The Ancients 2 supports any occasion, be it solemn (lovemaking, funeral), or unfortunate (stranded on a desert island/dateless night). The few times I tried to write this album up I hesitated. Street Funk was such a jam I just wanted to get down to it, revel in it and not have to think about it. This is probably due to the meteor shower of melody that rains down from it, from all over: the monstrous keyboard hook, the buoyant guitar that recalls Graham Coxon at his Blur-riant best and an ace beat from the ravishing Raquel that neatly clicks and pops. I’ll give Mark credit for the whammy bar in the chorus because I can’t give Jon all the credit.
Anyway this is a sterling guitar record and droll as all get out. Opening salvo: “Moving to the Street Funk/the invisible power/ looking through the street junk from a luxury shower,” sung by Jon and it’s safe to assume there’s a view out the window of his expensive shower (perhaps he has gold taps) to the street where someone’s left their junk. Other lines jump out (“jump into the rainbow in the media age”) — reminding me of, I don’t know what: pogoing asshats in bursting jodhpurs reading the news to kids?
The lyrics evoke otherworldliness (“he lives on a monastery on a mountain of bad dreams”) and paint nice pictures (“she drank the black mead and saw what the world needs/ her holographic horse she rode to the bottom of the sea”). On Rising Seas, the whimsy is suburbanized. All the sadness of life is here: broken tambourines, sax players in dead bars, seeing your boss drink until he cries. The nail in the coffin? “Singing Kokomo and songs you almost know.” Ouch.
The influence of Felt is felt all over. So many lovely filigrees I think Jon’s hand must hurt! Raquel and bassist Georgina sing harmonies on Christine that is like the early-girly Origami being lushly “Felt” up (The analogy isn’t perfect because Origami are lesbians).
Mark has found a weird uncle figure in Syd Barrett. His songs have a lugubrious doped quality that plays well here. Stoner trick on Missing Page is the descending bassline that pulls you down to a height no less strange.
And could the woebegone weekend be expressed anymore dolefully than Nathan Gray’s trumpet on the perfectly-titled Sunday Evening? A Patriot’s Duty, ironic or not, is one fat jam, a smart conclusion to a great album.
Jon’s now made, to these ears, four classic Australian albums (three from Mum Smokes and now this): urbane, wry, dry-humored with wonderfully observed details of Australia and all its walks of life. They’re also musically rich rock records with gorgeous guitar tones and spacey effects.
A good indication of a successful album is not to desire any other album while your listening to it and this also applies to lovemaking as well. When you are doing the wild thing, presumably it is with someone you care about and that person should be the only person you are thinking about — this is one way of saying that Ancients 2 inspires faithfulness and devotion.
Released on Sensory around the same time, Bellplay is like a low-rent Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, crepuscular and Tasmanian, made by nice people who like dark stuff. You can hear the machinations at work, every cog, grinding and droning, Rotwang giving them no slack, the band, in turn, growing delirious with repetition, the kind of workforce that achieves one-hundred percent efficiency for the quarter and spends their bonus on LaMonte Young bootlegs. A lot of people complained about the shit-stained recording, but I’m totally fine with it.
Certainly the names of Roger Grierson and Phil Judd are two you would tend never to have expected to see in the same place and the same time, though both men first came to prominence in the mid (for Judd) to late (for Grierson) 1970s, as members of Split Enz and the Thought Criminals respectively. Judd’s best-known moment is The Swingers’ ‘Counting the beat’, and Grierson doesn’t have one, though his career as a musician, manager, record company exec, music publisher, CEO and everything else is diverse and by certain gauges you could blame him for the careers of Tex Perkins and Caligula (the band), none of which, Thought Criminals included, should or would make anyone want to listen to music he was producing in 2009. In fact, ditto Phil Judd who has been exceptionally quiet in the last 20 years – you hear more about Phil Judd in songs Tim Finn writes about him than you do from Phil Judd himself.
