Album of the Week: Tropical F**k Storm’s “Braindrops”
By Chuyi Wang
A favourite platitude of Cool Music Dudes Who Have Good Taste™ these days is the proclamation that ‘guitar music is dead’. The six-string, they’ll argue, has served its fair share of time in the popular music of the 20th century, and we’ve managed to crank out every possible tone and sound out of the guitar. Even effects pedals have hit somewhat of a plateau. It’s time to retire the old dog and promote the rise of… Bubblegum Bass, I guess. While I can’t whole-heartedly disagree with the idea in light of the surf rock conveyor belt known as the Australian music industry, every now and then an artist or band comes along that breaks conventions so thrillingly that it’s impossible not to fall right back in love with rock and roll. Tropical Fuck Storm is just such a band.
A veritable supergroup of Australian experimental rock celebrities, Tropical Fuck Storm merges the unique sonic aspects of its constituent members - the angular noise of The Drones, the extreme metal of High Tension, and the indie sensibilities of Palm Springs - into a bizarre yet addictive blend of textures and moods. 2018’s electric debut A Laughing Death in Meatspace proved both a critical darling and a commercial success, and barely a full year has passed and we already have a full-length sophomore in the form of Braindrops. It’s almost intuitive to doubt a follow-up so soon after a universally lauded masterpiece. Can a band with such a unique sound maintain their frenetic energy across two albums? Will they dilute the elements of their successful singles and just plod out a repetitive record? And what’s with Australian bands (ahem, King Gizz) pumping out albums so quickly? I’m thrilled to say that, while Braindrops doesn’t necessarily innovate on any core elements of the band’s compositional oeuvre, it delivers another 50-minute dose of TFS songs that are so damn crunchy that it feels just like as much of a shock to the system as their debut.
Opening with Paradise, a 7-minute discourse on modern relationships, I was delighted to be re-acquainted Gareth Liddiard’s scratchy spoken-word singing, lathered so thick with cynicism and attitude that I can think of no other words to describe it but delicious. The instrumentation, jacked up on nervous energy, is weird and jagged in the best possible way. Bassist Fiona Kitschin’s contrasting vocal interplay brings a dimension of anxious edge to the entire sound; delicate in the track’s quieter moments but exploding with strained power when it needs to. Their distinctive guitar sound, rough yet somehow rounded, noodles in ambiguous tonalities and unleashes its bottled-up fuzz as the track reaches its cathartic climax. And that’s only the first song! The next two, The Planet of Straw Men and Who’s My Eugene?, introduce the band’s anti-establishment politics through lyrics so fiercely blasé (“They're always going for the coup de grâce / They think they're gonna fuck a movie star”) that you can’t help but be entranced by the band’s sarcastic Australian charm.
That’s not to say the album doesn’t have any calmer moments. Album interlude Maria 62 plays out like a quiet heartbreak ballad, and Aspirin sees Kitschin and Liddiard trade a constant stream of words that falls somewhere closer to hip-hop than it does rock; each vocalist hitting melodic and rhythmic pockets that find a way to bury themselves as indelible ear-worms. Title track Braindrops bounces through what appears to be a nation-wide existential crisis with crude humour and irony (“The driver staring through the windscreen in a trance / The hours are way too long, but then the pay is shit / I hear he's saving all his money for a hair transplant”) and album closer Maria 63 exhilaratingly refreshes many of the record’s musical motifs in one last distorted, screaming finale. While the record doesn’t feel as expansive and varied as the debut, despite being a minute longer, it’s undoubtedly tighter in performance and more focused in composition, resulting in an album that’s as exceptional in its craft as it is unflinchingly weird.
The music of Tropical Fuck Storm is and should be seen as an inspiration for aspiring experimentalists everywhere. Braindrops is unabashed and celebratory in its self-aware strangeness, somehow fusing together elements from across the musical spectrum without losing the group’s instantaneous catchiness or infectious energy. Even if you don’t dig the sound, you can’t deny the group is making music that sounds like nothing else out there right now. God, it feels nice to be proud of Australian music.