Fidel A Go Go: Mod Cons | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Wow, I’ve got that ‘I’m gonna regret this…’ feeling. In one fell swoop I’m going to take a chance on a local band that I’ve never heard of before today, with less than a hundred followers on Facebook (don’t you judge me, I know you look at this stuff too!) and admit just how many earnest teenage hours I nodded along to Alice In Chains on my discman, in my bedroom.

There is nothing mod about this debut record from the Meanjin / Brisbane thunderers. Mod Cons attacks a lot of different sounds but all of those sounds are hard-bitten veterans and some are in their second or third generations of fandom. Heavy, groovy and fuzzy memories of yesterday go from wall-to-wall here. Fidel A Go Go, by contrast, is brand spanking. Who on earth managed to form a band in 2019? I suppose there was a narrow window, but still, impressive effort …and while every other band is releasing the stuff that got shelved during the plague years, Fidel and friends have stitched together a brand new album out of whole cloth.

The playing is that of a very well-oiled, groovy machine. Opener, the appropriately-titled A Call To Arms, is every bit a tribute to AIC and the late, great Layne Staley, too. Well, maybe you might have to go an octave higher to meet him on his own turf. Frontman Duncan Beale’s lower-key growl fits the down-tuned guitars and the slightly more aggressively stoner sound that Fidel is bringing here. Love the vocal harmonies too.

Boy is it groovy, Bottle Rocket boogies harder than ZZ Top and the really-fast shuffle rock is tight. “I’m ready to explode!” is right. I’m loving a lot here it seems…but that jazzy bridge, building through a great big stoner crescendo! We’re back to grunge-metal anthems on Fadings and at six minutes it’s a big one. There’s a smooth interlude for the Kyuss fans before it’s back to the hammering business at hand. The slow, bluesy swagger of Holiday Special is a change and another single-worthy anthem.

Some lovely instrumental work up the back of the album, Speechless makes up for the lack of gabbing by being a multi-layered prog affair without any of the adolescent nonsense that infects the sound contemporarily. It’s partnered by a much more uptempo thunder in another leadingly titled cut, Turbostein. It roars by at enough of a pace that it’s done in under two minutes, the shortest thing here, but it is as welcome as the rest. Demonstrating an adroit understanding of how to deliver a big finish, Whitewater returns to stoner shuffle-rock, but with an exhilarating speed and punch. “I’m the raging whitewater baby, get out of my way”: simple, powerful, effective.

Out the other side of two trips through Mod Cons, I’m none the wiser about who Fidel A Go Go is, but they present like one of the best pub cover bands you could come across. Their sound is stuck somewhere between 1969 and 1996 and is the better for it - I hope I didn’t actually miss any classic covers hidden away in there! If I listen to this tomorrow and experience extreme buyer’s remorse I shall not be surprised, because it’s pretty difficult to believe that a band coming out of nowhere could sound this good.

- Chris Cobcroft.