Eddy Current Suppression Ring
Primary Colours
Shock
Last night, while browsing the DVD aisle of my local chain store, Eddy Current Suppression Ring began piping out of the store speakers. This is a place where usually only the big chart hits obnoxiously assault you with their over-produced, over-stuffed songs. Not so when Melbourne’s Eddy Cuz are piped. They play an elemental kind of punk rock. One guitar. One bass. Drum kit. One dude on vocals. And you know it. There’s an essential simplicity to their music. It’s what they deal in and it’s how they distinguish themselves. Chain stores, with their desire to over stimulate, the desire to press your consumer faculties into overdrive, don’t favour such things. Some punk must’ve hijacked the stereo. It was the nicest time I’ve spent in that store. (Malcolm McLaren did own a clothing store, after all...)
Eddy Current position themselves in a lineage of Australian punk rock—a kind of music that is particularly local version of a global trend. The two most obvious predecessors for them are X (the Australian one, not the LA one) and The Saints. They share both bands’ nous with embedding catchy pop melodies in otherwise tough, insistent songs. Primary Colours builds on their self-titled debut (from 2006) by planting a hook in every damn song—sometimes it’s a hot lead break from stellar guitarist Eddy Current (‘You Let Me Be Honest With You’), others it’s the strine vocal turns by Brendan Suppression (‘Colour Television’, ‘Memory Lane’).
Their live shows are the stuff of local legend—Brendan utterly losing himself in the moment, overwhelmed by the event—be it an mid-afternoon, all ages record store show or a festival stage. Primary Colours captures what makes their show such a magnetic draw for local audiences. A suite of well crafted punk songs guaranteed to lodge themselves in your brain. Plus it’s excellent shopping music.