polaroids of androids

From the sickening thrust of energy at the twenty eight second mark of the opening track, Before I Weigh, it's clear that this record is gonna kick ass, take names and then kick the shit out of the piece of paper on which it was written down the names. It's relentless and enjoyably punishing. It's dirty, perfectly under produced and topped with an unpredictable explosion of sound hidden behind every nook and cranny. This is beautiful messy stuff.

Increasingly, this dirty, sweat covered, organic style of rock is what Australia is distinctively taking ownership of. The Witch Hats stand above the others, however, thanks in a large part to the details that they are able to pack into not only each individual song, but the entire album as a single body of work. More than anything, Cellulite Soul, fantastically sums up so much about what we have come to love about local music over the past few years.

The slower tracks such as Ma Lord rely heavily on the emotional delivery of the lyrics and the determined strums of acoustic rhythm, while Hellhole, and other gut-wrenching powerful numbers such as Neil Diamond Entry and Summer Of Pain, are built around punishing bursts of well-guided aggression. It's this ability by the band to pause, change direction and alter their shape that makes this such a thrilling ride from start to finish.

If this album has any weakness it's that, at times, some of the guitar work sounds a little too similar to infamous mid-90's grunge riffs. It's a thin line between homage and plagiarism and, more than anything, this is a distracting element to the songs. This factor is only minor though and quickly dispatched to the 'too picky' part of your brain after a couple of laps through the tracklisting.

This record is a rare jewel - packing enough initial impact to floor you on first listens as well as enough substance to continually impress on the tenth, twentieth and hundredth listen. Clearly the best Australian album of 2008 so far.