Heil Progress 7"
Bedroom Suck Records, 2010 (300 copies)
I hear the Minutemen, Seems Twice, The Fall, Tactics, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on this record. A little bit from each of those, but the majority from the first. The three-piece lineup, elastic basslines, schizophrenic changes and scratchy guitar invite this comparison… maybe the beginning of first track ‘On Purpose’ is acknowledging this in humour by paying homage to Minutemen’s ‘Monuments’. None of this matters very much though, as Per Purpose have a tonne of good ideas of their own.
The playing has an unhinged energy that surprisingly never loses its focus through all the left-turns and choppy rhythms. The tracks are all shorter than 2 minutes but due to the hyperactive way that they assemble their songs, there’s lots of dynamics and varied sounds, though not through reliance on guitar effects. The guitar playing appears chaotic, but the way the notes harmonise weirdly with the bass shows that laboured effort went into finding these chords. Glen’s vocals are a constant warble, his skewed pop-ish melodies sitting under the collision of instruments. The bass pummels and slides about and is ridiculously fast. A comical squealing recorder appears now and then, and sounds like accelerated guitar feedback.
Harry engineered the recording to a four-track cassette machine, and it complements the band’s sound really well without use of any trickery. Dry and crisp and occasionally abrasive. This 7” has been released by Joe’s own label Bedroom Suck and is as good a documentation of Per Purpose’s early material as you could hope for. They’ve taken an unusual approach to their chosen style, and their obsession with Australia’s own varied post-punk history surely adds to their own uniqueness.
