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For some inexplicable reason Warner Music Australia went kind of nuts this fall over the classic Nuggets garage rock anthology, compiled by Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye and responsible for at least three or four waves of garage revivals and revivals of revivals. They’ve just released a remastered version of the compilation and two Down Under-themed companion pieces: a comp of Australian garage rock from the same era called Down Under Nuggets: Original Australian Artyfacts 1965-1967 and a set of contemporary Australian covers of original Nuggets tracks called Nuggets: Antipodean Interpolations of the First Psychedelic Era. The latter tends to be a little too reverential to the source material—maybe more so than the actual Nuggets bands, who treated their own compositions with an inspiring degree of disregard—but Melbourne trio Pearls interpret the Standells’ “Dirty Water” in an interesting way, stripping down the manic blues riffage and rebuilding it as a noise-drenched garage-shoegaze hybrid with an identity that’s very much its own.
