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SIMONCHAINSAW.com
burning rocking ghetto world
2003 sampler
BURNIN'
ROCKIN' GHETTO WORLD - Simon Chainsaw (Corrosion
Productions)
When there's talk about Aussie artists "taking it to the world", the
name of Simon Chainsaw (a.k.a. Simon Drew) should come up a lot more often than
it does, because he's been taking it to extremes for years. As he proclaims on
his web site, "Rock'n'roll has no regard for geography".
This is a sampler distilled from Simon's last four releases, or planned releases
anyway. A while ago I decided I wouldn't bother writing about samplers any more.
If a sample is good then what's of interest is the actual record that the sample
came from and if it's no good then... well, the less said the better.
Only before I was even half way through this CD, I began to feel an
uncontrollable urge to start ranting and raving about it. I could have gone next
door, battered down technoboy's door and made him cop an earful of what great
fuckin' songs these are, but judging by the dumb and bass drivel I so frequently
hear emanating from his place at two in the morning, I don't think he has much
of a clue about what good music sounds like. I guess that just leaves you and
me, but you might be at something of a disadvantage because I suspect I'm the
only one of us with the record.
These tracks come from "Basta" (recorded in Brazil with Sao Paulo's
Forgotten Boys), "Fire Down Below" and "Rock'n'Roll Uranus"
(recorded in Europe with a variety of musicians including members of French
bands Holy Curse and Turbolove and most of Sonny Vincent's German line-up, plus
on "Fire Down Below" Al Creed from the New Christs) and "Perigo
De Vida" (another Brazilian album, apparently with an "all star"
cast of luminaries from local bands all over the country). The albums are
credited variously to Simon Chainsaw & The Forgotten Boys, Simon Chainsaw's
BadAss Roadshow and Simon Chainsaw & The Hippy Killers.
However this barely scratches the surface of Simon's prolific output over the
past few years, which also includes the magnificent Chainsaw Men album (a
collaboration with members of San Diego's Gamma Men, released variously as
"Point Blank" and "Electric Juju", though regrettably not
too widely distributed under either title), "Hell Die Glaser Klingen"
(by Simon Chainsaw with The Intruders - another collaboration, this time with
members of Marky Ramone's backing band), an as yet untitled CD for French label
Nova Express (with some of the same musicians from the "Fire Down
Below" and "Rock'n'Roll Uranus" albums) and at least an album's
worth of classic Oz punk covers (Simon's very keen on Oz's golden decade of the
eighties, as he makes plain in "Back to my Roots" on this sampler, but
not to the extent of ignoring the present or forfeiting the future).
If you've been visiting this Bar much then you'll doubtless have heard of some
of these records already, because the flag has been waved enthusiastically every
time it has looked like one of them was going to be turned loose into the wild.
Unfortunately when you look at Simon's web
site , only "Basta" shows up in the "active" releases
section (though it appears he does have copies of both the earlier
"Electric Juju" and the Vanilla Chainsaws double CD best of "When
Liberty Smiles", also the subject some time ago of an enthusiastic
endorsement by yours truly), while "Fire Down Below", "Rock'n'Roll
Uranus" and "Perigo De Vida" are all (still) "coming
soon".
As if that wasn't enough, he's been back in Australia recently and there's talk
of a new band featuring former New Christs Mark Wilkinson and Christian
Houlemare, though the latest advice (from that most reliable of sources - a
bloke I met in a pub, or in this case a bloke I met at the bar of a floating
tavern during the Celibate Rifles Christmas cruise around Sydney harbour) is
that some sort of a European tour might happen first, as commitments in Brazil
will mean that there won't be time to do anything in Australia before the
planned European dates...
One of the major complaints I usually have about samplers is that they tend to
be patchy - you just start to get into something and then everything changes. Of
course this is an all Simon sampler, so you'd expect a little bit more
consistency with it, but then these albums were recorded over a period of three
to four years (2000 to 2003) and there's a complete change of personnel every
few tracks (each of the four albums gets three tracks apiece), which conversely
you might expect would lead to significantly more jarring inconsistencies.
The reality is that there's not too much in the way of inconsistency here at
all. Clearly the secret has been to find musicians who want to play the same
sort of music that he does and then let them get down to it. He's not afraid to
let the other musicians contribute songs either, with Steve Gardner responsible
for roughly half the songs on "Point Blank"/"Electric Juju"
(including the stand out "Frank Little" and "Meltdown") and
Al Creed contributing several songs to "Fire Down Below" (four I
think, but I can't place my hand on the cover at the moment and I'm not stopping
to look for it now).
The sampler opens with three tracks from "Perigo De Vida", the only
album that I hadn't previously heard any promo tracks from, but from the moment
that "Get It On" cranked itself up it seemed to be very much the same
mixture as before. The Chainsaw trademark sound involves guitars; lots of them.
