The Stems: Terminal Cool: Anthology 1983-1986

Anyone wise enough to have gotten his or her hands on last year’s Children of Nuggets box know what a useful jumping-off point for exploring the second garage scene (1976-1995) that set is. Australia’s the Stems have two songs featured in that box — “She’s Fine” and “Love Will Grow” — and both are pop gems that demanded further investigation of the Stems’ back catalogue by discerning garage fans. Enter Get Hip Records, which is more often than not, uh, hip to the needs of those fans, with a burgeoning roster of quality acts and now, with the Stems’ Terminal Cool: Anthology 1983-1986, Get Hip trolls the archives, sharing great, long-forgotten music that stands the test of time.

Admittedly, the Stems — singer/guitarist Dom Mariani, singer/guitarist/keyboardist Richard Lane, bassist Julian Matthews and drummer Gary Chambers — haven’t been completely consigned to the Jukebox of History, having been anthologized as recently as 2003 (Mushroom Soup: The Citadel Years), but that’s a hard-to-find import (at least, it is stateside) and Get Hip’s version boasts four tracks not on Mushroom Soup (though it omits “Power of Love”). Whether another anthology was truly necessary is debatable, but to these eyes and ears, the scale tips in favor of Get Hip. That said, two grumbles: The liner notes of Terminal Cool are riddled with typos and lack discography information — release dates, album/single/EP covers, etc.

The big question, of course: How does it all sound? The Stems’ body of work has held up well. They were always a band out of time — they emulated ’60s garage and psychedelia in early ’80s Australia, after all — so tunes like the fast ‘n’ fuzzed-out “She’s a Monster” and jangly “Make You Mine” (the band’s first two singles) sound just as good in 2006 as they would have in 1986 or even 1966. That said, the Stems’ m.o. is decidedly retro, – down to garb; lots of mop tops and paisley shirts in the liner note photos — so if an hour or so of fuzztone guitar, organ flourishes and three-minute long nuggets about girls loved and/or lost is not your idea of a good time, you should probably stop reading this review now.

Everybody else: Groove out to the psychedelic “Under Your Mushroom” (“There’s a world that’s up here too,” frontman Mariani reminds a too-blissed-out friend, in an odd bit anti-psychedelics psychedelia); the bluesy, barroom stomp of “On and On”; and the surf-rock/horror movie instrumental “Lon Cheney Juniors Daughter” [sic]. And, yes, “She’s Fine”, a little-more polished sounding than some of their other tunes, will always be their finest pure pop moment — it’s like the La’s “There She Goes” if that song was actually about a girl, instead of heroin — and it’s one of the revival scene’s best songs.

By and large, a lot of the Stems songs sound the same, but the band was never out to reinvent rock music. If anything, the Stems are important and enduring because they helped, along with the Hoodoo Gurus and Lime Spiders, to introduce ’60s garage rock to an entire continent. Unfortunately, intra-band strife on the eve of their 1987 European tour hastened the Stems’ demise and scuttled any plans for world domination the band members might’ve secretly harbored, but Terminal Cool is still a great snapshot of a band that, for three years at least, did their best to spread the gospel of garage rock to the masses.