Henge Beat
Iron Lung
by Martin Douglas
Featuring Mikey Young of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, among others, Total Control is as close to a supergroup as a tandem of cult Australian punks can get. Surprisingly, their debut LP surpasses even the top-shelf efforts from their other bands.
For the most part, "supergroup" is a relative term. It's a descriptor that itself holds a load of other nebulous, subjective ideas, such as "success," "relevance," and the notion of a "primary band." But with musicians-- especially nowadays-- being prone to enlist in three or four groups at a time, devoting a fairly even amount of attention to all of them, is there any way to logically keep track of which bands are bands and which bands are side-projects or supergroups?
Total Control are as close to a supergroup as a tandem of cult Australian punks can get. Each member is involved in another band, the most well-known of which being guitarist Mikey Young's Eddy Current Suppression Ring-- which, if you only have a passing knowledge of current garage-rock, can elicit the same sort of confused blank stare as if you told someone your band's most famous member also plays in the Growlers. Thankfully, when mild obscurity is on a group's side, they are allowed few expectations to conquer and the chance to legitimately surprise people. But even if you're intimately familiar with Eddy Current Suppression Ring, UV Race, Straightjacket Nation, and the Collapse, Henge Beat is startlingly good; good enough to surpass even the top-shelf efforts from the members' other bands.
As you might expect from a band named after a six-minute Motels single, Total Control possess a rich knowledge of a very specific point in music history. Though bearing no resemblance to the song in which they've derived their name, most of their key influences were very much active in 1979, the year the single was released. Opener "See More Glass" is indebted to Suicide's second self-titled album. Shades of late-period Roxy Music can be found in closer "Love Performance". Wire, the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, and Swell Maps all slow up in the strands of Total Control's DNA.
But if Henge Beat were simply a 36-minute post-punk genre exercise, it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. The band explores a different realm of possibilities in every song, punctuating creeping lurches with ear-splitting explosions and delivering spacey instrumentals not incredibly far removed from elevator music right after. "The Hammer" is eerie, black-clad darkwave. "Shame Thugs" sounds like alternate title screen music for beloved Super Nintendo RPG EarthBound. "No Bibs" comes off like SST hardcore thrown into vertigo. (If you have an older sibling that grew up in the 1980s and passed you all of their coolest punk records when they went off to college, give them a copy of Henge Beat and they may shed actual tears of joy.)
As if the ultra-cohesive fusion of punk music's fruitful first decade wasn't enough, Dan Stewart (Straightjacket Nation) makes for a compelling frontman, a lyricist weaned on Salinger and Philip K. Dick whose vocal range stays in the pocket but exhibits a great deal of versatility regardless. His taste in literature proves that he knows the value of a good narrator: The greedy factory owner in "Retiree" barks, "keep them at work," in an icy, robotic tone while looking at a gold watch ticking down the days. "Meds II" captures the redundancy of self-medicated culture-- through methods both legal and otherwise-- with the lyric, "Taking pills to remember to take pills to forget."
"Love Performance" can sound glittery and optimistic due to its blinking neon synths and "these are not the last days" refrain, but it's actually a rumination on our fantasies of being eulogized ("In the last days, they'll sing your praise"), finding Stewart pitching rocks at the celebratory stance of the supposedly righteous whenever they think the world's number is being called (think Y2k, the rapture, the end of the Mayan calendar). Album centerpiece "Carpet Rash" finds Stewart at his most detached vocally while crafting an array of evocative imagery ("Drinking detergent and licking the walls/ Eating your breakfast in shower stalls"), writing a song that fully embodies how desperate, unfulfilling, and hopeless sex can sometimes be.
Throughout the entirety of Henge Beat, there is a sharp fluidity in all of its elements, from the interplay of the band's members to its lyrical concepts. In spite of being primarily described as a composite of members from other groups, Total Control display the kind of unity that veteran bands take years to cultivate. They make you realize that a lot of the best "supergroups" are merely regular old groups with members noteworthy for being excellent at what they do.