Melbourne four-piece garage band Amyl and the Sniffers made their bones in the middle of the last decade with an angular, unlettered style of punk that fitted the local circuit hand in glove. Straddling the line between endearing and obnoxious, the quartet is fronted by Amy Taylor with the trio of guitarist Dec Martens, bassist Fergus Romer and drummer Bryce Wilson as backing band.
As a correspondent from down under, if I was to offer my international audience a comparison point for Amyl and the Sniffers, it would be the Pogues. This is not just on account of their brashly organic sound and open affection for recreational substances but for the trash-as-community spirit that Taylor, Martens, Romer and Wilson have made the essence of their being.
Melody Maker’s Simon Reynolds once described the Pogues as a band “in the gutter, looking up at the gutter”, noting that the common thread amongst the fans at their concerts was a jadedness of contemporary music and a yearning to be connected once again to the real, exciting experience of a band in full-flight at eye level.
The Sniffers let their freak flag fly on their newly released second album
Comfort to Me, solidifying everything that had brought the people to the band while expanding their repertoire beyond novelty act perceptions.
The sweaty, gurning mosh of ‘Freaks to the Front’ is the new Amyl anthem to sit on par with the volcanic frustration of ‘Gacked on Anger’ from the band’s 2019 self-titled debut LP. It isn’t alone for relatable humour, giving way to ‘Security’, Taylor’s first-hand lament about being an ugly chick who can’t bat her eyelashes past a bouncer.
That’s just the fun stuff we expected, though. What makes
Comfort to Me such an engaging album – and elevates them above bad-joke imitations like The Chats – is that the hipster-bogan act is merely the launching point for the music. Is it played up for an easy laugh? Sure. The Ozzie drongo stereotyping of ‘Snakes’ and the irreverent cussing that derails the chorus of lead-off single ‘Guided by Angels’ will roll eyes. However, the most pertinent takeaway from the Sniffers’ sophomore is that the band is not resting on its easy wins.
‘Capital’ is an indiscriminate spray against the federal government. Taylor’s screech pivots between climate change inaction, misogyny, government corruption, changing the date of Australia Day, burning the Union Jack and… sorry, what? Does she stop to expand upon them? Well, no. It’s all just a scanning lament. Which is the point, after all: when you’re “swimming in the river/Part of the river/Not convinced how much will change”, it’s hard to latch onto one issue before the torrent buffets you into the path of another agony.
Taylor slows down her focus on contemporary feminism and the haunting of a patriarchy becoming ever more insidious at disguising its evils on ‘Laughing’ and ‘Knifey’. The former is an angry bite at the expectations and judgments that come hand in hand with being a woman (“I am still a smart girl if I'm dressing slutty/And I am still a smart girl when I earn my money/I am still a good girl when I'm on the telly/I am still a good girl don't you farking tell me”) while the latter forms a clasp of solidarity with fellow Melbourne songwriter Courtney Barnett’s ‘Nameless Faceless’ (2018). Barnett’s song about the fear and danger felt by women walking home at night became a musical touchstone of women’s rights in Melbourne when comedian Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered in Princes Park just weeks after the song’s release. When Taylor took her turn, she echoed the feeling of being powerless and vulnerable to the monsters of the night but spun the conclusion into a revenge fantasy in which her protagonist overcomes her attacker.
And her band is growing its sound around her. Although Taylor told Apple Music upon the album’s release that the Sniffers “probably have more skills playing live than we do making music”, the riffs of Martens and Romer are at time startlingly assertive. ‘Laughing’, ‘Knifey’ and ‘No More Tears’ are pure grunge era Sub-Pop.
“I feel like, as a band, everyone thinks we’re just funny all the time. And we are funny and I love to laugh, but we also are full-spectrum humans who think about serious stuff as well, and I like that one because it’s kind of cryptic and poetic and a bit more dense,” Taylor said to Apple Music. “It’s not just, like, ‘Yee-haw, let’s punch a wall’, which there’s plenty of and I also really love. We’re showing our range a little bit.”
