If you leave skateboarders unattended around guitars for long enough they’re guaranteed to get weird with it, primarily because they cannot afford the fees that concussion clinic on Maribyrnong Road charges. Anything big T.L lays his hands on has the feel of the old fella at the record shop who is as well versed in T.S.O.L as he is in Faust and Keiji Haino’s cyclical alembications of krautrock and Japanoise, and who would sentence me to a slow bloodletting in the iron maiden for drunkenly and full-throatedly using the term “Japanoise”. There is an adulation for hardcore present on Metholated Spirits, largely in relation to song lengths, which satisfied me greatly as a key aspect of musical achievement is knowing when to shut up and move on. If the liner notes review is what they bray from the cheap seats for then sure, it’s a continuation of the karmic cycle of dole we all seem to be trying to dig up, although the contents of the time capsule are never as exciting as you remember. However if it’s the annoying drunk bitch in the smoker’s area who gets to call the shots, Metholated Spirits is a love letter to an eclectic palette formed by Antipodean isolation and the elation that comes when anything shiny and wet with the amniotic fluid of OutThere reaches our shores. Whack it on when summer comes and you open up your kneecaps so you leave bizarre brown plasma goo everywhere. It’s the only way to learn how to feel “alive”.