“You are ugly all day, I am hot always / You are just a critic and you want to hit it / You are fucking spiders, I am drinking riders” – Amyl and the Sniffers, “Jerkin'”
Amy Taylor comes out swinging on Amyl and The Sniffers’ third album and her opponents are many, though they all have one thing in common — they’re all trying to bring her down. In the case of “Jerkin‘,” it’s Twitter trolls and reply guys who Taylor quickly puts in their place: “Keep jerkin’ on your squirter / You will never get with me!” (It’s not necessarily just about dudes; Taylor happily notes that almost everyone has a “squirter.”) On Cartoon Darkness, she’s also fighting Big Tech, AI, music industry executives, and all manner of icky men who she attacks with caustic wit, fiery delivery and a crack band who are still delivering the pile-drivers and barn-burners Amyl are known for, while switching things up a little, too.
They even take their foot off the gas occasionally. “Big Dreams,” a song about trying to get your shit together as you watch birthdays fly by with increasing speed, is pure cinematic slow-burn with nods to Morricone’s spaghetti western scores while still sounding decidedly Australian and as big as the Outback. It’s a satisfying mood, all low key sizzle, but when the drums finally kick in and the ragged guitar solo rages, it’s like finally escaping a go-nowhere life. Amyl have never done anything like this before and it really suits them.
The band made the album in Los Angeles with Nick Launay, a veteran British producer who’s worked with lots of Aussies over the last 40+ years (Midnight Oil, Nick Cave, INXS) and who helped the band beef up and expand their sound. “Bailing on Me,” a bittersweet tale of heartbreak, adds jangle — and whistling — to the mix, while “U Should Not Be Doing That” and “Me and the Girls” dabble in disco. The latter also comes complete with both mouth harp and Daft Punk style vocoder.
“Me and the Girls,” whose title is followed by “are drunk in the airport” in the chorus, is one of the best, most pure fun songs on the album as well as one of a few “me/us vs them” songs on the album,” along with “Jerkin'” “Tiny Bikini,” and “U Should Not Be Doing That” where, again, various people are telling her that’s not how she should dress or act, and that The Sniffers are getting too big for their britches. Taylor dismantles her tormentors and picks the meat off their bones with the bravado and glee of a rap battle: “Me and the girls don’t care if we’re ugly / Me and the girls are out having fun / You and the boys are playing your Xbox / You and the guys are sooking, so dumb.”
Taylor attributes a lot of that negative energy to our current, too-online lifestyles. She confronts this directly in “Doin’ in Me Head,” which offers no deflections of humor, just dark thoughts and appropriately doomy riffs, and it’s where Cartoon Darkness gets its title: “Data brightens up my screen / The outrage connects big tech, I swear it’s true / Thoughts of the gen that were fed by a spoon / Cocooned child where the man should be.”
For the most part, though, Cartoon Darkness and Amyl & The Sniffers keep their heads up. “Don’t you know the best roses are always grown out of cow shit,” Taylor sings on “Going Somewhere,” which feels akin to “Big Dreams” but with a dash of romance for good measure. “Thick and through / I know that I’m going somewhere, will you come there too?” Nobody writes love songs quite like Amyl and the Sniffers, and here they are usually rippers: “I wanna ride you like a Harley D” she wails on “Motorbike Song,” and “Chewing Gum” is as sweet as it’s title (“I used to be oh so tough, but for love I’ll be dumb / Stuck on you, stuck like glue, stuck like chewing gum”).
The amped-up production and purposefully more varied styles highlights what good musicians guitarist Dec Martens, bassist Gus Romer and drummer Bryce Wilson are. They can do machine gun pub-punk all day, but this album allows them to strut with real swagger on “U Should Not Be Doing That,” “Do It, Do It,” and “Me and the Girls,” which in turn makes the Motörhead barnstormers hit harder. Through it all, Amy Taylor gives a bravura vocal performance full of charisma and fire, whether she’s screaming, wailing, singing, cooing, rapping, grunting, or dropping a spirited but reserved “yeah!” near the end of “Tiny Bikini.” Cartoon Darkness is Amyl and The Sniffers through-and-through (don’t worry, the C-word count remains high), but they’re growing up, just a little, and definitely growing out.