The track is a 10 minute studio jam and the new 12” is out now through US label Captcha.

Eddy Current Suppression System – Walking In Unison

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yabPL8bpE8k

Containing 22 hard-to-find 7″ singles, non-album and live tracks, the 2CD/LP collection should fill the gaps in every fans’ collection. The album includes their covers of The Chosen Few’s There’s A Lot Of It Going Around and The Go-Go’s We Go The Beat. The release covers their work from 2004 to 2011 and will be released through Fuse.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring is currently on hiatus and its members are dividing their time between side projects Total Control and Boomgates. Visit their website for more information.

The break follows their third album Rush To Relax, which was released last year.

Tracklisting:

1. So Many Things
2. Get Up Morning
3. You Don’t Care
4. It’s All Square
5. Precious Rose
6. Boy, Can I Dance Good
7. She’s Dancing Away
8. You Let Me Be Honest With You
9. We’ll Be Turned On
10. Demon’s Demands
11. I’m Guilty
12. That Time Of Day
13. It Ain’t Cheap
14. Noise In My Head
15. Sometimes
16. Iraq (it’s On The Map)
17. Wet Cement
18. Hey Mum
19. Through The Trees
20. T.a.l.o.i.g.a.
21. We Got The Beat
22. Rush To Relax

A band in possessing of the rare trait of making garage rock actually sound good rather than poser-ish, Thee Oh Sees are well worth it, if only for the weight you’ll loose in sweat while dancing like an awkward white person.

Warm Slime is out now through In The Red and tickets on sale Friday 5th November through moshtix.com.au *thetotehotel.com ***oztix.com.au

Adelaide
Jan 07
Format

Perth
Jan 08
Amplifier Bar

Geelong***
Jan 09
The Nash

Brisbane
Jan 11
Woodland

Melbourne*
Jan 12
The Tote

Melbourne*
Jan 13
The Tote

Sydney
Jan 14
Red Rattler

Newcastle***
Jan 16
Summer Vibes Festival

An Eddy Current Suppression Ring gig revolves around girls and boys working out their sexual frustrations in the most constructive way possible: moshing. People and objects become a blur as if you’re watching some kind of experiment in cinema vérité, shifting violently to a back beat as you try to find a safe place for your tongue. It isn’t long before you realize there is no safe place for your tongue or for the rest of you. Your best bet is to bite down on it really hard, somewhere between checking your jacket and entering the mosh pit. Try drawing some blood and any subsequent mastication will pale in comparison. At the very least, you can dribble some blood down your chin and pretend to be that Twilight guy. Girls aren’t necessarily exempt from this practice.

The ugly face of the new youth doesn’t slam dance and wear a Mohawk; it wears non-prescription glasses and hangs out at the Rooftop Bar. It’s skinny jean-clad North Korea and it’s utterly terrifying. What I see tonight are the cracks between the conformity. A crowd branded with the mark of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and The Philly Jays. But there are plenty of hipsters here too, if that’s your thing.

The Palace is, for lack of a better phrase, fucking packed. I’m not the only one wondering how a band from Frankston got this big. It had to happen sooner or later, though. A cocksure Melbourne band had to do it for themselves eventually. I’m just glad I’m around to witness it.

The band takes the stage. The gloves are on. A set list is torn through with Running of the Bulls-like ferocity. ‘Memory Lane’, ‘Colour Television’, ‘Sunday Comes’ and ‘Get Up Morning’ are all there. The latter reminds me of ‘Do It’ by the Rollins Band, but a whole lot catchier and with less boneheaded lyrics.

Each member of the band is dressed like you’ve seen your grandfather do at some point, whether on holiday, out to collect the paper in his robe or whatever. But they don’t sound like your grandfather. Hell no, what I hear is a Keith Morris-era Black Flag. I’ve never felt so patriotic towards Melbourne.

Guitarist Eddy Current plays the way you can instead of the way you wish you could. Brendan Suppression engages in all the usual Iggy Pop shit and one has no choice but to eat it all up, it’s just too good; the stage dive, walking on the crowd’s hands, running through the venue and climbing the balconies with the Palace’s eye trained on you the whole time. It’s not so much commanding the crowd as baiting it.

I don’t know what kinds of drugs fuel energy like that. My hope is it’s all Corona and a prayer. One thing I do know, however, is that good music is born out of passion. It’s something that you can’t sniff, snort, smoke or mainline. Passion is what makes Eddy Current Suppression Ring one of a handful of current bands worth a damn. It’s not the next evolution in punk or rock or music. They haven’t reinvented the spirit like Bikini Kill or reformulated the sound like Atari Teenage Riot. What they’ve done, and I couldn’t phrase this more childishly, with more arrogance or any other way, is give Australian live music a kick in the teeth. Maybe even a push in the right direction – one can only hope.

