How do you review a band who, 20 years ago, purported to end their career with a song called TISM Are Shit? As pre-emptive strikes go, it brooks no critical retort. Now – in a song called Old Skool TISM – the artistes formerly known as This is Serious Mum would have us believe that “everything is shit except for TISM”. I am not so sure.
True old-school fans should not be surprised by TISM’s return. Their public debut in late 1983 – menacingly billed as The Get Fucked Concert – was also meant to be their farewell. It is part of TISM folklore that the rot set in after that, and every show since has been a cynical cash-in. Don’t take my word for it: that’s according to the “TISM Wankerpedia fan page”.
So: caveat emptor. Death to Art, their seventh full-length album, is not as good as their debut, 1988’s Great Truckin’ Songs of the Renaissance. But that was a 10-star album; the kind of thing Guardian style guides don’t allow for. TISM would agree it’s only been downhill from there. I would argue it’s been a terminal decline since their first single, Defecate on My Face.
A song like that cannot be bottomed. But at least TISM began as they meant to go on. All the boxes on Death to Art have been checked. There’s scatology (after destroying all of art, they promise to “poo in the park”). There’s self-referentiality (Old Skool TISM; TISM’s Last Will and Testicle). There’s lots of Australian rules (70s football; VFA). And there’s profanity everywhere.
The stage is really set on Death to Art’s third song, Cunts v Cunts. “It’s band versus critic,” promises co-singer Ron Hitler-Barassi, over the prettiest piano-led intro since Spinal Tap’s Lick My Love Pump. “Who you gonna go for when you hate both sides?” That may depend on your tolerance for the six minutes of headache-inducing electroclash that follows.
The old axiom that brevity is the soul of wit has never bothered TISM (most of their albums are doubles). The standard version of Death to Art is 17 tracks, long enough to give Da Vinci a good kicking. The expanded edition swells to 29, with 12 of them counting down an interminable 78-minute train journey to the south-eastern suburb of Springvale in Melbourne.
In between, there are some good tunes: slightly dodgy earworms that you might find yourself absent-mindedly humming in public places. Creed of Steve Bannon sees them “flooding the zone with shit” to a dancefloor groove built for an 80s aerobics class, not too far removed from the sound of their biggest album, Machiavelli and the Four Seasons (1995).
Other songs look back to the more guitar-based rock of their early work: I’ve Gone Hillsong and the churning title track have the kind of riffs TISM haven’t bothered with since the departure of original guitar hero Leak Van Vlalen (he was replaced in 1992 by Tokin’ Blackman, who died in 2008; their new axe king is Vladimir Lenin-McCartney).
What’s missing here is the darker edge that saw TISM walk the tightrope between provocative and transgressive. TISM were equal-opportunity offenders, but they have realised there are some things – and some words – you just can’t say any more, even in a satirical context: what makes one section of the audience feel merely squeamish is likely to make another section sick.
On one hand, this is welcome recognition that TISM’s back catalogue hasn’t aged entirely well. They are now reliably punching upwards: Cabal of Bozos is (as the unnecessary subtitle states) “Dedicated to Australia’s Laziest Class, the Australian Business Class”. But this also makes things safer, more predictable and more comfortable.
Part of the visceral thrill of TISM was their ability to make the listener uncomfortable. Theirs was a comedy of manners aimed at the most hypersensitive of targets: earnest, university-educated and snobbish indie-rock fans. We should not miss TISM’s -isms. Now we’ve grown up a bit, we might look back on our secretly tasteless, vulgar and puerile youth with a certain nostalgia.
Death to Art is out now (genre.b.goode and DRW Entertainment). TISM are performing with Eskimo Joe, Machine Gun Fellatio, Ben Lee and the Mavis’s in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.
