Children Collide
Glass Mountain Liars
6 Track, EP (2006, Flying Nun)
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Related: Children Collide.
Like a half-remembered episode of ABC TV’s Recovery, ‘Glass Mountain Liars’ is all drop-D grunge riffs and honeyed harmonies – like Nitocris jamming with Teenage Fanclub jamming with Mudhoney jamming with Spiderbait jamming with Mr Blonde jamming with The Meanies. On their second EP, Melbourne’s Children Collide rock from this simple songbook: heavy down below, light up top. They sing in their pretty voices the earnest nonsense of grunge lyric sheets. This is nowhere more evident than on the Darwin-cum-Attenborough lyrics of big-dum-opener ‘We Are Amphibious’: “It was so long, so long ago/When fish crawled on to land/With fins instead of hands/We are, we are amphibious.”
Glass Mountain Liars is undoubtedly the sound of the 90s, brought back with a better fashion sense and a distinct lack of irony. And lack of feeling. Children Collide reverently rock in the manner of grunge but without giving a sense of its underlying alienation. They sound real good, but they lack the agitation that made the best grunge enjoyably rude. The bravado doesn’t quite make sense, its backstory isn’t evident. As pastiche, ‘Glass Mountain Liars’ is admirable and I’m sure the live show is a riot, but there’s an affective gap here. It sounds like an inner-city scene remembering “when Triple J was good” and when Dylan Lewis was “alternative”. It sounds like… nostalgia.
by Ben Gook
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