The first support act was the barely heard of Carburettor, whose monotonous melodies combusted into an unlikely mix of Brit-pop and Aus-rock, and although Sydney’s Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys did a fine job of working up the crowd, there was a true sense of ‘Are we there yet?!’ as the three piece churned out track after track of their tiresome punk-rock.

If they know how to warm a crowd up, Eddy Current Suppression Ring knows how to make them sweat. In fact, the sweaty pit that had only hours earlier been the empty front of house space was begging for a mop and a crate of deodorant (for its punters). Brendan ‘Suppression’ Huntley in his iconic purple gloves ignored the audience for most of the opening track, but looked like a wild animal staring at its prey by the last. Mickey Young, the man credited as the bands tour manager, producer and master of guitars and keys seemed submerged in riffs and solos, coming up for air only at the end of a track, despite Huntley’s persistent head-mashing and guitar-smacking.

The garage, new-wave punk of ECSR has an authenticity to it that this crowd understood. Obvious favourites (read: punters sang along very loudly and danced very hardly to) included ‘Wrapped Up’, ‘Memory Lane’ and ‘Sunday’s Coming’ from Primary Colours and new tracks ‘Anxiety’ and ‘Tuning Out’. Moshing, surfing, stage-diving, even band-member kissing was totally acceptable (if not a requirement) and Huntley’s mumbling “Be safe!” was genuine. ‘Walked into a Corner’ saw him crowd surfing for the whole 0:59 of the track. He then made his way across the bar (all along the top of it) and disappeared for a minute behind it, all the while his charismatically bogan vocals belted out ‘Which Way to Go’ until the crowd rolled forward towards the reappearance of his blackpurplebluepinkbluegreyblack striped shirt.

As expected, ECSR didn’t disappoint. They’re musicians with more than just a method or ‘style’ – when they play they mean it and their musical consistency and ingenuity mean they’re likely to be around for as long as we’ll have them – and we’ll have them alright.

Here’s what Eddy Current himself had to say about the whole affair:

“After holing up for much of winter, our band Eddy Current Suppression Ring actually got around to writing some songs again and practicing and doing the fun things that you start a band for.

We grabbed our trusty half inch 8 track and headed down to Revolver Rehearsals in Prahran to basically have a practice and record a couple of songs and see what was a good way to record our next album. However, we started to play really well and things sounded good that day in that shitty room. 6 hours later we had accidentally recorded 12 songs. I took them home and lo and behold they were pretty good.

I mixed it in my bedroom over the next month and magically we had an album!

We are all super stoked on it and think its our best thing yet, which I guess is what all bands say when they put out a new record but we are bloody serious!!”

Tickets for the Eddy Current Suppression Ring ‘Rush To Relax’ tour now on sale at www.lovepolice.com.au/ecsr and the venues.

Friday 19th March
The Amplifier Bar, Perth WA

Saturday 20th March
Margret River Masters Festival, Margret River WA

Saturday 27th March
Brisbane Hotel, Hobart, TAS

Thursday 8th April
The Zoo, Brisbane QLD

Friday 9th April
The Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW

Saturday 10th April
The Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW

Friday 16th April
The Palace, Melbourne VIC

Rush To Relax is out February 19th 2010. Supports vary – check www.myspace.com/eddycurrentsuppressionring for details.

For months just mentioning the name around me would usually invite a vitriolic diatribe against scensterism and fads, often peppered with undeserved insults and misplaced racial slurs.

Then one day I had a proper listen to Primary Colours and the next thing you know I’m standing in American Apparel telling anyone who’ll let me about Eddy Current Suppression Ring.

If you hadn’t heard, Eddy Current have had a corker of a year so far. For starters they won The Australian Music Prize, and as if that wasn’t enough have been eating up festival slots and tour supports as well as their own headline shows with a vengeance usually reserved for Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal films.

Trust me, even though mentioning the band on Oxford St is likely to result in violent exchange of indie oneupmanship over who heard them first, Eddy Current Suppression Ring are nothing but a kick arse rock band, a fucking awesome kick arse rock band.

With their follow up to Primary Colours pretty much done and waiting for release as well as recently playing Homebake and Meredith Festival, I caught up with guitarist Eddy Current to talk about the band’s success, their future and their most memorable moment of 2009.

