Artist: Baseball
Release: 2006
The Australian band Baseball is made up of members who play in all sorts of other lineups besides this one, and the music they skillfully craft – Thick Passage on vocals and violin, Monika Fikerle on bass and vocals, Evelyn Morris on drums and vocals, and Ben Butcher on guitar and vocals – is open to an incredibly wide range of influences.
So on this short but punchy thing titled Taiwan – Japan Tour EP, you get wildly restless, vehement music that hardly knows any limits, backed by the half-crazed, demonic screams of Thick Passage and the bipolarity embodied by Monika Fikerle.
In the opener “She Makes Cookies”, which kicks off with red-hot drums and a manic guitar, it sounds like right after the second chorus Thick’s mental state shifts dramatically and some kind of force (is it the cookies?) teleports him from fronting a garage band straight into an audition for the second singer spot in Sterbend! He sounds like a badly wounded animal, or like someone trying to lure the ghost of Screaming Jay Hawkins to his tea party, with Black Francis tagging along, straight out of the Surfer Rose era. Right after that comes “Where We All End Up”, which changes the whole picture quite a bit: Monika on vocals, sounding like it was recorded sometime in the eighties, surrounded by a wall of sound made of a hysterical bass line and sawing violin with a dash of electric guitar – but of course only for a short while. Thick Passage returns with “Hospitality Song”, where psychobilly singing about a “pig on fire” dives deep into the musical waters where some Queens Of The Stone Age riff and the screaming rage of David Yow from Jesus Lizard have sunk. Then they completely renovate their sound once more, because the very next track, “The Enemy Has Many Forms”, puts the guitar front and center with that typical surf “twang”, which could serve as the soundtrack to plenty of road movies set in a trailer, where the leads find their answers at the bottom of a glass in a constant haze of half-smoked cigarettes lying on a dusty carpet. And deep down, they carry a longing for true love: “…and a ring on her finger!” as Thick wraps it up. With that, Baseball are almost at the finish line, with only “Soft Boy Factory” left, which, with its repeated phrase “Hard man. Tough guy. Soft boy”, feels a bit more epic but just kind of sits there, and even though at one point it seems like the whole thing will turn into “(Ghost) Riders In The Sky” as performed by Dick Dale, that never happens either. Baseball only hint at how far you can go in a song format this small, which they use extremely well.
Ten truly intense minutes of music that only fuel the craving for a proper album, something a bit longer. Let the wait begin – but don’t make it too long!
Lineup
Thick Passage: Vocals, violin
Monika Fikerle: Bass, vocals
Evelyn Morris: Drums, vocals
Ben Butcher: Guitar, vocals
Track list
01. She Makes Cookies
02. Where We All End Up
03. The Hospitality Song (Ode To Good Will)
04. The Enemy Has Many Forms
05. Soft Boy Factory
Album length: 10:32