Think Husker Du's hard edged abrasiveness melting into the Buzzcocks' melodic
grind, with occasional wailing slabs of lead laid over the top. If you like that
sort of thing, then this is definitely the sort of thing you're gonna like!
The other aspect of Chainsaw records of recent years has been the sense of
urgency in most songs. Doubtless this has something to do with the "hit and
run" circumstances under which they recorded, but there aren't too many
slow, self indulgent intros amongst this lot. As soon as Simon's out of the
blocks, he's up in your face and going at it full bore. Lyrically there's that
same sense of "songs sung as if lives depended on them" that Bruce
Springsteen used to have back in the lean, mean days before he could afford his
first mansion.
"Get It On" does just that and then "Told Me A Lie" turns
everything up a notch. No, that doesn't mean that it's turned up to eleven;
there is no eleven. When that guy said that his amp went up eleven, that was
just a joke. This is no joke. This is heaving, seething rock action.
For a couple of seconds it seems that "Hard Luck Guy" might be
slightly calmer than "Told Me A Lie" but no, this one's a real rager
too. Between "Hard Luck Guy" and "Eight Times Lucky" (which
manages to work references to both "Eight Miles High" and "Eight
Days A Week" into its lyrics) there's hardly a moment's respite to catch
your breath. Yep we're out of "Perigo De Vida" and into "Rock'n'Roll
Uranus" without seeming to skip a beat (heart beat or drum beat, take your
choice).
"Catfight" isn't going to win Simon any fans on the Women's Hour of
his local radio station, but I don't think that's his target audience, so no
harm done there. Just in case you've been fooled into thinking that it's all
stern and unrelenting rock, Simon does have a lighter side which gets a brief
airing every couple of albums. The prime example of this would have to be
"Joyride" on "Point Blank"/"Electric Juju". Is
there a single motor vehicle/sexual innuendo in the English language that's
missing from this song? Apparently Jules Normington from Phantom Records once
called it the most puerile song he'd ever heard, though given that this is the
country where the 3 biggest hits (ever!) are "Sadie the Cleaning
Lady", "Up There Cazaly" and "Shut Up-a-Your Face", I'm
not sure that this would necessarily be a draw-back, saleswise, if it was true!
Anyway "Catfight" still rocks like fuck and it doesn't last too long
(barely two and a half minutes) if you can't get with it and then you're into
"Stealin' Fu Manchu", which is an unusual departure for Simon, veering
alternatively between muddy stoner heaviness and crisp power pop lightness.
Once again the transition between albums, this time from "Rock'n'Roll
Uranus" to "Basta", is barely perceptible. Actually that's not
quite right. Out of the four albums sampled here, I'd have to say that "Rock'n'Roll
Uranus" comes across as the lightest from this track selection and the
"Basta" title track, which is the first of the three chosen for this
sampler, is like some sort of aggressive urban renewal set to the sound of loud
guitars. It hits you like walking into a shower of falling masonry as the
buildings come down around you, so your head is spinning and you're too busy
seeing stars to take in the transition.
What you need then is "One For The Road", which is exactly what you
get next. The track after that may be "I Was Wrong", but there's no
hint of apologies, or regrets, in "One For The Road", which could
almost be a hymn to fond youthful memories of cheap alcohol, fast cars and a
complete absence of random breath testing; when a bloke could get dumped by his
girlfriend, get tanked up (assuming that the "one for the road" being
referred to is a drink, although the "I need to unload" rhyme is a
trifle ominous) and then just power off into the darkness; not particularly
socially responsible I'll admit, but then this is rock'n'roll after all.
I'm not going to talk about the three tracks from "Fire Down Below" at
all. That is one fuckin' killer album and I'm stuffed if I know how anyone could
pick any three tracks ahead of the other nine. I'm equally stuffed if I can
comprehend how that album can continue to languish unreleased...
Having said that, my favourite "Fire Down Below" track at the moment
is "Supersonic", which wasn't one of the three chosen for this
sampler. While lyrically a flippant couplet like "That rockin' noise is
just a tonic/it fills me up like high colonic" might make it sound like
Simon's not altogether serious, or else that the song more rightly belongs on
"Rock'n'Roll Uranus" (or maybe "Fire Down Below" actually
refers to a bowel inflammation?), the tempestuous sea of glorious guitar noise
over which the song sails is definitely no laughing matter.
Four albums, with 12 tracks apiece - that's 48 ball-tearing songs in three or
four years (well forty seven actually, because "Basta" contains both
English and Portuguese versions of the title track)! With Simon chucking so much
stuff at the wall, sooner or later something's gotta stick. In the meantime, for
an extra three bucks he's chucking this sampler in with anything ordered from
his website and I guess that's gonna have to do.
[According to news literally just to hand as I was typing this, the formerly
untitled French CD will be called "Down To The Wire", while "Perigo
De Vida" will appear as "Told Me A Lie" on Tronador Records
some time this year] - John McPharlin