Music Feeds: So you guys have had a massive year, you’ve played a whole bunch of festivals, won the AMP award and just generally kicked arse, do you have like a favourite memory of the year so far? Any moments that meant a lot to you that might not have been as well publicised as your other achievements like the Amp?

Eddy Current: We played a show at the Torquay football club 2 weeks ago, a fundraiser for the children’s hospital that was organised by our bass player’s buddy. It was a beautiful low key gig with local bands and heaps of tinnies and good natured drunk footy players. It was really refreshing to do a show like this. Get outta the city and play to a smaller crowd of people that have never heard of you. These sort of things sometimes feel the most rewarding.

MF: You guys are starting to become the sort of poster boys for independent music in Australia, how do you feel about that? Is it weird copping praise from people who probably never would’ve given you a second thought were it not for the exposure around Primary Colours etc?

EC: Oh I don’t pay any attention to nor do I feel like one of the poster boys for indie music. It has been strange where some of the praise has come from over the last 6 months but that’s cool. If people genuinely like the record, I don’t care who they are and where they are from.

MF: You guys have had a whole bunch of releases, what do you think it was about Primary Colours that got such a good response?

EC: Not sure, maybe good timing? It sounded a bit more palatable than the first LP too, which may have helped. I try not to analyse why people like some things of ours more than others and stuff like that too much as I don’t want to be conscious of it. I just wanna concentrate on doing what we like and if other people dig it, that’s a massive bonus.

MF: Your music has always been very raw and honest, live and on record, does putting that much energy into the music take a lot of it out of you?

EC: Not at all. I feel we get the energy by not overdoing it. We don’t overwrite or rehearse our songs, we spend bugger all time recording and we don’t play so many shows we get sick of them. So when it does come time to playing live or recording the energy is there because we are excited, not bored and burnt out.

MF: I saw an interview with Nick Cave where he was saying making an album takes so much out of him that afterwards he usually has to work on something else – a play, novel or whatever – so that he can come back to music. Do you have a similar problem/solution? Does playing with the Oooga Boogas help keep you creatively fresh for EDSR?

EC: For me, doing other stuff like the Boogas definitely keeps my mind fresh for Eddy Current. Mixing with different people and making different music helps reset my brain a bit.

MF: So the new album is ready? What can we expect? When is it going to get released?

EC: Mid February. um… expect the same but a bit different. I feel like its the closest we’ve come to capturing our energy on tape. Its a bit more varied in song length and styles but its still just the four of us in a room playing the same instruments.

MF: You guys always have a steady stream of recording going on, how do you stay inspired? Does it ever get to the point where you guys feel burnt out and need to take a break?

EC: Nah, it may seem like we have a lot going on but it’s pretty easy. We can record ourselves, sometimes just at practice so it never feels like much of a chore and effort to do these things. We do take plenty of breaks for all our other interests in life and it helps. Keeping the band as a hobby and making sure fun and good times is the most important thing we get from it. That has kept it from getting stale.

MF: We’ve spoken before about listening to music helping you to keep the ideas coming. Are there any bands in particular you’ve been flogging recently? (If not to help with ideas, just cos they rock?)

EC: Ntsamina – Spiritual Singers, Late Night – Nothing People, my two fave LPs of the year

MF: You’ve got Laneway coming up, you did Big Day Out earlier this year, Homebake last week and Meredith the other day, are there any festivals left in the country that you’d really like to play?

EC: Not really. If we get asked and the timing’s right, we’ll do em, but we don’t want to play every single festival. It would get pretty annoying.

MF: Being rooted in playing smaller venues what’s it like playing on a festival stage? Do you go through any tantric meditations to build more energy for the bigger stages?

EC: Haha. No. It’s weirdly the same in a lot of ways. We don’t play any different, our stage show doesn’t change. Its pretty easy to feed of the energy of thousands of people though, so we can sap it off the people and throw it back… or something?

MF: Also, you just played Homebake, what was that like? Any bands you saw that really stuck out?

EC: I watched tumbleweed as they were my fave teen band and they stood up pretty well.
Homebake was fun to play. We’ve played it twice now and had a real good time both times. It runs easy, the people that work there are nice and its just a smooth day, which doesn’t always happen.

MF: Also you just played with Thee Oh Sees, can you tell us about the shows, as much detail as possible if you don’t mind as I have heard their stage show is intense?

