84 - You, Me and Imfamy (Album)
The first thing that strikes you about this album is not the wall of fuzz guitars or how the volume suddenly has jumped up 100 decibels on your stereo, but the vocals. From a band described as garage, dirty, rock, and intense you would expect the vocals to be equally gritty, rough and deep. Destroyed from thousands of gigs in the dirtiest pubs across the world and thousands of packets of darts. However I find the vocals to be quite melodic, clean and sitting fairly high in the register. Not to say that it isn’t intense though. This voice carries and holds the album together. Without it I’d feel the album would be pretty much be a pub rock album. Not really pushing the boundaries of it’s genre or creating something different. Maybe just something that hasn’t been heard in 30 or so years. However the vocals really make this album and the band something special. It’s so prominent that it jumps out of the speaker and punches you more than the very powerful guitars. Hard to pin down it’s reminiscent of Jim Morrison but not depressive and low. A little bit like the Australian 60’s greats The Loved Ones, with their hit ‘Everlovin’ Man’ (Google it right now. No, I mean it. Before you read on). Maybe a bit like The Guess Who with ‘American Woman’. You see where I am now? It’s the same sort of sound.
84 are channeling equal parts 60’s garage and 70’s heavy metal with hints of 60’s psych. You can hear that psych with touches of vintage organ on songs like ‘Soul beat’ and ‘Year of the dog’. Just hidden in the background but making your pub rock a little cooler and groovier. There’s defiantly a groove on this album. Tracks like ‘Swamp blues’ and ‘Lil white soul’ really pull out the groove and even a bit of funk in the mainly bluesy rock of the album. Then there are a few jumpy tunes that would probably be pulled as radio singles. ‘Dead are the brave’ and ‘You me and infamy’ come to mind. Then there’s blistering freak out rock in ‘Mesapotania’ that would so go down well live and a great epic, ‘The river has come.’ Which is reminiscent of The Doors again with their song ‘The end’. Makes a great end to the disc.
The band hailing from Melbourne is no surprise at all. It is the mecca of the true pub rock genre. Billy thorp and the Aztecs, Rose Tattoo and the like would not sound out of place on the same stage with these guys. In fact when I saw these guys about 3 years ago in a dirty St Kilda pub in Melbourne their intensity was felt to the back wall. The album reflects them entirely.
On first listen to the album it’s very hard to hear beyond the homogenous guitar rock and really start to feel the album. There’s isn’t really a one stand out single track and if you’re not in a dirty pub listening to it most of it will probably go over your head. However, the more you listen to the album the more you grow to love it and realise the work as a whole. So cohesive is the album that I wouldn’t dream of pulling tracks off it to put on mix tapes now. You’d lose too much in the translation. The album is a hard and fast 10 songs (9 really as the opener track being just a 13 second epilogue), gives you a clue to how this band do things. They don’t mess around with filler or waste your time on throw-away pop singles. They give you an intense album of honest rock n blues. In this day in age of the instant hits this album will get left on the wayside. However I doubt the band care or even want that. The aim of this album really is steeped in the 60’s and 70’s where bands used to create albums of great stuff and occasionally (almost by accident) have hit singles. Those bands are still selling mint in vinyl 30 years on! This is definitely an album which I think would have benefited not having any track marks, making the listener go from start to finish in one go and not being able to skip through. In fact his album would sound fantastic on vinyl. It really is not only a homage to those bands but a welcome return to the art of the album.
You’ll love this album if you love those 60’s and 70’s acts like the ones I described before and if your arses imprint lives on a stool at the local.
Johnny Rock
