Through lineup changes, the death of a key member, and the consumption of enough booze to inebriate the population of a large city over a long holiday weekend, Australia’s Cosmic Psychos have persisted beyond all expectations, and in fact they just finished an American tour booked to coincide with the reissue of their early recordings. Those discs are all currently available from the terrific Memphis-based label Goner, with each one being quite dandy. However, the fuzzed-out rawness of “Down on the Farm,” their five-song debut EP from 1985, is definitely the place to start.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a bunch of dudes more unglamorous than the Cosmic Psychos. And over the years these hard-working, heavy-drinking charmers have played up this image to the hilt, becoming ragged, uncomely ambassadors of no-frills high-energy rock, but a good look at any of their group portraits should make it abundantly clear that it’s anything but a put-on.
Where the general tendency for aging rockers is to either get out of the game or to gradually adjust their approach in the attempt to compliment their increasing age, the Cosmic Psychos, led across their lifespan by bassist/vocalist Ross Knight, have done little to slow the pace over the years, and as time has marched forward they’ve increasingly come off like a bunch of burly factory workers searching for emotional release by extending the sounds of The Stooges, The Ramones, and Motörhead.
When they first appeared in 1985 the Psychos were simply one in a steady outpouring of Australian bands diving deeply into undiluted punk waters just as so much of the rest of the globe had either turned its back on the impulse or were busy running it into the ground. Indeed, by mid-decade in the USA, punk was a solidly subterranean and far from artistically healthy scenario.
So bad was the situation that Americans having grown sick over the diminishing returns of rote hardcore turned to sounds from Down Under in hopes of sating their musical kicks. And the shelling out of large dollars for a bounty of import discs (along with the infrequent lucky second-hand score) from labels like Au Go Go, Citadel, Waterfront, Greasy Pop, and Aberrant didn’t disappoint, with the records serving as raucous proof the flame was still alive.
The Cosmic Psychos formed when Knight replaced a pair of departing members from the obscure band Spring Plains, an outfit mainly noted for contributing a sludgy, Birthday Party-damaged cut to the ’84 Au Go Go compilation Asleep at the Wheel. Searching it out reveals a good song, but also one that falls into a specific historical context.
For in mid-‘80s Australia the influence of home country heroes Nick Cave and company was still rather huge, a reality that fit in rather snuggly with the deep currents of contemporaneous Aussie love expressed for The Cramps and to a lesser extent The Gun Club. And all this deep appreciation (and in some cases blatant adulation) resulted in a major facet of the country’s musical personality being punk-derived roots destruction.
But with guitarist/vocalist Peter “Dirty” Jones and drummer/vocalist Bill Walsh, Knight completed a trio that stripped away any highfalutin subtleties as they revitalized the uncut spirit of ’69 Detroit and ’77 Ramones (with a little bit of early Aussie punk champs Radio Birdman thrown in) as a brawnier, formidable beast appropriate for the climate of the 1980s.
This lineup completed an EP, two studio LPs, and a live disc before Jones departed. Of all this material their second rec, ‘89’s Go the Hack brought the Psychos their biggest American visibility due to getting licensed by Sub Pop and becoming a tangential part of the ensuing Grunge explosion. And since the Psychos have been sometimes described as basically recording the same album over and over, Go the Hack might seem like just the place for a curious dabbler to commence.
However, reputed non-growth of the Cosmic Psychos ain’t all that true, and it’s my considered opinion that anybody interested in their back catalog should proceed directly to that debut EP, ‘85’s “Down on the Farm.” The reasons for this are numerous, but for starters the skuzzy bare-bones production is immediately distinct from the two long-players that came after and as such gives the band’s long reign its logical starting point.
Recorded on a two-track tape machine with all the finesse of an overtaxed bulldozer, it sounds like a band not likely to survive one year much less twenty-eight of them. This is the aura of three guys simply going for it, not with any real aspirations for rock ‘n’ roll glory (which is perhaps why they actually managed a small bit of u-ground fame) but instead channeling their disdain for boredom into five hard-charging cuts that were essentially a means to an end. They just didn’t have anything better to do, you know?
And this lack of premeditation turns “Down on the Farm” into a bruising listen that’s lost nothing in the decades since it first appeared. Even better is that the record begins with “Custom Credit,” easily one of the Psychos greatest songs. It’s named after one of those horrid finance companies that offer loans at predatory interest rates, and it soaks up the dead-end vibe of the early Stooges like a filthy sponge only to wring it back out with defiant bitterness. As its six minutes unravel it becomes one of the bleakest, and yet also wickedly humorous, plunges into Stoogoid mayhem these ears have ever heard.
Knight alternates descriptions of avoiding a persistent debt collector (“I wound up the windows/I pulled down the phone/I rolled up the carpet/I pretended I wasn’t home”) with disgust over the whole situation (“twenty-seven and a half percent/that’s money well spent/god, I should’ve tried a bank/ha, I should’ve tried to rob a bank!”) as Walsh lays down an unflaggingly propulsive backbeat, Knight’s bass rumbles along in tandem and Jones’ guitar riffs get suitably raunchy and he spits out nasty streams of tangled up wah-pedal gunk for good measure.