EC: They are seriously one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen. Just catchy as fuck, great people, amazing amounts of energy from the first note. A lot of their tunes are just basic one riff garage standards (which I have no problem at all with) but they have a totally individual sound that makes the most simple thing sound thick and beautiful. My vocabulary doesn’t justify the excitement I feel when I see these dudes.

MF: Outside of the new album or release or whatever what should we be keeping an eye out for Eddy Current wise?

EC: A tour in March, a 7″ of non album tracks, and a new filmclip.

Primary Colours is out now on Aarght! Records. Check out their website for more info. Eddy Current Suppression Ring have a few shows coming up. See below for full details.

Saturday 18th December
Billboards, Melbourne
w/ Thee Oh Sees(USA), Witch Hats & The Twerps

Sunday 3rd January, 2010
SOLAR FESTIVAL – Mornington Racecourse
Mornington – Tyabb rd, Mornington Victoria,

ECSR also play the Laneway Festival in January / February 2010.

Add to this Black Lips, Eddy Current Suppression Ring and the muthafucking Dirty Three (Melbourne only), plus the fact that I’ve heard great things from alright people about most of the other bands, and voila, you have a festival that’s worth tearing your sphincter over.

The Line Up…

Echo & The Bunnymen, Florence and The Machine, Black Lips, The XX, Daniel Johnston, Sarah Blasko, N.AS.A, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Hockey, Dappled Cities, Mumford & Sons [Performing in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne & Perth], Radio Clit, The Very Best, Wild Beasts [Performing in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne & Perth], Whitley, The Middle East, Kid Sam, Dirty Three (Melbourne only) and more to be announced.

Friday 29th January – Brisbane
Alexandria St off St Paul’s Terrace, Fortitude Valley (Twilight event)

Saturday 30th January – Melbourne
Footscray Community Arts Centre (FCAC)

Sunday 31st January – Sydney
Sydney College of the Arts (SCA)

Monday 1st February – Auckland
Britomart Station.

Friday 5th February – Adelaide
Fowler’s Live, North Terrace (Twilight event)

Saturday 6th February – Perth
Cultural Centre, Northbridge

TIX ONSALE FRIDAY 30TH OCTOBER, 9am
TICKETS AVAILABLE FROM GREEN TIX
Web Bookings: http://www.greentix.com.au
Phone Bookings: 1300 369 882

“Last year we were at Gonerfest in Memphis,” says Eddy. “I remember me and Rich, another dude I do art with, were there and we were saying that it was quite possible for something like this to exist in Melbourne. I thought there were enough good local bands to pull it off and we both had friend’s bands overseas who would love an excuse to come to Australia. If you think about Gonerfest, you love those bands together and because you have that meeting place every year, you do sense the community. It probably always existed but the event gives it a time and a place.”

Next Saturday’s event will surely rock hard with the listless ozpunk sounds of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, giving you a place to have a hell of a good time. Did I mention there’s a barbecue?

“The live show is the same thing as us in the studio. The live show was never exactly a show, it’s exactly what happens in the rehearsal studio. We all just look at each other, cue each other on the right bits… We never over-rehearse or overplay, so every time we rehearse or play we’re really excited. We’re just not doing it to death, keeping that nervous energy, always knowing that something could go wrong.”

The latest album, Primary Colours, is beefy, yet raw, a masterpiece of deliberately low production values. It is the live show that turns up the heat to cook your meat, though merely searing to seal in the juices.

“We haven’t really wanted to think about it too hard,” Eddy says of the album. “For what we do, the simplicity and the quicker we can do things give a more accurate representation of the music. It just doesn’t need anything. I don’t want to add any extra layers or anything, I want it to exist as simply as possible. Recording is the best way to do that, you just live with the mistakes. I don’t think we’ve hit exactly what we want to sound like but I think this next thing will be the closest that comes to it.”

The recording process, with its little glitches, mistakes and calamities, gives the album that appealing rawness, as Eddy explains. “Nothing was in our minds when we were doing it, we were just like ‘let’s do it’. It was trial and error; none of us had huge experience in bands or recording. We were just like, let’s do it anyway and let’s do it ourselves. There were certain things we were influenced by I’m sure, but it was more just being naïve and not knowing what we were doing.”

Earlier this year Eddy Current Suppression Ring won the Australian Music Prize for the album Primary Colours. For Eddy though, that surprise simply came too soon after the surprise of their nomination to be fully absorbed.

