Bands coming from Australia – or anywhere that could potentially prove odd and foreign for American audiences – have been crafting exciting and obviously skewed variations on pop music since the seventies. For the most part, the folks gaining attention in the West have leaned towards to more palatable end of the spectrum-odd. So, figuring that, the group’s not granted relative fame in the States most be really odd. Kinda.

The Saints thought the Ramones had ripped them off. Not the case, but an interesting conclusion to arrive at. Understanding that sentiment, though, reveals that musical ideas travel across the world at unknowing paces. There’s no way that one thing happens in the States and is instantly transmitted to that island continent. Now, perhaps that’s the case. But if it is, that doesn’t really explain the recent Siltbreeze release Naked on the Vague’s Heaps of Nothing.

The group, beginning as a duo, enlisted a few other players for its second long player. Consisting of downer, new wave antics, the disc might have done a far sight better if it had been issued something like five or six years ago. While the no wave thing is still exerting its influence here on this album and in the States in a general way, the pervasive cheeseball new wave, eighties pop thing hijacks Heaps of Nothing.

“Sacred Youth,” like a great many forgotten efforts from the earlier groups working this territory, comes off like the Doors if that LA group donned all black and turned in its native mysticism for British sadness.

The dour tone of not just that song, but the entire album should really make any listener just dress up in gauzey, dark monochrome gear and go sit at some bar called the Dungeon, if such a thing exists in your neck of the woods.

What’s bizarre about Naked on the Vague is that none of Heaps really sounds like the band was trying to hard. It simply fell out of the band in practices and during the recording session. And while the eighties thing isn’t ever going to be a favorite of mine (nor should it be of yours), Naked on the Vague avoids coming off as contrived even if the place it hails from appreciates warm weather and sunshine.

It’d be hard to dismiss the disc out of hand. And even when considering its entrance into the Siltbreeze catalog as a surprise, Naked on the Vague presents something that someone wants somewhere. Somewhere sad.