SixFtHick - 'Cane Trash' spooky019

 

 

 

Reviews

 

I-94 Bar - Sydney

Six Ft Hick wouldnt be the first band whose recorded outputs critical appreciation collapses under the impossible weight of a hefty live reputation. And let's face it - until record companies start packaging holograms of frontmen to do gymnastics on top of the CD player (bundled with a case of stale beer to spill on your carpet), theres no way to replicate the live experience at home, let alone in your car on the way to work. Not that I really want to be tossed out of my car at the lights by anenormous Pacific Islander growling "drink 'em up" just because the dashboard clock says it's 11.45.

As tall and order as it is for Six Ft Hick to live up to their hard-earned, face-to-face reputation on disc, they may have pulled it off on this, their third long playing release. Where anything vaguely resembling a message might be lost amid all those whirring arms, backbends and smashed glasses when the band hits the stage and the chest hairs start being set alight, Canetrash resonates with clever lyrics and a depth of songwriting. The Hick's music might still celebrate people with personality disorders and situations that reek of desperation, and the music's frantic, but the words are now a helluva lot easier to understand.

The best Lou Reed songs are when he gets inside someone else's head and tells a story from their own sordid perspective. That's why "Flight of the Shitbird" is a firm favourite from this disc, laying out the daily swoop of a junkie on the 'done as he does the rounds of the Fortitude Valley Mall. The music neither swoops or swirls but divebombs, and it's tempting to tag it as fairly representative of the whole disc.

But there's the rub: If youre able to accurately categorise Six Ft Hicks music, youre doing well (and frankly should spend more time doing Mensa puzzles than slumming it online with us). Their roots may be in rockabilly, but theyve absorbed enough swamp/thrash/metal/hardcore influences to qualify for some sort of dodgy government grant for services to cultural diversity.

There's a scurvy-ridden, skanky undertow to the guitars that sucks the songs along like detritus bubbling down a dirty inner-city gutter after a downpur, with the rhythm section locking in and clattering away in tandem. Geoff and Ben Corbett alternate on vocals, sometimes sounding like Jello Biafra after the helium bottle has run dry. Nicely edgy, always in your face. I'm still none the wiser as to what their "Five Rules" are but if they ever catch up with Peewee ("Payday for Peewee), he is in one shitload of trouble.

Loki Lockwoods production is first class and part of the deal is you get a bonus disc of live Hickage, recorded in 2006 at the Tote Hotel in Melbourne. While the hologram would have been handy, there's no guarantee it wouldn't have jumped off the top of the stereo and kicked half of the Barmaid's handmade pottery off the surrounding shelves and halfway to Brisbane, such is the murderous intent in these songs.

Not for the faint-hearted but then again they breed 'em out of whack in cane country. - The Barman

 

 

Round and Shiny - Australia

SixFtHick have strong capabilities. Any serious examination must
include the power in their live performance. They rave, they raunch,
they rollick and are very much the people's choice of their native
Queensland. There. Done!

Cane Trash in general and SixFtHick in particular help maintain that
much-loved phrase, "rock's rich tapestry." Genealogical surf-punk from
the quicksilver musical brains of the Corbett brothers combine savage
but affectionate enthusiasm with cyclonic whoops and head bouncing
observations on sex, pain, intensity and urgency.

My speakers rang out as the siblings wailed, "I've made a relief map
outta my flesh, I mark the spot with "X" - let's have sex. It looks
like mincemeat but it feels like love" from: "Beat Myself." What's
really impressive is the way SixFtHick manages to wrap all their sonic
erudition in a style quite far removed from the ranting traditions
they so obviously admire. They're at their best when this rigid
chronology counterbalances their haphazard, gadfly nature. Cane Trash
shows SixFtHick have matured substantially since their last release
from back in 2002.
Peter Thornton


 

Rave Magazine - Brisbane

Ah.It's been 10 years since the spitting , Sweaty , twin-headed hydra emerged from the tiger snake infested, burnt-sugar smelling cane fields of the Nambour backwaters,crawled a couple of hours to Brisbane and began SixFtHick. We've had a decade of the 'Hick albeit with a couple of line-up shifts...each time you're slowly moving away from the front of the stage,trying not to look them in the eyes,fearing for your personal safety,whilst being aroused some what. Maybe thats just me.It feels wrong, like kissing your cousin.

