Spooky031

Sailors & Swine - All Hail The Drunken Liar

 

Reviews

The Age - EG

When the chemistry clicks, as it does on stand-out track Miner's Bride, S&S sound like world beaters.

Let's say you've formed a band. You've got a sound in your head, inspired by one of the best Australian groups to come along in years, the Drones. You're signed to their first label, and their producer, Loki Lockwood, is doing the knobs for your debut long-player; your guitarists Nils Arnold and Billy McCabe have the clashing, chiming, pummelling sound down solid; your rhythm section of drummer Vijay Singh and Owen Eszeki on bass is maybe even stronger than theirs; and McCabe's singing is sturdy and soulful. Better not start counting that Australian Music Prize money just yet, however. S&S have the chops and the attitude but this set of songs lacks that spark of mad genius that makes the other band dance right out to the edge and not just look down but do pirouettes. When the chemistry clicks, as it does on stand-out track Miner's Bride, S&S sound like world beaters. But the extended noodling on opener Holy Shark makes as much sense as a mermaid on a bicycle.

Jeff Glorfeld

 

 

Beat Magazine Album Review - Melbourne

Once upon a time waterfront regions were places of ill-repute, danger and the natural operating environment of the human detritus that resides on the margins of society.  Then along came the white shoe wearing property developers, armed with chardonnay and cocaine sponsored images of a sanitised precinct with, ahem, considerable commercial potential.  The gritty world of the waterfront was stripped of every last semblance of character, replaced by a sanitised milieu with all the charisma of a soggy cardboard box.  Ladies and gentlemen – we give you Docklands. 

There’s nothing beautiful about Sailors and Swine, but neither should there be.  Sailors and Swine inhabit a musical world as dank, gloomy and confronting as any territory traversed by the Beasts of Bourbon, Scientists, the Birthday Party or The Drones.  The rumbling bass that ushers in Holy Shark is foreboding, but positively comforting relative to the jagged guitar chords that slice and dice the sonic atmosphere shortly after.  The song’s narrative – emotional betrayal, death, and the rest – sets the theme for the rest of the album, an aesthetic that is littered with violence, pain and psychological turmoil.  Ships and the Night is as bruising as the physical effects of a drunken brawl, Miner’s Bride is restrained, and honest to the point of pathetic indifference and the lumbering and the unhinged intensity of Rotten Night makes some of Gareth Liddiard’s emotional pleadings seem like Enid Blyton stories in comparison.   

The mixture of sociopathic anger, grinding bass and screeching guitar in The Birds brings to mind the earliest incarnation of Kim Salmon and the Surrealists, The Boiling Sea presents the beauty of love in a seedy, brutal, sincere and Harem Scarem sponsored package, Pig Machine is out and out nasty, and Stranger lumbers and swaggers like the cocksure, but pissed, fighter taking on the residents of a dockside bar. 

All Hail the Drunken Liar is a harsh record, but undeniably fair.  Like the traditional waterfront residents trying to fight the tide of filthy lucre that threatens their existence, Sailors and Swine are fighting the good fight, and demonstrating that the greatest beauty lies hidden within the ugliest facade. 

Patrick Emery

 

 

 

Time Off Album Review - Brisbane

While the ‘country’ genre has often been considered off-limits

for anyone aspiring to true rock credibility, there’s no denying

the entrancing appeal of the genre’s outlaw mythologies and

dark, tragic romances. When drone-kingpins Earth released

the decidedly country-influenced masterpiece The Bees

Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull earlier this year, they merely

confirmed what the popularity of artists like Ryan Adams and

My Morning Jacket has hinted at for years: country is, in some

indefatigable way, cool.

Rick Rubin knew it when he re-invigorated

Johnny Cash’s career, Nick Cave has always

known it and Sailors & Swine definitely know it.

All Hail The Drunken Liar, the debut album for the Melbourne

quartet, takes Sailors & Swine’s clear affection for country

music’s blood-soaked narratives and twanging guitars and

subsumes them in a bass-heavy post-punk squall not unlike

that of The Birthday Party’s early years.

Opener ‘Holy Shark’ staggers violently into the room and

loudly announces the band’s intentions with snarled baritone

vocals, a kicking groove and jagged, distorted guitar twangs

all swinging drunkenly from a bass-line of such commendable

filthiness, it almost demands an immediate shower on the

part of the listener. The group then proceed to explore their

country/post-punk hybrid to full effect, from the darkly poetic

and yearning ‘Miner’s Bride’, to the vicious, stomping swing of

‘The Birds’ and the unsettling blackened waltz of ‘Stranger’.

It’s a hybrid that works to surprisingly consistent effect, proving

viscerally primal, slyly intelligent and disturbingly sordid all at

once, leaving the entirety of All Hail The Drunken Liar suffused

with a dark, faintly horrifying, psychedelic atmosphere. It’s an

atmosphere which will endure as a tantalisingly uncomfortable

memory long after the individual songs have concluded and

which distinguishes All Hail The Drunken Liar as a very

impressive debut.

Matt O’Neill

 

 

Boiling Sea / The Birds single

 

Rave Magazine – Single of the Week

 

Take into account the name of this new

Melbourne band, the title of their debut

single, and the nom de plume of their upcoming

album All Hail The Drunken Liar,

and it would be reasonable to expect a

shanty-styled collection of maritime rumjigs.

What The Boiling Sea reveals, however,

is less swash in the group’s buckle,

and more Old in their Testament. Wait,

that made literally no sense. Retribution

themed and harsh sounding, vocalist Billy

McCabe releases a majestically demented

howl, baying about a world notsomuch

black and white as it is different shades

of blood and flame. The Boiling Sea builds

from a Kim Salmon styled creeps into

a frightening ‘80s-Bad-Seeds Nick Cave

story, like The Mercy Seat but without

its underlying nobility. B-side The Birds

skips back over Cave’s work to the even

more primal The Birthday Party, with the

brutally told tale of a man falsely accused

of murder and hanged, and the line “Birds

/ birds / birds rip out his eyes” straight up

giving me the willies. Comprising members

of other Melbourne groups like Bit By

Bats, Moscow Schoolboy and The Process,

Sailors & Swine arrive not just with some

darkly morbid post-punk-country fables,

but an addictively chilling mindset. At this

rate, the album might leave you curled in

a ball on the floor muttering about seeing

the devil. Giggle. I can’t wait.

 

 

Time Off - Single Review

 

The newest band on the ever-reliable Spooky Records in

Melbourne is Sailors & Swine, and this two track sampler

from their forthcoming albumAll Hail The Drunken Liar

sees them fi t snugly onto the Spooky roster. Clearly

infl uenced by a generation of swampy blues garage rock,

Sailors & Swine's own take on the genre is very faithful

to its origins (translation: it sounds just like The Birthday

Party), and the songs are interesting enough to make

it all worthwhile, and not just an exercise in nostalgia.

Rambunctious vocals and jaunty timings make song two

'The Birds' the pick of these two tracks; the album will be

very interesting.

 

 

Brag Live Review - Sydney

 

Melbourne quatro Sailors & Swine have trotted the gangplank and set sail into the moonlit ocean of fire, leaving the tattered remnants of righteousness in their wake…Guided by the dying screams of a heretic burnt at the stake, the sea of swampy sounds spew from the mouth of an old electric guitar regurgitating rejected reverb and tremolo drenched notes. As the flames of dusk become embers of the night, the raging and wild beat of the drum can still be heard across distant waters…Fresh from the Melbourne underground, they spat dark blues influenced gold, mesmerising a gig-hardened crowd of Sydney’s indie elite. Jared James.