Amyl And The Sniffers
Cartoon Darkness
★★★★
ROUGH TRADE
MOJO WAS straight out of the traps in early 2018 when, with their first two EPs packaged together as the Big Attraction & Giddy Up LP, Amyl And The Sniffers were set to visit these shores for the very first time. Our profile caught them full of youthful piss and vinegar, their fashion-defying rat’s-tail mullets as fresh and nasty as their old-school street punk sounds.
That was over six years ago, after which two more studio albums have revealed steady growth – the last, 2021’s Comfort To Me, providing a noticeably thicker, heavier, marginally more metal-y backdrop for Amy Taylor’s profane, bolshy, sex-charged diaries of life in the goon-sack sewer of Melbourne’s punk demimonde. Which begs the question: how do you continue to develop musically as a punk band and still be punk?
Cartoon Darkness achieves this by doing something rather clever: what the Sniffers do well it simply works tirelessly to do even better. Key to this is a judicious exercise in sonic reduction at the hands of veteran post-punk producer Nick Launay (recently of Nick Cave and Idles renown), who makes everything crisper, cleaner, edgier. It perhaps helps that the record was made at the Foo Fighters’ 606 studio, on the near-mythical console used for Rumours and Nevermind; yet while the latter was all about making Nirvana sweeter, here Mission Sniffer is to become brighter and more dynamic. And, critically, more emotionally nuanced.
The opening track, Jerkin’, bursts in with a spare, push-pull riff, Taylor verbally assaulting a suitor – “You’re a dumb cunt, you’re an asshole” – before rising into a sinuous chorus that advises, “Keep jerkin’ on your squirter, cunt, you won’t get with me!” So far, so Amy, and it will come as no surprise that her trademark confrontational, sex-politics invective is still the Sniffers’ defining feature, as on the Barbie-doll-voiced protest to wear a Tiny Bikini, the travelogue of controlling behaviour described on the Patti Smith-conjuring rap U Should Not Be Doing That, or the brattish Me And The Girls.
But elsewhere there’s a new emphasis on feeling and experience. Chewing Gum, all mid-paced pulse and twisty guitar, features a genius moment when “the voice of me when I was a girl” speaks to the grown-up Amy, reassuring her that’s she “doing fine”. Yet the startling poignancy of that moment pales against the tugging sadness of Bailing On Me, a Goffin-King-style ballad that in the Sniffers’ punky hands brings to mind X-Ray Spex. Another slowie, Big Dreams, is even better, pinching the sorrowful motif of Tears For Fears’ Mad World and adding corkscrew R.E.M. guitars, a welcome complement to Dec Mehrtens’ thrilling, default-Captain Sensible punk-metal flights.
“The best roses are always grown out of cow shit,” sings Taylor, sagely, on Going Somewhere. She should know: smart, funny, characterful, there’s virtually nothing not to like about this record.
Cartoon Darkness is out October 25 on Rough Trade.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV
Tracklisting:
Jerkin’
Chewing Gum
Tiny Bikini
Big Dreams
It’s Mine
Motorbike Song
Doing In Me Head
Pigs
Bailing On Me
U Should Not Be Doing That
Do It Do It
Going Somewhere
Me And The Girls
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Photo: John Angus Stewart