INXS: Shabooh Shoobah : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In direct contradiction to their name, the new Australian band INXS (pronounced "in excess") actually offers a radically streamlined, quietly menacing variation on techno-pop's fluffy, bouncy norm. Tim Farriss' electronic keyboards are not the center of attention; instead, they provide an unsettling punctuation and a shades-of-gray back-drop for the angular clang of Kirk Pengilly's guitars and the sleek propulsion of bassist Garry Beers and drummer Jon Farriss. Such subtle pop gestures as the Byrdsy guitar clatter in "Golden Playpen" and the Roxy Music snap of "The One Thing" (complete with Andy Mackay-style, honking-car-horn sax by Pengilly) are also heightened by Michael Hutchence's unlikely vocal style – a declamatory futurist croon, with the cutting enunciation of Graham Parker and a hearty, white-soul yell that is more celebration than apocalypse.

INXS occasionally disappears into its own subtlety, hiding behind telegramlike lyrics and teasing melodic fragments on the bloodless electroboogie "Here Comes." But most of Shabooh Shoobah, the group's American debut, is both novel in approach and stirring in execution. Amid the current plague of identikit synth-pop records, Shabooh Shoobah is certainly no ordinary song and dance.