of those lauded outfits have fallen by the wayside. Clever sound equally as energised as on their snarling debut, Kewdi Udi. For some reason it barely occured to me that the loss of momentum, overthinking and creative bankruptcy that lands other bands in a second record slump might hit Clever. Just so, it doesn’t at all. They’re just right back in there with exactly the same level of intensity as before.

If you were going to pick a hole in this, it might be that Clever have stuck to their guns so hard, that there’s little difference between the band in 2016 and 2019. Honestly, who cares? The sound is exactly as full of hidden depth: the great riffs, the complex rhythms, the slurred and slobbered tales of depraved Australiana, delivered with a clarity of production that lets you hear every bit. For all that Clever are the inheritors of the punk tradition, their approach has the same bile-spewing refinement as The Drones, if The Drones went in the opposite direction from where they’re heading now and focused on the rawest most primal aspects of their craft.

Perhaps the Gareth Liddiard instincts are really infecting Clever, however, because there are the vaguest inklings of a more cerebral approach here. The album’s title track stretches out to five minutes, a genuine epic by Clever standards. Gooch’s guitar chimes sweetly against Perkins’ monotonous spoken word. He details a lightly hallucinogenic trip that loses touch with reality somewhere between hopping in the Commodore and getting to the bottley. “What are you doing man? / You’re drunk, you lost your license three weeks back, in a similar situation / What are you doing man!? Stop it! Slow down! / We’re going a little bit faster / The objects are blurred / Your words are starting to sluuuurrrr”. It’s a quintessential bit of a certain sort of Australiana and, at the same time, suspiciously similar to Rick & Morty’s Bushworld Adventures. If that isn’t a recommendation then I don’t know if I can help you.

Clever’s uncompromising commitment make them exactly as abrasive and nasty as a punk band can be. It hides a level of skill that, in some ways, isn’t very punk at all. It’s as unlikely as it is viscerally appealing. Brisbane’s sewage system has been known to back up and occasionally spray raw effluent all over the bathroom. It hasn’t happened to me in a while and I can probably do without it. Every time Clever come bubbling up out of the underground, however, it’s exactly as good as I remember.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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