Misplaced anger is easy to find in the post-irony era, it's post-irony to be angry with your single mum for taking you hunting as a young boy and it's post-irony to hate your art teacher for letting you be so abstract. When anger is unleashed without wit or irony, but rather with - funnily enough - anger, it's a dose of much needed reality.
Melbourne's The Nation Blue deliver a scathing lyrical collage, imbued with the personal-social-political heritage of Fugazi and the rage of hard-edged punk rock. Damnation is the three piece's second LP after relocating to Melbourne from Tasmania and shifting off Trial and Error Records. The album is a sonic dirty-bomb, spreading shrieking, squealing riffs and brooding bass lines across a wide variety of song structures and lyrical ideas.
The brilliance of Damnation is in its unrelenting energy, sonic sophistication and lyrical muscularity. In short, The Nation Blue are the complete package.
From the moment Tom Lyngcoln's guitar plugs in the former Taswegians offer up hooks, riffs, brutality and solitude but rarely in equal measure. Van Deiman, with the gloomy vocals of Linda J is the bleakest point on an album not short of despair. Lyngcoln's guitar offers a virtually unbroken wall of distorted squalor through the second half of the song, stopping briefly to noodle and slide before pummelling a white noise wall again. Van Deiman is the hardest song on the album to listen to and for that reason, is the most rewarding.
Solar/sonar is the story of two hard-up lovers, driven towards each other by a choir and a gently growing musical background. It's without doubt a wild musical leap for a band most obviously at ease with squalling guitars and swivelling rhythms. What a genuine joy when a risk pays off.
The Nation Blue still stand resolute behind the engineering concepts created by their predecessors, vocals are just another instrument and should be mixed as such. Vocals should not lead the music and vice versa.
Good Behaviour could easily be a summer pop punk anthem given the massive hook driving right through the centre of it and the fast paced rhythm section but The Nation Blue would never have it. Laying a warping, industrial riff over the top of the first verse and writing a sparse, depressed bridge gives the song real character and the hook only sticks harder because of it.
Even with its sonic ingenuity and lyrical smarts, Damnation stands tall as an album because of the same reason all good albums stand; strong, creative and smart songwriting. The Nation Blue will deserve nearly every adulation that comes their way because of this album, even the predictable hyperbole will be right in places.
3/4
