THE SCIENTISTS:

'A Place Called Bad';

Box Set w/ 4 CDs, 67pp booklet, Band Genealogy Chart (Numero Group, 2016). Also available as a Double LP Vinyl set with a drastically reduced track list.

A restless, irritable dissatisfaction, a hurried, sardonic contempt, a seething impatience that '...no, man, you still haven't got it, still not got it right, still not got it they way I meant it, man, not got it at all...' simmers and boils in the background of just about everything Kim Salmon does in the way of music.

Hailing from Perth, Australia, a fine town I'm sure, but, really, the back end of nowhere, Kim Salmon is, improbably, one of those rare individuals who, as Ezra Pound once said of T.S. Eliot, 'made himself modern all on his on.'

And if not modern, well, at least a punk of sorts.

Not unlike being in Denver at the time, Kim Salmon's first exposure to hints of a new trend in pop music came not from hearing the music but reading about it in the magazines of the day. So, in the mid-Seventies, a teenage geek already hopelessly out of touch by being into Star Trek and Lost In Space, Salmon would read an already six weeks old New Musical Express featuring pieces on the Heartbreakers, The Modern Lovers or The Ramones and, well, imagine what the music was like.

And then start a band to sound like what he thought that should sound like.

Yeah, a bit of tough going that.

Still, it wasn't a vacuum. Australia, like many outposts of empire, had (and still has) a thriving kitchen sink avant-garde: kids who, pre-internet, read the papers, went to the movies, sought out the records: and recognized themselves in what they saw and heard: raw, razored, wrecked.

Besides the proto-punk of Aussie renegades like Radio Birdman and The Saints, pre-Punk Australia had a lot to be proud of, a lot to draw on: the four volumes of the vinyl bootleg series, Ugly Things, amply attests to this. Bands like the Easybeats, The Wild Colonials, The In-Sect, Machine Gun Kelly's Rejects and, maybe best of all, The Birds (with, you know, an 'i' instead of a 'y' like that American band) showed the way. At their best, these Sixties Garage bands from Down Under were hard, fast and precision tooled: again, at their best, they sound like The Hollies crossed with The Shadows of Knight.

So the first iterations of The Scientists, circa 1979-1981, sound like a really good garage band from somewhere you've never heard of who got to record a few tracks but went nowhere. Kim Salmon's very first release as a Scientist was 'Frantic Romantic', issued on 7” single in 1979 on D.N.A. And it would sound perfectly in place on a Nuggets collection, nestling comfortably between a Nashville Teens track and something by The Standells. And there are a bunch more like that: hammered, tight, snotty: power pop with attitude. Fine stuff.

Retreating back to Perth from the big city, Sydney, where they had tried to break through with their first generation of songs, The Scientists changed their line-up some (they would do this almost daily it seems for the next few years!) and started listening to their inner Iggy: The Stooges, Suicide, The Cramps, The Modern Lovers, The New York Dolls: thick, dark, ragged... fucked up.

They headed back to Sydney to try it again. 'We didn’t want to continue with the tradition of paisley shirts and the Talk Talk retread riff,” Salmon says. 'We had our own agenda. I think for a lot of people in Sydney it didn’t occur that you could do anything different.'

This version of the band owed a lot to the above mentioned bands but especially to The Cramps, The Gun Club and to one not mentioned yet, Nick Cave's gloriously chaotic, harrowingly self-destructive and ear-bleedingly powerful, The Birthday Party (also from Australia).

Whatever the actual alchemical make-up, in 1981 The Scientists hooked up with Melbourne's fledgling label Au Go Go and started recording: midnight to morning when the rates are cheapest and no one's around to tell you you are doing it wrong. In these hours, fueled on alcohol, speed and sleep deprivation, the band found its way.

The first result was a 7” single, released in 1982 on Au Go Go, 'This Is My Happy Hour' b/w 'Swampland'. Ostensibly the 'B' side, 'Swampland' became the band's first real success, getting radio play and selling some 6,000 copies. Borrowing Johnny Kidd & The Pirates 'Shaking All Over's shimmery, shivery opening riff as well as tearing a page out of Nick Cave's obsessions with the American Gothic South, the song is slippery and seductive: inside a brooding, claustrophobic Blues structure, Salmon morosely intones, 'my mind returns to the everglades / a place of green mangroves and brine / shotguns and snakes, alligator wine...' – probably the first, and only, song, to rhyme 'piranha' with 'nirvana'!

A year later came the seminal, career-defining six-song mini-album, 'Blood Red River', also on Au Go Go. A long, slow grind 'down the blood red river to your heart', this set, with the stand-outs 'Set It On Fire', 'Rev Head' and the title track, 'Blood Red River', is a Goth classic where every color is black, every love doomed, every hope crushed. Yeah, the kids ate it up.

Success in Sydney was followed, perhaps inevitably, by a jump across the pond to London and The Big Time. More recordings, more touring (opening for The Gun Club and Siouxsie & The Banshees), more alcohol, more drugs... more fucking-up. Even as the band perfected their sound with howling workouts like “Hell Beach', 'Atom Bomb Baby', 'Travis' and, their most Birthday Party like track, 'Demolition Derby', the band fell into all the cliches of The Band That Almost Made It But Didn't. Inter-band squabbling and dissatisfaction over creative input, i.e. why did it seem that everything was Kim Salmon, was followed by the soul-killing banality of war with their label, Au Go Go.

It's an old story though always fascinating in its details and you can read up on it in the box set's booklet. What remains, what counts, is the music and here the box set shines: 4 CDs, 80 tracks: pretty much everything the band released as well as a 12 song setlist from a live show in 1983 that shows what I missed by never having the opportunity of seeing them live: churning overdrive guitars, frayed miserabilist vocals, drums and bass meshing the sound into a desperate, darkling therapy session gone postal that burns into your ears and down that blood red river to your heart.

Out now and priced at a staggeringly low $34.98 – yeah, $34.98 for 4 CD's, 67 page booklet and band genealogy poster. Kudos to the Numero Group for this one – it's a keeper.