Eddy Current Suppression Ring - Rush to Relax (Goner Records 2010)
Four Australian guys meet at their factory job, and decide to form a band. Favoring a more straight-ahead sound that looks back at mid-to-late ‘70s proto- and punk proper with hardly a sideways glance, they release a few singles, a couple of great albums, and even manage tour the States a couple of times, all to the acclaim of the punk/garage cognoscenti. A Pulitzer-worthy story this is most decidedly not, as the only thing more remarkable about Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s bare bones tracks is the absolutely unremarkable nature of the four gents who craft them. Not that that’s a problem, mind you — one suspects that a significant part of the band’s appeal and relative success (especially in their home country) is due to the fact that they’ve always written songs that mirror their own disposition as run-of-the-mill dudes. It took Eddy Current Suppression Ring just six studio hours to craft a follow up to their sophomore LP, Primary Colours. That's less time than most Americans will spend at work in a day. While that pace created a final product much less polished than the band's previous work, Rush to Relax is also a more accurate, interesting sonic articulation of the band's frenetic frontman, Brendan Suppression. "Anxiety" picks up right where Colours left off-- its rubber-band riffs wrapped tightly around Suppression's existential babbling. The guitar sound is still a spring-loaded hybrid cobbled together from Saints and Stooges records.
Basic, unassuming, and calling to mind a grip of classic material without going to great lengths to mimic it, Rush to Relax, the band’s third LP, adds almost nothing new to Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s repertoire. There’s the band-cited Pagans and Troggs similarities, but also bits of the Fall’s slang rants and Wire’s early, deceptively simple primitivism. That’s largely a good thing, though — recorded in a day and often showing it, this album is loose and limber, sacrificing pinpoint precision for an unkempt energy few can match.
Quietly-laced and hardly lo-fi when quite a few of their contemporaries are anything but, Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s Rush to Relax is that rare record, asking nothing up front, but yielding more and more rewards with each passing listen.
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