Album Review: Violent Soho, Violent Soho 

Reviewed by: Tim Forrester

Skiddle rating: 3/5

Everything has been done before. That’s the saddening truth about modern music; new ideas pretty much dried up some time in the mid-80’s; we’ve been left repackaging and cross-pollinating previous forms ever since, and Australia’s, Violent Soho are certainly no exceptions to this rule.

Their grungey existence almost seems like the creation of a dark laboratory experiment that sought to fuse a musical monster out of the bodies of vintage bands from the early 90’s. A spot of Pavement here, a sprinkling of Nirvana there, a splash of ‘Give Out But Don’t Give Up’ era Primal Scream...you get the picture. Also, given that Thurston Moore has even signed them to his Ecstatic Peace! label, it seems like there is no shortage of nods back to that time in the early 90’s when the internet was merely a time wasting ‘dial-up’ novelty and the great tradition of discovering new music in record shops still existed.

So are we ready for an early 90’s revival now the second decade of the 21st century is upon us and the next generation of musicians were likely to have been influenced by the grimey, smack-tastic sounds of depressives from Seattle instead of the narcissistic 80’s pop music throwbacks we’ve been subjected to for the previous decade? The answer to that is ‘probably not’, but the good news, if you’re into that sound, is Violent Soho are the ones who are able to believably provide it.

Given the band’s upbringing in their home town of Mansfield, Brisbane, right in the middle of Australia’s bible belt, and the fact they began in drummer Michael Richards' garage whilst his parents were at church, the record conjures up imagery of teenage tearaways finding out that the devil will always have the best tunes. With lines like “Jesus stole my girlfriend” and “Ignore your religion you’ll be happy”, alongside an album cover depicting a harrowed looking kid wearing a crown of thorns, it’s not difficult to detect a certain resentment for their religious surroundings.

Violent Soho veers between a believable angst and a slightly overproduced pop edge as lead singer, Luke Boerdam, manages to emulate that powerful ‘Kurt Cobain/Frank Black’ type of vocal screech when he gets going, but it’s occasionally mired by him sounding like a preppy American when he calms down from telling the world to f*ck off.

All in all a solid album that could have done with just that little bit more aggression and less focus on pop sensibilities.