People, the fourth album by TV Freaks, is dedicated to This Ain’t Hollywood, a recently shuttered venue in the band’s hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Named after the 1982 album by local first-wave punk legends the Forgotten Rebels, This Ain’t Hollywood was everything you could want in a scuzzy rock’n’roll dive: Seventies B movies showing on a bank of old TV sets behind the bar, piss-stenched bathrooms covered in Sharpie and band stickers, and a psychedelic Johnny Cash painting gazing upon the room like some all-seeing eye. Since forming in 2010, TV Freaks have effectively served as This Aint’s unofficial house band, brandishing a manic style of Stooges-spiked hardcore that embodied both the gritty edge and welcoming, misfit-clubhouse vibe of the space. But while the sight of venues closing has become all too common in the COVID era, the writing was on the wall for This Ain’t Hollywood long before the pandemic hit. The building was initially put up for sale in 2018, a circumstance that speaks to another invisible force affecting urban music scenes: the market-driven transformation of once grungy corners into prime real estate.
People is TV Freaks’ first proper album in five years, and while it was made well before This Ain’t Hollywood announced its closure this past spring, it’s a fitting—and necessary—progression for a band that can’t go home again. On the surface, People doesn’t appear to be a concerted effort to break overground; it was recorded live off the floor by frontman Dave O’Connor at a home studio in a single weekend. (Like 2015’s Bad Luck Charms, it was mastered by Aussie DIY demigod Mikey Young, of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and Total Control). But while the opening “Destined for Stardom” seems to mock the very idea of swinging for the fences, the song’s sudden transformation from a staccato stomp to a dance-punk sprint suggests that if TV Freaks aren’t about to conform, they’re at least willing to contort.
Growing up within garage punk is often a fool’s errand that requires bands to adopt the very qualities—sing-along melodies, classic-rock conventions, modern production touches—that are antithetical to the genre’s primal essence. But on People, TV Freaks pull off the uncommon trick of making themselves more accessible without sounding any less irascible. In the past, O’Connor often had to bark himself hoarse in order to be heard above guitarist TJ Charlton’s in-the-red riffs, Vivenne Bell Bright’s pugilistic basslines, and drummer Nathan Burger’s double-timed gallop, but the repressed flamboyance and trembling distress in his voice belied his imposing aggression. He has explored those qualities more freely in the new-wave goth-soul serenades of his solo alias, Sweet Dave, but on People, TV Freaks take full advantage of his violent-to-vulnerable range.
You can hear the band broaden its horizons even in a two-minute blitz like “Souvenir,” where O’Connor alternates between stoned ’60s-garage melodies and bugged-out, David Byrne-like convulsions. But the results are all the more impressive when he uses his voice to invest the band’s righteous racket with a greater emotional depth and heightened sense of drama. Where “Space” begins as an unsubtle homage to Spacemen 3’s psych-punk rave-up “Revolution,” the song is ultimately less a call for war than a cry for help, capping its panicked chorus with a warning—“This is my last resort”—that, intentional Papa Roach quote or not, sounds like an ominous dispatch from a point of no return. The references are even more overt on “Heart of Gold”—not a cover of the Neil Young classic, but fueled by a similar quest for purity in a world where everything’s “just a different shade of beige.” As its bass-throttled, post-punky urgency gives way to an extended blur of overlapping melodies, the song is elevated from trashy to transcendent.
None of this is to suggest that TV Freaks have lost their absurdist sense of humor; it just manifests itself in more abstract, meta fashion. Coming from another band, the opening line of “Saturday Night”—“You want to party on a Saturday night/It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be alright”—might seem like the height of rock cliche. But when O’Connor adopts his finest goth monotone atop a churning “She’s Lost Control” rhythm, you’re thrust into some bizarro-world parallel universe where Joy Division are playing weekend keggers. The tension between TV Freaks’ irreverent and insolent sides hits its fever pitch on “Capital Eye,” a motorik Neu!-wave ripper that reaffirms O’Connor’s eternal outsider status as he declares, “I can’t/Stare at/Anything/Beautiful too long.” But he delivers those words via the album’s most infectious shout-it-out-loud hook—and even as Chartlon launches into a spastic solo, O’Connor continues to repeat the mantra as if locked in a trance. Maybe he’s just marvelling at his band’s newly realized potential: When faced with the rare garage-rock album that’s as tense and tuneful as People, it’s easy to be mesmerized.
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