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# Neither Novel Nor Unique, but Definitely Shithouse
- URL: https://goodoil.news/neither-novel-nor-unique-but-definitely-shithouse/
- Published: 2024-10-08T03:00:51.000Z
- Updated: 2024-10-08T03:00:50.000Z
- Description: Album review: TISM, ‘Death to Art’
- Author: Lushington Brady
- Tags: Reviews, Music

In reviewing the new TISM (‘This Is Serious Mum’) album, the *Guardian* [almost got it right for once](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/oct/04/tism-death-to-art-album-review?ref=goodoil.news). 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.

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