Amyl And The Sniffers - Cartoon Darkness

Anyone wondering whether international infamy would affect Amyl and The Sniffers’ musical output can rest easy just one line into opener ‘Jerkin’’: “You’re a dumb cunt”. For the most part, the Aussies’ third full-length is refreshingly familiar, eschewing the seemingly perennially attractive mode of sanding off hard edges and slowing the tempo. Instead, the outfit’s sonic maturity lives in the varied spaces they create for vocalist Amy Taylor to revel in the spotlight, such as with the classic rock riff that underpins ‘Tiny Bikini’, or her impassioned yell in tandem with a sprawling guitar throughout ‘Do It Do It’. When things do take a turn for the less punchy, there’s always a payoff: as ‘Big Dreams’ threatens to descend into plod, for example, it cuts out for ‘It’s Mine’ to thunder into life like a musical gotcha; Amy’s almost-soft singing on ‘U Should Not Be Doing That’, meanwhile, amplifies the smirk of the line, “You were down in Sydney getting jacked off”. While, yes, the faster, noisier tracks are the standouts here - ‘Pigs’ and in particular ‘Motorbike Song’, the latter a glorious paean to hedonism - the album’s most impactful moment is perhaps saved for its closing gambit. The central refrain of ‘Me And The Girls’ taps directly into much of the group’s output, but here, the line and its implications are used as an impeccable device. In the song’s first verse, it follows a take on the playground staple theme of ‘girls rule, boys drool’ (“You and your boy band, ugly and hairy / Me and the girls look snazzy and hot”); by the second, it’s “Me and the girls are stealing our napkins / Me and the girls don’t want to be taxed / Me and the girls, we want free abortions,” and “Me and the girls, we don’t want protection / Me and the girls don’t want to be boxed / Me and the girls are gonna go party / You and the boys can shut the fuck up”. On a record from a band who know only raw and real, it’s somehow all the more of a sucker punch. Moreover, the song almost directly takes its musical template from Blondie’s ‘Rapture’, a funky strut with Amy delivering the final verse as a proto-rap monologue much like punk foremother Debbie Harry did in 1980. Musically soundtracking a good time but lyrically soundtracking a real time is pretty much what most want from an Amyl and The Sniffers record, and on that ‘Cartoon Darkness’ delivers.