Album Review; Blend Inn

Holly Blackmore

Vibrant, defiant and a little nostalgic, Australian band Hockey Dad produces songs worthy of exposing your most whimsical dance-moves, as you writhe along to their gritty guitar hooks. Post punk in essence, their second album ‘Blend Inn’ is an instrumental ode to the burden of pressing adulthood, an introspective glance into the salty psyche of coastal youth.

The album’s forty minutes are stocked with vocalist Zach Stephenson jaunting through notions of social unrest and pressure to conform, ‘trying to make it through the night, cold sweat and my hands are shaking’. The listener can recognise these fierce truths that Stephenson eludes to, the profundity of each and every phrase. ‘Pop the collar, spend a dollar, wear those boots, you get a rough idea what they want from you’. Perhaps the band’s densest, and most restive music to date.

Another zippy man makes up this partnership - spirited drummer Billy Fleming. While Stephenson strums the guitar, Fleming supplies the rolling rhythm of the drums; blonde hair swinging, body bouncing to the heavy beats of his own formation. The recurring themes of disappointment and suffocating youth in this album hypnotise the threshing crowd as Billy’s head sways along, eyes closed in an expression of refined fervour.

The two musicians met at the tender age of four years old, playing football together on Boronia Street. It was the beginning of a brotherhood that would stand the test of time; now over fifteen years later, having endured the angst of high school and several years within the music industry itself, the boys continue to expose their simultaneously reckless and fragile attitudes towards the world around them. It’s the epitome of surf punk - conveying pleasure over pain.

Yes, we know: such gritty tunes may not be ‘your thing’. But Hockey Dad is everyone’s thing. You can be sure that somewhere deep down, beneath your lungs and worn-out liver, your inner surf rocker is prepared to clamber out and welcome these potent doses of existential unease. Daunting? Not at all.

Their most sophisticated music to date, ‘Blend Inn’ is both invigorating and disheartening at the same time. The turn of a new page for the Wollongong grommits, who attribute their success to  Rad Bar’s opening in the city-centre. ‘My life is dying, I’m enticed in hiding’. As a listener, I’m also transported to such an agonising place of personal introspect. Days are humble, and nights are desolate. Misgiving is mingled with the salty air.

Volume up, please.