Dead Beat is probably one of the most anticipated Australian albums of 2008, at least for anyone who has seen and felt moved by Ohana’ numerous performances this year. Two standout tracks began to appear in their live set earlier this year (‘One on Four’ and ‘Birth of the Clinic’) and both left a startling impression, offering proof that Ohana were set to eclipse their 2007 debut LP Weak Wrists. For someone who was starting to lose faith in “guitar music’ around the middle of 2007 Ohana was a potent wake-up call, and both of these songs had lodged themselves inside my head long before they were committed to tape.
During a time when full-throttle hard rock and punk bands seem to have a stranglehold on most of Sydney’ warehouse spaces it’s rare for a band to stand out to this degree, but Ohana is doggedly assertive: they bear an almost iconoclastic inscrutability, one that teases questions. We all know that asking questions about a group’ motives – the personal truths an ensemble espouses – is one of the great pleasures of loving rock music (don’ we?), and like their contemporaries My Disco, Ohana can contain their ideas in music, sound and discord, as well as in words. You can grapple with Dead Beat, you can wonder about it. The ideas can lead you astray.
For much of Dead Beat the group swap between two modes: the more common model is a rhythmically rigid, discordant rock momentum that occasionally collapses into troughs of chaotic fuzz, as on “They Scoundrels’. The track is based around one predominant bass and drum line, with swathes of barbed guitar textures applied liberally, unmercifully. If this format accounts for much of the 26 minutes of the album, infrequent contrasts can be found in tracks like “Our Distant Foundations’, which tends to duck and swoop from one time signature to another in a rather jarring, evasive manner – perfectly evoking the restless, imperative and envenomed melancholy of Will Farrier’ lyrics.
Indeed this is melancholic music, strikingly bereft of humour, singularly determined and unabashedly polemical. Dead Beat is frustrated and aghast at the perennial injustices, and there’ a fascinating self-loathing apparent on certain tracks, some inherent sense of guilt that is difficult not to share. “I will never know the value of things If we define in difference,†Farrier screams at the end of “Foreign Profession’, “I rely on the difference of you / push me onwards outwards inwards / push me boundaries, darkness, limits / either way, I am the very definition of complacency.†It’s one of the few moments where Farrier really breaks loose, though it’s only one frightening and powerful moment on an album that’s liberally packed full of them. Dead Beat certainly lives up to the hype.
Shaun Prescott
