Various Artists: Loud As Ever | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Sound As Ever is a Facebook group dedicated to remembering Australian indie music from the 1990s. Formed a year ago by former Recovery television host Jane Gazzo and presumably boosted by the COVID lockdown nostalgia boom, the group now has over seventeen-thousand members - including personnel from many bands of the era.

Loud As Ever is the third compilation release from the Sound As Ever crew. After two indie-rock flavoured mixes last year, this one explores the heavier side of early '90’s Australian music with twenty songs from some famous names and mostly forgotten ones. Available on compact disc with additional t-shirt, poster and stubby holder, it’s a release that harks back to a time when music was sold as a physical product.

The selection is heavy on Melbourne bands, with a smattering from other cities. Pick of the tracks is the glorious staccato riffing and odd time signatures of Adelaide legends The Mark Of Cain, while Brisbane provides another couple of highlights from Budd and Fur, plus another Queensland expat, Greg Atkinson, in Big Heavy Stuff. I wouldn’t say stylistic diversity is a feature of the album – amongst all the dropped D riffs and gruff yelling, sometimes you could be forgiven for forgetting it’s a compilation.

Sound As Ever is unashamedly a nostalgia group. Anything other than posts about '90’s music is banned, and most posts just say “remember such and such a band?” Members are offered exclusive tickets to '90’s revival festival Spring Loaded. There’s something ironic about what had once been startlingly new – the so-called “alternative” takeover of mainstream music – becoming the golden oldies of today; but seventeen-thousand members tells its own story, and few are complaining about a lack of focus on new music.

It’s interesting to reflect on how we interact with past music, especially when it is repackaged several decades on. Sometimes reissues are conscious attempts to give old artists a second life with a modern audience – things like the Tales From The Australian Underground compilations from a few years ago being an example. Obviously any kind of representation of the past will require editorial decisions that portray it in a subjective way. These days that might play out in depicting the scene through today’s standards of diverse representation. “'90’s Australian rock wasn’t all about white dudes with low slung guitars,” you could say by showcasing the diversity.

Funnily enough, Loud As Ever doesn’t seem to attempt that. There are only three female voices among the twenty songs here, and while it was undoubtedly a pretty testosteroned scene, there are surely other women who could have been picked – the queen of '90’s oz rock Adalita being just one obvious example. Interesting that album curator Jane Gazzo, one of the most prominent female media figures in that era of Australian music, didn’t try harder on that score. Same goes for multiculturalism, where the Hard Ons would have been one obvious inclusion to throw a bit of ethnic diversity into the mix. And while TISM inject some political satire, mostly Loud As Ever doesn’t give any impression of political engagement. Again, this could have been easily done with some of the abundant protest punk and industrial from the time.

The album could have looked quite different then, but it doesn’t. This in itself says something about its view of the past. The folks behind Loud As Ever didn’t see a need to impress anyone – their edition of five-hundred CDs has a readymade audience of seventeen-thousand Facebook profiles, many of whom will be stoked to hear again bands they knew back in the '90s. Loud As Ever manages to avoid rose-tinted or overly critical hindsight, to instead present an incomplete but uncomplicated document of a certain time and place. Like the liner notes from former live music publican Nick Wheelhouse, who remembers great rock’n’roll and a sense of community, but also violent skinheads, death threats and himself feeling burnt out at age twenty-seven from “booze and bad habits”. Appropriately, at the end he says, “if I could live those years again I wouldn’t change a thing”.

- Andy Paine.
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3578397265/size=large/bgcol=f…; seamless><a href="https://soundaseveraustralianindie90-99.bandcamp.com/album/loud-as-ever… As Ever by Sound As Ever (Australian Indie 90-99)</a></iframe>