THE ESSENTIAL SEMINAL RATS 1984-1991 - The Seminal Rats (Bang! Records)
Here's a Melbourne band that all but passed me by in the '80s. Put it down to Sydney-centricness and the tyranny of geography. The bits of this music that did make it up the Hume Highway, however, did ring true. I'm fondly recalling the Seminal Rats' contribution ("Gimme Danger") to Dog Meat's peerless Stooges tribute, "Hard To Beat", which was one of its crown jewels. So much so, that and I'd long been thinking it was high time me and the Rats and got better acquainted.
Spain - sorry Basque Country's - best Australian label, Bang! Records, obviously had parallel thoughts and has made this double CD collection of 27 songs available for our Rock Action pleasure. It's an essential purchase - for the music but also for the bonus of the packaging. It's not a digipack or a wallet - it's a fully-fledged book and the sort of finery for which Rhino Records usual win critical accolades.
Outer-suburban Melbournites with all the class of rats with gold teeth but much better taste, the Seminal Rats were pathfinders in many respects, clearing the way for equally raw and spirited bands like the Powdermonkeys, GOD and Bored! In a town whose bands sometimes attracted open sneering from us in Sydney for their (unhappy) Birthday (Party) artiness, the Seminal Rats waved the Detroit/high-energy flag more enthusiastically than most.
He might have been a acid-blitzed pisshead but old Jimbo Morrison got one thing right: the little girls understand. And so did elements of the shameless, denim-and-T-shirt-clad rock piglets of suburban Melbourne and its satellite city Geelong. These sons and daughters of Sunbury hippies adopted the Stooges and Sabbath in equal proportions. They took to the Rats, then took up the stringed cudgels of rock and roll themselves. Dig into this collection and you'll hear why.
The twin-guitar attack of (the late) Mick Weber and Rueben Pinkster sounds more grimly determined than precise on songs drawn from the two studio long players and one live album from the original line-up. And that, boys and girls, is how the best rock and roll is played. Not pretty or polished but with a heartful of soul.
Covers of Birdman ("Non Stop Girls"), the Sonics ("Boss Hoss"), the Stooges and the MC5 ("Call Me Animal" - played as Landau should have recorded it) rub shoulders with a string of originals ("LME", "Le Grande Rat Bouffe", "Part Time Girl", "Red Planet") that more than hold their own.
Vocalist Michael Harley has a formidable growl that's Younger-esque on "Gruntled" album tracks like "A Day Away". The shadow of Ig isn't far away either: "Rat Race" is surely a close cousin of "Gimme Some Skin". You can't pick your relatives but you can pick your influences.
Ultimately, the passing of Mick Weber at just 33 put a lid on the Rats who by all accounts had wound down by 1999 after a decade-and-a-half of fun and furious ousting of jams. Only one of them (drummer Todd McNeair) still plays and there's no way on earth we'll get a reformation (partial or otherwise) but that doesn't mean you can't play the shit out of this and wish more contemporary bands took a leaf out of their book.
Like one of the magazine writers in the liners, I'm still perplexed what the term "grebo" meant (it was penned by the smart-arse British rock papers) and why it applied to the Seminal Rats. Guess I'll die wondering.
Track down a copy without trepidation. –
The Barman
