Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.
In this series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.
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SCABZ’ Siobhan Poynton – Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s ‘Rush To Relax’ (2010)
Dear Rush to Relax,
When I met you, I was working a desk job and was on my way out to Bathurst for a regional outreach thing. I messed up the car hire cause that’s the kind of thing I would mess up but managed to borrow a car and get out there just in time. I was pretty bummed on the trip that I was probably going to get in trouble at work cause I used to care about those kinds of things.
On the way back from Bathurst the radio started to break up, so I had a dig round in this car for CDs. The first one I grabbed was you. I listened to you the whole way over The Blue Mountains and back into Newtown, and you’ve been my favourite ever since. I got fired a few weeks after that, bought a new guitar with my sick leave payout and started writing some new music.
When Lozzy our bass player moved into the same share house as me, we used to listen to you a lot in the mornings while we made Bloody Maryʼs and avoided life. There’s a real sense of urgency we loved about some of the tracks, like ‘Anxiety’, but a real simple comfort we loved about others, like ‘Gentle Man’. We used to talk about that a lot when we first started jamming SCABZ songs.
I hadn’t really played much electric guitar/punk guitar prior to SCABZ and was only just learning to break out of the habit of singing in an American accent.
You helped me find a new way to sing and talk about the things I saw in the world around me. Songs like ‘I Can Be A Jerk’ in particular influenced a lot of our own self depreciating humour style songs. The guitar solo in ‘Tuning Out’, and the way the guitar parts and vocals interact with each other, changed the way I thought about structure in songs and that sometimes you can just do what sounds best, not what the song writing rules say are best.
I just want to say thanks, Rush To Relax, you’re ageing gracefully, and I still listen to you more often than I should. x
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Newtown’s self-proclaimed shittest band SCABZ have just revealed their fierce new single ‘Feel Good Summer’ – produced and mixed by Daniel Antix at Defwolf Studios, Sydney.
It’s a glorious, acidic fuck-you anthem taking aim at climate change deniers and the ridiculous points they make to justify their cause.
SCABZ are here to trash your self-entitled world view with their gritty brand of politically-charged urban backyard punk. Get around it.
