- There are two types of cool, the first is confined to the kind of thing eight year olds say when they flip out and the second looks like a long-haired rake smoking a ciggie and wearing sunglasses at night. The Wireheads produce music that is somewhere between the two. That is to say undeniably cool and also a totally abstract value.

Arrive Alive is their most recent release and presents a tidy collection of Australian-flavoured pop songs with a heavy dose of inspiration from US lo-fi indie bands. The Wireheads’ Brisbane-based label Tenth Court is the place to do that kinda thing these days, with labelmates like Sewers, DeadShred, Thigh Master, Police Force and Naked pushing their indie profile slowly in an upwards direction for the past few years. The Wireheads jaunty rhythms, abrasive vocals and straight up weird lyrics will not be for everyone, in fact it may be solely for themselves and their mates, a fair few of which showed up on the record to contribute to a grand total twenty recording musicians. Sadly, the details of Arrive Alive’s recording and engineering aren’t as available as their last album Big Issues, which was engineered by Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening in his Olympia studios in Washington, USA. If you don’t think that’s a big deal, just ask any skinny young man with a Milk Records shirt on what a 'Beat Happening’ is.

Speaking of Milk records, lead vocalist Dom Trimboli’s atonal and thoroughly Australian delivery is like a man drunk and tonedeaf, although to be fair he could be emulating any one of an entire host of successful vocalists who emerged after the punk wave broke in the '70s. Take The Wireheads vocals or leave them, their otherwise sublime melodies and female backing vocals are more than worth a listen from the average punter. Ice Kool Flavor Aid is a particularly catchy tune, and Banana Fish lets their fantastic female vocals shine on one of the prettier ditties of the album.

The tone is decidedly offbeat, with several allusions to violence and trauma amongst nuggets of American pop culture and wry references to the everyday in Australia, the most glaring of which is the police slogan used as the title of the album. Nero, Proserpina and Dedication even make some sideways glances at Ancient Rome for some reason, possibly a history major. It’s hard to really pin down what this album is about thematically, but that’s probably the point. You can find Arrive Alive streaming on Bandcamp or on limited release 12” vinyl, and if it’s your kind of thing you’d know by now.

- Matt Hall.