Even as We Speak
Feral Pop Frenzy

As always, I began to jot down my thoughts on an album released by Sarah Records by writing about Sarah Records itself. At this point, it’s impossible not to come across as cloying: I’ve managed to do so even now by repeating "Sarah Records" two (3) times in two (2) lines. All fans of a certain kind of music know that the Bristol-based independent label quickly established itself as a mark of quality for a certain way of making pop rock, becoming a semi-legend within the indie scene. Everyone knows this, just as everyone around the world should know that indie means independent, even though it doesn’t mean what the Serenissima Nasiòn of Veneto Libaro would like it to mean, and much less the sense of "pertaining to the Bhārat Gaṇarājya." Everyone should know, as everyone on DeBaser knows by now, having read and heard it to exhaustion, that any band playing shoegaze is inspired by My Bloody Valentine and as everyone on TrueMetal knows, that Swedish death metal is the fastest and Florida’s is the most technical.

This last statement I threw out randomly, I hope it's true.

The surprise is that it will not be redundant to describe how Feral Pop Frenzy sounds, the only LP by the Australians Even As We Speak released in 1993 by that label with the cherries. It’s obvious, these small heroes of Pacific Ocean rock have the jangle guitar and the twee voice: the former is very clean and elegant, always in accord with the chubby bass, the latter is feminine and dreamy, often supported by a counter-chant that’s so dreamlike-you-can’t-even. But besides looking to the glorious English tradition of the Eighties, Even As We Speak also look towards that generic panorama called alternative which by then was in vogue on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: they do not fear showing a certain somewhat non-twee fierceness nor do they hesitate to use solutions more typical of that Manchester where baggy, pocket-filled pants were fashionable. And they occasionally throw in samples that might seem a bit gratuitous, and enjoy more than one banjo interlude.

In short: it’s entirely a Sarah record, but it also has a definite taste of the Nineties, and it doesn’t cause any embarrassment.