In American English, saying you're "up for anything" usually means you're open, adventurous, maybe a little indecisive. The Brisbane teen trio the Goon Sax have titled their debut album Up to Anything, which might be the dark flipside of that sentiment: "I'm not feeling up to anything/I'm nothing, nowhere, all over again/I can't walk/I can't walk this sadness out," bellows frontman Louis Forster on the first and title track. In this mind state, you aren't just open, you're rudderless and confused, and will go along with whatever life presents you. It's a place of self-defeating vulnerability that anyone young has experienced, and the Goon Sax have made a jangly pop record that reflects it.
The Goon Sax began in 2013 when Forster and guitarist James Harrison were in high school (they're still of school age, the band averaging 17.) Drummer Riley Jones joined in 2014 after a month of lessons on the instrument. That inexperience is something of a theme within the band, even within their name: a goon sack in Australia is the silver plastic bag of booze within a wine box, something of a symbol of youth—it's inexpensive alcohol. For American ears, imagine it similar to someone naming their band Franzia or 4Loko.
The best moments on Up to Anything are as clever as they are sad, a dynamic Forster perhaps inherited from his father Robert Forster, one-half of the songwriting duo behind the Go-Betweens. "Sometimes Accidentally" could sit closely to "Cattle and Cane," perhaps just with modern, youthful vigor: Harrison takes over (his voice is a sweet alternative to Louis' deep, apathetic tone) and sings, "Sometimes I think about things and sometimes I accidentally think about you." The line echoes Courtney Barnett, and is performed in a similar speak-sing. In "Telephone," the band villainizes the antiquated technological development of talking on the phone, as if it's to blame for a conversation gone awry. In "Target," the shopping center becomes a reflection of the joy they don't feel: "Couldn't work at Target / The only color shirt I wear is blue." "Home Haircuts" depicts the indignity of trying (and failing) to get a rock-star hairstyle, at home or at the local salon: "I show them a picture of Roger McGuinn / Edwyn Collins / John Lennon / David Byrne / It seems I just can't win."
For a band so intimately linked to one of Australia's greatest pop acts, the namedropping is fitting. Their music is entirely '80s in feel, channeling the Pastels at this turn and classic Flying Nun at that—the video for the song "Boyfriend," in which Louis longs for a man to call his own while systematically threatening to make him miserable, was inspired by Top of the Pops, a classic music program everyone in the band is too young to have seen firsthand. This music is a distinctly Australian blend of honesty and unpretentiousness. Like the Go-Betweens, they are as confident in their songcraft as they are uncertain in life. Each song is well-structured and wise beyond its years while the messages are confused, delicate and very, very teenage. This is the sound of growing up smart.
