Album Review: The Spinning Rooms - The Spinning Rooms

Art can breed nightmares, yet rarely can it typify a region so succinctly whilst doing so. Kenneth Cook's 1961 outback horror novel, Wake In Fright, does so with brilliant gusto; and now there's the aural equivalent in The Spinning Rooms' eponymous debut. An album of fervent anguish and gnashing of teeth, it only takes a couple of minutes of opening track, 101011, to sneak insidiously into the bloodstream to form a feverish nausea that maintains its grip throughout. The track staggers along over plaintive riffs and drums, Pete Dickinson's anguished howls delivered with dry-mouthed vehemence. The repetition fits the subject matter of out-of-towners stuck in a grotesque Groundhog Day, with the quiet breakdown towards the end only heightening how beautifully fucked their situation is.

And so it goes on the downward spiral – Good God is a roiling morass of shrieking sax (Joe Greenway is the band's real ace in the hole), guitar and dawning realisations of the horrors of last night; A Cask In The Park offers sparseness and impassioned wailing before crashing down in a smouldering heap; Caught In A Brawl is the aural accompaniment to a slow-motion glassing in a country pub; Buddy reeks of desperation and misplaced zeal.

Reverting To Type offers a melancholic respite, whilst Know No Secrets is a Krautrock-aping rollick that's the closest they get to a “positive” rock song, but in the main The Spinning Rooms is a torrid sweat-drenched affair that digs in its rancid claws and refuses to leave. You can hear Mikey Young and Tom Lyngcoln's influences in the production, but the Melbourne band is inherently a quivering mass of sweat, fear, tension and fetid brilliance.