Amyl and The Sniffers - Cartoon Darkness Review
On Cartoon Darkness, the Melbourne band flaunt their punk credentials, but sometimes can't keep up with their own ambition.
Amyl is the Aussie slang term for amyl nitrate, more commonly known as poppers. Those miniature bottles of Liquid Gold that eventually find their way into your hands on a raucous night out. The fumes expand your blood vessels, shooting a blast of euphoria straight into your head. It lasts for about 15 seconds. On Cartoon Darkness, Melbourne band Amyl and The Sniffers throw everything they can at you to re-create this exact sensation and continue living up their namesake as they have for the past few years. While not everything sticks the landing, its highs last a bit longer than 15 seconds.
Album opener ‘Jerkin’ is about as blatant a demonstration of what this record is about. Profanity laced from the get go (“You’re a dumb cunt/You’re an asshole”), lead singer Amy Taylor forces every word out her mouth with such a mischievous, knowing sneer, that you can’t help but be firmly on her side. A running thread throughout the album, Taylor professes how much better she is than a male partner. Empowering to Taylor or humorously degrading to the listener? Depends on how you want to take it, but her confidence in the delivery is undeniable, raising it from a silly song to a proper anthem. Taylor’s delivery is top-notch throughout, riding that line between smirking conviction and earnest openness with consistent precision. On other brash highlights like ‘Tiny Bikini’ and ‘Motorbike Song’, the songwriting is witty too. The former has Taylor in a purposefully flirtatious tenor, taunting another man, while “I wanna ride you like a Harley D” and the constant repetition of “Moty B” on the latter are undoubtedly dumb, but combined with Taylor’s slurring yells scratches a specific part of itch that you keep wanting it back. On the record’s slower cuts, Taylor also has free rein to show a softer side of her vocals. On ‘Big Dreams’, she laments about someone’s failed ambition, and sombre guitar arpeggios make her words ring true. ‘Bailing On Me’ shows that Taylor is also susceptible to heartbreak, and provides a welcome interlude before she returns to the top of her confidence.
Not wanting to have Taylor take all of the limelight, the instrumentation and production flash their strengths throughout. Injected with strong punk sensibilities, the drumming is always frenetic, always surging, while the guitar and bass prove their versatility in the 13-track runtime. ‘Pigs’ showcases energetic power guitars, as well as a manic solo in the back half that both breaks the song up and also injects new energy before its bold final section. ‘Bailing On Me’ has an almost bluegrass bassline, playing background to Taylor’s ballad. That said, lead single ‘U Should Not Be Doing That’ does serve to highlight the limitations of the band’s base repertoire. The addition of a howling saxophone adds new complexity to their manic sound, and there are moments that the rest of the album sounds more empty without it. ‘Going Somewhere’ or ‘Doing In Me Head’ are by no means bad tracks, but mixed in with the rest of the offering, get lost as an afterthought when its instrumentation sounds like less inspired versions of previous Amyl tracks. The band have the ability to keep up with Taylor, but on Cartoon Darkness it occasionally feels like they might be out of breath because of it, and fail to go further.
Again though, Taylor has more than enough zest and frenzy to keep the pace of the album up. ‘Do It’, with a great vocal hook coupled with rapid fire hi-hats packs a real punch, while ‘Me And the Girls’ closes the record with a song made for dive bar jukeboxes. Its smart and blunt lyrics work as a direct result of having someone like Taylor who knows how to scream them in the right tone.
Amyl and The Sniffers are a band that are now at the level of stardom to play Hyde Park, but still retain their original character. You can easily imagine their scruffy, unserious selves playing at a random venue in the middle of nowhere, with all of them steaming off of lagers. Cartoon Darkness demonstrates that they have all the basics and pure punk energy covered, but too often it feels that Taylor is the one pushing them forwards, and the instrumentation is lagging just a little behind. The thing is it might and should not matter to many, and it definitely doesn’t matter to them. They’re here to have fun and fuck shit up, and while Cartoon Darkness isn’t knockout the whole way through, when it lands a hit it knocks absolutely all the wind out of you.