Album Review: Faspeedelay - Ghost On The Waterfront

Who needs vocalists? All they do is make the whole thing about them. And keys? Well, keyboardists are all closet Rick Wakemans, aren't they?

If you don't want your message diluted by an over the top egomaniac, then it's much better to keep it simple. Or at least that seems to be the idea behind Melbourne three-piece Faspeedelay. They've stripped away all the fat, until we're left with the bare essentials: bass, guitar and drums. Among a little bit of soundscape meandering, in the main they create charging instrumental rock jams. There's energy here, and a little bit of a post-punk attitude. You can hear links to everything from the first Desert Sessions EP to The Wipers, to Yawning Man, and at a stretch even Can.

It's the trio's debut album after an EP on Dreamland Recordings and a bunch of on-and-off live shows since 2000, while participants performed in other local groups like The Paul Kidney Experience and The Infinite Decimals. There's not a lot of tricks or flourishes here. What you see is what you get; a good honest rock-out with no apologies. Yet they do enjoy stretching things out occasionally, such as on the appropriately titled 11-minute-plus In The Zone, in which the guitar takes on some real atmospheric soundscape duties before the tempo increases dramatically and it goes from riffing to shredding, which is then followed by an extended soundscape. It's on this track that you get the sense that the reason it's taken over a decade for a debut LP to appear is because Faspeedelay's real forte is live, where they can extend things outwards on any given night and just go where the music takes them.