Kamikaze Trio
Rain On Your Parade

Bred on beer dregs and raised on sticky carpet floors, Melbourne’s Kamikaze Trio appear custom-made for rock & roll. Infused from an early age with the sorts of sounds your parents would probably have dropped acid to, K3 add to it; trash n’ roll with the ability to make it seem coherent and in the right place where before there was only fuzzy, booze soaked best intentions. Rain On Your Parade, the second full length record from the band, is exactly that: dirty, ragged, savagely drunken three chord garage rock, and despite the fact the Kamikaze’s pertain not to be one of those bands recycling sounds of old, to be honest, that’s mainly what they’re doing here. It’s done very well, you can almost feel them stumbling around and breaking things as they’re recording, but it’s nothing groundbreaking.

It’s aggressive from the opening note of ‘My Demons’, which with it’s almost spoken word vocals rings heavily of Mark Of Cain, and as you get deeper into the disc, despite the fact this is garage rock and nothing else, it is quite eclectic within it’s own tightly formed boundaries. ‘Long Night’ and ‘Send Me A Sign’ grind out periods of grunge-stained stoner rock, almost jam-like, whereas ‘Are You Going To The Protest’ channels the basic punk ethos, while ‘Hear Them Coming” mixes in a dash of The Vines. You get the feeling that with Rain On Your Parade the trio were going for something more than your everyday three chord rock, and though they do that well, that’s all it is really, perhaps robbing the album of the scope it could have been afforded if the band put aside their blinkers.

by Sam Fell