A biography written by IRS to try to sell the Hunna’s in America.

Author: IRS Records.

Date: 1987.

Article Text

Hunters & Collectors rebound from their acclaimed 1986 album, Human Frailty, with a 5-song, $5.98 list EP entitled Living Daylight (I.R.S.- 36 01 7) set for Spring ’87 release.

The EP will serve as a point of reference for an 8-week American tour, and will prelude the Autumn 1987 release of a new album. Human Frailty was co-produced by the band and Greg Edward, best-known for his engineering work with R.E.M. (Life’s Rich Pageant) and John Cougar Mellencamp, and was recorded in the band’s hometown of Melbourne, Australia.

It contains three newly-recorded songs (“Inside A Fireball,” “Living Daylight” and “January Rain”) along with two songs from the group’s Slash LP of 1983, Jaws Of Life (“The Slab” and “Carry Me”) given new vocals and mixes.

Why the impetuous work ethic to return to America short months after their last foray to wage its conquest city by city?

Responds frontman Mark Seymour, “if you’re an Australian rock’n’roll band who’s played everywhere there is to play in Australia, then you’ve got two choices: Either stay home and go into semi-retirement, or go overseas.”

So why America

“Well, it’s big and it’s the next town on the map. But the way we want to approach it is the same way we’ve approached Australia. We started at the bottom and worked our way up through increasing our live audiences for the most part through word-of-mouth. And then gradually, our records began to chart.

“We believe that if you can convince a live audience of your music, then the whole thing’s worth doing. Conversely, if you can’t, then it’s not. It’s called self-promotion and it works. Believing as we do in the strength of our live performance, we’re eager to take the same risks in America,” Seymour concludes.

The U.S. press has had its own take on Hunters & Collectors based on the Human Frailty LP and its ensuing tour. Craig Lee, in the Los Angeles Times, cited the record’s “strong, cohesive and sometimes nightmarish look at personal relationships, documenting a band’s playing at the peak of its collective power.”

Los Angeles Times reviewer Duncan Strauss, describing the band’s kickoff American date, called them “riveting” and “enormously provocative.”

Cary Darling in California’s BAM magazine noted that while Hunters & Collectors’ first appeared on these shores three years back with an “intensely physical, bass-driven set that combined the power of the prehistoric with the intelligence of the information age,” that the newer material is “almost primal in its simplicity, digging deeper emotionally than standard-issue pop rock.”

Hunters & Collectors formed in Melbourne in 1980 as a large, funky ensemble with ‘industrial percussion. Over the years, they developed a nationwide reputation for their live shows in which their increasingly- cited “wall of rhythm” generated immense power over a long period. The band recorded a number of EP’s and LP’s released in Australia only before releasing one LP apiece on A&M and Slash.

Human Frailty, the first LP in a long-term American relationship with I.R.S., is the cornerstone in the band’s desire to put their powerful act before American audiences. Living Daylight suggests there’s more where that came from and whets appetites for the new full LP later this year.

Living Daylight (I.R.S. 36017 ) 4/87

• John Archer – bass
• Doug Falconer – drums
• Jack Howard trumpet
• Mark Seymour vocals, guitars, lyrics
• Jeremy Smith French horns, keyboards
• Michael Waters – trombone, keyboards.

I.R.S. Publicity (818) 777-4745 / (212) 605-060 Living Daylight (I.R.S.-JbUll) 4/87 Human Frailty (I.R.S.-5801) 8/86 I.R.S. Publicity (818) 777-4745 / (212) 605-0608.

Comments

~ typed up by Caelie.