If you’ve never been to Hamilton, NZ, you’ve probably been to a place just like it: a small, leafy university town with a disproportionate number of bands per capita. Maybe it’s just that there’s not much to do growing up in Hamilton, but every second kid seems to grab a guitar or a drumkit and start bashing away in their parent’s garage with a six-pack and a microphone taped to a broom handle. Everyone is either in a band, goes out with a musician or makes gig posters. You can’t walk down the street without bumping into three drummers, seven guitarists and that guy who once played with that big international act. So far, so much cliched suburban rock mythology. If it’s true of Hamilton, then it’s true by definition of millions of other towns. The Shrugs started in a garage (tick) in a leafy suburb (tick) with a microphone taped to a broom handle (tick). They had all been in heaps of other bands before, but they weren’t immediately amazingly good. In fact, they were pretty bad. Which seems strange now, when their songwriting and musical ability has become local legend (Geoff Doube once beat Christian Livingstone of The Datsuns to the coveted title of ‘best Hamilton guitarist’ from a local radio station, which perhaps shows a slight lack of judgement from the radio station). What has also become local legend is the supposedly huge number of lineups that have comprised the Shrugs over the years. While it is true that there have been a few different configurations of the band, it’s also true that there have been other Hamilton groups with many more permutations over a much shorter time period. What those other bands have often found to be a weakness, however, has been the Shrugs’ strength. The diffusion and dissipation of creative energy that often come with a change of lineups has played well into the Shrugs’ methodology - or lack thereof. After all, this is a band whose lyrics are often primarily concerned with ambivalence, reticence, uncertainty and numbness. Unambiguous expressions of adolescent desire or anger are not this band’s terrain. Neither are metaphors which speak clearly once and for all; where the Shrugs do use metaphor, it is toyed with and re-used until it is no longer a single image but a collection of competing voices. This lack of a method and this open-endedness has also meant that the Shrugs have wandered off the beaten path, musically, as many times as they’ve wandered onto it. When there’s no fixed destination at the start of a journey, then it’s OK to get lost on the way. And the Shrugs have certainly got lost many times, but somehow the whole thing makes some sort of soft-focus sense. So while other bands struggle on under the weight of self-imposed stylistic strictures, the Shrugs simply follow their own wanderlust, wherever it may take them. You’re invited on the trip, too.
