Album Review: The UV Race - Racism

The UV Race never really fit into the new Melbourne garage rock scene where they were frequently heralded as forerunners. They're messy, use terrible sounding instruments and play sloppily like the others, but they always have had qualities that make them unique in a sea of bands all trying to sound like each other.

While the band are full of awesome bohemian weirdos, frontman Marcus Rechsteiner no doubt shapes the sound and feeling of the band the most. His lyrics are almost baffling in their obviousness, and this naïvety and upfront honesty becomes profound and even visionary. Now, this might be a bit a hard to swallow if you take shit out of context and focus on, let's say track two, I'm A Pig, where the chorus is a choir of the band oinking. Even still, there's probably something deeper going on under the surface. Life Park sees the band pull out some really interesting chord progression and the lyrics about working just to survive illustrate the beautiful simple genius of the songwriting. An over the top synth riff cranks up the silliness in case you thought it was getting a bit serious. Sophie Says has a spoken word intro that is sincere and sets up the sadness of the song, which even the happy sounding instruments can't detract from.

The band sound amazing with all their elements like the thumping floor toms, jarring keyboards and plinky guitars perfectly slotting into place. Alongside the soundtrack to their film Autonomy And Deliberation (which is much better than it should be) Racism makes The UV Race's contributions to 2012 invaluable.