Album Review: The Love Junkies - Maybelene

Emerging straight-up rock outfits are hard to come by in this country, in a genuinely-captivating capacity at least. Well now you can chalk one up for Western Australia's The Love Junkies, who come to us firing on all cylinders on this, their debut album. With influences clearly shouted from the rooftops, the power-trio somehow manage to remain quite sincere in all methods of their delivery and with a lethal weapon in frontman and founder Mitch McDonald. This is a band that would've flourished in 1991, with a genuine darkness below the guitar-fuzz and a polite nod to grunge. In 2013, you can hear the channelling of generations of Aussie rockers while still pulling from the ever-relevant impact of grunge.

They are utterly flawless in their light and shade and what they possess here on these 11 tracks is nothing short of astonishing. Heads Down immediately builds the tension to breaking point with a furious percussion intro and spooky McDonald falsetto (“Heads down and the lights are low...”) before tearing into the rest of the song. Oxymoron is their Song 2, beginning with a casual guitar strum and a stoned vocal, before diving into a fuzzed-out chorus with blatantly simple lyrics, while the subsequent Broken Strings and Baby Come Home rumble amongst the best. Hurt You is their slow jam, dropping effortlessly into a vocally sweet, instrumentally rich track that shows they can swoon as hard they rock.

The Love Junkies could be the country's best kept secret. All it's going to take is that one radio tune to truly boost the band to the pedestal the extraordinary Maybelene should be putting them on. Fuck yes!