Ground Components: An Eye for a Brow, a Tooth for a Pick

There’s no shame in doing covers. Or at least, there shouldn’t be. Covers were all the rage in the 1960s, when even the best bands would do new versions of old songs to bolster their albums. It’s easy to forget the Beatles’ early penchant for covers. Only two songs on the Stones’ eponymous debut were penned by the group. The debut singles of the Byrds, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and even Nirvana were all covers. Yet today, the very idea of doing unoriginal material is considered gimmicky, uncool or straight out lazy.

Perhaps Bob Dylan started it. When Dylan arrived in conjunction with the Beatles, all of a sudden being a talented stage performer or recording artist wasn’t enough. No-one wanted to just be remembered as a great singer or a great musician. It was about being a great songwriter. Never mind that despite nearly 50 years of original material, Dylan still makes an effort to reinterpret the works of others.

Melbourne’s Ground Components have no shame in doing covers. It takes musicians with lots of balls to create an album of two-thirds rocking original material. But it takes more balls to come to terms with the fact that you don’t have enough of it to see the record through. That’s where “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” comes in.

Some Dylan songs are open game. Every mainstream rock band, pop-punk starlet and West Coast folk singer have done their versions of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. Everyone from Glen Campbell to the Four Seasons have had their go at “All I Really Want to Do”, while “It Ain’t Me Babe” set the Turtles up for life. But there are some Bob Dylan songs that are considered sacred. “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” is one such example. Musicians take on a burden of responsibility, and inevitably, contempt, when they have a shot at “Like a Rolling Stone”. But “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” is too wordy, too droning and too bleak for all but the most audacious to attempt. The way that scraggly and scrawny Joe McGuigan ambles around on stage at any Ground Components performance bare-chested and sweaty lets you know that the group isn’t short of audacity.

The grinding, cathartic and truly epic version of the Dylan song that closes off Ground Components’ debut An Eye for a Brow, A Tooth for a Pick makes the album worth buying, regardless of the other tracks. It is an exhausting and exhilarating example of music that seems far shorter than it should be, quite an achievement for a song clocking in at nine minutes. With the strikingly fast bass riffs, the swirling and climaxing Hammond organ, the vocals that feel like McGuigan’s violent exorcism, and most of all, the call-and-response chorus, Ground Components take Dylan’s impressive chore of a song and turn it into an apocalyptic anthem.

There is nothing on the rest of the album that tops the closer, but Ground Components have some other promising material. While their original material may superficially seem like run-of-the-mill blues-rock, their talent lies in throwing together incongruent genres, giving songs new life before they get boring. “Head in the Sand” might pass off as high-speed Captain Beefheart rock, seamlessly flowing from feedback heavy guitar soloing to cheeky doo-wah vocals. “Hands in the Air” is wall-of-sound new wave, a less subversive do of “Modern Music” by Black Mountain, but with unexpectedly well-suited Na-na-nas at the end. The haunting mariachi of “Fistful of Dallas” carries itself well, and the way McGuigan’s howl cuts through the mix on “On Your Living Room Floor” lends itself to Black Francis, only perhaps more demented and less bilingual. His guitar work on the album isn’t dissimilar to that of like-minded Melburnians, the Drones.

Including “Coming In From All Angles”, penned and starring hip-hopper Macromantics, is a serious error of judgment, and the inevitable acoustic track “As the Winter Months Approach” is a little lacklustre, but these tracks are exceptions to the rules.

One of the earliest lines on the album is the cry, “I want something I can sink my teeth into”. An Eye for a Brow, A Tooth for a Pick is an often thrilling and cathartic debut, and has enough audacious and heavy material to sink our teeth into.