Eddy Current Suppression Ring
So Many Things
(Fuse)
Eddy Current Suppression Ring are a great band, and they have three great albums to prove it, including the Australian Music Prize-winning Primary Colours. But this stopgap odds ‘n’ sods collection doesn’t cast the Melbourne quartet in the most flattering light. Dominated by demo-quality lo-fi recordings, its 22 scrappy tracks pile on with such a sameness that ECSR sound more formulaic than they really are.
Mostly spanning various singles and compilation tracks from the past seven years, So Many Things has neither the back-to-back garage anthems of the band’s first two albums or the horizon-bound Krautrock sprawl of last year’s more evolved Rush to Relax. It also doesn’t capture the adrenaline rush of ECSR live, instead tending more towards the shrugged-off shambles of the opening title track, a song that feels as much like a piss take as an outtake. Granted, that’s from the band’s very first release, recorded at the Melbourne pressing plant where they formed on a whim. And singer Brendan Suppression’s conflicted lyrics about leaving behind an ex are funny. It’s just that the song is positively dilapidated compared to even the rough first album.
‘Get Up Morning’ from that first self-titled LP retains its clawing urgency at least, and the following ‘You Don’t Care’ turns a Kinks-y hook into a nice little bruiser. Really, so many of these songs are solid enough despite their lo-fi decay, but piling them all on top of each another inspires a collective fatigue. Some highlights, then, include the Buzzcocks-ish Pagans cover ‘Boy, Can I Dance Good’, the punk testiness of ‘You Let Me Be Honest With You’ and the killer bargain-bin organ line intact on Primary Colours’ ‘We’ll Be Turned On’ – it recalls The Clean’s classic ‘Tally Ho’.
Flipsides of a 2008 single, ‘Demon’s Demands’ and ‘I’m Guilty’ are darker and rumbling, the former’s six minutes predicting the elongated jams of Rush to Relax. A trio of songs from 2009 channel British Invasion rock (‘Noise in My Head’, ‘It Ain’t Cheap’) and surf (‘That Time of Day’), while the lyrically barbed ‘Iraq (It’s on the Map)’ sets the band’s kneejerk guitar clang to an appropriate near-military drum march. Brendan Suppression’s talk-like bark wears a little thin over this marathon disc, but it does shine on tracks like that and the downtrodden ‘Wet Cement’.
And things do pick up towards the end: ‘Through the Trees’ has more of the Krautrock pulse and drone of Rush to Relax, and a cover of The Go-Go’s ‘We Got the Beat’ perfectly lives up to that band’s surf-garage feistiness. A closing early version of Rush to Relax’s title track peters out nicely but still manages a mean crunch.
Given the quality of all three ECSR albums, maybe my disappointment is just a matter of outsized expectations. After all, the whole point of So Many Things is a warts-and-all portrait of the band thus far. It may be flawed, but it’s totally honest.
Doug Wallen