Submersive Behaviour

About

Only a band like Tropical Fuck Storm could convincingly open an EP with a cover of Jimi Hendrix deep cut, “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn To Be).” The original is 13 minutes long. The Melbourne quartet’s take on it is almost 18 minutes long and also features Queensland singer-songwriter Dan Kelly’s vivid strangeness, transforming what was already an addled odyssey into a maze-like excursion where every exit is the way you came in. Fittingly, the EP’s actual exit is an equally hingeless rendition of “Ann” by The Stooges. The songs in between are originals—though the band initially claimed they were also covers from such hilariously fabricated acts as “Middle Aged in the Middle East in the Middle Ages.” It’s abrasively bold, and typically so for Tropical Fuck Storm. The clue, as always, is in the band’s carefree moniker—not to mention the EP’s contrastingly implicit title: <i>Submersive Behaviour</i> goes to great, abyssal lengths to sink well beneath simple subversiveness over its five tracks. There’s a deeply embedded reason for this: If the opening gambit is a spit in the face of “the recent wrongs perpetrated against Hendrix classics” as lead singer Gareth Liddiard has declared, then the rest of what constitutes <i>Submersive Behaviour</i> is similarly reactionary on multiple levels. Its production is so lo-fi it fittingly harks back to the woolly studio standards of 1963, and the band does not even seem to have played to a strict click-track—most notably on single “The Golden Ratio”’s ironically woozy, wonky, and refreshingly wonderful jam-session-turned-sort-of-song.

via Apple Music