Share MELVILLE - Movie Star Junkies (Voodoo Rhythm Records)
Put simply, this is bloody brilliant. Another example of wearing your influences on your sleeve but making something of it, this Italian band starts with a song which appears to be a Gun Club out-take with Nick Cave on vocals. They've got his phrasing down to a nicety, but the best thing is that it's handled imaginatively, not predictable. In fact, I'd argue that the first song is the weakest on the disc.I'm not going to go track by track, except to mention that the entire album is something you want to put on again and again, in the same way the Gun Club or the BP were at the time, wearing the records thin, wallowing in the newly-blurred lines of most resistance over and over. Similarly, we find more than a nod to '80s Scientists here as well, but frankly I don't give a bugger, the songs are sound, well-structured; you can imagine a powerful band at work on stage, everything collapsing around them and somehow they hold it together.
Familiar but not, this is a band for the ages, who on the one hand you can imagine dropping everything to see them headline at the Big Day Out, or wreaking tinnitus with wild abandon at your local hostelry, annoying the publican so much that he refuses to have them back, to even entertain the idea, until he realises how much the punters have drunk.
Movie Star Junkies are a bona-fide mighty fine band; a find, in fact. Grabs you first-off and drags you off on an epic journey. And the journey appears, believe it or not, to be about the life of Herman Melville, the author of Typee and Moby Dick. The clear link between the songs simply makes the album that much stronger; you've got to hear it to believe it.
Perhaps the most moving song on the album is the last one, a very different version of the song at the heart of the album; "Melville". It starts with a traditional brass section and continues from there, revealing part of the heart of the story, somewhere between a village knees-up and sea-shanty. In fact it made me want to hear them do the entire album like this, just to see if they could find further gems to mine from the leavings of so many before them. The mark of a great band is that they could come from anywhere, go anywhere, be anything to anyone, and MSJ come awfully close to that.
Their latest album is "A Poison Tree", and at the time of writing they're touring Europe and I hope they one day make it down to Australia. - Robert Brokenmouth
Five bottles. I ain't joking.
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