So here's "Canetrash". Their first release since 2002's "Lap of Luxury". We start off with the ominous surf/death/punk intro (courtesy of gutarist Dan Baebler)to the first track. The Five Tips - a call to arms- spat,growled,intimidating- setting much of the tone for the rest of the disc. The twin Geoff/Ben vocals, the dirty squeal/rumble of the guitar,the earth-shifting bass, Freds relentless thumping....and as always Australian garage greats as reference points. They've got the danger,grime,gruff and dark humour of bands like the Beasts of Bourbon and The Birthday Party. Just to name a few.

There are some great songs on here, which emerge after a couple of listens - it's an assault which just takes you by surprise the first time.

Beat myself has a wonderfully swampy serpentine feel - but it's Payday for Pee Wee that really proves it for me. It's slower , more stripped back - which proves they can do menacing without the aggro swagger.

A big part of appreciating SixFtHick is seeing them live. Often they have'nt translated well onto record. But,whats great here is the songs are extermely well-wrought and powerful - it almost compensates for not being able to see them.

Speaking of live,included with this record is "TrainCrash", a set recordedlive at the Tote in Melbourne, which takes in cuts from the current release as well as some older material.I'm glad they've put it in here.They're a near-flawless live band - they make nearly eneryone else look like cowards and amateurs.

Take your emo-afflicted younger sibling to see them. Tell them to stand up front.Then they'll really have something to cry about.

Jean Nicotine

 

 

Citysearch - Australia

Once rock fans the world over are finished crying over the demise of the masterful tunes and gentlemanly showmanship of US rockin'-billy legends Rocket from the Crypt, may they wipe their tears and pick up Brisbane swamp threshers SixFtHick's new album Cane Trash.

As the sweat melts their Brylcremed pompadours, these Northern rock'n'roll evangelists have been laying waste to stages and stereos across the nation with their fatalistic and deranged swamp-stomp. Snake-hipped brothers Ben and Geoff Corbett swap yelps like lust-crazed Elvises. With just guitar, bass and drums, the rest of the Hicks form an almighty chugging locomotive of rock'n'rock'n'rock. It's more than enough to convert listeners to whatever faith these good ol' boys are peddling.

Although you can hear a dark undercurrent of country on Cane Trash it only fully emerges during the unsettling Payday for Peewee. Even the final two "blues" tracks at the end of the album are raucous and insidious. What you're paying here for is psychotic, wall-eyed, flailing rock straight from the croc-infested climes of rural Northern Australia. And not only do you get that in shovel-fulls, there's a live album attached so that you can fully appreciate the band when they preach to the choir in the chapel. This is spine-tingling stuff.

Andrew Tijs

 

Inpress – Melbourne

Canetrash is possibly the best named album of the year. But it’s not just the title of this album that’s a winner. Whereas before the ‘Hicks have taken to the musical cane toad with a 3 iron, this time they’ve rammed a high powered fire-cracker right up it’s clacker and lit the fuse with one of those flame throwers usually used to light the sugar cane. And a bit like their (now not so) native toads, this album is an unrelenting, unstoppable bastard, with the call and response vocals of brothers Geoffro and Gentle Ben never sounding so pressing, assured and downright fucking dangerous. Whether it’s the self-harming carnage inflicted in Beat Myself (“The way to my heart is through my chest / I’ve made a relief map outta my flesh”) to the threatening Forty Cents (“Here’s forty cents / You’re gonna have an accident”) this is the way rock’n’roll should sound; loud, unsettling and imposingly defiant. Even when the guys pause for breath and bring it down a notch, say in Payday for Peewee, there’s still an element of menace stalking the picked guitar notes and sinister vocal croon.

The playing is tight and ruthless, testament to a band at the top of their game, without a single weak track providing any hint of filler. In fact, it would be bloody difficult picking singles off Canetrash such is its consistent strength, not that you’d expect the Hicks to try and corner the 13-year-old girlie market. Surely some of the credit should go to the omnipresent Loki Lockwood, handling the recording and mixing at Atlantis and the mastering at Spooky Manor, retaining the edge and bite of their impressive live show, (not surprising as he’s been their front-of-house man for quite some time). And, adding to the Melbourne flavour, a bonus CD confirms their great live sound, recorded last October at the Tote, just in case you needed any extra persuasion to purchase what is a contender for Aussie rock album of the year.

Jayson Argall

 

MAG – Australia

They call their swampy sound “canepunk” SixFtHick are the wildest thing to come out of Brisbane since the Black Assassins. Their new album is a rootsy rave-up, with the Corbett brothers, Ben and Geoff, leading the frenzy with their twin vocal attack. This is a band that has no pretensions live, taking risks and putting on a show. SixFtHick is a band that deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as the Beasts of Bourbon and The Drones. And the new album comes with a wicked bonus disc – 14 songs recorded live at The Tote in Melbourne.

