Down here in Hobart, the thylacine is never far from view. It’s on the number plates, the beer labels and the state coat of arms, a striped ghost that refuses to leave the room. So I felt a jolt of recognition on finding that the last of his kind, who died alone at the Beaumaris Zoo on the Queens Domain in 1936, has been given a new wave swan song on USER’s fourth album. He’s a fitting emblem for a record that stares hard at what we have already lost and what we’re busy losing.
‘Extinction’ arrives on the seventh anniversary of the band’s debut release. It follows last year’s ‘Mira Imposta’, whose Lynchian red-velvet fugue left a lasting impression on these ears. The absinthe haze has lifted a little this time. In its place is something colder and angrier, though no less seductive. According to the band:
A dark transmission from a world becoming undone. EXTINCTION descends into human hopelessness, greed, tragedy, confinement, surveillance and manipulative algorithms.
As ever with USER, the music is only part of the conceptual whole. Where ‘Mira Imposta’ came in 150 upcycled sleeves that reimagined the band members’ most cherished albums, ‘Extinction’ comes in ten unique covers across a run of just 100 vinyl records. Each one features a heavily pixelated extinct creature rendered in a man-made colour. There’s a dodo in lurid red, a thylacine in sickly chartreuse and a sabre-toothed cat in violet. And of course for those in the know, the rare and almost extinct Handfish, some still detected near Hobart. It’s a visual requiem in which our species’ fingerprints are all over every lost one. True to form, the vinyl is only available at the launch shows.
The title track opens proceedings with a punchy, post-punk blast, a lament for a sad earth delivered with the urgency of a siren as Lisa Gibbs ominously repeats no-one’s listening, no-one’s weeping, no-one’s weeping. There is a post-apocalyptic thrash, a sonic Mad Max world, bleak and pessimistic, a hint of Garbage (the band) in the delivery.
‘Siesta Siesta’ then dissolves the edges completely. It’s a dirty, dreamy, fractured wall of sound that you simply have to let wash over you, shoegaze heaven for anyone who still keeps a dog-eared copy of ‘Loveless’ close at hand. The drums pound like a pulse in the ears while guitars scythe before muted vocals enter with dark moody lyrics over a relentless bass. The segue into a blistering chorus creates a celestial updraft. The lyycs are bleak and powerful, prescient:
Ignore Distaster and Suffering
Watch a Brand New Show
Hegemonic, Cruelty
Short Term Blockers, Anxiety
Cold and Alone, Chilled to the Bone
Dislocation Turn off your Phone
‘The Rise of Mercurichrome’ is moodier and more atmospheric, a soundscape instrumental punctured by sweeping echoing percussion, digital stabs and robotic swells. It carries a whiff of the Visage and Ultravox electronica that ran through the last album. ‘Algorhythms Fix Everyone’ slinks into a laidback late-night groove with sweeping melodies, its title a sly dig at the invisible hands that curate our lives. It’s the sort of track that, ironically, deserves to mess with your algorithm. The vocals are mysterious, distorted like in a nightmare, fluttering at the edge of the senses, strangulated, muted, frustrated, yearning. There is a Bowie-esque air, restrained and yet urgent.
‘Siesta Siesta (reprise)’ is a brief lo-fi instrumental that acts as a palate cleanser before the album’s darker second half with it’s plucking strings and piano rumbles.
‘Panopticon’ takes Jeremy Bentham’s all-seeing prison and drags it into the digital age. It’s a driving art-rock number in which the watchers are everywhere and the bars are made of data. The synth edge is brutal and hard, contrasted by Gibbs’s breathy dreamy soft vocals and a heart-rending wail in the ether. There are genetic traces of classic shoegaze mixed in with the butal electronic of Cabaret Voltaire.
‘Diane … On the other side’ revisits a character from USER’s first album, ‘Dimensions, Prisms and Waves’. It’s a dark sensory trip that explores meditation as a passage to somewhere beyond. The wailing vocals and clattering sounds discombobulates and when the main vocals enter, it’s foreboding, ominous and dark, again with a Bowie timbre. Then comes ‘Never to Dance’, that new wave swan song for the last thylacine. It’s a mournful elegy for a creature that died from neglect in a cold Hobart enclosure while the world looked the other way. The synth drone is sharp and visceral while Gibbs’s vocals are buried deep, haunting, elegiac. An über cool riff burnishes the track with a ray of light.
Closing track ‘Psychogenic Mouse Trap’ signs off with an ethereal free-jazz fuzz trip, unhinged and untethered, leaving the listener with the band’s own nagging question: No tomorrow. Is that the plan?
‘Extinction’ is USER at their most focused and most furious, a concept album whose bleakness is offset by the band’s enduring gift for melody and that hyperkinetic electronic thrum. It’s Berlin nightclub noir with a conscience, a dance at the end of the world. Creativity does not have a use-by date, and neither, it seems, does outrage.
‘Extinction’ is available digitally via Bandcamp now and via all the usal sites. The limited-edition vinyl is available exclusively at the following launch shows:
- Sydney: The Vanguard, 14 November
- Adelaide: Grace Emily, 28 November
- Geelong: Church, 4 December
- Eaglehawk: Trash Cult, 12 December
USER are Lisa Gibbs, Frank Galgano, Andrew Nunns and Daryl Bradie.
Originally the brainchild of Andrew Nunns (The Black Heart Death Cult/Autohaze/Underground Lovers/Glenn Bennie – GB3 – Kilbey/Lime Spiders) and Frank Galgano (The Lamp/HAL/Euphoric Amoeba) , USER morphed into a permanent four piece with captivating vocalist/bassist Lisa Gibbs (The Moth Body/GB3 – Glenn Bennie/Greenhouse/The Same Same) and atmospheric guitarist extraordinaire Daryl Bradie (Gersey/Walkerville/Glenn Bennie) joining the fold permanently in 2022.
