Camp Cope
How to Socialise & Make Friends
Run for Cover Records
Australian trio Camp Cope’s new album How to Socialise & Make Friends is not a fun album. It is a nine track, garage punk gut punch. It is a document of feminine rage that never raises its voice, because you don’t have to shout when you are right.
How to Socialise & Make Friends never lets the listener get comfortable. Lyrically the songs fall in the unquiet place between personal and political, between public and private. A mix of autobiography and political manifesto, that still manages to be a damn fine listen. Georgia “Maq” McDonald’s make no attempt to gentrify her message or her Australian heritage in her controlled, guttural, snarl of vocals that you keep expecting to erupt into a scream, and the tension when it doesn’t, is a large part of her strength as a vocalist.
The music and the verse construction also adds to the discomfort as the simple riffs keep repeating with few changes and the verses just keep flowing often without hooks or choruses. Everything on the record seems to be calculated to keep you a little bit off balance and defying chiche. Camp Cope never goes for the throat but are relentless in throwing body blows against the establishment, against “nice guys”, and against the world that still sees an all female band as a novelty. “It’s another all-male tour preaching equality…Yeah, just get a female opener, that’ll fill the quota.”
