Concrete Lawn

picture by Dougal Gorman

Concrete Lawn is a quartet from Sydney, Australia, and has probably been around since 2018/2017...

The band is playing an interesting kind of female-fronted punk post-punk (yes that's a weird description).

 

I think everybody was surprised and excited by their february 2018 demo tape released by Urge Records).

With 4 songs out of 5 under the 1min40 mark and this dark and confusing artwork cover I was expecting another aussie punk hardcore band but no, not really...

With mid-tempo beats, heavy guitar riffs, post-punk bass lines and very upfront female vocals à la early Amyl And The Sniffers (without the bogan attitude), Concrete Lawn is delivering something not completely new but which sounds like what I could imagine as modern aussie post-punk...

Their live shows look a lot more "punk" than their records though:

 Aggregate is the first Concrete Lawn full length, released by Urge Records on May 2020 and features this great artwork cover by Maxine Booker.
From the first seconds of No Patience it's obvious that the band has changed a lot since the demo, forget the teenage aussie vocals and the post-punk influence, what we have here is some pure punk that would perfectly fit in a 1982 show with Action Pact! and Vice Squad.



With a more polished sound and a less snotty atittude the band is clearly driving away from the aussie sound and I understand as they have probably been compared way to much to Amyl and her gang and it was getting annoying... but unfortunatly they have also lost this charming touch that was making them stick out of the masses.

It's a good punk album that will delight all the fans of Beki Bondage and George Cheex but it's also probably why I am slighlty disappointed...  in the end I feel like the band is delivering an album which is more classic than what the demo was making me expect.

 picture by 35mmSCANS

You can listen to Concrete Lawn on Rien à Faire #9


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