TOLD
ME A LIE - Simon Chainsaw and the Hippy Killers (Tronador)
Expat Aussie Simon Chainsaw makes albums as often as most people make breakfast
- which isn't to suggest "Told Me a Lie" and its predecessors are
the musical equivalent of wholegrain bran. Aserving of 
The formula is well evident: Guitar-fueled tunes with Simon's alternately
soaring and gravelly vocals, plenty of melodies mixed with power and a pace
that rarely, if ever, slackens. "Told Me a Lie" doesn't disappoint
on any of those scores. Social Distortion meets The Clash without the sloganeering.
No wonder this guy's a big deal in his adopted home of Brazil, where punk-derived
rock and roll enjoys a status previously known only by the Mop Tops and the
Ramones.
The Hippy Killers pack a formidable punk rock punch with guitarist Fabio Marrone's
leadwork a feature. A string of guest players from all over South America,
France (Vinz from Holy Curse) and New York City (Johnny Pisano of Marky Ramone
and the Intruders/Jesse Malin Band) contribute extra instrumentation. More
rock punk than punk rock (always a plus aorund here), but the tempos don't
often slacken if that's an issue for you.
It's all good but that's not to say that the occasional song might not benefit
from some judicious trimming or an injection of light and shade to make them
great. I know Simon's had it in his ear before but I still have to wonder
what some of these songs would sound like with a little brevity, a dash of
keyboard or different guitar sounds. The mid-tempo "Communication Breakdown"
works in because the wall of guitars is temporarily dispensed with so it can
breathe. "Bad Luck Guy" has a great melody line but suffers from
backing vox that are buried in the mix. Half the fun for Simon is self-production
and working fast, and he has worked before with producers, but you never know
what an external ear could have brought to this particular party, even if
that had invovled extra expense.
That said, you'd go a long way to hear a better cover of Razar's "Stamp
Out Disco" (you'd go a long way to hear or any Razar cover, for that
matter) The title track (half sung in Portugese) lays out a molten carpet
of guitar, while "1,2,3, Go Go Go" and "Get It On" are
eminently moshable and enjoyable fodder for I-94 Bar patrons.
While "Told Me a Lie" might be more of the same for Simon Chainsaw,
such consistency is something plenty of contemporaries would kill for. Cock
an ear and find out for yourself - or betetr still, play back-to-back with
"Basta" and "Down to the Wire". This is great music to
accompany a long, fast drive down a highway with the window open. -
The Barman
3/4
DOWN
TO THE WIRE - Simon Chainsaw (Nova
Express)
The great thing about this album is that there's no stuffing around. The songs
are concise and to the point. Simon and his multi-national strike force gets
in, drops the rock and roll payload and gets the fuck out of there. Brevity
is the byword. A hit-and-run mission - and the odds are you'll call in another
airstrike as soon as it's run the course of its 36 minutes.
Teaming with a Franco-German band (drawn from the ranks of Holy Curse and
a Sonny Vincent backline, two of the Bar's perennial faves), the underrated
Brazil-based Australian spits out a dozen frenetic tunes. Recent Chainsaw
bands have been top-notch (the Forgotten Boys spring to mind), and these guys
are no exception, but the arrangements here are less drawn-out.
Lead guitarist on most cuts, Johnny Rio, can take a bow; his sharp playing
adds real sting to already steaming tunes like "Get On With the Show".
His photo has also been enigmatically left off the CD slick "for contractual
reasons" so we can only guess at his true moniker (or wonder if his day
job is as an extra in a ghost train). The other lead player, James Kipput,
doesn't acquit himself badly either.
The engine room of Vinz Holy Curse and Buenax Samurai lays down a fat bed
of sound to rival most anything else around, the slight ring in the snare
notwithstanding. They also cook up a shitstorm on a foot-to-the-floor stomper
like the ever-accelerating "Can't Break Me".
The mix might be a little dirtier here than on other Chainsaw recordings (actually,
a lot dirtier), but that's no detraction. It's roughed-up but not to the point
of muddiness. The songs are high on the energy quotient with no superfluous
embellishment. The other key factor is the Chainsaw vocal - gravelly undertones
blessed with the ability to ride the melody line home on catchy songs like
the title track or the monstrous "Sick".
