The year is 1993. The biggest rock bands on the airwaves are Nirvana. Pearl Jam. The Smashing Pumpkins. Grunge is flourishing. Everyone wants in. So how does a plucky power trio from a small town in New South Wales called Spiderbait decide to introduce themselves to this status quo? Drop an album with a title meaning “crazyhead” in Serbo-Croatian, filled with underproduced, blazingly inconsistent, mostly breakneck and sometimes silly tracks that would have felt unfashionable were it not so cohesively convincing in its mission statement: If rock is about doing whatever you want (but loudly), we’re gonna do whatever we want (even more loudly). The combined force of 10 new songs and seven more cribbed from early EP P’Tang Yang Kipper Bang Uh! (yep), Shashavaglava mostly covets punky thrash, but it also straddles everything from Primus-esque honky-tonk (“Invisible Man”) to ska (“Ol’ Man Sam”) and, bizarrely, the same song again, recorded differently (“Old Man Sam”). There’s a whole lot of “Man” in those song titles, but, perhaps ironically, Spiderbait were one of the first ’90s Australian bands to spotlight a prominent female bassist and singer, Janet English, who takes the mic to fantastic effect on standout “B & T”—and who would later vocally helm one of Spiderbait’s most beloved hits, “Calypso”, from 1996’s Ivy and the Big Apples. In fact, one of Spiderbait’s more unusual and most endearing qualities was firmly established here: The rhythm section, including English and drummer Mark “Kram” Maher, sings. Spiderbait’s biggest single wouldn’t arrive until 2004 with their infamous cover of Lead Belly’s “Black Betty”, and there are no such flights on Shashavaglava. “Too Much” is a thrash metal song laden with an array of time signatures; The Goodies’ “Run” is covered with queasy psychedelic verve. “Bergerac” drowns its swagger in bleating horns, and arguably showcases the first solid, recorded statement of the razor-bladed guitar tone that guitarist Damian “Whit” Whitty would cultivate as an intrinsic part of Spiderbait’s musical identity. Most intriguing of all is the title track (and its separatist instrumental outro, bitingly titled “Scenester”). An early exemplar of jazzcore, the track is a two-minute outburst, replete with scatting. Interestingly, the song that immediately follows offers a completely different musical direction—the blueprint of which Spiderbait would follow to great subsequent success. “Footy” (followed up by “Another Brick in the Head”, which is effectively a rougher version of the same song) hinted at the whiplash sing-along abandon that would introduce Spiderbait to the mainstream with later hits like “Buy Me a Pony” and “Shazam!”.