Album Review: Kim Salmon & Spencer P Jones - Runaways

A collaborative album from Beasts of Bourbon bandmates and Aussie rock stalwarts Kim Salmon and Spencer P Jones is not really surprising. What is surprising is that it took so long for it to happen and what they do without the constraints of a full band.

Kicking off with blues rocker A Bitter Projection, the album's intent seems clear: Beasts-style guitar rock with a slightly looser edge, though also slightly lesser formed ideas. This is thrown out the window with the intense blues punk second tune, I Asked For Water. Stripped back guitar fuzz with only meagre tambourine percussion to keep the beat, the duo wail crazy – on guitar and into the mic. Lyrics like “You're saying we're a match made in heaven/but you just wanna strike that match” show the duo in far more playful and reckless territory than ever before.

Conventionality is never thrown to the wind more than in the duo's cover of Kanye West's Runaway. A blues-cum-noise-punk take of a nine-minute hip hop masterpiece isn't anything anyone asked for, but that's just why you need it.

The album does lack a cohesive nature, occasionally sounding more like a scrap book of notes than fully formed ideas. Rants and diatribes in between songs are as all over the place as one would expect, being funny, touching, trite and boring all at once. These are absolutely part of the album's charm, but also mark Runaway's biggest weakness. For a first, and perhaps only, album from these two, it is frustrating that it often plays like a B-Side compilation.

Nonetheless, Runaways is a hell of a rocker and a more than worthy addition to these two gents' oeuvres.