Various Artists - Easy Fever: A Tribute To The Easybeats and Stevie Wright (Album)
Can you feel it? That deep bass rumble, shaking the ground, making concentric ripples in your nearby water glass? It’s coming… through the trees, creaking, wailing – it’s – Jurassic – rock…
Not to be too cynical but it appears that Sony just rounded up a bunch of artists off their roster to get the project off the ground, then pulled in a few key ring-ins who hadn’t released anything for a while. The aim? To capitalise on that cover of Evie a few years back – you remember – and recall all the self-congratulation around Australian music history and new bright lights Jet – remember them? Sure you do.
Despite a truly eclectic roster of artists the songs all sound like out-takes from the Evie sessions, except the Resin Dogs who do something quite different and whose track really doesn’t fit with the rest of the album. Relative newcomers like The Veronicas are surprisingly listenable and Old Man River is his usual oddball self but elder statesmen like Neil Finn really should have been able to produce something more original and inspiring out of Wright’s material. Worse, liner notes by Glen A. Baker (alarm bells should be ringing) seek to canonise Wright as a key figure in the development of Australian rock – kind of like a proto-Bon-Scott.
I don’t want to detract from the important place the Easybeats and Wright – singer, occasional songwriter and commensurate performer – played in shaping an Australian popular culture identity when we really were an isolated colony ten years behind the rest of the world. The problem I have is Sony, or perhaps some other industry entrepreneur, trying to cash in with a mediocre re-imagining of Wright’s music and legacy. Comparing this album to the exceptionally well realised Kev Carmody tribute a couple of years ago further serves to highlight the bland and derivative nature of much of this album. The second disc of Easybeats originals are worth adding to your collection but you can probably find a best-of that will give you the same material without the sub-standard covers. Your Mum or Dad might like it but I was under–awed.
