After two years of live shows, demos and one 7” single, the debut full-length album from RABBIT, good love is a hot chip, enters the Hobart/nipaluna musical canon dripping with volume and sweat. The album is a dense mix of ripping punk and thundering ballads steeped in Australian rock ‘n’ roll traditions.
From the opening track Sunday Best through to I Don’t Wanna Hear near the end of the album, the influence of bands like The Saints and Celibate Rifles runs deep. Many of the songs wrestle with memories – old places and friends and old heartaches – and the path they shape to the present. Safeguard is a breakneck sprint of a song about finding solace in the mud, with a firm nod to the guitar idiom of Divinyls/McEntee along the way. The mid-pace belter Goodbye Kitchen Bench melds a pithy farewell with 1970s power-pop hooks and a verse borrowed from the English folk singer Anne Briggs. In the middle of the album two songs sit together, The Bones of Kinder Things and The Path Now Passed, soaring punk ballads that showcase the twin-lead vocal RABBIT leans into so well. Throughout the album Maggie Edwards sings deceptively sweetly, snaking melodic lines through the towering rhythm section of Willy Wyers (drumkit) and Claire Johnston (bass), with the guitar of Bobby K grinding white-hot sparks around it all.
The album was recorded by Zac Blain in a decrepit West Hobart share-house in February 2021 and mixed over the next year. Released on cassette with a cover by the Tasmanian artist Jess Bateman, good love is a hot chip is a steeplechase sprint through a boulder field; nine songs to bang your shins on and skin your knees and by the end you’re giddy and breathless and there’s blood in your sock. Go get ‘em tiger.
good love is a hot chip is the latest release for nipaluna/Hobart-based Rough Skies Records, the fourth album released by the label in 2022. good love is a hot chip is available for purchase on cassette via the Rough Skies Bandcamp and in some record stores, and is available on digital streaming platforms courtesy of Gaga Digi.
Release: November 4th, 2022, Rough Skies Records
The Bones of Kinder Things video directed, filmed and edited by Keith Deverell. Filmed at and with thanks to the Raptor Refuge sanctuary in Kettering, lutruwita/Tasmania