Sounds From The Junkshop #72 - The Vines

 

"My time's a riddle that won't ever be solved" - The Vines - Highly Evolved

I've mentioned on here in the past how I wasn't entirely sold on the whole post-millennial garage rock boom, mainly because to me the Strokes and the White Stripes always both seemed ridiculously over-hyped for what they were. However, for some reason I didn't mind the movement's Australian representatives the Vines who emerged around the same time and briefly looked like being the sort of band who would be major players in the game for years to come until their sheer dysfunctionality well and truly saw them sabotage their own career.

Listening back to the group's debut album Highly Evolved for the first time in nearly two decades as I write this, the main thing that strikes me is that it's actually held up pretty well. I think maybe because the group's fall from grace was almost as quick as the rise that preceded it, I was fully expecting it to not be as good as I remember but it's actually a really strong effort, blending ultra-raw grunge-punk (grunk? I dunno) on tunes like Get Free (basically a blatant steal of Nirvana's Negative Creep but what the hell, if you're gonna nick one of Kurt and co's tunes then it might as well be one of the good ones), Outtathaway and the title track to some quite lovely slower hazy psychedelic numbers like Country Yard and the Lennonesque Homesick. There's no denying it did deserve the many plaudits it got and it makes you wonder exactly how it all went so wrong for them.

Well, actually, scratch below the surface and it becomes a bit obvious - basically the Vines were an incredibly dysfunctional band with the members seemingly hating each others’ guts right from the get-go. Case in point - when Highly Evolved made some waves in the States, they went on Letterman for what should have been their big break only for frontman Craig Nicholls (who I always thought looked like a shorter-haired version of Mark Keds from my old favourites the Senseless Things, maybe this was another reason I liked 'em?) to have what can probably best be described as a full on meltdown onstage. Later on the same tour, a series of gigs got cancelled following an onstage fist fight between Nicholls and bass player Patrick Matthews. It's maybe not a surprise that their profile never quite recovered afterwards as line-up instability set in (Matthews would leave and then return and the band would go through a Spinal Tap like series of drummers through the recording of the first album before eventually settling on Hamish Rosser to tour it) and Nicholls started to get a reputation as a volatile control freak with anger management issues.

Surprisingly Nicholls and Matthews would keep it together long enough to record a second album, 2004's Winning Days but it very much sounded the same as the first except with much less in the way of memorable tunes and hooks - the slowies mostly just sounded dull and the anger on songs like Fuck The World and Evil Town now just felt forced rather than genuinely venomous. It was maybe telling that the best song on there, Sun Child, was one that had already surfaced as a B-side in the Highly Evolved era. It did give the group one final Top 40 hit in Ride but it sold a fraction of what its predecessor did and the band were on the slippery slope. By the time of their third album, 2006's Vision Valley, the tensions between Nicholls and Matthews finally boiled over and the latter quit the group. I completely missed that album (as it seems did a lot of people over here - it peaked at a miserable number 71 and both its singles stalled in the lower reaches of the Top 75) and despite generally favourable reviews, it turned out to be the band's last with their major label paymasters EMI.

Weirdly, I did have one last interaction with the band in the form of their fourth album Melodia which surfaced on minor label Ivy League in 2008 and ended up in my review pile with the press release seeing Nicholls hailing it as a return to the feral garage punk they'd made their name with. What it actually was unfortunately was a collection of half-ideas which sounded like unfinished songs - it was like they’d just taken a load of early stage demos and done an extensive remastering job on them without actually fleshing any of the ideas or tunes out. "Forgettable" was the word that sprang to mind and unsurprisingly the band quickly fell back off my radar again. Soon afterwards, guitarist Ryan Griffiths and drummer Hamish Rosser (who'd both been with the band since they were touring the first album) would be shown the door leaving Nicholls as the only member remaining from the glory days.

They're still out there mind - a look at the Vines' Wikipedia page says that they're now on seven albums with 2018's In Miracle Land being their most recent. However, the band have long since dropped back to the Aussie small to middling venue circuit and I think the prospect of them mounting any sort of comeback on UK soil is a bit of an unlikely one even putting the whole Covid thing aside. But for their first album at least, make no mistake the Vines were genuinely good - I'd honestly say that Highly Evolved well and truly tanks the more celebrated debut albums by the Strokes and the Libertines in terms of quality. It's just a shame that they never really kicked on from there and slowly faded away rather than burning out bright.