Cold Chisel
No Plans (Warner Music)
I don`t want to tell you again all that stuff about Chisel’s history, reformation; big tours chart positions how platinum 78s and all that hoopla bullshit. What`s interesting about this album is not that it exists after all this time or that it`s good. There`s only one surprise and that is that the band can still cut it without Steve Prestwich playing drums. No Plans shows up just how bland modern rock has become. There`s a baker’s dozen here of really powerful, well-crafted songs that are about something played by people who mean it – and when was the last time you can say you heard that. Let’s face it, most groups now slam down a bunch of songs that don`t really mean very much and there`s nothing really at stake. Or they do the comeback Ian Thorpe style – lots of headlines and breast beating and confessions in the women`s magazines and they get in the pool and they don`t cut it. Cold Chisel just came back. They put the same standards in place that they always had, trained hard. Delivered. It`s a record that exists outside of all the shit we hear about fame and celebrity and social goddamn media and the latest cocktail from the military industrial complex and how to get the top of the charts without ever trying. This record is just about what`s in our hearts, it`s about who you are when you`re driving late at night across the plain at dusk and the radio`s busted and it`s just you and your thoughts; angry, sad. It`s a record that makes no apologies or wallows in self-pity. The opening track ’No Plans’ is kind of setting up the theme; lost in the supermarket perhaps but not giving a fuck. ’Everybody’ and ’HQ454 Monroe’ are nice companion pieces the latter almost up there with ’Home and Brokenhearted’. There are songs about love ’All For You’, ’Dead and Laid to Rest’ and ’Missing A Girl’ but fortunately not mawkish or sentimental like a sappy Diane Keaton film. Cold Chisel have always had a more Clint Eastwood approach to talking about emotion and that`s the way we like it. There are no flashy moments when it`s trying to prove anything. It`s not a record about growing old though there are songs about experience. It`s not about feeling alienated and angry (like the first 4 LPs) Closest comparison; Dylan`s Together Through Life; there`s jokes, ex wives, scar tissue but a firm belief in the future.

[rating:4.5/5]

Johnny Friendly