The Bad Luck Charms

The Bad Luck Charms were from Hobart and featured ex-members of The Frustrations, The Stinky Bitches and The Reactions. They started playing in August 2005...........................They toured Melbourne in August '06/May & July '07, ..........................They released three CD-R singles (Lilith, I Dont Care Anymore, and The Little bear and The Little Punk) and released an EP, called "Halcyon Days". The EP and singles have sold out their initial print run and are included on the definitive compilation of early BLC material called "Almanac" (available at Tommygun Records in Hobart & Missing Link Records in Melbourne)...........................The band released their album "Rant & Drift" in August '07. The album was recorded by Anthony Rochester at his Winter Palace Studios............................The band played their last gig at the Brisbane Hotel in Hobart in September '07..........................Review from Beat Magazine October 07: First the Dwarf Emu, then the Tasmanian Tiger, and now these guys. Hobart's Bad Luck Charms have become extinct. Capping off an excellent year where they rocked Melbourne's world and compiled their singles into a vicious Almanac, they lave us with this, their first (and final) full-length. But my word, what an exit. Rant & Drift is the best thing to come out of Tasmania since Cascade Premium Lager.Recorded by Anthony Rochester, the music is beefed-up and ripped full of muscle. Julian Teakle (easily one of my favourite guitarists of the past ten years) bends his hooks like they were intractable lightning. Lisa Rime and Matt Moller meanwhile drive quite a hard bargain, by which I mean their rhythm is so tight it will cost you your life. In song form, Impossible Love is a rant reduced to a Ric Flair-like blow of a bruising riff to your body (if you were made of glass) and a fierce bottom-end with a riotous Fugazi-chorus and hyper handclaps.Two badarse non-members, Beatrix Bae-Bouwman and Peter Escott, contribute Wait and Twenty Steps To Paradise. Bouwman's Wait is about a girl who could have been great but something stopped her and made her wait. It's a whale of a song, a rainy-day beauty recalling Life Without Buildings behind a Kleenex/Lilliput backbeat; it seuges neatly into a song by Julian about losing a friend and the onset of grief (I Had A Dream Last Week). After that is Escott's rant - an inspired revolution written at 2am on cocktail napkins. Lisa follows with Match Made In Heaven, a cynical song about an indie couple that's very true and really funny. I Need To Get Out is a hell of a song about being stuck inside Melbourne with the Hobart blues again.Saving the best for last, Oh Frank Daft/The McDonald Sisters is a cleverly conjoined classic. Lisa takes on the Frank part, spilling the beans about this conspiracy theorist who likes to shoot kittens. Half-way through, the beat skids and the guitar performs a country-punk twang of a costume change. "Oh haven't you heard... begins Julian, as the beat starts kicking "about the McDonald sisters!" He goes on to tell us about these girls who make enigmatic films and the arty parents who love and support them (mum says "nice one girls" while Dad makes tea and biscuits). The song matches You And Me and Might off Archers of Loaf's Icky Mettle for spastic-rush of rock and roll good times, something this album is chock full of.