Album Review: A. Swayze & The Ghosts – Paid Salvation


Paid Salvation




It was the arch punk himself John Lydon who described anger as an energy, and if that’s true then Andrew Swayze, frontman of the Hobart four-piece that bears his name, seems to have enough rage to power a small town, one which moves him to call the odds out on missed opportunities: ‘It really shits me off when bands have this pedestal…and they waste it by singing about stupid shit like going to the pub or having a smoke break at work.’

That said, if you come at globally successful fellow countrymen The Chats – almost certainly the unnamed targets of this beef – then you’d best have more in your locker than a bad attitude and a big mouth. The singer’s invective also heaps the pressure on Paid Salvation, a debut release that wisely froths with messages, not just trash-talk directed at people they might meet one day backstage at a festival.

As opener It’s Not Alright shows, this Tasmanian-born strand of punk owes much to the snarly, snotty movement’s first generation, chiefly The Ramones, New York Dolls and Antipodean standard bearers The Saints, but the words aren’t about Saturday night punches but young men respecting the word ‘no’ whenever they hear it. On Connect To Consume, it’s the turn of the by-now familiar dichotomy of being over exposed to/on social media to take a hammering but to their credit, despite the stand-up, 2D feel to the riffs and sneers, it doesn’t shrink from railing against their own audience.

There’s something oddly reassuring though about a character so committed to a bunch of ideas that the notion of self-sabotage is only part of the package. Swayze’s voice – atonal, piercing, loud – gives these tunes a weird kind of authority, so even when the slacker backline chips in on News, this is still the sound of a group with lack of compromise as their essence.

The jolts don’t stop, Beaches jaggedly elbowing its way into the climate war chamber, while Marigold relies on raw power, condemning the sort of herd mentality which was punk’s enemy even before the misfits and mongrels who flocked to it even knew the name.

As well as committing the sin of trying to make people think, a little buried but still there are musical tweaks as well. The title-track deals with the hypocrisy of buying redemption like something from a convenience store, but it trapezes over a drum machine for extra confrontation, while Cancer is the sort of outsider-disco Ohio mavericks Devo may once have considered worth bringing to the world, as close as the listener gets to jerkish danceability.

Andrew Swayze has a vision fashioned by a sense of duty to tell the world how wrong it is, whilst also being the embodiment of a life lived without guide rails.

Paid Salvation has the smarts but not the tunes, so if they don’t get their lights punched out first the quartet at least have one impudent leg up on someone else’s stage.



6.5/10

Andy Peterson


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