Because the floodgates were forced open so violently by the build-up of post-punk experimentalism at the turn of the 1980s, it’s no surprise that many interesting bands slipped through the cracks and only gained a smattering of posthumous appreciation.
Having reviewed the Laughing Outlaw label’s extensive 2-CD set ‘Inner City Sound’ a couple of years back, I’m under no illusion of how fertile the Australian post-punk scene was in those days. In fact, that touchstone of a compilation featured a track from a short-lived, but popular local cult outfit called Voigt/465, who would later bequeath two members (John Turnbull and Rae Byrom) to Sydney post-punkers WILD WEST.
WW would themselves implode within two years and their official output added up to merely one EP (‘Beat the Drought’) and a track on another compilation (the self-explanatory ‘A Selection’) on the M-Squared label. However, as this intriguing archival collection proves, a fair bit more releasable material ended up gathering dust in the vaults.
As was often the case in those forward-thinking days, Wild West was primarily a guitar-wielding band wide to receive the sound of primitive, analogue synths. Opening tune ‘Calling the House’ (also the lead track from ‘Beat the Drought’) has a pleasingly quirky feel akin to early Go-Betweens with a little of Pere Ubu’s kooked-out white noise riding shotgun. Indeed, as the songs quietly unfurl, hints of everything from nervy, Talking Heads-y pop (‘We Can Do’) through to quirked-out Beefheartian splurges (‘Coast’) raise their pretty little heads without ever threatening to dominate the proceedings.
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OK, some of it hasn’t aged quite so well. The faltering likes of ‘Bobbies’ and the brittle ‘Fierce Atoms’ verge dangerously close to twee and ‘New Associations’ is too abstract by half. The tracks from the band’s final session (only weeks from their split in late ’81), however, have a sombre, brooding quality and the best of them (‘Psycho’, the poppier, strident ‘Disappear’) suggest that greater things could have been on the horizon if they’d had the will to stick around and shape ‘em.
Nonetheless, ‘Scratch Another Day’ writes a dignified epitaph for Wild West. Rounded off by live tracks from the band’s first and last gigs – it all adds up to a decent, thought-provoking re-writing of the Aussie post-punk rules.
Listen to Wild West at Bandcamp
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