Hailing from Brisbane, Dune Rats, “three hyperactive stoner cunts” (by their own admission) have been releasing music since 2011.
What’s the highest you’ve ever been? Not Eureka Tower high, or Mt. Everest high –more like telling your parents you have laser vision when they ask you why your eyes are red. Realising that snakes are just tails with faces, turning down your music because you can’t taste your food – that type of high.
Have you ever been so high that you and a couple of your mates started a surf-rock band that almost exclusively writes songs about how high you all are? Dune Rats have. Kicking things off with the Sexy Beach EP, they haven’t stopped since then, dropping the EP Social Atoms in 2011, and 2012 single ‘Fuck It’.
Dune Rats’ 2013 EP Smile – whose cover is adorned with a picture of a bunk-bed threesome – features their breakout single, ‘Red Light, Green Light’. If you haven’t believed anything I’ve said about how much these guys like the devil’s lettuce, give that a search on the old YouTubes and bear witness to a bong-ripping display that would make Seth Rogen eat his own butt.
From the Sexy Beach EP to 2014 effort Dune Rats (their full-length debut), very little has changed in the Dunies style. The production has been polished up, but polish doesn’t quite feel like the right word. More like they’ve started using a finer grain of sandpaper.
The band has always cultivated a garage-rock aesthetic to their tunes, and while on earlier records that comes across in a choppy and rough sounding mix, on Dune Rats, it sounds less like a by-product of their recording environment and more of a stylistic choice.
Dune Rats have always kept things simple. There’s no big guitar licks, drum solos, or bass…things (can you show off on a bass?). Just rhythm and melody working hand in hand to create jams that could be compared to a vegetable smoothie – tasty and digestible.
Danny Beus’ vocals blend in with the music to a point that they become a part of the instrumentation itself – sometimes lyrical, sometimes melodic. Harmonies pile on top of uncomplicated riffs and beats to form the perfect background noise for road trips and parties, and endless sing-along material.
The album is chock-full of tracks you could imagine being churned out at your local surf club, in the shed where the lifesavers keep all the gear and rip cones when it’s not busy. It’s an album that sounds like the beach.
If you had to pick a weak spot in the Dune Rats arsenal, you’d call them out on repetition. As I said, noone is doing anything too complicated here. It’s simple riffs, on simple drums, with simple basslines, complete with a couple of lines droned out over and over – opening track, ‘Dalai Lama, Big Banana, Marijuana’, consists of literally nothing but those words. Every other song on the record has at least two lines that get more than their fair share of airtime.
Dune Rats might not be the most technically proficient band in the world, but sometimes you don’t want a Masterchef meal; you just want a burger and chips.
That’s exactly what Dune Rats are. I know Missy Higgins and Dido and all those other shorthaired women from the early 2000s tend to take up the genre of easy listening, but I’d call Dune Rats something along the same lines.
It’s a piece of piss to flick on their album and just zonk yourself out while a couple of bangers run out of your speakers and fall through your ears. Every now and then you can rouse yourself enough to shout along to a well timed “WOO!” If you’re getting fried at a party, this is the music you’d want on the sound system.
I don’t think the Dunies are looking like going down in history as a band that changed the face of the way music is played any time soon. Still, you’d be stupid to think they’re not going to generate a massive following of people who enjoy nothing more than a bit of music they can sway and shout along to. If I were making a list of top Australian bands, I’d have to say Dune Rats are the highest they’ve ever been.
Check back in Wednesday for the interview with Dune Rats.