Following Mick Turner’s career – the Aussie, not the Hawkwind affiliated Britisher – is something of a confusing endeavor. Spanning something like forty years and pretty much every guitar based form of music has resulted in an unwieldy discography as confusing as it is intriguing. There’s no real way to figure a specific strain of music to associate the guy with – he’s even performed with Cat Power at this late date. And while the Dirty Three is probably the best known project Turner had a significant influence over, it’s some of his earlier work that should be considered a bit more important. That’s relative, of course.
After a stint with the shambolic and endless destructive Sick Things – again, not the Brit based group, but an Australian strain of weirdo – and then with Venom P. Stinger, Turner tried to work out some tunes with Fungus Brains. Yeah, that seems like a willful mushroom eating reference. And while that particular drug could be considered an important part of the group’s eventually oeuvre, everything revealed over the course of the Brains’ first disc – Ron Pistos Real World - points to a dramatic Stooges fixation. And Funhouse specifically. It wasn’t the first or the last time that album would be mined for source material, but was probably a welcome change of pace during the mid eighties at the time of its release.
After “Hairbrush” and another track, “Day of Heat” winds up coming off as a pretty good setting for a spot on David Thomas (Pere Ubu) impersonation. The Brains don’t get anywhere near as funky or off kilter as that Cleveland based band, but the inclusion of tossed off trumpets works a long way to not only solidify the Stooges link, but also to enable the band to simply rave up a huge two note groove on the following “Death Dance.”
But if the redeeming quality Fungus Brains sported was its similarity to other groups, they wouldn’t be worth noting. While it’s not the most original take on rock stuffs, the Aussies are/were still more than capacious of playing a convincing variant on then existing noise bands.
Closing out the whole thing is a song called “Car Accident,” which kinda sounds like its title. And it should. With vocals as repetitive as the backing track, the song’s a noisy meditation on what can happen when everyone just lets go and plays as fast as possible while attempting to maintain some sense of timing. It’s a pretty incredible feat.