TERRY
Call Me Terry (Upset The Rhythm)
Comprising four people, none of them called Terry but having collectively invested some sort of mystical significance into the name, the first album in five years by this Melbourne group is a real winner if you like 1980s-style Antipodean jangle-pop, or postpunk at the genre’s most airy and melodic. This shouldn’t, though, be taken to mean Call Me Terry is a happy-go-lucky experience.
There’s a darker undercurrent to Terry’s sound, from the droning garage-ish organs and primitive-soundchipped keyboards to the stumbling guitar/bass interplay. This all lands somewhere near Young Marble Giants on occasion, and certainly, that band were proof positive that sweet tunes could be deployed in sinister ways. Mid-album number Golden Head feels like the one that could (in a better world) score radio play, with a synth refrain that sounds traced from some ultra-bombastic 80s pop hit.
And then there are the lyrics, which double up as the album artwork: each track is coupled with a photo of an Australian building or place of interest, tying into caustic lines about domestic politics and colonialist history.
words NOEL GARDNER
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