- It may not be immediately apparent, but East Brunswick All Girls Choir have learnt the value of taking their time. They know to relax, not to mess with a thing until it’s good and ready. Despite their associations with country and blues, easygoing wouldn’t, traditionally, be the first assessment you’d make of their nervy, twitching, often just flat-out screaming sound. You need look no further than the opening numbers of their latest record, Teddywaddy, for evidence of that intensity: as the rocking fires up -and up- all the way to the roaring, corruscating peaks of their sound, with all the intensity of a white noise generator, jammed on maximum volume.
The psychotic contrasts of opener Steeple People go from silence to shrieking in a couple of seconds and -especially with its string accompaniment- give more than a passing nod to Dirty Three. Later, the leaner, meaner reworking of the band’s 2010 number, Essendon 1986, away from blues rock and into a vicious post-punk machine, might make you think they’ve even less patience than ever before. That isn’t the case and it’s quite possibly the best thing about the new record.
You really have to wait till you get to expansive numbers like Exile Spree and Never Never, lazing away in the middle of the record, but you’ll hear EBAGC tap into the sweet, slow heart of country and blues in a way they rarely do. All rock music can be traced -by more or less roundabout roots- back to the blues and on Teddywaddy it feels like Marcus Hobbs and crew have worked out the truth of that.
They certainly have fun with it, shifting from the almost lullaby lyrics “sleep through the night / sleep all day” in Never Never to “you **** me I’ll **** you” yelling in Cicada Chirps The Chicane, which sounds quite a lot like At The Drive In just shouldered their way on to the record. It’s an impressive departure and so too is Old Phil which takes another timeworn path out of the blues and into blue-eyed soul, echoing the stylings of another soulfully rocking Aussie outfit, Harmony.
If there’s one other band that looms largest, however, unavoidably so, whenever you listen to East Brunswick All Girls Choir, it’s The Drones. The more exciting and different Teddywaddy manages to be, the more excitingly experimental they go and the more masterful they sound doing it, you know The Drones did all this before and sounded, well, The Drones usually sound pretty masterful. Still, if you’ve got to sound a bit like another band…
In the schemes and cycles of the music industry they say any longer than four years is a bit too long to wait for an LP. You could say that East Brunswick All Girls Choir have taken just the right amount of time to make Teddywaddy, a record which, in turn, takes its time to be all the things it can be. It’s pretty audacious line of malarky to speak of ‘making the blues all it can be’ but then this is a sound of pretty perfect proportions.
- Chris Cobcroft.