A review:

“I didn’t know someone could be so lonesome, didn’t know a person could show off this much emotion…” Smudge

Two things people tend to know about Smudge:

• That they were best mates with bubblegrunge posterboy Evan Dando, who covered a bunch of their stuff, co-wrote with their frontman Tom Morgan and wrote a crush-song (‘Alison’s Starting to Happen’) about drummer Alison Galloway.
• That their debut single, ‘Don’t Wanna Be Grant McLennan’, was an affectionate ode about realising that, no matter how cool you wish you were, you’re always going to be more like the sincere, balding Go-Between, than Robert Forster, his hipster Adonis counterpart.

Even though Australian alt-rockers Smudge’s debut album first arrived two years after the Lemonheads’ breakthrough, it’s easy to hear exactly what their frontman saw in them in their early days. Much of the material here sounds like it should have found a home on It’s a Shame About Ray, with tracks like ‘Ingrown’ displaying that Dandoesque overdriven jangle and witty flair (“That’s how it always goes – I’m always steppin’ on your toes”) and ‘Don’t Understand’ all but inventing Ash. Meanwhile, ‘Superhero’ taps into a more muscular, Mascisular vein, with some hardcore fuzz and gnarly soloing. There’s a typically Antipodean breeziness to much of the album – the sound of Generation X taking their problems to the beach – with the band’s take on ‘Down About It’ sounding far more relaxed than the Lemonheads’ supercharged version. For a band who once covered the Laverne and Shirley theme tune, it’s no surprise that geeky humour is what marks the album’s standouts; the brisk ‘Scary Cassettes’ is a paean to being as in love with Lou Reed as your own girlfriend, while ‘Divan’ is an addictive anthem to that most slack of living arrangements: couchsurfing. Over the course of twenty-one tracks, some numbers get easily lost in Manilow‘s melee – though the two sub-five-second jingles are oddly memorable – but the album gives you a real sense of a band trying to establish an identity.

Fast forward four years to the band’s final LP, Real McCoy, Wrong Sinatra, and right from the first note of the brilliantly-titled ‘Ya We Are Cruel But We Have Our Agenda’, there’s an newly-audible focus to the Smudge sound that was sorely lacking on Manilow. The record has a more melancholic edge than the band’s debut, though there’s still humour lurking in its lyrics – witness the title track’s opening line: “She’s a little bit less out of it than she was when we first met…” Alison Galloway’s lead vocal turn on ‘Lucked Out’ adds an effortless girlish cool to the band’s sound, like Isobel Campbell fronting Teenage Fanclub, while the anticipatory adolescent angst of ‘Eighteen in a Week’ comes over like a laid-back cousin of the Replacements’ seminal ‘Sixteen Blue’. An unsurprisingly consistent beast in comparison with the band’s sprawling debut, Real McCoy also sounds far less dated and more mature – proof, if proof be need be, that the band were fully capable of riding their own bikes without any Dando-brand training wheels.

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A complaint:

“I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on Fire Records.” Dan Treacy, Television Personalities

Things most people know about Fire Records:

• That they have released some great records by some great bands.
• That they have a habit of binding their artists into dire contracts that can only be broken by the savviest of litigators (see: Pulp, Luke Haines).

These two long-out-of-print albums are being given a new lease of life through Fire Records’ recent ‘Embers’ campaign. Now, even in spite of the fact that this series of reissues includes practically the entire back catalogue of the mighty Television Personalities and some of the best work by The Pastels, its name is nothing short of pathetic; it sells some classic records short, and seems to suggest that these albums are insignificant in comparison to the label that released them. Indeed, the reissues are pretty bare-bones, boasting inferior artwork and typos in the liner notes, and it’s hard not to be disappointed with the lack of sleevenotes, if only to shed light on a group whose legacy has so little to do with their own records. Still, in this case, regardless of the presentation, it’s good to see Smudge pushed slightly further away from the margin.

Indeed, the reissues are pretty bare-bones, boasting inferior artwork and typos in the liner notes, and it’s hard