hey mook - crash into you - available at the hobart bookshop in salamanca place, tracks music, aeroplane records in tasmania or from the slightly scarier mainland at missing link, candle records, greville street records, collectors corner or in a store far away from you from at www.heymook.com

[PUNTER "classic"] [Sister Ray - "not our kind of music, we only like the local stuff ... "] [PUNTER "... rumored to be best since Hendrix"] [Heartland Records - verdict - "too soft."] [PUNTER "beautiful singing, highly original ... "] [Au Go Go - "hmmmmmm ... not sure ? is it our kinda music ?"] [PUNTER " ... at least four good tracks .. "]

Hey Mook,

Well the last couple of days have been coloured by the sweet somewhat lascivious sounds of Hey Mook's 'Crash Into You' ... I think I've had it on permanent rotation to get familiar with it and have listened to it by itself and on random mixed in with the masters like Parliament, Red Krayola, Temptations, the various artists of Bollywood Breaks, & Jacques Dutronc. Needless to say it holds up very well both ways.

The opening of Cold Snap sounds like it's set to launch into a Television song ... but it's probably much more The Church. Straightahead rhythm with gothic overtones - Come Along Sweetness has the same Churchy feel with the languid harmonies and 12-string ... Charlie Rich has got a great hook/chorus line ... reminiscent of Tom Morgan/Nic Dalton's band Sneeze in the classic hook + humour angle. I love Let's Go Down the Docks and it's rampant gayness. That hookline is something you can sink your teeth into & Banjo Frenzy sounds like it's infused with the spirit of old style Sand Pebbles ...

One thing that surprises me is that you (Tor) don't sing more - what's the thinking behind that ?.. especially on something like 'Worms' ... you boys do love your 6/8 time!

'Central Nervous Station' has lashings of 'Spanish Harlem Incident' about it while the opening to San Francisco is fuckin' brilliant. It sounds really loose and untamed and I wish you'd played that up a bit more with the wild guitar louder and the rhythm down a tad. I also love the call/response Modern Lovers chorus. It would have to be a crowd favourite.

Well done. I like it. I like it a lot.

Chris Hollow

The new "Hey Mook" album 'Crash into You' as reviewed by Newk McGowan.

At a production rate of one album every five years or so, you wouldn't call "Hey Mook" prolific by any means. But what they lack in meat they make up for in bone. 'Crash into you' delivers more lament, disgust and oblique derision with unaffected intelligence than any girl/boy band spin doctor could ever hope to muster under the influence of diet pepsi and Ritalin in bouncing castle of sycophants.

Lets face it, Tasmania is an Island untold and it will remain so. The Mooks whisper sweet nothings into the ear of history and listen for the maze of influences to echo back. Kim Pearce penned most of the tracks. An 8th generation Tasmanian, (it goes back no more for the Northern folk) his music resonates with the all the murk and clarity that paradoxically define a town (Hobart) that Mark Twain once thought the neatest and cleanest on Earth. Cutting to the chase with the opening, 'cold snap' a song about the son of demented Hobart doctor who hacked up his wife and flushed her in the toilet. An archivist, Pearce annotates an untold side to Hobartian life. But hey! it's about the music, lets not get too realistic, the second track dons a hat to Charlie Rich and his performance after being beaten by John Denver for Country singer of the year, which saw him set fire to the winning envelope on stage. A rich ballad that is skillfully crafted and lyrically compelling : "In a town that bites the hand you'd slept with the evidence of a counterfeit sound."

"Come along Sweetness" is a song that Nick Cave might have written if he was Kicking around with Nick Drake and wasn't at the wrong birthday party. Unconsciously the older Cruickshank has written a sublime tune that sticks in your head like a dyslexic palindrome, but with melody. It carries sincerity in a basket to a picnic of cynics.

An FM hit to swoon ardent disco jive out of the colgate zone for 4 and a half minutes. He gets suitably darker on 'worms' but stops short of blackness with a Lemonheadsesque bit of keyboard. Pearce adds two more well written tracks 'Helicopter'(written before Sept. last year) and the quirky 'central nervous station' The album ends with a more rock 'n roll throwaway track or two that send the mooks on their merry way, not to San Francisco methinks but maybe to some flat mountain land in the nether regions of the Tasmanian wilderscape.

Newk gives this one ****1/2

Source : The Admission Chronicles - San francisco

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