Tropical Fuck Storm: Fairyland Codex

The cover art to Tropical Fuck Storm’s fourth long-player, Fairyland Codex, is an enlightening one. A smorgasbord of beasts and ghouls, it paints an accurate picture of these times; or in the words of Gareth Liddiard’s during the droning mutant rock of Goon Show, “The golden of arseholes and triumph of disgrace” that “rains cats and dogma” in a world where “people wave flags at people waving flags”. It’s an epic takedown on the internet and, by extension, the world at large, as Tropical Fuck Storm do a better job than anyone at illuminating this horror show.

Tropical Fuck Storm has always orchestrated the kind of narratives that pop, and Fairyland Codex sees Liddiard, Fiona Kitschin, Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel reach into the deepest part of their bag of tricks to deliver one of the year’s best albums. One of its many highlights, Dunning Kruger’s Loser Cruiser, sees the band cleverly creating two contrasting worlds of “reality” – the latter, an ever fading one in that quest for privacy and how tech companies have ultimately hijacked our emotions (“I feel good for no bad reason / I feel bad for no good reason”).

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Speaking to Liddiard back in 2021 following the release of Springtime’s self-titled debut LP (the collaboration also featuring Jim White and Chris Abrahams), and he hinted at a similar thing. That creeping “leisure panic” thanks to people guilt tripping you over not responding emails in less than 10 minutes. It was classic Liddiard, but on Dunning Kruger’s Loser Cruiser there’s more than just a hint: this band have had a gutful of the internet mob.

On Fairyland Codex, Liddiard gives one of his most stirring performances. His narratives, Joyce-like but firmly in the maelstrom, and while the edifice has already crumbled, Liddiard’s characters are either left to skirt around the ruins or create even more of them. The black acid nightmare of the aptly titled Irukandji Syndrome, a tale of a protagonist flitting from the Bay of Pigs to sabotaging aircraft carriers as he suffers from the venom of a box jellyfish. Ultimately, it plays out like Jack London’s The Sea Wolf on shrooms.

The band’s staple serrated sonics remain throughout to match these vivid chronicles. Currently the finest multi-instrumentalist in the Australian rock ’n’ roll pantheon, Dunn fires her own shots, firstly with Teeth Marché. Another abstract tale pulled from life’s grimiest corners, as Tropical Fuck Storm reverse engineer proto-rock as only they know how.

However, it’s where the band strays from their norm that makes Fairyland Codex the high-watermark it is. It’s not all cavalier and armour plates, and it’s these moments where Tropical Fuck Storm dial down the scorn that offer the most impressive results. The balladeering Stepping on a Rake, the most beautiful thing the band has written in what enters into love song territory (“I’m still an island when you’re washed away”).

It’s not the only time Liddiard flirts with the quieter aesthetics that made his solo LP, Strange Tourist, an Australian sleeper classic. The title track, an inventive outlier and among the best Tropical Fuck Storm has written. With woodsy, countrified echoes, and a narrative that once again swings back and forth between two realities, a bipolar flourish emerges like two different songs colliding. The protagonist, finding themselves in the dream state, sailing away to escape the misery of working life only to be sucked back into the “village of hell” where “the whole world’s at death’s door… picking the lock.”

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Bloodsport sees Dunn excavating through these same landscapes of existential dread, but on Bye Bye Snake Eyes, she does some dialling down of her own in another of Fairyland Codex’s tender moments. All told, it’s a song that could have been conjured up around the campfire at the band’s Nagambie base.

Ending with Moscovium, Tropical Fuck Storm flex their muscles with the kind of quiet / loud dynamics that embody Fairyland Codex. The kind of wartime lament that Liddiard has mastered over the years, on this occasion the protagonist finds themselves chewed up and spat out on the other side of battle; the whole story told just by the look in their eye, as another tortured soul is left to function in a world that grows more confusing by the day.

While there are many kernels of truth throughout Fairyland Codex, it’s Joe Meek Will Inherit the Earth that is the album’s MVP. “If you’re wondering where it all went wrong, come and see,” offer Dunn and Kitschin, and joined by Liddiard for the chorus (“Charity, charity, charity, charity, charity begins at home”), it’s delivered with the earnestness of a serenade at the gates of hell. It captures the selfishness and narcissism accelerated by the digital age, and as it spirals out of the control where the line between reality and bullshit is now rendered non-existent, at least one thing’s for certain: Tropical Fuck Storm is a band you can always trust.

Fairyland Codex is out now via Fire Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.