You Am I
Hourly, Daily (Ra/Warner Bros.)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Spring 1999

We live in a curious era of music-making when artists tend to celebrate the past by trying as hard as possible to emulate it. What a relief, then, that Australia's finest working band continue to acknowledge it, absorb it and then drag it ahead with them. Both of the Aussie trio's prior albums, the perfect debut Sound As Ever and the glorious mess that was Hi-Fi Way, have been winners, but Hourly, Daily trumps them both, expanding on previous ideas (their own and others') while stretching out in all directions musically. The title track fulfills the acoustic balladry requirement and gets it out of the way right from the start, so the band, who've never sounded tighter, can concentrate on making full-blast rock like "Trike," a nifty little post-mod love song that could've been written in 1968 were it not for the blaring guitar and lyrics about killing your parents and running away in a hormone-laced fever dream.

Actually, there was one guy in 1968 making a pretty good living writing songs about these kind of freaks, and don't think that guitarist/singer/bandleader Tim Rogers, with his twisted teenscapes and musical curiosity, doesn't know it. And that's just what's celebrated here, Rogers finally becoming his dream of dreams: a postmodern Pete Townshend. Rogers knows, however, the value not in imitating his hero but in capturing his intentions: to fuck with and subvert the status of music, alternative or otherwise, as it is now. In fact, even though there's only one song to back it up specifically (the swingin' radio promo "Good Mornin'"), this may well be as close to The Who Sell Out as the world may ever again see.

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