There is a school of thought which says that, regardless that the culture and language might change, the dry powder which ignited to make punk rock exists in anyone with a certain set of values.
This is probably why it remains one of the most popular movements around the world – you can see a punk band anywhere from Tierra Del Fuego to Tromso – and also how it can thrive even under the baking sun of Queensland, Australia, the oven like constituency which has thrown up a mightily uncouth trio in The Chats.
Having got together whilst still at school, guitarist Josh Price, bassist Eamonn Sandwidth and drummer Matt Boggis loved AC/DC and wrote songs about what they knew, from boredom to bouncers, all served up in a primal two-chord stew of youthful hubris. Famously, their break came when the self-produced video for Smoko – immortalising the native term for a cigarette break – earned them the patronage of Dave Grohl and Josh Homme; it’s hard to know how much they understood of its succession of pisstakes and Antipodean in-jokes, but regardless it earned the then teenagers a global reputation they’re now pleased to live down to.
High Risk Behaviour is released on the band’s own Bargain Bin label and recorded in a converted shipping container in Geelong, proof that relative fame has far from gone to their heads. 14 tracks pass in just 28 spiky, often hilarious minutes, with subject matter ranging from low functioning in the constant heat (Stinker), pulling a restaurant runner (Dine N Dash), being hacked after buying drugs (Identity Theft) and getting the clap (The Clap).
This is not necessarily music for the Instagram actors, but it’s got the in-your-face integrity of those who’ve suffered plenty of inertia and life on the outside looking in. Nowhere better is this lack of control expressed than on the yobbish chanted outro of Drunk n’ Disorderly: ‘Relaxation/Mood alteration/Boredom leads to intoxication’, cries Sandwidth, Price’s guitar at its most angry and rabid. Nobody cares, and neither do they.
Unsurprisingly, they’re not ones for buying into their own mythology either, Sandwidth confiding: ‘Some of the songs were first-take and we were like, that’s good, whatever. We’re really not perfectionists.’ And yet that’s a quality that hangs out where you find it. There’s an unspoken confidence shadowing everything here: boldly, there’s no Smoko in earshot, but in the forearm smash of Pub Feed, Keep The Grubs Out’s wily caricature of social exclusion and 4573’s manic garage energy, there’s a definite impression that respect even for their own material is theirs and theirs only to give.
High Risk Behaviour finds The Chats pulling off the supreme, Dookie-esque trick of seeming totally apathetic whilst acing high energy punk rock creamed from a six pack of the lowest common denominators.
Soon you’ll be able to hear it all over the world, snotty nihilism in a universal language you just need the right attitude to understand.
