The Grates, "The Ouch. The Touch."

The Grates - The Ouch. The Touch.

The Grates' The Ouch. The Touch. delivers sparkly, raw Indie pop. It's a silly costume party to which The Grates are playing host – pull on a tiger suit and join them!

Brisbane Indie band The Grates have produced an innovative and highly enjoyable EP with The Ouch. The Touch. As the name implies, the emphasis is less on meaning and more on sensation. The trio - Alana Skyring (drums), Patience Hogson (vocals), and John Patterson (guitars) - create Indie Pop that captures childhood logic, play for the sake of play, and a subversive resistance to adult meaning, not unlike Pylon.

The EP kicks off with "Message", which blasts out at a jarring and spastic pace. The pounding drums of Alana Skyring and twanging of John Patterson's thick guitar chords speed up and down unexpectedly, keeping the listener unbalanced. Patience Hogson's high voice trips out the lyrics with ease and sounds off-the-cuff. The song is chaotic, charming and funny all at the same time. That The Grates manage to do this in under 2 minutes is even more impressive, and a shrewd move since the energy of the song cannot be sustained anyway.

Just as "Message" eludes traditional song structure, it also eludes meaning with its nonsense chorus: "I've got a message for you and it's dammit - ba, ba, ba..." You fill in the blank, if you need meaning - if you don't, so much the better; you're freed up to enjoy a melody that lunges forward like a wooden roller coaster.

The Grates return to a more traditional song structure and intelligible meaning with the second track. "Sukkafish" comes on like a Carter Family song, with a basic four-by-four tempo and banjo. Patience sings of the improbable combination of raising children, suicide notes, frontier landscape (or is it a metaphor for something else?) and joy ("I ain't never been this happy before"). "Sukkafish" is infectious and lasts a glorious four minutes.

There are two other tracks ("Wash Me" and "Trampoline"), but the pairing of "Message" and "Sukkafish" at the start is clever, as it showcases the band's skill in two different extremes of songwriting: the innovative, brief shot, and the prolonged story-telling format with nods to tradition. Will The Grates develop one way or the other, or manage to incorporate both?

Overall, there is an infectious joy in the music on The Ouch. The Touch. It's whimsical without being sickly sweet, and edgy as well.

The Grates are celebrating - why not join in?

Cherrytree Records/Dew Process

Rating: 3½ out of 5

Highlights: "Message", "Sukkafish"

Similar to: Pylon, The Vaselines, Jonathan Richman

First published on Suite 101