POLITICAL ACOUSTIC

A longtime fixture of the Melbourne live music circuit, indie rocker Paul "Bom" Bombig drops a scrappy second album that has plenty to say – and delivers it with a gut-punch of guitar and percussion. Envisioned as the soundtrack for an upcoming 30-minute film, aiming for a Christmas release date, No More Lip Service takes the sonic guise of a train ride through Melbourne’s underground transport network. 

A longtime fixture of the Melbourne live music circuit, indie rocker Paul "Bom" Bombig drops a scrappy second album that has plenty to say – and delivers it with a gut-punch of guitar and percussion. Envisioned as the soundtrack for an upcoming 30-minute film, aiming for a Christmas release date, No More Lip Service takes the sonic guise of a train ride through Melbourne’s underground transport network. 

Appropriately for a ride into subterranean territory, the concept album’s diverse range of tracks touches on somewhat dark subject matter. Equally fitting, perhaps, is Bombig’s next live performance date at The Worker’s Club, on Melbourne’s historic Brunswick Street: 11 September, specifically the 25th anniversary of the harrowing terrorist attack. This sombre commemoration befits the album’s thematic focus on US interventionist geopolitics, as well as more up-to-the-minute subject matter including the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Evidently, then, Bombig aims high with co-writers Jamie Stanton and Gavin D’Monte on No More Lip Service – and its cinematic ambitions are well-deserved. Offering a clear narrative arc, with plenty of old-school punk attitude sewn throughout its timely lyrics, this is an ambitious undertaking for an indie artist.

The album’s opening track, “STG 1”, drops the listener into a hazy meditation of the world burning, as seen through the screen of a television. "Bombs are fallin’ from sky, still falling," Bombig sings, "I don't wanna be feeling like I'm falling again." Here Bombig offers his artistic agenda, immediately, of blending personal and global scopes in a subversion of supposedly safe private space. We are placed in a disconcerting trajectory from the outset, as though riding deeper along the train tunnel… 

Thereafter, we are confronted with a sprawling character study of the human cost of war and imperial expansion (as stated above, Bombig and Stanton take big swings with their subject matter). The second track, “Lady”, follows a shellshocked soldier occupying a deteriorating pavement, a two-tour Baghdad soldier still proud of his service. Until the point at which Bombig and Stanton ask one of the uncomfortable questions that he routinely seeks throughout No More Lip Service: "Where were you when the towers fell? / How can you buy the lies that they sell." 

The album’s following tracks, paired as "V2" and "V3," follow the same soldier as he progresses deeper into ruin, carrying a job making steel girders so directionless that he "can't remember what they were for." These grim portraits of a shattered life follow the soldier through a collapsed marriage, bank repossession, and finally a portrait of homelessness that lead lyricist Jamie Stanton renders in the bleak poetry of "searching through a bin / Looking for a cigarette to give it life again." 

Ever more, deeper down the tunnel we go – and further into the fractious worldview Bombig holds of contemporary society. Throughout all this, the album’s gutsy guitar riffs and chattering drums keep the mood raucous enough to protect the listener’s spirits from crashing too hard out of a window. Engineered by Chris Gatz, the sound balance just about stabilises a vigorous force of saxophone, drums, and organ. As such, the fusion of instruments across the album is reflected in the multi-genre flavours Bombig samples here from classic rock, blues, and spoken-word punk. 

An added sense of vintage grittiness across the sound mix comes from the actual train sound of the Melbourne Metro, consistently returning us to the album’s conceptual tether of a train ride barrelling into the underworld.

The album concludes in the deepest reaches of the tunnel, with a chilling reproduction of text written by Hossam Shabat, the Palestinian journalist killed while reporting on conflicts in northern Gaza, aged just 23. Over a span of 18 months, Shabar documented what he called "the horrors," sleeping on pavements, in schools and in tents, frequently going hungry. His words close the album: "Do not stop talking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories until Palestine is free."

For all of Bombig’s middle-finger-raising, punk rocker posturing, the grim flourish here is decidedly devastating. Importantly, however, Bombig doesn't speak about Gaza; he simply gives the war-ravaged locale the last word of an already fiery, overtly political album. 

With this last gut-punching track, the train, decidedly, has reached the end of the tunnel. We are left with plenty to reflect on as Bombig’s mournful, ponderous guitar solo reverberates into ashen silence.