Geelong delinquents The Living Eyes are a four piece (vocalist Billy Gardner also runs the Antifade label) and this is their second full length recording.
It strikes me as being very garage but you may as well throw in punk and power pop as well. These slackers took a whole day and a half to record this. It was then apparently finished off in a couple of bedrooms. This was presumably achieved by turning all the faders way the fuck up and the result is delirious.
Their reference points are the homegrown talent of The Saints, The Hard Ons, The Easybeats and The Hoodoo Guru and rightly so but that is as much about the attitude as anything else as this band are fashioning their own style and sound, albeit a derivative one.
Clearly their priority was to imbue all these tracks with energy and then capture that and make no mistake they achieved it. There may be the odd bit of sloppiness but who gives a monkey about that when the songs are so good? They even have the decency to ‘change it up’ (actually down) with a bit of mid-pace flower-power on ‘Dry Spell’.
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Other than that it’s pretty much a case of smash and grab. ‘High Standards’ (Crampsian), ‘Eat It Up’ and ‘All in Good Time’, set both the tone and the standard. If this way you come you will be set for a rollicking good time. The sound is all up in the treble zone and the vibe is trouble zone and sixties retro. ‘On Sale’ lurches about, ‘Guilty Pleasures’ evokes the mosh pit, ‘Put It Back’ gives off a whiff of The Ramones and ‘Bad Example’ has an almost anthemic quality if that’s possible over the course of two and a half minutes?
The album finishes with the long drawn out (3.48), ever ascending ’Lighten Up’. From more recent times this band remind me of The Pattern (Oakland, California) or even The D4 (Auckland, New Zealand). It certainly has a 60’s retro flavour to it but in a nutshell it is blitzkrieg power pop ONE TWO THREE FOUR!
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