“Once you’re nominated for the prize you realise that you’ve got a chance, you may win. We were definitely surprised when they called it out but just getting to that final eight was enough of a surprise. Not that I thought for one minute that we’d win it, but I knew we had a chance. Looking at the winners from previous years, they’re obviously very fond of bands that are like, four white guys playing rock n roll. Also, someone sent me a list of the judges and I thought ‘hmm, that guy might like our record’.”

Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for the next thing from Eddy Current Suppression Ring. It seems unlikely considering their creative process is like a massacre at a gym – survival of the fittest. “Brendan has so many lyrics piled up in notebooks, basically we get together and hopefully I’ve got a riff or I make something up and we go through and find some lyrics that Brendan thinks suits. We basically decide after ten minutes whether it sucks or doesn’t suck. We really don’t like to spend too much time making a song work, it’s more if it works we’ll know about it straight away. It’s not something we have to think about too hard.”

Nor do you need to think hard about next Saturday’s line-up at the Manning Bar. Get down there, have a sausage, buy some records at the fair, check out some sick bands – hell, go completely nuts and have a shandy if you want to. Just don’t miss it.

For more interviews with bands playing Flip Out, click here.

Awesome is when the tape turns into a recording and gives births to one of the better garage/indie/punk/rock bands with a modesty that keeps shows small, clocking the fans in at under 250 people each gig. Without fail, gigs sell out and your ticket turns into something as valuable as a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, and what went down on Friday, March 13 at La Campana in the Spanish Quar ter was about as absurd and awesome as anything you’re likely to find in a Roald Dahl book.

The place is underground, empty and plays Latino dance music, but also has a dirty backroom, which is exactly what you need for an Eddy Current show.

(Editor’s note: I too attended this gig, and it was so rockin’ I felt I needed to add a little extra insight, mainly because I am an attention-seeking print whore. Anyway, as Amy said La Campana is one of the best/worst venues in Sydney. As you enter, you are scanned with a metal detector, presumably to weed out any triad hitmen, before descending the dark stairway with walls rendered in plaster and dotted with Spanish tourism posters from the mid-80s. The main room, bathed in smoke and lasers despite the dancefloor barren of people dancing, looks how a middleage man with no family must feel. It looks like something out of American Psycho and I swear I saw Pat Bateman sitting at a table with Paul Allen attempting to convice him the place is chic by pointing out one of the overweight, over-peroxided tragedies in the corner as Ivana Trump.)

Mainly, a lot of beer was consumed in the time between “Fuck yes, I’m going to Eddy Current” and getting there. We showed up at 10ish, expecting the usual headliner start of 10:30pm, but once more the band had made wanting to love them difficult (although, this is strangely satisfying), deciding 12:20 was more appropriate. More beer was thus needed, so we only saw the end of New Orleans act Quintron and Miss Pussycat (but were impressed with the revolving leslie organ speaker), a bizarre organ-and-percussion one man-one lady show that seemed strangely appropriate for the unfamiliar surrounds.

(I too, having been duped by the late start time arrived even earlier, just in time to catch Miss Pussycat’s puppet show. Performed in a white stage, rigged with black lights, Miss Pussycat took us on a psychedelic and flouro filled journey into the heart of a haunted art gallery. The plot made little to no sense and there were some fairly impressive ‘special effects’ with spinning artworks glowing in the black light, but the whole play came to a head at the end with the two leads engaging in an allfemale feline pash frenzy.

Quintron himself was amazing. Imagine some crazy mix between That One Guy and The Black Keys playing two organs and a hi-hat simultaneously while sweating like a monsoon rain and
screaming for whiskey. – Ed.)

The reasoning for the beer was that the Eddy Current experience is heightened when you’re also loaded on Reschs (kind of the same argument as dropping acid and listening to Magical Mystery Tour or doing heroin and getting on the Lou Reed train). We were right, anyway. After this point, I didn’t see my entourage again unless they were popped back out of the mosh — pink,
sweaty and happy.

Eddy Current played all the ‘hits’, and all the ‘other stuff’, but the ‘other stuff’ is pretty fucking good anyway, plus they played for about an hour, so it was all smiles. The guys played a pristine set, and even though the venue wasn’t the best for sound, it was still pretty good, probably because it was so loud (oh, and we were all drunk). I’d say the high point was when Brendan Suppression crowd-surfed (and the last gig I went to where anyone moshed or crowd surfed was The Living End in 2003 when I was 15), and kicked the venue’s rather pricey projector of f the roof, and all anyone cared about was keeping his mic cord tangle free.

Everyone left sweaty, grazed and as smiley as Charlie Bucket after his visit to the Wonka factory, but we were less well behaved.

Photos By Kurt Davies