TISM – Death To Art [Album Review]

Review: Christian Stanger

Break out your activewear, dancing shoes, and balaclavas, TISM is back! Well, the otherwise named This Is Serious Mum, reformed a couple of years ago, and even released a new track here and there. But with the release of this new collection, the erstwhile purveyors of catchy tunes marked with satire, social commentary and a certain amount of shit to be stirred, have inserted themselves back into the alternative zeitgeist.

Never really into brevity, the band have packed 29 tracks into what purports to be an 80-minute tape, soundtracking a road trip to Springvale cemetery. That’s the concept. The tone, however, is typical TISM. First developed in the 80s with raucous live shows and unleashed in record stores with 1988’s debut ‘Great Truckin’ Songs of the Renaissance’, they’ve never looked like changing anything and the first proper track, ‘Old Skool TISM’ is a testament to that fact.

All the ingredients are there. The self-deprecation (“part catchy pop, part botulism, let’s go sick with old school TISM”), the meta-commentary on their own return (“Good Things offered ten million bucks”), and the dated references (“I feel like Kerry fuckin’ Packer”). They’re all there set to a danceable beat, and a few tracks later, the provocative ‘Creed of Steven Bannon’ “floods the zone with shit” and burrows into your brain as an infectious earworm. Later, the equally defiant ‘Cabal of Bozos (dedicated to Australia’s Laziest Class, the Australian Business Class)’ seals the deal with a fusion of catchy melodies and beats with trademark wit and sarcasm with the occasionally biting social commentary, we’ve come to expect.

Football references make a return in heavy dose as well with ‘70s Football’ and ‘VFA’ showcasing the diversity Humphry B. Flaubert and co. are drawing from. The former arrives like a disco-ball, that is sure to get feet tapping before the lyrics arrive like a famous Billy Joel number with a list of people and popular references – in this case listing footy players from 50 years ago. While the latter is more classic Australian guitar rock, evoking the band’s earlier work with a new wave chorus that seems straight from the memory bank of an aged Casio keyboard.

At 29 tracks, this is a long haul that feels short. Not a track is to be skipped and there’s a lot to digest through the runtime as the welcome back to the scene is cemented. This reformation of an iconic, nostalgic and unabashedly Australian band, isn’t just going to satisfy the 40-somethings in the crowd, attempting to recapture their youth. But it might just draw in some of those from Generation Z looking for something truly unique in the musical landscape that, of late, has looked more and more homogeneous.3

TISM – Death To Art is out now