Good Boy: It Takes A Lot Of Skill To Milk A Mare

- It was just three years ago I was celebrating the seemingly unstoppable future of lush punkers Good Boy. 2020 has brought it all to a crashing halt, in a strange way. Off the back of three extremely well-received EPs, banged out in quick succession, comes Good Boy’s debut LP, created in a more traditional timeframe. It brims with confidence, tuneful power and also that utter dissatisfaction that has always sprayed from Rian King’s vocals. It’s been kind of a weird fit the whole way along though, do you know what I mean? Maybe this explains why one of Brisbane’s most highly tipped bands has decided to call it a day. Lush punk, as productive as that formula has been for Good Boy, sounds like a contradiction in terms and that contradiction is in full force on this full-length, It Takes A Lot Of Skill To Milk A Mare.

If you wanna be a little reductive, it probably isn’t that difficult to break down. Tom Lindeman’s guitar sound has always been the lushest part of Good Boy’s harmonic onslaught. Listening to it up against King’s yelps and barks and sneers it feels like two different artistic sensibilities that may have been on completely different trajectories for some time. Lindeman’s other band, Future Haunts has actually just released an EP of their own and the urgent, indie sound they practice might just be a better fit for his axe-work.

Future Haunts may be trying to rival Interpol in the radio-friendly postpunk stakes, but it’s not like the rest of Good Boy are left behind doing threadbare garage-punk. King, for all his screaming, screeching and Strayn twang is capable of opening his throat to an almost alarming degree, busting out high As and Bs like a budding Robert Plant rather than a slobbering, straining Joe Strummer. If there’s something that just fits and works for Good Boy, it must be Stu Mackenzie’s relentless pounding of the skins, still driving the songs along while everything else about the place is changing. Speaking of which, the band has bulked out, with Chakra Efendi collaborator Marli Smales picking up the bass and then there’s those brass bursts that finally push Good Boy right out of punk and into the rich, fusion sounds of post-punk and no wave.

The political tirades like the anti-Joe Hockey (where the hell did he go, just by the way?) anthem CRF are about a million miles from the hard-bitten, bare bones work of Good Boy classic Poverty Line. I think this may be the thing that ended it all for them: I can hear Good Boy growing into something huge, like a more politically poisonous version of Tame Impala or Arcade Fire. Crazy? Maybe. I know some of my more uncompromising friends find that completely unbearable, but I can’t help imagining what that future would have been like.

At any rate, It Takes A Lot Of Skill To Milk A Mare is a huge record, the record of a band that grew so much, they grew right out of themselves. It’s hard to imagine that a final statement like this won’t trail them around, whatever they do next. I guess it’s unlikely to pull them back together in the next few years, though it’ll probably make for a couple of good reunion tours in twenty. I don’t know what the final word should be here, except it’s hard to imagine the sneering mug of Rian King going out on anything else except his own terms.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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