Turn My Dial: M Squared Recordings & More 1981-84＜Blue Vinyl＞

In the early 80s, there were outposts all around the globe of musical outsiders applying punk’s D.I.Y. lessons and post-punk’s experimentation. One such area was a small suburb of Brisbane, Australia, where a group of teenagers banded together to make some the era’s best, most interesting, and exciting music. Tangled Shoelaces were three siblings and a school chum who hit a sweet spot between Television Personalities bedroom psychedelia and the Swell Maps sonic adventurism, adding plenty of innocent charm to the mix. Their scant recordings and unreleased tracks are gathered with loving care by Chapter Music on the long overdue collection Turn My Dial: M Squared Recordings & More, 1981-1984. The groups chief songwriter and guitarist Stephen was also the oldest of the Mackerras clan; he and his sister Lucy shared most of the vocals. Brother Ben played bass and Leigh Nelson handled the drumming, except when he couldnt make the recording sessions in Sydney and the group used a drum machine. Together, they were fearless and able to turn their nascent musical skills into something truly special as they grew and tried out styles, moods, and genres to see what worked. Their most conventional songs sound like radio pop built out of baling wire and cardboard, yet theyre still achingly pretty and emotionally powerful. The Biggest Movie Ever Made is a lovely pop song featuring fairground organ, honking sax, and Stephens yearning vocals, and takes off for the heavens in the verses when Lucy and a sweeping synth come in. World comes across like a majestic Echo & the Bunnymen track jammed into a snow globe, Rejection sounds like the mopiest B-52s track ever, and S.E.P. is menacing dance-punk-funk built around samples and Bens thudding bass. A tweak here and there in the production and any of these tracks could have made it to a Rhino comp down the line. As great as these songs are, when the band take a leap into less well-charted territory they come up with some very interesting results. Turn My Dial is a fascinating lo-fi romp with a sugary chorus, an amazing Baroque synth solo, and enough cheeky exuberance to power a small town for a week. Its hard to think of anything else in the early 80s that sounds like this; it would have been more at home on K Records in the early 90s. I Need a Stamp is a truly odd song that strays far from any existing pop music templates, the lengthy Beware of Fallen Objects is marvelously gloomy and understated post-punk balladry, and Bordumb has exactly the right kind of ramshackle brilliance that would have sounded perfect on Flying Nun records, and everything else they did has something weird or wonderful in either the music or lyrics to recommend it. Its rare that lost recordings live up to their legend, but these do. Or that a band as obscure as Tangled Shoelaces actually prove even better than advertised. ~ Tim Sendra