PER PURPOSE

Per Purpose are from Brisbane, Queensland. They are pretty fresh, maybe going on a year or so, and a vital addition to a scene that draws from punk music but doesn’t sit well with punks. Main protagonist Glen Schenau has carried over some ideas from his former band Marl Carx, which was a more no-wave derived outfit. Where that band embraced a totally shambolic style of clumsy primitivism, Per Purpose are sharp. Their songs are tightly strung punk/funk constructions, complex but well thought-out in a way that belies concerns of over-indulgence. Harry Byrne (guitarist in Loomer) plays the bass and Joe Alexander (Bedroom Suck Records, Kitchen’s Floor, Loose Grip) drums. Several months earlier, they released a CD-R demo entitled Demonstrating.

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.

RUBBISH THROWERS

Duncan Blachford (Snawklor, ex-Witch Hats) put out the Rubbish Throwers 7” this year as the first release on his label Endless Melt. These four recordings are a few years old, and in that time he was worked on other avant/experimental projects including Drunk Hands, Actual Holes, the recently released Psychic Baggage album, and solo percussion explorations released under his own name.

Tapeworms 7"

Endless Melt, 2010 (150 copies)

This however is a damaged lo-fi noise punk record. There are hints of a no-wave influence, in the harsh stinging guitars and the occasional stubborn drum rhythm, but the staunchly anti-conventional ideals of the no-wave thought process have been refreshingly balanced out with some primitive backbeat and rock-isms.

‘Tapeworms’ is an effectively ugly start to proceedings. Its hook is a descending guitar line that sounds depressed and defeated, and really nags at you for it. Abrasive blasts of string mangling act as choruses. There’s a lot of guitar on this recording in general, but not in a gratuitous way; several of them will make contrasting but equally uncomfortable noises at the same time. Late in the song, one of my personal favourite guitar sounds appears, that whirring, hyper-strummed dissonance heard in bands like U.S. Maple, some Arab On Radar and Sonic Youth. Hard to describe in print but easily recognised aurally.

Second A-side track ‘Weak Eyelids’ is more bass driven and swaggers along, with plenty of wild guitar squalls buzzing around like annoyingly persistent insects. Bone-headed drumming stops and starts in a likeably delinquent manner, and a few chanted vocals fight their way through the mess.

These songs have a loose jam feel to them, but kept concise in average song lengths. As I assume all the instruments were played by Duncan, there must be some degree of preconceived plan of where he was going to take these jams, but if that’s the case, it isn’t really evident. If mostly improvised, the way the overdubbed guitars have filled out the random spaces is perfect. This kind of consequential, elusively-structured chaos is always an achievement to my ears.

The second side opens with the only genuinely pleasant reprieve on the record… a hypnotic floor tom and bass pulse backing watery guitars drifting in reverb and chiming surf-tones. It could almost appear on a much more palatable album, and does a good job of segueing sharply into the most obnoxious track, ‘Willworker’. With only one drumstick-click’s warning, a huge wall of screeching guitars pound through the speakers, setting your frontal lobe shuddering. It’s almost funny how overblown this racket is, at times drowning out the thump of the drums.

Being a 33rpm 7”, the sound quality has gone awry, and whether this was a conscious decision or just not a concern, it works out well. You might find elements of Hex Enduction Hour period Fall, Confusion Is Sex-era Sonic Youth, the aforementioned U.S. Maple, as well as the experimental side of Swell Maps shown on Jane From Occupied Europe. This record has a more belligerent vibe to those albums, as it’s less calculated than SY and more malicious than Swell Maps. The amazing guitar playing is of note, successfully reaching painfully screeching peaks while suitably simple bass and drums provide the rolling drunk momentum.