Listen Up: Album Of The Week

Author: Stephen Downie

For years, people were under the misapprehension The Living End were a kind of Stray Cats meets Green Day. In truth, their sound was more rooted in the hard driving rock riffola of bands closer to home. AC/DC and The Angels were always lurking beneath the surface.

On their fourth album The Living End should finally shake the punk monkey from their backs and see them assume their position as the classiest rock act in the country today.

Album opener Till The End explodes from the speakers like a screeching Falcon down Mt Panorama’s Conrod Straight.

The band weren’t happy with the way the previous album, the patchy Modern Artillery sounded. That was due, in part, to an unhappy time spent in an LA studio. But this one, recorded in Byron Bay, is their most complete offering since Roll On.

Long Live The Weekend builds on an upbeat jangle verse to a euphoric chorus. We Want More, with its massive shouty bits, sounds like it could have been recorded on stage at last year’s Splendour In The Grass. Chris Cheney’s fretwork is, as always, frenetic and on big guitar tracks such as Reborn and Black Cat, is more fluid courtesy of their seemingly endless touring cycle.

On What’s On Your Radio Cheney’s guitar licks grab your throat and don’t let go ’til the end. But it’s the brooding, atmospheric tracks No Way Out and the album’s highwater Nothing Lasts Forever which set this band apart from everybody else out there.

At a time when rock is in danger of turning disco, thank God these guys are here to save us.