"Screaming Hand" boasts one of Reatard's most direct and effective lyrics in its merciless look back at a troubled childhood: "When I was a young boy I didn't need much/A kind word or two ... but instead I got a man with an empty beer bottle and a screaming hand."

Other highlights abound: The swirling, driving "You Mean Nothing to Me"; the delicate, restless, regretful "No Time" effectively roughed-up with some intentional distortion; the assaulting "Dead on Arrival" sounding like old times up against the folkie departure of "You Were Sleeping."

But while the Memphis-based Reatard is making his move via the New York-based Matador, another of this year's best garage rock-oriented acts is making their own splash via Memphis.

I ran into a local musician on the weekend of last month's Gonerfest, the semi-annual rock festival sponsored by local label Goner. He'd made it out to some of the festival, as had I, and he volunteered this observation: "A lot of those Gonerfest bands suck. They're supposed to suck. But have you heard that Eddy Current Suppression Ring record? Oh man."

The record in question is Primary Colours, the second album from the Melbourne, Australia, quartet, which was a Top 10 debut in their home country and was recently nominated for Best Rock Album in the ARIA Awards, essentially the Australian equivalent of the Grammys. The album got a stateside release from Memphis' Goner Records last month and is, indeed, a doozy. A lot of those Gonerfest bands are really good, of course, but the point is taken: This is a band that would seem to have considerable appeal outside the subculture.

Primary Colours is the kind of post-punk guitar statement that turns limitation into triumph: What it lacks in flashy solos, skronky, feedback-laden breakdowns, swaggering blues licks, or extreme volume, it makes up for in tone, insistence, and rhythmic build-up. Primary Colours is the kind of post-punk record that takes its guitar cues from the Velvet Underground's "What Goes On" and Nuggets-era garage rock and maybe-just-maybe Sonic Youth at their most modest and tuneful. And when singer Brendan Suppression sing-speaks about watching the world via his "Colour Television" over a brittle, bare guitar riff, it evokes the Minutemen, another band that made immense virtue of modest tools.

Primary Colours is as basic lyrically as it is musically, communicating in a string of simple but affective statements, stuff like: "Sunday's come like a kick to the face" and "I'm wrapped up in you'" and "I still don't know which way to go" and "I don't want to play no more."

The only track that feels out of character is such a charmer that it doesn't matter: "We'll Be Turned On (Fix the Reception)" pairs keyboard work so cheap and fun it could be a Swinging Medallions outtake with sexual double-entendres that are lovably silly ("When I come home to you/I'm gonna do all the things I said I would do/Like I'll fix the reception/With a little bit of lovin'/And a touch of affection").

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