This is the Wreckery album that never was, but always should have been! 

At the crest of the mid-'80s Australian post punk era, The Wreckery, from Melbourne, were a major presence. Scions of the same St Kilda scene that bred Nick Cave, Rowland S Howard and The Birthday Party - indeed Wreckery frontman Hugo Race was an original member of the Bad Seeds - The Wreckery played dark atmospheric rock with a film-noir swagger and authentic renegade attitude, carving a loyal true hearted following. Their early recordings showcased the band’s creative fusion of swamp blues, noir-jazz and deadpan rock (check out the Ruling Energy video below) but creative insolvable tensions saw the band implode as they were reaching their peak with the Laying Down Law album (Citadel Records, 1988).

35 years on, the brand new album Fake is Forever, reveals the fire still remains along with the band’s classic DNA - the signature sound of Charles Todd’s baritone sax, the scathing lyrics of Hugo Race, the distorted angular guitars of Clayton-Jones, the eclecticism of multi-instrumentalist Robin Casinader; Nick Barker and former Plays with Marionettes drummer Frank Trobbiani fuse as the solid engine room of this iconic group.

The songs still emanate from the deep dark end of the pool. The sarcastic, provocative lyrics of Smack Me Down, Get A Name, Young People, the musical fury of Stole it from Alpha Ray and Evil Eye, the romantic melodrama of The Devil in You and Whistle Clean, the deranged rock of Dragonfly and Garbage Juice – the Wreckery’s range is as vast as it is ferocious. Whereas the band in the 80’s was brash and angry, this record finds the band conjuring quiet menace, sensual, and mildly intoxicating.

One of the more important bands on the Australian post-punk scene of the 1980s, Melbourne's the Wreckery played dark, atmospheric music informed by the blues and the same sort of chemical and cultural obsessions as their contemporaries Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds."

Mark Deming of AllMusic

"Led by the enigmatic, petulant Hugo Race, whose bleak visions stabbed at the heart of the human condition, [the group] defied conventional approaches to plough a deep furrow of dark romantic melodrama." 

Australian musicologist, Ian McFarlane

"The Wreckery were only together for about four years before we blew ourselves up. As corny and melodramatic as I know this sounds, it was fucking magical being back together after 35 years. As it turns out, this new Wreckery album saved my sanity in ways I still don’t quite understand.. it was great to see everyone again and feel some of that old magic in the room, in fact a lot of it really made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The songs we brought to this record were very much intended for the Wreckery, or at least for a 21st-century version of the Wreckery staying close to our rock roots and dark sense of humour. It seems to me, that ironically, everything that is plastic and fake will last for all techno eternity. Yet, what is real and valuable is transient and short-lived..... like happiness, like us! So Fake Is Forever if you will a protest title swimming against the tide, just like the Wreckery always believed they did!"

Hugo Race

STREAMING LINKS : https://ffm.to/fakeisforever