In reviewing the new TISM (‘This Is Serious Mum’) album, the Guardian almost got it right for once. As Death to Art shows, even more than the widely acknowledged nadir, 2001’s De Rigeur Mortis, TISM ‘have lost their darker edge’. What was once funny, insightful and provocative, is now just… mildly amusing at best, sophomoric at worse.
But the Guardian, being the Guardian of course and having diagnosed the malady, spectacularly misses the cause: “TISM were equal-opportunity offenders, but they have realised there are some things – and some words – you just can’t say any more, even in a satirical context.” The Guardian, the paper of record of the mid-wit, bourgeois left, clearly approves of not saying some things any more. The “Old Skool TISM”, to borrow the title of one of the better songs on Death to Art, would have known that that’s exactly when you should say them. The new TISM play it safe.
And there’s the problem: if I had to sum up Death to Art in a single word, it would be safe.
Which is the last word anyone should be using about TISM. This is the band, remember, whose first single was an Adolf Hitler/Eva Braun love song titled “Defecate on my Face”, and it’s even more provocative B-side, “The Art-Income Dialectic”. Upping the stakes, the sleeve not only packaged a 7” single in a completely sealed 12” sleeve, but the artwork, squinted at from a distance, resolved itself into a swastika.
From then on, TISM poked, prodded and needled all sides, from violent yobbos (“I’ll ’Ave Ya”; “The Fosters Carpark Boogie”) to pretentious wankers (“Whatareya”; “The Mystery of the Artist Explained”). They shocked the cat’s-bum-mouthed wowsers with “(He’ll Never Be) An Old Man River”, with an it’s in-your-face opening chant, I’m on the drug that killed River Phoenix! Even when they were bad taste, such as billing themselves as “Angela Taylor and the Walsh Street Singers” (referencing a serious of notorious murders of junior police officers), they were at least offending all round.
In 2024, despite a decidedly target-rich environment, TISM choose to tilt at the safest windmills: Hillsong, Steve Bannon, the ‘Australian Business Class’. Saying ‘cunt’ a lot. Ooh, don’t cut yourselves on that edge, there, boys.
Still, it’s not all bad. TISM were always a singles band, not so great at solid, track-to-track albums (with the exception of Machiavelli and the Four Seasons). Despite playing to the art crowd for much of their career, TISM always had the knack of putting chords together so they sound pleasant. So, even on a lesser effort like The White Album, they could still crank out a corker like ‘Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me’.
Death to Art doesn’t fail to deliver on that front, at least on a couple of tracks. “Old Skool TISM”, “Death to Art”… and that’s about it, really. They could simply have released a double-A-side single and gone out in a blaze of glory. Instead, we get an album of filler that’s, well, okay. At best. At worst, there’s the interminable “75 Minutes to Springvale”, an apparent attempt at inserting Eminem-style skits between tracks, which makes you wonder how they didn’t learn from their “40 minute rock opera in one act” from 2001, “2Pot Screama”.
Mostly, though, Death to Art is depressing by the numbers.
And that’s about the saddest thing you could ever once have said about a TISM album.
