Tropical Fuck Storm: Goon Show

Like the unruly clamour they make, Tropical Fuck Storm have always gone against the grain. Take last year’s live album, Tropical Fuckstorm’s Inflatable Playground. Who releases a live album in this day age and, furthermore, has success of doing so? Yup, you guessed it…

There’s been no let up for the antipodean proto-rock titans. A fine, aging wine with added nails of course, the four-piece continue dispensing their unique brand of mind-bending mutant rock all over the world. It’s come about by plenty of adversity (bassist/vocalist and band co-founder, Fiona Kitschin, having spent most of this decade battling cancer), and working their arses off (look no further than their recent gigography).

It’s the kind of honest toil in face of this new world that is quite throwback, and the results are as accomplished as any other independent band on the planet. You love to see it.

Making the jump from Indianapolis label Joyful Noise Recordings to Fire Records, Tropical Fuck Storm mark the occasion with their latest single, Goon Show. The band’s latest acerbic rant in the face of an imploding world.

Gareth Liddiard’s wordplay is as sharp as ever on Goon Show. The “crisis actors” and this “golden age of arseholes” heaping misery on everything and everyone around them. The “cell phone footage of cats and dogma”, a classic Liddiard line as he tells a story of thugs scrambling to K-Mart to source their latest paraphernalia for the next public disturbance. Or in Liddiard’s words, where people “wave their flags at people’s flags”.

It paints a vivid picture of this modern age. The rancid, hyperbolic nature of it where the internet plays catalyst to the same actors who have been in Liddiard’s ire before (Springtime’s Will to Power). Sonically, it’s Tropical Fuck Storm with a new sunken gloom. Not even Erica Dunn and Kitschin’s wonderful harmonies can gloss over the dread, as skewed synths create a hypnotic haze that leads to the precipice.

A sordid serenade rather telling of these times, the world might be an absolute mess, but with Tropical Fuck Storm back in the new music game, you take the small victories where you can. And Goon Show is one of them.

Goon Show is out now via Fire Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.