leftards

RONNY VAN DYK
Wreckless Enterprise label honcho and member of The Leftards
Wollongong, NSW, Australia 

TOP TEN '60s CLIPS

If you’ve spent any time in Wollongong, you’ll know it as Sydney’s less pretentious cousin. Much of the music from the onetime steelworks city is the same way. So here’s cheers to The Leftards, your new favourite punk band. 

As a bunch of older dudes from shop-soiled local bands like Bulldoze All Bowlos and The Dark Clouds,The Leftards have no compunction winding things back to the late ‘70s when everybody knew rap was crap and techno was a college where mechanics went to do a trade. This is the second Leftards seven-inch release and puts four inspired songs on a vinyl single.

Buzzy, fuzzy guitars, nagging and damaged vocals, yob humour and social commentary all sit side by side. The sound is a little shambolic - like a loose version of the Misfits - but nobody's shooting for AOR airplay.

Stoneage Scomeos - The BotBots (Outtaspace/Wreckless Enterprises)

This really shouldn’t work. A couple of rehearsals and one gig that was truncated for excessive swearing. A by-the-seat-of-the-pants recording session fuelled by beer in a terrace house-cum-studio, four months later. Seven songs in nine minutes. Punk rock, eh?

The buzz of blowflies announces “Engadine Maccas”, a 52-second treatise about an alleged bout of Prime Ministerial diarrhoea in a southern Sydney fast food joint. Apocryphal or not, you don't need to wear brown corduroys to know the song's as funny as fuck. The makers of Imodium need to license it for an ad.

There’s a whiff of genius about the concept: Twelve bands on a seven-inch single. Not one song longer than a minute. Yeah, I hear ya. Sound on a vinyl single degrades the closer the grooves are crammed together. Hence, the brevity of the songs. And it’s punk rock. It’s not supposed to be audiophile.

Some of these bands you may know and others may be new. A compilation of this order is a public service, of sorts. It’s is a way to sample the unfamiliar and chase down their output if they row your boat. Musical democracy in action.