Play it back-to-back with "Basta" and you'll appreciate that there
are quite a few people out there around the globe doing their utmost to keep
Real Rock Action alive. Oh, you can buy a copy in our shop,
too. Now if Simon would only get back to Australia and play live here more
often, a few more people in this neck of the woods might know about it. -
The Barman
BURNIN'
ROCKIN' GHETTO WORLD - Simon Chainsaw (Corrosion
Productions)
When there's talk about Aussie artists "taking it to the world",
the name of Simon Chainsaw (a.k.a. Simon Drew) should come up a lot more often
than it does, because he's been taking it to extremes for years. As he proclaims
on his web site, "Rock'n'roll has no regard for geography".
This is a sampler distilled from Simon's last four releases, or planned releases
anyway. A while ago I decided I wouldn't bother writing about samplers any
more. If a sample is good then what's of interest is the actual record that
the sample came from and if it's no good then... well, the less said the better.
Only before I was even half way through this CD, I began to feel an uncontrollable
urge to start ranting and raving about it. I could have gone next door, battered
down technoboy's door and made him cop an earful of what great fuckin' songs
these are, but judging by the dumb and bass drivel I so frequently hear emanating
from his place at two in the morning, I don't think he has much of a clue
about what good music sounds like. I guess that just leaves you and me, but
you might be at something of a disadvantage because I suspect I'm the only
one of us with the record.
These tracks come from "Basta" (recorded in Brazil with Sao Paulo's
Forgotten Boys), "Fire Down Below" and "Rock'n'Roll Uranus"
(recorded in Europe with a variety of musicians including members of French
bands Holy Curse and Turbolove and most of Sonny Vincent's German line-up,
plus on "Fire Down Below" Al Creed from the New Christs) and "Perigo
De Vida" (another Brazilian album, apparently with an "all star"
cast of luminaries from local bands all over the country). The albums are
credited variously to Simon Chainsaw & The Forgotten Boys, Simon Chainsaw's
BadAss Roadshow and Simon Chainsaw & The Hippy Killers.
However this barely scratches the surface of Simon's prolific output over
the past few years, which also includes the magnificent Chainsaw Men album
(a collaboration with members of San Diego's Gamma Men, released variously
as "Point Blank" and "Electric Juju", though regrettably
not too widely distributed under either title), "Hell Die Glaser Klingen"
(by Simon Chainsaw with The Intruders - another collaboration, this time with
members of Marky Ramone's backing band), an as yet untitled CD for French
label Nova Express (with some of the same musicians from the "Fire Down
Below" and "Rock'n'Roll Uranus" albums) and at least an album's
worth of classic Oz punk covers (Simon's very keen on Oz's golden decade of
the eighties, as he makes plain in "Back to my Roots" on this sampler,
but not to the extent of ignoring the present or forfeiting the future).
If you've been visiting this Bar much then you'll doubtless have heard of
some of these records already, because the flag has been waved enthusiastically
every time it has looked like one of them was going to be turned loose into
the wild. Unfortunately when you look at Simon's web
site , only "Basta" shows up in the "active" releases
section (though it appears he does have copies of both the earlier "Electric
Juju" and the Vanilla Chainsaws double CD best of "When Liberty
Smiles", also the subject some time ago of an enthusiastic endorsement
by yours truly), while "Fire Down Below", "Rock'n'Roll Uranus"
and "Perigo De Vida" are all (still) "coming soon".
As if that wasn't enough, he's been back in Australia recently and there's
talk of a new band featuring former New Christs Mark Wilkinson and Christian
Houlemare, though the latest advice (from that most reliable of sources -
a bloke I met in a pub, or in this case a bloke I met at the bar of a floating
tavern during the Celibate Rifles Christmas cruise around Sydney harbour)
is that some sort of a European tour might happen first, as commitments in
Brazil will mean that there won't be time to do anything in Australia before
the planned European dates...
One of the major complaints I usually have about samplers is that they tend
to be patchy - you just start to get into something and then everything changes.
Of course this is an all Simon sampler, so you'd expect a little bit more
consistency with it, but then these albums were recorded over a period of
three to four years (2000 to 2003) and there's a complete change of personnel
every few tracks (each of the four albums gets three tracks apiece), which
conversely you might expect would lead to significantly more jarring inconsistencies.
