The Chats - High Risk Behaviour

The Guardian 80

(Bargain Bin)
The Queensland rockers prove that it takes a lot of musical skill to sound so gleefully stupid in this witty debut

After some colourful YouTube videos that went viral and two acclaimed EPs, Dave Grohl/Iggy Pop-favoured Aussies the Chats’ “shed rock” debut blazes out of Queensland with a similar short, sharp shock to that delivered by punk pioneer predecessors the Saints 44 years ago. Perhaps these complex, bewildering times require another musical clearing of the decks, and singer-bassist Eamon Sandwith, guitarist Josh Price and drummer Matt Boggis certainly deliver that.

In the same way NME scribe Paul Morley observed that you could pack an entire Ramones album into the length of a single song by San Francisco drug rockers the Grateful Dead, the Chats are a similar exercise in perfectly honed brevity. None of the 14 songs are more than three minutes long, and several barely clock in at much more than a minute. The brawling attitude and upstart vibe are more than familiar from punk’s first wave. There are fleeting hints of Gang of Four’s choppy funkiness and there’s a certain kindred spirit with Melbourne rabble-rousers Amyl and the Sniffers or Dublin’s Fontaines DC. However, while originality isn’t the Chats’ forte, they have terrific tunes – and lots of them.