Lyrically, "Fuck the World" doesn't make a lot of sense. As a songwriter, the Australian band's precocious leader, twenty-six-year-old singer-guitarist Craig Nicholls, prefers the sound of words, the crunch and color of pronunciation, to mere linear meaning. "Walk the fields and we stare at the ocean/Roll the wheel but forget the notion," he barks through a mouthful of fuzz. "Life was better before was smaller." There is something in there about saving the planet, about globalization and endangered innocence. Mostly, though, there's a lot of fuck. Nicholls repeatedly sings, shouts and screams it, in tight, sour choral overdubs and utter noteless bawl, over the band's dirty gallop.

As message, "Fuck the World" is a mess of good intentions. As pissed-off theater, it absolutely rocks. You believe every ugly note, and you can sing along, too. The only drag: The song should go out in a blaze of chaos, "My Generation"-style. (When I saw the Vines play it live at New York's CBGB in 2002, Nicholls actually trashed their gear.) Instead, "Fuck the World" ends with thirty seconds of amp squeal, too much for a song not even four minutes long.

But that's a rare misstep. When Nicholls, bassist Patrick Matthews, drummer Hamish Rosser and second guitarist Ryan Griffiths put the pedal to their modern-garage mettle and Nicholls pushes his voice to the limits of melody, Winning Days is a noisy triumph -- as good as their 2002 debut, Highly Evolved, and in some ways a leap forward in style and frenzy.

The glut of comparisons to Nirvana, mostly inspired by Nicholls' serrated braying and loose-cannon act on- and offstage, are misleading. Nicholls got the band's name from his father's 1960s Aussie combo the Vynes, and the son's roots, at least subconsciously, go back to the gleaming clatter of the Who's maximum-R&B era and the Sixties freakbeat of the Creation and the Pretty Things. The opening wallop here, "Ride," is an airtight package of extremes: Nicholls' bitter wail; harmonized, ska-like strum; the feedback seeping out of the lead break during the clipped march of the bridge. In "TV Pro," Nicholls mixes liquid mercury (psychedelic sustainment, choirboy vocal bliss) with a breakout chorus of nonsense chanting and dogfighting guitars. Nicholls is not reinventing hard-pop songwriting here. His specialty is decorative flourishes, like the seductive melodic curls and sudden, pensive brake in tempo in the Beatlesque "Winning Days."

When Nicholls drops the speed and goes quiet, his disdain for grammar and clarity can make you wince. "Sun Child" and "Autumn Shade II" are flimsy beauties, deep, pretty breaths between the rave-ups. And the Vines should never play anything slow and heavy, such as "Evil Town." Sludge doesn't suit them.

But do not mistake three stars for faint praise. Nicholls is not as great as the Vines' hyperbolic U.K. press clips claim; he is at least a few years and albums away from Godlike genius. But Nicholls has the voice and fire of a winner. In his best songs here -- the loud and fast ones -- it doesn't matter if you can't figure out what he wants or means. It's the force of his argument that counts.

DAVID FRICKE
(RS 945, April 1, 2004)

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(Posted: Mar 10, 2004)