I-94 Bar review (Australia)

3 out of 5 bottles from Australia's I-94 bar. The Lou Reed comparison is cute.

I like the way it kicks off – guitar riff, bass & drums kick in, then vox “I’m ready to testify, I feel it down in my soul.” Hey, neat! “Cos I been smoking angel dust, And now I’m outa control.” Oh dear.

Fucking hell, even I feel a bit embarassed for these guys. And I once wrote a column titled ‘I Love Drugs’ The album actually has a bass solo, just to prove that too much drugs really can fuck you up.

Musically it aint too bad. Fairly straight forward punkrock kinda stuff, but played tight & hard and with enough musical imagination to keep your attention. They’ve got a neat rhythmic groove happening, too, sitting here at a puta, it’s kinda toe tapping and if you were to catch ‘em at a gig, you might dance, espcially if you were halfway thru a bottle of vodka and had just smoked your third joint to take the edge of that line of speed.

And then I hear a line like “We’re puking on the stage and we’re ready to deal.” The vocals are sang in a particularly clear voice, and mixed high and mostly dry in the mix. You can’t miss understanding every last word. There’s no wit or humour about any of it, it’s just this relentless barrage of the often mundane realities of devoting a life to getting wasted. Woody High tends to sing in your face, as it were. It’s kinda like the drug-fucked punk equivalent of gangsta rap.

And then you get a song like "Breaking Shit", another humourless ode, this time to destroying David Bowie records and it occurred to me – maybe ‘Mighty High’ are an FBI or ATF plant? The sound of all those breaking bottles at the end of that track are gonna scare the kids off a drug-fuelled lifestyle, lest they end up writing lyrics like these. Fuck, it’s working for me already.

Lou Reed never had to write “Drug city, here I come, let me in right now.” No, he wrote "Heroin" a love song to the drug, but like all the best love songs, full of ambiguity and mixed feelings. And a work of fucking art. - Earl O'Neill

http://www.i94bar.com/reviews/mightyhigh.html