Here, have a listen to Trampoline from 2005. It’s wonderful.
Back then I described The Grates’s lead singer Patience Hodgson as an “ebullient and ridiculously loveable singer, who scissor-kicks and bounces high into the air from standing like a Sally Ally version of Karen O, shameless in her adoration for her feisty-cute band, all breathy innuendo and ruinous energy”. The song – and the band – possessed a nerveless, boundless vitality and coy sexuality – all the better for not being fully-formed.
Here, have a listen to The Grates’s new single, Holiday Home – recorded with the rest of their new album Dream Team over the space of six days, with producer Owen Penglis (of Straight Arrows) at Sydney’s Linear Studios.
It’s still excellent, the edges not too rounded off. (How could they be, in such a short space of time?) The one-note guitar line sounds like sped-up Psycho Killer (that is, it’s minimal). Hodgson has moved on from her 2000s infatuation with Williamsburg, and now sounds like a cross between Chrissy Amphlett and (weirdly) Chrissie Hynde, with a little Courtney Love thrown in. I’d like to say she sounds like her own self, but I’m not sure she does. She’s still assimilating her influences.
No, she hasn’t lost the American accent.
The drumming, though … now, that’s something else. What made The Grates so immediately loveable across their first two albums – the hi-octane garage-indie debut 2006 Gravity Won’t Get You High, and its more introspective follow-up Teeth Lost, Hearts Won (2008) – was that they gelled as a band, not merely a collection of good musicians. From the moment I first heard The Grates, I always figured original drummer Alana Skyring to be as vital a component as Hodgson and her guitarist husband John Patterson. Perhaps more so. Bad – or merely competent – drumming will ruin a band faster than a crap guitarist.
The Grates’s fourth album suffers from the same problem as their third, 2011’s fine but unspectacular Secret Rituals: good, solid, muscly bloke drumming (this time, courtesy of Ritchie Daniell, a barista at Hodgson and Patterson’s Brisbane café, Southside Tea Room). Not everything has to be treated like it’s an anthem.
If Dream Team sounds more “grown up” – what with the hyper-energetic brat-pop Grates of old switched for something a little more refined, more radio-friendly – there are still enough moments of euphoria to lift it above the mundane. Holiday Home, for sure. 7-Eleven bubbles and calls back to the group’s DIY garage rock roots. Dirty Hands squeals and teases nastily like something from Hole’s second album, with the band showing a great and welcome grasp of dynamics. I say Hole, but Hodgson’s phrasing on the deceptively throwaway middle section is pure Hynde.
There are a few plodders; why indie rock bands insist on including songs like the drawn-out It Won’t Hurt Anymore on their albums, I don’t know. Slowing the pace and lingering over words doesn’t automatically make your music more emotional. It just makes it slower. (I blame Coldplay and the way Chris Martin insists every feeling has to be broad enough to fill a stadium.)
But for every song like that, or the misjudged garage rocker Wild One (which appears to reprise the refrain from The Troggs’ Wild Thing under the squall), there’s a gorgeously blunt and brief Friends With Scum.
And the stunning slowie What’s Wrong With You could be a Shadow Morton B-side from the 1960s, or something wonderful and tear-streaked from Grease. For once, Hodgson is unafraid to let rip with the undoubted beauty of her voice. This one could go massive.
The album finishes with future crowd-pleaser, the slow-burning Back To Back. The feeling one is left with is of slight disappointment – what I would have given to have heard a female drummer on these songs – but mostly one of pleasure. The Grates are back, and good on them!