Jeff Jenkins

 

Beat Magazine – Melbourne Australia

The Australian novel (and subsequent film) Wake in Fright portrayed vividly the threatening underbelly of life in an Australian country town, providing a stark contrast to the cliched mythology of rural and regional Australia. Sixfthick take that disturbing redneck sensibility and infuse it with punk, swamp and blues. It’s hard to work out whether you should be threatened or comforted by the band – and that equivocation is part of the attraction.

Cane Trash is the band’s first album since 2002’s Lap of Luxury. It’s a bruising ride that combines the dangerous blues punk edge of the Beasts of Bourbon, the wild anger of the Boys Next Door and Birthday Party and the disconcerting narratives of Edgar Allen Poe. Geoff and Ben Corbett trade stark observations and prophetic images like a couple of punk revivalist preachers hellbent on waking the community from its Howard Era slumber. The intensity of the lyrics matches the music– Flight of the Shitbird is as vivid a portrayal of street junkie life as anything Johnny Thunders wrote, while Magnets takes cathartic emotional counselling to its absolute extreme. While there’s a feeling latent in Set Your House in Order that all this mania must surely come to a head one day, Ben’s intoning threats of revenge in Payday for Peewee provide the perfect circuit breaker. And if you’re feeling good about yourself, throw Dogshit Blues on the stereo and see where it leaves you.

The second disc – Train Crash – is taken from a Hick show recorded live at The Tote in October 2005. Trying to capture the shear, unadulterated intensity of the Hicks live on stage is almost logically impossible, but this attempt is worth commending. Sure, you can’t catch the absolute vigour of Geoff Corbett’s facial expression as he strangles his microphone into submission, or Ben Corbett’s cane punk aerobic madness, but close your eyes and you can smell the marriage of the Tote stench of and the Hick’s patented swamp punk aroma.

The dark cane punk world of Sixfthick is not a place you’d enter without warning. It’s evil, it’s foreboding, it’s probably going to leave you with a hangover that’ll burst your frontal lobes. But it’s one helluva fun ride while you’re on it.

PATRICK EMERY

 

I-94 Bar – Sydney

The Hicks have come up with a new one at last. This is good news indeed.

An odd bunch these boys, very different in their musical attitude and sweaty country boy persona to the (fairly arty) presentation of their CDs. This comes as a double- one studio, one live. Not sure if this is some sort of limited edition, the lack of info about the live disc makes me think it may be.

The studio disc, “Cane Trash” kicks off hard, with “The Five Tips” surf guitar intro and rattling snare drums. Although they don’t elaborate, I hazard a guess the Hick’s tips for living include: get as drunk as possible as often as possible, don’t take any shit, hit the other guy first and make sure you get the cash upfront. "Number Five" is probably something about looking after your woman…let’s not get into that here.

It’s a fairly sparse sound, with the constantly swapping twin vocals taking up a lot of the space that a second guitar might use. Most of the tunes are fast and fairly short, choppy and aggressive, driven by abrupt riffs and the aforementioned vocals, which swoop holler and roar.

They revel in gutter life and from the sound of “Flight Of the Shitbird” &  “40 Cents” there’s still plenty of it drifting round Fortitude Valley. The pace doesn’t really let up until the sweetly menacing “Payday For Peewee”.  They close with the pure class of “Dogshit Blues” and the warning tale of “Post Powder Blues”.

“Train Crash”, the live slab, was apparently recorded at the Tote late last year, and includes tracks from “Cane Trash” like “Beat Myself” and “Ashtray”, as well as tunes from “Lap of Luxury” and a few earlier things. The mighty “I Was Just Cleaning It, And It Went Off’ is here, in fine form. Not as much between song banter as I remember from the last time I saw them.

They tour pretty relentlessly; if you live in Australia chances are you’ve already seen them. If you don’t, this will have to do until the inevitable overseas tour. - TJ Honeysuckle

 

Time Off - Brisbane

SixFtHick's presence in Brisbane's musical consciousness since 1995
has been a little hard to ignore to say the least, and as a live band,
they've often been seen blowing many an international headliner off
the stage with their inimitable passion for performance  -  in the
truest sense of the word.

On record, it's hard to bottle a sound that goes hand-in-hand with
visuals. And with their trademark call and response vocals between
brothers Geoff and Ben Corbett, their third album Canetrash emerges as
a powerful piece of work takes makes up for the silence in the four
years since Lap Of Luxury.

