Deaf Wish are renowned for being one of Australia’s wildest, most chaotic live bands. Their shows regularly result in sonic and physical mayhem, with guitarists Jensen Tjhung, Pete Dickinson and bassist Nick Pratt battering the living daylights out of their long-suffering instruments and bodies while drummer Daniel Twomey tries to maintain some sort of tenuous control over the maelstrom of noise and feedback.

It’s a visual spectacle as much as an aural assault, but it would just be a bloody mess if there weren’t killer songs trying to escape from under all that scuzzy noise. With their first self-titled album, released in 2007, Deaf Wish proved that they could write songs to rival anything by The Wipers, Hüsker Dü or Sonic Youth. Sadly, their debut never saw a proper release, available only as a sporadically re-issued CD-R. It was also the last appearance of founding member Sarah Hardiman who went off in search of greener pastures overseas soon after the album’s release.

With her replacement Pete Dickinson (ex-Group Seizure), Deaf Wish underwent a transformation that saw them embracing looser song structures and the idea of jamming out tunes as a band, rather than the concise writing that marked their debut. It was a logical progression, deriving from their ability to create magic from the frenzied mess of live performances. It made sense then for the band to try and capture this feel in the recording of their second album Reality & Visions.

Rather than going to a studio, Deaf Wish camped out in a friend’s warehouse, recording anything and everything that their fevered imagination could produce – from fleshed-out songs to sketchy ideas and boozy jams. The sprawling, unwieldy result was then edited down to a manageable size and eventually became the twisted, snarling beast that is Reality & Visions, co-released on gloriously chunky vinyl by hip Melbourne labels Exo Records and Idget Child. Right from the start, it becomes clear that this isn’t going to be an easy ride.

‘Man/Manbeast’ begins with samples of seemingly random radio transmissions, some Jim Morrison-esque pseudo-visionary monologue from Tjhung and a truncated tune that bursts into the brief punk rock rush of ‘Smash’. Before the song has a chance to unfold beyond its second verse, we’re thrust headlong into the mad stomp of ‘Bad Water’, its shouted chorus being the first obvious hook for listeners to hold on to. ‘Gentle Mental Illness’ provides some respite with its loping pace, but still clocks in at just over a minute and a half. It’s one of those “What the fuck?” album-opening sequences you have to listen to a few times to fully appreciate.

By the fifth track, the largely instrumental ‘Backwards’, Deaf Wish finally allow themselves and the tune some breathing space. The guitars are let off the leash to pace nervously like junkyard dogs, before the song segues into some cosmic ramble that could only come from the addled mind of Pratt. ‘FLHC’ features some cool call-and-response vocals and more hallucinatory lyrics about millions of tiny men raining from the sky. (Hmmmm … Sounds like someone’s been getting into the medicine cabinet).

Side B continues in a similarly fragmented vein, with ‘Grey Turo Said’ and ‘Mean To Me’ being the most fully developed songs of the bunch. Herein lies the frustrating beauty of this album – by being such an untidy smear of throwaway ideas and half-developed tunes, there is little for listeners to focus on. In this sense, the best way to listen to this album is to abandon oneself to its twists and turns without trying to make too much sense of it or waiting for the big pay-off.

Deaf Wish have succeeded in creating an aural obstacle course that brims with ideas, yet is also the product of minds with extremely short attention spans. It may not be the greatest punk rock in recent memory, but still compels you to return to it again and again. It’s like the corpse of The Beatles’ White Album torn apart and fought over by bratty children and reassembled into some kind of Frankenstein monster that stumbles around your living room for 29 minutes, drinks all the beer from your fridge and then collapses in a pool of its own vomit.

by René Schaefer