According to the liner notes to
Order of Operation, which break down the costs of making
Ausmuteants' third full-length album, the Australian synth punks spent all of $1900 on recording, mixing, and mastering the project (more than three times as much as
Nirvana shelled out for
Bleach!), and judging from the finished product, this must have been a considerable step up from their previous releases.
Order of Operation doesn't sound slick by any standards, but there's a clarity in the audio that serves the band's cheap guitars and keyboards far better than the homemade sound of their self-titled second effort, and while the band has dialed back on the ferocity of its earlier recordings, the pulse of the electronics and the crunch of the guitars are much more precise here, and if you're going to spend a lot of your time striving to live up to a standard set by
Devo, precision is an important goal. (Though "Family Time" and "Tunnel Vision" suggest the guys have also been spending quality time with their Screamers bootlegs.) And as
Devo have always been a clear influence on
Ausmuteants,
Order of Operation certainly sounds less punk and more new wave, as the guitars take a less dominating position in the arrangements and the keyboards take the lead, and the melodies walk a fine line between cleanly effective and herky-jerky discombobulated. However, the high-pitched bark of the vocals and the thematic ranting of the lyrics bring back some of the grit that might have been buffed off in the music, and the result is an album that's less cluttered and more user-friendly while leaving
Ausmuteants' musical personality largely untouched. In short, with
Order of Operation Ausmuteants are having their cake and eating it too, and all for under two grand -- that really is a bargain. ~ Mark Deming