Musically speaking, Fred's no-frills drumming and Tony Giacca's
rumbling bass stop the Corbett brothers from scaling the walls of the
studio, and with Dan Baebler's water- (liquor-?) tight guitar playing,
SixFtHick have never sounded so perfect on tape. And with Spooky's
head honcho Loki Lockwood behind the desk, the sound is direct and
purely an as-is affair.

And although 'Forty Cents' sounds like a song Ian Rilen dropped out of
his hands to pick up a drink, it's one of 13 moments on this record
which presents SixFtHick's most impressive sonic moment in 11 years.
In one word: flawless. And in four: album of the month.

 (Donat Tahiraj)

 

Faster Louder

When buying this album, I was wishing that thousands, nay millions, of others would do the same thing. Because it's about time this band got some prime time recognition for being the best at what they do: incendiary rollicking musical rides that rip off girls' panties and gives young men chest hair.

OK, so maybe not ALL panties are ripped off by these guys; mine remain firmly in place despite many Sixfthick gigs over the years. The band has a fierce and primal tongue stuck in cheek which makes them adored by many across the globe. I was just talking last night to someone in Italy who loves their music and I have friends across the world who want to see the band purely from my gushing descriptions.

However, live performances and albums are two different species and often the live vibe essence is not captured in a recording. In the case of Sixfthick's latest release, Canetrash, this works to their advantage. While the energy and fire is still there, the recording captures a maturity of lyric and musicianship previously unseen by this writer in their previous albums. The theme of "Canetrash" seems much more cohesive and the vocals are evocative.

This line-up is the best to date, supporting the high voltage vocal duo of brothers Ben and Geoff Corbett. The combination of Dan Baebler on guitar, Tony Giacca on bass, and the inimitable 'Fred' on drums (you have to hear him sing the golden shower song at one of their gigs to believe it!) is a tour de force of unrelenting erotic energy pulsing from their instruments to your ears. If this sounds rude, you should get used to it, because Sixfthick really takes no prisoners when it comes to blatant sexuality. In their live gigs, the sight of two bare chested Corbetts writhing on stage - and more often than not, off stage - is almost enough to make a girl lose consciousness.

The song "Beat Myself" starts off with a grinding bass line, and from the second they sing "Let's retire to lick each other's wounds", you know you're in for some interesting lyrics. But rather than being a song about masturbation, which was my first impression, the song seems to carry some acerbic statements on the interconnection of pain and love, love and sex, sex and pain. "I've made a relief map outta my flesh, I mark the spot with "X" - let's have sex. It looks like mincemeat but it feels like love."

Other standout tracks on the album include "Magnets", "Nervous Ticks", "Payday for Peewee", and "Post Powder Blues". "Magnets" is a flip-off to ex-lovers around the world, the vocals screaming and hollering pain away, daring it to return. Most can relate to the lyrics, "Little magnets to silence the critiques of my conscience"; I think using magnets as a metaphor for clearing your mind of past failures in the same way they wipe cassettes is very clever. Then again, I'm obsessed with great lyrics and I know you want to hear more about the music, right?

Most of the album is true to Sixfthick form: raucous rockabilly inspired-rocking-punk-psycho-swampland. In other words, this band is incredibly difficult to define, which is a great feature I believe, especially when many bands sound the same. They stand out from the crowd, even in a crowd as superb as the current batch of Australian bands releasing the best music I've heard in years.

"Payday for Peewee" takes a step back, and it is in this state it becomes obvious how talented this band is. Even with the pounding energy stripped away in a slower song like this, the band excels. The vocals on this song are sublime, enthralling...more powerful with the vulnerability that is permitted to come through. Sounding a little like The Stranglers, this song is my personal favourite. The music is laidback and chilled, yet reminiscent of a caged panther licking its lips, deciding whether or not to pounce. It touches a deeper part of me than other songs on the album. It reaches inside and grabs your imagination as if a magical storyteller.

Not enough superlatives can be used for this album. In "Canetrash", Sixfthick has accomplished the best album of their 10 year career. If you haven't seen this band perform, do it now, because they really are the best live act I've seen in my life, on a par with an Iggy Pop gig I experienced in the late '80s. They bring new meaning to the term 'audience interaction'! "Canetrash" is a must-have album for your collection because it embodies a period of music at the moment that is creative and experimental and crazy.

Sixfthick is really the personification of the word 'energy': wild, untamed and ready to make your ears bleed...a little pain with pleasure never goes astray.

Blackcherry

 

 

 

 

Previous Releases on Valve Records

 

                 

       Cousins                 Daddy's Home              Chicken