HTRK - Nostalgia
according to Nigel
"In December 2004 we got high in Sean's basement apartment in Melbourne's CBD, prior to our first tour of Sydney. We ran a set and recorded it through two microphones and an old tape deck. The performance was uncanny... It was called Nostalgia because of our hatred of bands and fans who suck the past dry, as well as our own guilty nostalgia for the nihilistic energies rampant in the 80s underground, as well as the strange role that the Tarkovsky film Nostalghia played in the earliest days of the band's creation, up in the Macedon hills. It is in many ways our definitive introductory statement."
------------------------------------------------------------
----------
Self-released in Feb 2005 on CD (ltd ed. of 500), packaged in an LP-style plastic sleeve with deluxe card insert including lyrics and photos.
CD digipak released by Fire Records on 30 May 2007 with new artwork in black and white.
Vinyl 12" released by Fire Records on Sept 10 2007 with gold and cream artwork.
------------------------------------------------------------
----------
Where to purchase:
Boomkat | Norman Records | Juno Records | Rough Trade
------------------------REVIEWS-----------------------------
-------
ALLMUSIC
HTRK's Nostalgia is a buzzing, droning, lo-fi deconstruction befitting the Australian trio's "hate rock" moniker. Recorded without embellishment using two mikes and a vintage tape machine, the album's seven songs blend into an agitated haze of addictive ambivalence. Nigel Yang's swirling, stabbing guitar isn't the device of terror here as some critics would have you believe. Nostalgia has been compared to the Birthday Party and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, but those are just influences and not really indicative of HTRK's own original sound. Instead of the swagger and violence of those influences, the overall feeling is of beautiful disharmony, and more akin to 1990s indie psychedelic groups from labels like Drag City. Singer Jonnine Standish might be mad or sad or just bothered, but her voice is mostly just another patch of reverb-drenched soundwaves to weave around the guitar and Sean Stewart's bass, and the lack of separation in the recording means her lyrics are, for the most part, indecipherable. That's not a bad thing at all. The simple drum machine aesthetic setup, emotional distancing, and artsy backdrop obviously recall Suicide, but there's a sense you're not getting a full representation of the band's intentions, given the ultra lo-fi recording techniques. It ultimately feels like a taste of things to come when the budget grows, though fans of raw drone will zone out in its glory. Tim DiGravina
------------------------------------------------------------
----------
TANK
MELBOURNE'S HTRK, HAVING flown their home town and landed in vivid, seedy, glamorous Berlin, specialise in despair and claustrophobia, bandaged up in Suicide nihilism and early Cocteaus fuzz. Nigel Yang and Sean Stewart birthed the band's first incarnation in 2003, laying down droning guitar nose beneath a grid of highly processed digital rhythm. Later joined by the blank-eyed, enigmatic Jonnine Standish, they became HTRK and developed a crop of songs as obsessive as they are oppressive.
In HTRK's world, treated vocals reflect off each other like trapped moths bouncing off light bulbs, while industrial clangs and faceless echos fill the unnavigable space between crackly, synthesised beats. Debut album Nostalgia confirms the Lynchian influences they hold dear - gorgeous textures; disconnected, paranoid narratives; romance twisted by a painful demandingly submissive sexuality. "It's all the sounds screamed we were too heartbroken to say in person," says Standish.
Live, HTRK are at their most confrontational. "It is the most horrific and most terrifying feeling for me," she says. "Somehow I thrive on this feeling and turn it into arrogance." Cold beats, distorted by doped-out fuzz and punctuated by Jonnine's deadened solo percussion and hollow vocals, smack against the kind of bass that plucks out your throat, all of it turned up to amp-blowing volume. Yet despite the layers, there's a sparseness and clarity throughout. Sexual disinhibition, discarded pride - all is laid bare. It's pop at its bitterest and darkest. For all the ideas and possibilities of their music, HTRK go for the jugular. This could be their year. Gen Williams
------------------------------------------------------------
----------
ROCK A ROLLA
This sounds like Nico and Loop on Mogadon jamming over a copy of The Reptile House EP with a brick on the turntable. Which means it's brilliant, in case you didn't know. Sometimes sounding like bored bourgeois drop-outs playing at art rock and sometimes dripping with affected Germanic cool this is a pretty patchy record, but the band will be forgiven considering it was recorded live and on a budget of about 6p with the shittiest equipment imaginable. The fact that they got it recorded at all is a minor miracle, and the fact that it sounds like this is teetering on awe-inspiring. Swamped in reverb and shimmering, haunted vocals and guitar, this is a gorgeous record that you think you're going to hate, but you're not. The only way it could be cooler is if it came with a packet of full tar Gitanes taped to it, and unless you own it you will never be half as aloof and disaffected as you think you are. Despite the bands claim to despise the retro leeches, Nostalgia is firmly rooted in the past, but the past never sounded like this. If it did it would have been much more fun and being into 4AD bands wouldn't have got you laughed at and ridiculed by punk rockers. Best played when you're completely wasted or when you want the party to end and everybody to go away and leave you alone. No, wait. This is a party record, just not the sort of sleazy parties we ever get invited to. By the time you read this the band will already have toured and gone home, but if you were lucky enough to catch them then chances are you will have a new favorite band. Oh, and HTRK, posing naked on the cover doesn't make you sexy or dangerous. It makes you ugly and creepy. Cris McGuire
------------------------------------------------------------
----------
PLAN B
Recorded live in 2004 with (it says here) two microphones and an old tape deck, this slab of wonder is less a breath of fresh air than cold blast of subterranean spite. All dazed and barely decipherable, Jarboe/Nico-esque vocals bludgeoned by great globs of Stygian bass, shrieking sheet-metal guitar and a cavernous drum machine death-stomp seldom heard since early Schoolly D or Pornography-era Cure, Nostalgia inhabits a reverb-drenched tomb of psychedelic nihilism so unremittingly dank it's almost camp. I've been trying to kick the habit of invoking other bands, but this really does come on like a self-flagellating MBV, or Swans on MDMA. Their name is pronounced 'hate rock' and Rowland S Howard of The Birthday Party has produced the first album proper, which comes out later this year. James Papademetrie
------------------------------------------------------------
----------
BIZARRE
This is a real horrorshow, hypnotic introduction to the enigmatic Australian trio. A collection of seven live recordings captured with two microphones and a decrepit tape deck, each one's a Mogadon scrawl of mystery and disorientation that is drenched in reverb and relentless in its downbeat delivery. Shifting from Eraserhead-style industrial noise to The Birthday Party at their most desolate, it's deliciously delirious and bloody irresistible. Billy Chainsaw
