I don’t know whether to call Having
Pop-Punk Feelings in a Country-Western Body an album or an EP but in
my mind it’s the former. The six songs on here run for just shy of half an hour
and make for a cohesive collection of ideas alongside a fully-developed sound.
In fact, even their previous two EPs -Two Songs
for the Piano Accordion and In a Shed… Doing ASBESTOS we
can- sounded deceptively like a band that had been playing together
for years. They’ve actually only been together since late 2014. If I were to
try to describe them to someone who hadn’t heard their music I’d probably throw
out to comparisons to other great violin-weilding Australian acts like The
Go-Betweens, Rowland S Howard’s Teenage Snuff Film band
and of course, Dirty Three, with some PJ Harvey and Neutral
Milk Hotel thrown in there for good measure.
The first line of the first song is
melancholy, “Crying to myself on the street / Thunderstorm for one” and
it builds to a peak in the middle with crescendoing violin, emotive drums and
what could be seen as a plea from lead singer June Jones of “Let
me paint my face, put on my dress and go out dancing / I wanna not care if it’s
not allowed / Fists might await me but I won’t care / People might hate me but
I won’t care”. It’s just the start of a concept that runs
through Having Pop-Punk Feelings in a Country-Western Body and
it’s a concept that becomes a celebration over the course of the album. It’s
such a great title for a collection of songs that are mainly concerned with
gender transition. It’s tongue-in-cheek and suitably so.
My favourite song on this record, and the one that
you will hear shortly, is More True More Rowdy and it’s
because of the glimpse of the inner-workings of June Jones' mind and especially
her views on small-town masculinity and the trappings thereof. She sings: “Portrait
of a cowboy in a sports car / Gladiator at home in a sports bar / The mask has
been shattered / The pieces been scattered / Glued back together with Red Bull
an Jaeger” and later on “I just don’t know what to do with
myself / Does high-as-fuck count as an emotion?”
I feel like that song is a perfect summation of my
teenage years. Somehow it manages to be person-specific and anthemic at the
same time. I think this record will be a favourite of many this year for the
bold take on the subject matter but most for the impressive and singular
musicianship of the band as a whole.
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