Negative gearing is a term for an investment where the cost of ownership is more than the rate of return—as might be the case, for instance, if you bought an apartment building that required more money to maintain than it generated in rent. It is, perhaps, the most pointless of capitalist activities, one in which, for all the effort involved, the investor digs him or herself into an ever deeper hole, and it can serve as a metaphor for all kinds of economic struggle. Slightly modified, it is also the name of a kick-ass garage punk band from Australia, whose dire but tuneful racket recalls the epic dystopias of the Wipers and the new wave glamor of Echo & the Bunnymen.
This is Negative Gear’s second full-length, though it’s been half a decade since the self-titled debut (which Maximum Rock ‘N Roll described approvingly as “Six demented screeds bifurcated by one ’80s synth interlude”). That’s a rough five years, including COVID, lock-down, raging forest fires, growing income inequality and an increasing sense of climate doom, and Moraliser reflects the trauma. “I…..hate myself….hate myself,” howls the singer in claustrophobic “Room,” a room which nightmarishly contains only a mirror.
The album really gets going in its mid-section where muscular riffs power through a cavernous, echoing ruin. “Ants” imagines a striver taking in the panoramic views from his apartment, congratulating himself on his success (“I guess some people just can’t handle the unbearable pressure of an upper middle lifestyle”). By the song’s end, though, he’s jumped to his death (“Sixteen stories to paradise”). The narrative is grim, but the music is stirring, anthemic, eruptive, a swell of synth bursting from clanking, chugging post-punk riffs. You can make connections to brute force Aussie punk bands like Eddy Current and Total Control, but there’s a dark romanticism in there that reminds me of Echo & the Bunnymen, too.
“Lifestyle” is the album’s churning vortex, its main riff circling downward like a whitewater eddy. “Always, always, always,” chants the singer in broad, flat Australian vowels, and you can hear him and the whole band scrabbling at the edges of modern life, trying not to go down. “Pills,” which follows, is boxier and more propulsive, chugging maniacally forward on a pick-clanking bassline.
Moraliser is all sinew and effort, bulling forward with doomed energy even as the walls close in. It’s the sound of trying so hard in a system that’s rigged against you, of not going under without a ferocious struggle, the sound, maybe, of negative gears gnashing on their way to the abyss.
