Words by Luke Murphy
Does a country have it’s own sound? I mean, there are some extremely obvious ones out there that you can point to (Nashville country is probably the most obvious), but if you’d asked me twenty years ago when I was still back home I would’ve strongly denied that Australia had any distinctive sound. Today, I think being away from it has completely changed my mind, but I’m still trying to pin down exactly what it is.
So much of the early Australian pop-music traded on what was happening in other countries. Artists like Peter Allen and Johnny O’Keefe took songs that were popular in the US and the UK and repackaged them for Australian audiences. However, the emergence of pub rock in the 1970s and 1980s, with bands like The Angels, Rose Tattoo, INXS, Cold Chisel, and Mental as Anything, brought out a sound that sounded uniquely Australian. There’s something about songs like ‘The Boys Light Up’ or ‘Cheap Wine’ that sound like a beer-soaked pub somewhere in the outback. There’s more of a blues-inspired sound, combined with the fact that they all played incredibly loud to get over the sound of loud Aussie pubs. Roll this in with the classic working-class ethos and lots of ‘mateship’ that makes it uniquely dirty and Australian.
Fast-forward to the late nineties and early 2000s, and bands like Powderfinger, You Am I, Custard, and The Whitlams, expanded on this, bringing in elements of brit-pop and grunge, but still retaining that typical ‘loud pub’ vibe. Even the songs that aren’t typically ‘loud’ still have that air. Listen to ‘Blow Up the Pokies’ by The Whitlams, and you’re instantly transported to a Newtown pub, smelling the distinctive odour of stale Australian beer wafting up from the wet carpet, feeling the oppressively humid heat of a summer night, and hearing the beeps and bloops from the dreaded pokies in the corner. Nothing else touches it.
I feel like the current swathe of Australian alternative music, from bands like The Chats, Sly Withers, Amyl and the Sniffers, Press Club and the rest, have given a new breathe of life to the Australian scene. It feels like a lot of the macho bullshit of previous generations of music has been shed, and there’s a kind of carefree, no-worries vibe that permeates now. For some reason, most Australian music these days just reminds me of beach bars, and late hot nights spent with mates. Chuck on a song like ‘Sobercoaster’ by Beddy Rays, and you can almost picture driving down a coastal road in the baking sun with mates.
And it’s not just rock either. Dive into Australian hip-hop (Seth Sentry and Hilltop Hoods are good starting points) and you’ll find something that takes 1990s positive hip-hop and completely rewrites it into straight up party tunes (the accent doesn’t hurt either). Australian pop (give Mallrat and G Flip a go) has something that is just so completely chill, that I don’t think anywhere else matches. We even had a moment in EDM when Melbourne Bounce came on the scene, which I don’t think you can easily make anywhere else in the world.
So, it’s not just a single sound, but there’s definitely something that makes Australian music sound exactly like Australia. So if you haven’t heard any of it, get cracking and get it up ya.
Quintessential albums for the Australian sound(s)
- Aussie Pub Rock — Cold Chisel, Cold Chisel (1978)
- 90s Alternative — You Am I, Sound As Ever (1993)
- Indie-Pop — The Lucksmiths, Where Were We? (2002)
- Punk — Frenzal Rhomb, Meet The Family (1997)
- Hip-hop — Seth Sentry, This Was Tomorrow (2012)
- Emo — Luca Brasi, Stay (2018)
