If you want to sum feedtime up in a catchphrase, check out a track toward the end of their 1988 all-covers LP Cooper-S. After steamrolling their stamp onto tunes by the Beach Boys, Slade, and the Rolling Stones, the Australian trio attacks the Ramones' "Loudmouth"-- and it actually sounds like the Ramones! Well, if the Ramones were woozy from too much sludgy guitar and sledgehammer bass. Feedtime stretch the original melody with muscular low-end, chugging along like a freight truck fighting gravity. As they did in their own music, here they share the Ramones' knack for making a few simple chords seem like all the world needs. So there's your catchphrase-- feedtime were the heavy Ramones.
Of course, no catchphrase can sum up a band, and there was a lot more to feedtime than Ramones similarities. They could speed up like a two-ton hardcore band, or back down nto Black Sabbath-like dirge (see the Cooper-S take on "Paint it Black", whose slow burn out-spooks the Stones' original). They could sound like weightlifters sweating though pounding beats, or surfers riding waves of distortion. Most vitally-- and again like the Ramones-- they found ways to make lots of interesting music from repetitive elements and narrow sonic parameters. If that formula sounds attractive, you might find the 1980s albums collected in The Aberrant Years (alongside bonus tracks from 7" singles and compilations) as compelling as the Ramones' early work.
That formula was pretty simple, built on a power-trio nucleus that rarely deviated from its set path. But it had a unique catalyst in the weighty bass-playing of Al (all three band members went by their first names). His mates often made heavy sounds too, but even when Rick's sliding guitar spun around him or Tom's bullet-hole drums fired at him, Al's bass was the anchor-- the gravitational center around which everything else rotated. The result was music with unavoidable pull. Feedtime named their 1989 LP, Suction, after an in-joke term for rock-industry buzz, but it's actually a perfect description of their quick-sand sound, which sucks all the air and matter around it into a hypnotic vortex of noisy rock.
That might sound like difficult listening, but it's not-- feedtime made visceral, catchy music that shot closer to the gut than the brain. That's likely a product of their wide tastes. When Al and Rick formed the band in the late 1970s, they were inspired not only by rock and punk, but blues and even Cajun music. One highlight on their 1985 self-titled debut is a cover of Mississippi Fred McDowell's "I Wonder What's the Matter with Papa's Little Angel Child", which the trio morphs from a lonesome prayer into a growling, engine-revving workout. Much of the album has an even bluesier feel, alternating hard-charging tunes with darker songs that drip with primal angst.
That's a potent mix, but feedtime hit their stride with 1987's shovel, a record that never backs off even when its songs slow down. Many tracks feel like alternate-universe hits-- take the greasy hardcore stomp "Mother", the three-chord swinger "Gun 'Em Down", and the surprisingly anthemic "Rock N Roll". "Well some of the people, all of the time/ They don't like rock'n'roll," Rick sings, sounding like the last brave defender of an art form the band had clearly mastered. That mastery continued on Cooper-S, a thoroughly entertaining glimpse at how feedtime's sound could survive anyone's songs, and Suction, which mixes moments of acoustic guitar and female vocals in with its pedal-to-the-metal noise-punk.
Now that more than two decades have passed since that brand of noise-punk was in full swing, it's tempting to claim that feedtime presaged or even helped create grunge. There's probably some truth to that-- you can hear a lot of the 1990s fuzz-and-howl obsessions in Al and Rick's riffs and guttural screams, and they clearly influenced Mudhoney's Mark Arm, who recently posted a stream of his favorite songs from the box set. But listen to all of The Aberrant Years, and you'll probably get too caught up in feedtime's bracing songs to think much about bands that came after them. Al, Rick, and Tom had lots of influences and loved to play other people's music, but their sound was a world of its own.