The reality is that there's not too much in the way of inconsistency here
at all. Clearly the secret has been to find musicians who want to play the
same sort of music that he does and then let them get down to it. He's not
afraid to let the other musicians contribute songs either, with Steve Gardner
responsible for roughly half the songs on "Point Blank"/"Electric
Juju" (including the stand out "Frank Little" and "Meltdown")
and Al Creed contributing several songs to "Fire Down Below" (four
I think, but I can't place my hand on the cover at the moment and I'm not
stopping to look for it now).
The sampler opens with three tracks from "Perigo De Vida", the only
album that I hadn't previously heard any promo tracks from, but from the moment
that "Get It On" cranked itself up it seemed to be very much the
same mixture as before. The Chainsaw trademark sound involves guitars; lots
of them. Think Husker Du's hard edged abrasiveness melting into the Buzzcocks'
melodic grind, with occasional wailing slabs of lead laid over the top. If
you like that sort of thing, then this is definitely the sort of thing you're
gonna like!
The other aspect of Chainsaw records of recent years has been the sense of
urgency in most songs. Doubtless this has something to do with the "hit
and run" circumstances under which they recorded, but there aren't too
many slow, self indulgent intros amongst this lot. As soon as Simon's out
of the blocks, he's up in your face and going at it full bore. Lyrically there's
that same sense of "songs sung as if lives depended on them" that
Bruce Springsteen used to have back in the lean, mean days before he could
afford his first mansion.
"Get It On" does just that and then "Told Me A Lie" turns
everything up a notch. No, that doesn't mean that it's turned up to eleven;
there is no eleven. When that guy said that his amp went up eleven, that was
just a joke. This is no joke. This is heaving, seething rock action.
For a couple of seconds it seems that "Hard Luck Guy" might be slightly
calmer than "Told Me A Lie" but no, this one's a real rager too.
Between "Hard Luck Guy" and "Eight Times Lucky" (which
manages to work references to both "Eight Miles High" and "Eight
Days A Week" into its lyrics) there's hardly a moment's respite to catch
your breath. Yep we're out of "Perigo De Vida" and into "Rock'n'Roll
Uranus" without seeming to skip a beat (heart beat or drum beat, take
your choice).
"Catfight" isn't going to win Simon any fans on the Women's Hour
of his local radio station, but I don't think that's his target audience,
so no harm done there. Just in case you've been fooled into thinking that
it's all stern and unrelenting rock, Simon does have a lighter side which
gets a brief airing every couple of albums. The prime example of this would
have to be "Joyride" on "Point Blank"/"Electric Juju".
Is there a single motor vehicle/sexual innuendo in the English language that's
missing from this song? Apparently Jules Normington from Phantom Records once
called it the most puerile song he'd ever heard, though given that this is
the country where the 3 biggest hits (ever!) are "Sadie the Cleaning
Lady", "Up There Cazaly" and "Shut Up-a-Your Face",
I'm not sure that this would necessarily be a draw-back, saleswise, if it
was true!
Anyway "Catfight" still rocks like fuck and it doesn't last too
long (barely two and a half minutes) if you can't get with it and then you're
into "Stealin' Fu Manchu", which is an unusual departure for Simon,
veering alternatively between muddy stoner heaviness and crisp power pop lightness.
Once again the transition between albums, this time from "Rock'n'Roll
Uranus" to "Basta", is barely perceptible. Actually that's
not quite right. Out of the four albums sampled here, I'd have to say that
"Rock'n'Roll Uranus" comes across as the lightest from this track
selection and the "Basta" title track, which is the first of the
three chosen for this sampler, is like some sort of aggressive urban renewal
set to the sound of loud guitars. It hits you like walking into a shower of
falling masonry as the buildings come down around you, so your head is spinning
and you're too busy seeing stars to take in the transition.
What you need then is "One For The Road", which is exactly what
you get next. The track after that may be "I Was Wrong", but there's
no hint of apologies, or regrets, in "One For The Road", which could
almost be a hymn to fond youthful memories of cheap alcohol, fast cars and
a complete absence of random breath testing; when a bloke could get dumped
by his girlfriend, get tanked up (assuming that the "one for the road"
being referred to is a drink, although the "I need to unload" rhyme
is a trifle ominous) and then just power off into the darkness; not particularly
socially responsible I'll admit, but then this is rock'n'roll after all.
