Who said being in the business of making noise had to be serious? Sydney-based duo Party Dozen certainly don’t think it’s a requirement. Over their career, the pair (made up of saxophonist Kirsty Tickle and percussionist Jonathan Boulet) have ravaged ears, but also kept their sense of humour close by. They make loud music, sure, but they also sometimes make loud music with silly noises. Their last album, 2022’s The Real Work, had more than a few servings of silliness (namely the boomwhacker-like pomp of “Fruits of Labour”) but this was beside stodgy rockets of noises (the Nick Cave-featuring “Macca the Mutt” being the undeniable highlight). “Yes, we are serious about our craft, but yes, we are also exceedingly immature,” they explain, fully aware of their meshing, melding, and crashing of styles and influences and how ridiculous it can sometimes sound.
On the band’s new album, Crime in Australia, the ethos is still the same, if not heightened across its runtime. Inspired in strands by the gentrification of their recording location of Marrickville and TV cop shows, they still blast the listener with walls of noise, still cater to their zany inclinations, but also branch out that bit more.
Lead single “The Big Man Upstairs” is a taste of something new, a bonafide slice of dreamy shoegaze complete with starry guitar chords and reverberated vocals singing indistinguishable lyrics. Sit back with your eyes closed and it sounds like travelling through a wormhole. It was something of a red herring on its initial release, but it’s not the only one Party Dozen serve up here. “The Righteous Front” is a spacey, fidgety and psychedelic three minutes. A curious number in all respects for the band (and it’s great to see them working with unexpected textures), but it mostly acts as a respite from the surrounding material.
It’s those more frivolous moments that stick out the best. Opening track “Coup De Gronk” could be tighter and trimmed for maximum effect, but the throbbing fuzzy synth and the warbled vocoder-like effect make for a lyrical but kind of silly tone. Similarly “Les Crimes” contrasts softer sax interludes with jazzy skronks; it very much sounds like the duo have audibly captured their tongue in their own cheeks. Equally on the made-for-the-moshpit “Money & The Drugs” there’s a frenzied, carefree punky blues on show while “Judge Hammer” is a sludgy dirge caked in feedback, where Tickle’s sax bell-singing comes off like a grungy harmonica to fascinating effect.
And when they make noise, they are great too at making an impressionable post punk racket that demands your attention. The stonking, gritty bass is the perfect backdrop for the exasperated breathing in and out of Tickle on her sax on “Bad News Department”, while the excellently-titled “Piss On Earth” is a groaning, lurching, and hazy dirt cloud falling in on itself. Come the final track “Jon’s International Marketplace” they unleash a flurry of noise before traversing through a landscape of scuzzy distortion, pummelling until the very end of it’s extended outro.
Loosely dividing each half of the album as “order” and “disorder”, the second side plays more to the duo’s improvisatory tendencies; sometimes it sounds like they don’t know quite where they are going and at first there’s a definite wonder to be had in seeing them figure it out. After a while though, the aimlessness does wear a little, leaving space that feels like it needs another player to come in and fill.
Do some of the same problems exist? Sure: moments here could definitely be snappier; there are points where it seems like the band rely on building to a squall of noise as the only destination a track can get to; and there are songs that rely a little too much on one defining feature to make it memorable (the hammered piano on “Wake In Might”, the theatrical blast of organ synths on “Judge Hammer”). But Tickle is still finding interesting ways to make her saxophone sound like anything but and Boulet is the album’s secret weapon, putting in flairs and fills in what feels like every bar of music (you could listen to the album just for his drumwork alone and come out appreciative). It’s a step forward from The Real Work for its more experimental side alone, and Party Dozen still know how to grab you by the scruff of your neck with their music. There’s just a little something missing that ideally would have your head turned to them from the get go – and keep you fixated on them too.
