A bit of a gap with these — a few weeks — due to travelling, guests and a myriad of other things so I’m now back in the saddle so to speak I was looking forward to writing about this track because I get to leave what are basically newly formed impressions as I in reality don’t really know much about this band, that being the classic Australian post-punk group Hunters & Collectors. Sure, you can find stuff on the internet these days but haven’t really gotten around to finding out the background story about them — except for the fact that the band’s vocalist and main instigator, Mark Seymour, has a brother by the name of Nick Seymour who in the latter half of the 1980s became the bass player of the popular New Zealand pop/rock group Crowded House. Therefore with the sparse and piecemeal information I cobbled together regarding Hunters & Collectors I just let my imagination fill in the rest.
Being an avid cinemaphile, a number of years ago I went through a phase of unearthing a lot of films in what might roughly be found under the genre umbrella of ozploitation — a catch-all definition generally applied to lower budget, artier and underground films that have come out of Australia since the introduction of their R rating in 1971. I suppose one of the earlier Peter Weir films, 1974’s The Cars That Ate Paris, falls into this category as well but there’s many others out there, including the most well-known product of this genre, and that being the 1979 film Mad Max.
The 1986 film Dogs In Space by Australian director Richard Lowenstein and starring Michael Hutchence of INXS, would maybe fall into this category but it’s more so a film giving a fictional portrayal of Melbourne’s Little Band post-punk scene in the late 1970s, featuring soundtrack contributions and live performances by local groups such as Primitive Calculators and Boys Next Door, the latter who would morph into the more well-known The Birthday Party. Within this period of watching films in this genre, I checked out the 1986 Australian film Dead End Drive-In by director Brian Trenchard-Smith, which too straddles the ozploitation genre but also the burgeoning rise of films working with new wave and punk cultures.
It was with that film that the track “Talking To A Stranger” by Hunters & Collectors was featured in a scene in the film, the track coming from their Australian 1982, self-titled debut album. It was that track that hooked me in and got me interested in checking out their releases. Then, on a trip to Canada earlier this year, I found that debut album on vinyl although it’s the US version of that album that came out a year later with a completely different cover and tracklisting. In fact, there’s only a couple of tracks from their original Australian debut that carried over to the US version and that US version contains a bunch of other tracks not featured on the original release.
This sort of thing has happened before — often a result of licensing records to other countries and the branch of whatever major label in that country making an executive decision to change things up for their national audience. However, the original cover doesn’t seem to be anywhere to remotely being confidential, and is visually a more artistic “collage” based cover compared to the visual afterthought of the US cover. I’m sure there’s a story there.
Across these two versions of the début, the band forges a sound based on a number of things I can hear, such as the classic sound of Australian pub rock of the time (Midnight Oil being an example), developments in angular funk-inflected post-punk emerging in the UK (Gang Of Four, Au Pairs, etc.) as well as a slightly industrial sound that has faint echos of Einstürzende Neubauten — mainly due to the clanging metal percussion throughout a lot of the band’s tracks from this era — and bit of an unhinged chaos in the vocal delivery that straddles the line between melody and manic outbursts. This applies to the instrumentation as well, with some of the less pop-leaning tracks moving into territory that local peers The Birthday Party were experimenting with at the time.
And this brings us to the track featured here entitled “Droptank”, which slots in as the second track of the first side of the US version of the LP. This track for me is the most shining example from this period of the band where the vast instrumentation of the band — which at times expanded to almost ten members, including drums, guitars, a horn section and extra percussionists — has one foot in experimental rock tradition but also lays down some foundations that are the building blocks of electronic dance music, despite there not being a drum machine or any synthesizers to be found.
Given that I find this track a bit fascinating and it’s one of the most magnetic from this band during this period — myself coming from hardcore and guitar-based roots but working the world of electronic music for many years now. Like a lot of electronic music, it features a strong, looping bass line that moves around the fretboard with ample gaps and empty space to become that more powerful. The kick drum pounds on a solid 4-4 pattern, decorated with an array of percussion ranging from cowbell, wood blocks, cymbals and even what sounds like found metal percussion. Above all that slide guitars chime out passages through reverb in an atmospheric sheen with sparse, anthemic and repetitive vocals. There even seems to be a choir of background vocals that resemble more of a lush synthesizer pad sound than anything else. It’s almost like angular, repetitive electronic loops that think more like club music.
Decades later bands like The Rapture, Radio 4, !!!, Liars, GoGoGo Airheart and countless others at the turn of the millenium came back to this interesting fusion during the dance-punk and post-punk revival movement of the turn of the millenium and well into the 2000s. These bands listed mostly came out of the 90s underground hardcore scene, and like the first wave of original post-punk before them, came from more noisier and aggressive roots to embrace the euphoria that had been found in the dance music scenes as likely the musical tastes of the members expanded as time went by.
And perhaps this inflection of dance music unintentionally found its way into some hardcore/post-hardcore of the time, most notably the post-punk leaning “four-on-the-floor” kick drum styling of Matt Deline, the drummer of Canadian mid-90s hardcore band Shotmaker.
I suppose I’m coming back to, and interested in this fusion of what we call “rock” instrumentation (electric guitar, bass, drum kit, etc) as I myself have been recently playing the guitar again after a long break from it. It was my main instrument for a long time and one that I got into quite young, so my style and stamina are coming back to form but after a long time of writing, producing and performing electronic music, I’m finding that my style and approach to composition is quite skewed by being in the world of synths and electronics for quite some time, and is making for some interesting variations on playing guitar.
As mentioned at the start of this piece I didn’t really have much in-depth information on Hunters & Collectors and have mainly reserved my time with them to solely just listening to their music here and there. Sometimes it’s refreshing in a day and age where one can get the full background details and colourful anecdotes out of a band with a few clicks of a mouse by way of the world wide web to just have whatever band is being listened to covered in a slightly opaque shade of mystery. What I do know about this band as that they approached the mid to late 1980s, they had a notable shift in style to far more accessibly pop/rock composiutions, starting with their 1986 album Human Frailty.
In a way there’s sort of similar trend with a number of well known bands from down under. Similar Australian bands like INXS and Midnight Oil were already a good number of albums into their tenure before they exploded more onto a mainstream stage with the albums Kick and Diesel and Dust respectively. New Zealand band Split Enz put out a series of quirky folk/glam/artrock albums — complete with the band donning a unique look and costuming (see clip below) with their 70s output — before their fifth album True Colours came out with their breakthrough hit “I Got You” was released, featuring the younger of the band’s Finn brothers, Neil, stepping up to the limelight in that band and within years that band had dissolved, with the younger Finn starting the even more successful Crowded House and the myriad of well-known hit singles that that band released. Perhaps this slower process of breaking out had something to do with the relative distance and isolation of Australia and New Zealand to the rest of the world.
Overall for me the first releases of Hunters & Collectors is a nice little discovery for me, and taps into my current interest in the intersection of dance music foundations paired with the handiwork of more traditional pop/rock music instrumentation.