“Custom Credit” is far from a pretty picture, but as a snapshot of working class hopelessness cloaked in downer-punk scorch, it remains pretty damned galvanizing. Furthermore, the thickness of Knight’s accent as he rails against that debt collector, repeating “You drove me up the wall/I ain’t no spidah” with increasing discontent, really brings a vivid geographical flavor to it all, something that often got diminished or even lost when Aussie bands adopted musical motifs from far off regions.
And the way he calls out for a solo (“Give us some wah-wah, Dirty!”) really underscores how off-the-cuff this massive first step from the Psychos actually was. As the subsequent records have hit the racks they’ve done a very good job of avoiding the atmosphere of going through the motions, but for me, nothing else in their catalog really nails the air of playing rock music out of the simple necessity to alleviate the burdens of an otherwise unfulfilling life quite like this song does.
Actually, not a completely unrewarding existence, for on the heavily Ramones-informed title track Knight evinces much love for life on his farm, at two points exclaiming “I love my tractor!” and “Long live Massey Ferguson!” Complicating it somewhat however are lyrics pointing to troubled parental relations, and overall the tune remains a far from generic immersion into the worthiness of the Ramonesian dynamic.
Next comes two numbers sung by drummer Walsh. “She’s a Cat” is the first, and while it surely continues the EP’s intense tunneling into the territory of the Brudders, it does so with vocals (and guitar breaks) spawned from the fount of Iggy and crew. “Crazy Woman” is the second, grafting a tried-and-true lyrical lament over female troubles to a seven and a half minute exploration of twisted Stooges head-space that finds Jones’ guitar getting seriously out-there.
This leaves us with the closer “Gangrene Dream,” one last extended excursion into mania ala Stooge and easily the most darkly warped entry on the record. Nobody sings this time out, the vocals being replaced by audio samples including those sourced from last century’s biggest turd Adolf Hitler, and as the sound of these diseased speeches unwind the band gets positively unhinged.
Unlike the limp attempts toward the transgressive that sprang from many “bad-boy” punks as they flirted with the “dangerousness” of Nazi trappings, “Gangrene Dream” has always connected like a caustic collective seizure against the ugliness found at the heart of rampant patriotism. In short, a blistering social statement from a decidedly nonpolitical band and in turn quite different from anything else I’ve heard in their discography.
Both of the Psychos’ succeeding studio full-lengths, ‘87’s self-titled effort and Do the Hack are tightly-wound blasts of punk throttle, but on them the ear can already detect the band realizing they have the goods to stick around for a while. And that’s cool. After that live slab Slave to the Crave in ’90, Jones’ exit was followed by the entrance of guitarist Robbie “Rocket” Watts and then the release of the Butch Vig-produced Blokes You Can Trust in ’91 by Amphetamine Reptile.
It’s at this point that the Psychos kinda developed into an unruly sibling of Motörhead (or punk incarnation of AC/DC) in their dogged resistance to departing from a winning formula, and two more discs for AmRep, ‘93’s “Palomino Pizza” EP and ‘95’s Self Totalled LP helped to solidify their rep with the decade’s unkempt noise rock brigade. From there additional recordings arrived including a 2CD/2LP comp Sixteen Years, a Million Bears in 2001, and then a long hiatus broken by the emergence of 2005’s Off Ya Cruet that revealed an acrimonious split with drummer Walsh, his role taken up by Dean Muller.
That left Knight as the sole original member, and in ’06 Watts died of a heart attack. Undeterred, Knight recruited John “Mad Macka” McKeering of The Onyas on guitar and since then three more albums, two studio and one live, have been completed. To get up to date, they just finished with a US tour capped off with an appearance at Goner’s yearly celebration Gonerfest. And there’s even a fresh documentary about them titled Cosmic Psychos: Blokes You Can Trust that includes the participation of a handful of musician fans including Vig, members of Mudhoney and the Melvins, and even Mr. Edward Vedder.
Goner’s reissue of the early work from the Cosmic Psychos is certainly admirable, and anybody gassed by this sort of low-brow high-octane mayhem should look into the entire lot. While Knight has done nothing to sweeten the band’s manly odor over the years, the stuff with the original lineup is pretty special, and as detailed above “Down on the Farm” possesses its own tweaked ambiance. On CD the EP is combined with the LP Cosmic Psychos, but the prospect of extra spending should in no way deter vinyl aficionados from picking up “Down on the Farm” as a single item.
For these five tracks are the inaugural eruptions of a one-of-a-kind band that’s displayed odds-defying endurance. If they became more assured and powerful later, “Down on the Farm” has always emitted the allure of a well-made first document. In turn it remains my long sentimental favorite, and with some time spent it just might become yours as well.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
