Underground Lovers

The Underground Lovers surfaced in the 1990s from Australia's prolific alternative scene with a style that fused a professional rock sound (unlike the "lo-fi" version that was popular at the time) with psychedelic overtones that were often transcendental.

Formed by Vince Giarruso and Glenn Bennie, they debuted with the album Get To Notice (Shock, 1991), mostly plagiarizing the psychedelic classics of the 1960s.

Leaves Me Blind (Guernica, 1993) built on the foundations of the first album and explored a broader range of styles, from the electronic dream-pop of Holiday to the acoustic ballad Whisper Me Nothing.
As accomplished as these songs are, they pale compared with the experimental core of the album. The quintet has the guts to open the album with a seven-minute fresco, Eastside Stories, that is drenched in exotic and mystical sounds, from the raga accent of the guitar distortions to the middle-eastern intonation of the voice. The guitars keep weaving their eastern scales and their distorted mantras around the propulsive pace of Promenade. The guitar work approximates the incendiary impetus of the Television. I Was Right borrows a drum-machine to inject a Suicide-style frenzy in a duet between an angelic female singer and cascading repetitive figures a` la early Sonic Youth. Got Off On You reverberates with Suicide's throbbing neurosis and and Velvet Underground's spasmodic depression. The instrumental Waves achieves nirvana with a shaggy, static drone. The trancey psych-pop of Your Eyes barely skims the surface of an eight-minute, exhausting shoegazing monolith, the guitars tapping/strumming a light, insistent boogie rhythm that propels Sonic Youth's guitar minimalism to ambient/psychedelic orbits.
To cap this atmospheric masterpiece, the Underground Lovers concoct the nine-minute nightmare of Ladies' Choice, which is just about the opposite of what preceded it: a mellow trip-hop shuffle drenched in sensual vocalizing, dub ambience, syncopated drumming, ethereal guitar licks.

Dream It Down (Polydor, 1995) sfodera un sound piu` professionale. Eastside Stories caracolla fra i Velvet Underground filtrati attraverso gli occhi dei Soft Boys e i Pink Floyd di Careful With That Axe. Promenadee esplode sulle note di un boogie elettrico con un acido chitarrismo alla Neil Young, ma la scansione ritmica progredisce rapidamente verso una specie di raga ipnotico. Las Vegas da` i brividi riprendendo il tono epicamente straccione dei primi Rolling Stones. La title-track sembrare uscire da More dei Pink Floyd e su I Was Right sembra di ascoltare i Sonic Youth con Kim Gordon al canto.
La somiglianza con i Soft Boys viene accentuata dagli esperimenti di arrangiamento: la musica da camera liberamente ispirata a Pachelbel di Supernova, la scansione minimalisma in crescendo alla Michael Nyman di Beautiful World. Per qualche forma di masochismo il gruppo deve sempre indulgere almeno un paio di volte nel sunthpop: per quanto Losin' It sia meglio dei Swing Out Sisters, e` un po' fuori posto.