- “Influence”, definition: the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behaviour of someone or something, or the effect itself.
For an artist -musical, visual or otherwise- what you create is composed of your influences, conscious or unconscious and influence can be non-linear and indirect. A landscape painter might be influenced by Baudrillard’s poetic ruminations on travel. A pianist's performance might be influenced by the movement of bamboo, swaying against the breeze. On the fourth No Sister release since 2014’s Portrait In A Rearview Mirror the most obvious influences are the most engaging.
Forming in Brisbane in 2013 before relocating to Melbourne, No Sister are a four-piece, post punk band who utilise extra-musical sounds in their jarring and dystopic compositions. Led by founding members Mino Peric and Tiarney Miekus and rounded out by Gemma Helms and Murray Coggan, the band have polished their lexicon of dissonance to a fine sheen on this release: expanding the space between the harder, more typical punk sounds of earlier releases with the experimental soundscapes and industrial rhythms on Influence's four tracks.
Opening song and lead single New Career evokes Unknown Pleasures-era Joy Division, and the influence of that Martin Hannett produced album jumps out from the first chimes sounded by Peric and Miekus’s guitars. Tiarney’s vocals open the song stating “ I used to do my hair with rollers / But now I use spray cans and pliers / I used to tend to our garden / But now I think of trying arson”. These subtly disturbing statements are spoken deadpan, feeling like the vocal equivalent of bureaucratic paperwork. The half-time chorus introduces synths and drum machine percussion that pulls closer the early '80's shroud before lurching back into the second verse.
New Career leads into the unhinged tension of Pacific where siren-like guitar tones top a monolithic rhythm section. Peric barks a drill-sergeant’s address in abstract poetry and there's a palpable sense of fear, uncertainty and creeping dread through the track as the triplet hook tells us that “... My life falls, my life falls, my life falls / My life falls off the nation's back”. The rhythm section here and throughout does a great job of anchoring the floating non-musical guitar tones and synths.
Track three, Something, explores soundscapes further and the spoken vocals would lurch into truly art-music realms if not for the weighty constancy of the bass and drums. Closing track Burning News brings us back into post-punk Head Office, opening with seasick guitar and now signature atonal guitar rhythms. “... Bad news, good news, old news / Burning new overhead” goes the refrain as the song drunkenly wanders further into an open space of dissonant harmony.
When first I stumbled on to New Career I was taken aback by the slickness of the sound: a deliciously modern update on a classic post-punk recipe. However I can't shake the feeling that a sung vocal could take these songs, and the band to a new, more profound and accessible place. Perhaps I just felt short changed by the monotony of the spoken-word delivery amidst such a vibrant, breathing and three dimensional musical landscape. In the end it may not matter what I think however: despite bristling with confident disdain, the songs on Influence have a sort of dark magnetism. Tracks hiss and howl with a purpose and the mostly deadpan, spoken vocals suggest that none of this is tongue-in-cheek or open for discussion.
- William Tom.