High Risk Behaviour // The Chats – Ed Brown
Released: 27 March 2020
It is my belief that a good band is greater than the sum of its parts. If there is better testimony to this theory than Ozzy punk outfit The Chats, I haven’t found it yet. The Australian press enthusiastically labels the trio ‘bogans’ – a term meaning an obnoxious drunken layabout – but their debut album High Risk Behaviour far surpasses any expectations that such a description might imply.
The success of High Risk Behaviour comes from its sheer simplicity. The album offers a series of bracingly to-the-point tunes, each of them a short, sharp, shock of sound dealing with some facet of everyday Ozzy life – veering toward either the mundane or the disgusting – delivered with a charmingly adolescent punkish snarl. The Chats reveal their thoughts on the struggles of heavy drinking, the contraction of STDs, and being refused entry to a club because of their mullets.
There’s little technical skill behind most of this – each song is a smashing together of 3 or 4 fuzzy power chords whilst the drums just about hold things together with their equally cacophonous thudding – but this vulgarity is exactly why it works.
The Chats aren’t here to impress anyone. There’s a palpable joy radiating from High Risk Behaviour that fills you with energy and doesn’t ask questions. And in 2020, who’s gonna turn that down?