Review From 'HEARD' 2002

A Tasmanian band, which apparently started out as a solo act, later evolving into a 3 piece outfit & the sound reminds me of quite a few bands, though doesn't really sound like any particular one of them. It's an interesting album, featuring 13 tracks, sometimes grabbing electronic sounds but mostly pulling the sounds including a healthy helping of guitar out into the main mix.

The first couple of tracks took a bit of effort to get into, but the 3rd track in, "Coo" really has a fascinating melody to it that really is addictive & will interest many, as will a few odd tracks along the way, including "Stadium" & "Fresh". Definitely an appeal there & it's great to see a Tasmanian band aspiring to be something more than an ordinary pop outfit - there's too few interesting acts out of that state as it is.

Review from BEAT April 18th, 2001:

RENTBOY
Clocktower (Consumer Productions)

Rentboy’s album has everything I personally want from an album. The best basslines since the first Public Image album. Singing a little off-key from people who actually could sing on-key if they thought it had validity. Drumming reminiscent of a simple machine (repetitive but powering; sassy without being showy... hmm, maybe it’s a drum machine) and, you know, great songs. The group are Tasmanian and this fact, along with Radio National’s Arts Today program’s recent Tasmanian reports, Hal Porter’s memoir The Paper Chase, and a five-year-old documentary I saw last week about Tasmanian bands, makes me appreciate all the more what a brilliant spawning ground Tasmania is for unique art/music/lives. At the risk of sounding like one of those irritating Americans who pine for New Zealand or those foolish Brits who desire Iceland, I reckon Tasmania is quite possibly my spiritual home (which doesn’t mean I want to live there. The last thing you want to do is get close to your spititual home - it’s like pining for the afterlife.) Tasmania is weird, it’s scary, it’s gothic (not goth, but gothic), it’s sort of a social cockfight going on down there all the time. Except unlike the cocks, people can leave Tasmania whenever they want to and the often do, and then they come to Melbourne and bitch about when they walk down the street and they don’t know everyone one they see, but you have to love them for that. Rentboy is a terrible name for a band, particularly a Hobart band since you can well imagine Hobart only has one male prostitute and he only works on Thursday nights anyway. But it kind of fits their rough and sketchy songs, full of off-the cuff, hazy meanderings and diversions into weird shadowy experimentation. Best comparisons I can come up with are: Jesus and Mary Chain - Echo and the Bunnymen - The Fall - Blackbird - Mercury Spectres - the Pixies - Television or the Ramones maybe? There’s also a moderately funny song that hangs it on the Doors, called ‘City at Night’ . The song ‘Detergent’ is a massive classic piece of new wave. I am guessing that Rentboy’s lyrics, most of which are indecipherable to me, are not deep thoughts mired in ragged metaphor. They’re probably about sleeping in and buying milk, but in fact that’s cool and I can identify with it, even though I don’t like milk. Or sleeping in. But you shouldn’t but this record simply because it is Tasmanian or because it sometimes sounds like Blackbird, a group no-one has even heard except me who bought their albums for a dollar a pop at an Au Go Go sale. You should buy it because it’s dynamic, exotic and schintillatingly solid. What more could you want?

DAVID NICHOLS