I'm not going to talk about the three tracks from "Fire Down Below"
at all. That is one fuckin' killer album and I'm stuffed if I know how anyone
could pick any three tracks ahead of the other nine. I'm equally stuffed if
I can comprehend how that album can continue to languish unreleased...
Having said that, my favourite "Fire Down Below" track at the moment
is "Supersonic", which wasn't one of the three chosen for this sampler.
While lyrically a flippant couplet like "That rockin' noise is just a
tonic/it fills me up like high colonic" might make it sound like Simon's
not altogether serious, or else that the song more rightly belongs on "Rock'n'Roll
Uranus" (or maybe "Fire Down Below" actually refers to a bowel
inflammation?), the tempestuous sea of glorious guitar noise over which the
song sails is definitely no laughing matter.
Four albums, with 12 tracks apiece - that's 48 ball-tearing songs in three
or four years (well forty seven actually, because "Basta" contains
both English and Portuguese versions of the title track)! With Simon chucking
so much stuff at the wall, sooner or later something's gotta stick. In the
meantime, for an extra three bucks he's chucking this sampler in with anything
ordered from his website and I guess that's gonna have to do.
[According to news literally just to hand as I was typing this, the formerly
untitled French CD will be called "Down To The Wire", while "Perigo
De Vida" will appear as "Told Me A Lie" on Tronador Records
some time this year] - John McPharlin
BASTA
- Simon Chainsaw and the Forgotten Boys (Tronador)
Finally, this one's seen the light of day. A couple of us in the I-94 Bar
have been singing the praises of onetime Vanilla
Chainsaw-turned-citizen-of-the-world Simon Chainsaw for some time. "Basta"
sees him working with a bunch of South American players and this f is a brutal
slab of melodic rock that screams out for wider attention.
There's a backlog of Simon Chainsaw material in the can so you really have
to ask the question: Does it really take an Aussie based in Brazil to put
label resources behind an album like this? As well as "Basta" (recorded while
Simon was working in Brazil as a guitar tech for touring overseas bands like
Marky Ramone and the Intruders and Killing Joke, some of whom would haul him
up on stage), waiting in the wings is a disc with him fronting French Detroit
rockers Holy Curse, a record ("Rock n Roll Uranus") spawned by a coupling
with Sonny Vincent's German band, an album's worth of classic Oz punk covers
(only awaiting guest soloists), a fiery album ("Badass Roadshow") with ex-New
Christ/Panadoll Al Creed and another brutal set with yet another Brazillian
punk band, the Hippy Killers. Simon writes driving, guitar-based rock with
lashings of melody, with growling but tuneful vocals (hence the Chainsaw tag).
These are some of the best - and shortest - songs he's written, all but one
clocking in at less than 4mins each. Hooky songs like "Thinking About It"
and "Million Miles Away" mix it with grinding ("Bag of Bricks", "Always Wrong")
and driving rockers ("Basta" and the Lime Spiders-like Killing Off the Past").
Plus, there's a masterful cover of the Saints' "No Time" that pits guitar
against hot boogie piano (the guitar wins, but it's a close run thing).
Dunno why Brazil doesn't spring to mind when someone says "rock" - South America's
produced some mind-bending psych in the late '60s and acts like the Ramones
are (still) worshipped there in a way that makes the Beatles look like they
couldn't have gotten arrested. Simon's lolcal mates, the Forgotten Boys, provide
(warning: bad pun approaching) "memorable" backing and are as tighter than
a tourist's grip on his wallet in some of the seedier parts of San Paulo.
If you want local flavour, the title track is sung for the most part in Portugese.
Your guess is probably better than mine as to what Inocentes singer Clemente
is singing as guest vocalist, but it sounds OK.
For a while the Vanilla Chainsaws (in retrospect) shaped as worthy contenders
on a very crowded Australian scene. That they didn't probably came down to
a lot of things, but you have to wonder if Simon hadn't caught the travel
bug that his profile in his home country might not be higher. No problem.
Get in on one of the best kept secrets and give this a spin. (While you're
at it, snap up the Chainsaw Men disc he churned out with ex-Gamma Men drummer
Steve Gardner in San Diego too a few years ago. It' cheap as chips in our
store or from NKVD.)
- The Barman
3/4