Naked on the Vague’s new record 'Heaps of Nothing' plays out like an Orwellian nightmare, but it’s still brimming with pop-rock hits, writes SHAUN PRESCOTT.

Superficially, this is exactly the album you might expect from Naked on the Vague at this point in their career, considering their heritage. Yet at its core, Heaps of Nothing is studiedly different from any of the transient, trend-shackled groups who squeeze fretfully beneath the now fashionable umbrella of designedly shat out lo-fi punk. There’s a surplus of treble and a fuckload of wanton feedback here, but conspicuously absent is the droll, self-negating plainness that marks this zeitgeist’s well-insulated anomie. Here, the tendency to dwell, the desire to explicate a common enmity towards some oblique beige norm, is replaced by a nigh unfathomable abstraction: a wholehearted embrace of an unfashionably gratuitous weird.

Lucy Phelan and Matthew Hopkins have always expressed their “weird” through a myriad of side-projects, but Naked on the Vague until now maintained a certain urban-centricity, an affinity towards the solid, an aura of the crumbling civic monolithic. It was industrial music by virtue of its illustrative force and through its ability to conjure the inevitable renewal of the derelict and the ensuing extermination of the meek. Their first LP The Blood Pressure Sessions was timely, emerging as it did at a time when it felt that a Sydney underground scene was being systematically smoked out. But Heaps of Nothing has none of that topicality, none of that ground-zero momentum, and carries no burden of the potentially iconic. Here is a band that broadcasts on a larger scale, with a sound indebted to the past, in cahoots with contemporaries, but imbued with a personality all of its own.

There’s always been a faintly hilarious aspect to Naked on the Vague. To hear Phelan sing in her forcibly guttural register, and to see Hopkins attack his guitar so viscerally yet absently, is an integral part of their appeal. There are personalities here to appreciate rather than negotiate, and there’s nothing inherently challenging about this “noise”, but rather much to enjoy in its playful subversion of the “dark”. With the addition of a bassist and a live drummer this core duo feels even more like a showcase of personalities.

“This is a band that endeavours to gash the humble veneer of their workmanlike punk peers; to transcend the ordinary, to pour something strange and seductive into the punchbowl of erstwhile urban realism.”

Left of stage, you have an invariably spooky Phelan, incanting minimalist and carefully indistinct imagery through a gauze of oozing reverb. Right of stage, there’s Hopkins: inverted-comma devil horns, playfully malignant, knowingly absurd. During the opening seconds of ‘Sacred Youth’ these personas combine and mutate from vastly different temperaments. Intentions, moods, timbres and noises congeal but make no sense, like ghosts from vastly different eras chanting their argot in unison. It’s beyond interpretation: a sheer, inexplicably reigned sound, alien, yet containing something. When Phelan repeatedly howls about “the wrong room” during the song of that title, you can’t help but imagine Orwell’s room 101. Four walls containing a nightmare. That’s precisely what it sounds like.

But this is a pop-rock album, and every song is a hit. A squalling, maximalist, comically evil, lyrically imprecise pop-rock album – but a pop-rock album nonetheless. Naked on the Vague have proffered ear worms before, but Heaps of Nothing is an obvious attempt to concentrate their anthemic goth-rock tendencies into 40 minutes of surreally addictive set pieces. ‘These Days’ is a highlight. For the first time, Phelan sings in the first person, of “losing my way”, but she’s losing her way somewhere cobwebbed, subterranean, not of this world. This song marks a widescreen shift in NOTV’s sound, a hugely strut-able, rhythmically enslaving cant swathed in cartoonishly overcooked feedback squall. The song is surrounded by noise, rather than the other way around. Put these guys in a “professional” recording studio and strip Hopkins’ guitar of its last three strings and you’d have the best song Black Sabbath were too fucked up to write.

It’s funny how Naked on the Vague has become a band that inhabits so many supposedly incompatible styles, scenes and semiotic niches. This is a band that fits as neatly alongside one-time tour peers Blank Dogs as they do sharing a stage with the likes of Australian drunken favourites Deaf Wish. But the crucial ingredient in Naked on the Vague’s arsenal is imagination. While firmly rooted in the present and cathartically aligned with dour, proletarian punk rock, this is a band that endeavours to gash the humble veneer of their workmanlike punk peers; to transcend the ordinary, to pour something strange and seductive into the punchbowl of erstwhile urban realism.

Heaps of Nothing is exactly that: a repudiation of the notion that the extraordinary is an extraneous element in punk rock. Naked on the Vague exploit what most of their contemporaries probably consider too outre: the surreal and the obfuscating, the colours, textures and illuminations that ensue through the penetration of some other. It’s hopeful in that sense, because in the face of a prevalent apathetic cycle of work/sleep/eat/fuck/sing-about-it, there are still more compelling and risible demons to extract from our consciousness. If you don’t like Heaps of Nothing, use your fucking imagination, and then try again.

+

Heaps of Nothing is out now through Siltbreeze.