You may recall the absurd joke a journalist for The Australian played on… who? … a few years ago by sending extracts from Patrick White books to publishers who (a) did not recognise them as White and (b) rejected the work in various ways. What this was supposed to prove is anyone’s guess – like a lot of literary hoaxes, there was some kind of underlying assumption that no-one actually holds if they think about it for more than a minute. 
I was a Systematics fan from the second release, though I would have been one from the first. Hard to imagine an Australia that was so provincial, in the sense not of being one large province but a number of them, that an independent band’s first single basically could not get out of the city from whence it originated, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened to the Systematics’ single ‘Pulp Baby’; I didn’t see or hear the record until about five years ago, and I’ve seen things. The second release was a 12” EP called Rural, and it was extraordinarily (literally) diverse, showing pretty much the limits of what two wry Sydney men (Patrick Gibson had been the only member of the ‘Pulp Baby’ band; he was then joined by Michael Filewood) could do with a four-track, a guitar and a synthesiser. They were sick (just as ‘Pulp Baby’, as its title might suggest, was sick) with their songs ‘When I’m Older’ and ‘Numbers in General’; they were dextrously tuneful with their instrumental ‘Dinner’s on the Table’; they were outrageously (literally) obscure with fauxk tunes like ‘Stuh Echipidah’; they weren’t cool, in fact the whole thing might have been regarded as a proud wank, but much of it was highly listenable. They added a member in Fiona Graham and their next release was another EP – a 7” this time – called My Life in the Field of Cows, with funny songs like ‘Bovine’. And that was it (or rather, one member, Patrick Gibson, left and Michael Filewood, Michael Tee and Fiona Graham became Ya Ya Choral, a group with a whole weird history of its own). The Systematics were a part – a formative part – of the M2 record label, which issued about ten records of varying quality bound to divide opinion. If there was a label sound it was probably partly because there was a label studio, and synthesisers record better to four track than guitars (and because they had a niche there). This sumptuous double LP collects the whole world of the Systematics with one disc of the official vinyl releases (not the cassette releases, though M2 did do some – there was a ‘Rural side 3’, for instance, and a live compilation called Box Brownies which was ¼ Systematics) and a second of demos and etcetera. There are a number of ways one might approach this material; the way I’d be most interested in, I suspect, though probably because it’s the one I’m least able to imagine or take on, is what one might make of it today having never heard any of the material before and, even better, having little understanding of or familiarity with late 1970s/early 1980s independent pop-‘electronic’ (as Patrick Gibson points out in his sleevenotes, a very problematic and probably quite lazy descriptor) music. My memory of this kind of thing was that it – not just most of the M2 material, but contemporaneous international things like Throbbing Gristle (particularly their pop end), Fad Gadget, men-only Human League, perhaps even Suicide, was that its very existence seemed like a brash challenge. Synthesisers were regarded with suspicion in some quarters (until they sounded sufficiently like ‘real instruments’ that they could be used secretly) and – just like sampling a few years later – were seen as, somehow, a cheat. To my mind the Systematics demonstrably engage with this all the way: a number of their songs (‘Pulp Baby’, ‘International Voltage’) are about electrics (as opposed to electronics); Patrick Gibson’s (it is usually he, I think) vocals are affected and over the top ‘showbiz’ parodic. The mere act of recording synthesiser music with mistakes deliberately left in (and not just pushing-the-wrong-key mistakes – towards the end of ‘Numbers in General’, Gibson announces he’s finished the vocal track, things like that) and then releasing it on a permanent, forever, unchangeable vinyl record was a statement of its time. In these ways the Systematics were very 1980, and even if you really like experimental music of a particular epoch (like me, in this case) you might well ask, as so many people so often do, why should I have to learn about a milieu to enjoy its artefacts? Then again, perhaps my knowledge/ memories mask for me the fact that much of this stuff is, on its own terms, quite remarkable. I can’t know!!! 
