For a cult act that was only vaguely known outside their Australian home turf until a 2001 Sub Pop comp renewed wider international interest, Radio Birdman wound up embodying nearly every fascinating facet of ’70s first-wave punk rock in a way that would make them practically archetypal. It helped that guitarist Deniz Tek came to Sydney from Ann Arbor and brought an infatuation with the Stooges and MC5 with him; it helped some more that singer Rob Younger had a voice that used its confrontationally weighty rasp to embody both a “gimme danger” bravado and a “the danger’s getting to me” panic. Their debut LP Radios Appear also put them in the nebulously artsy hard-rock orbit of Blue Öyster Cult, not just off its “Dominance and Submission”-quoting title, but a similar sense of surrealistic Beat-pulp mysticism found in their more ruminative deep cuts like “Man With Golden Helmet” (laced with an amazingly beautiful yet foreboding piano solo by Pip Hoyle that’d do Allan Lanier proud). But the fast-and-loud proto-pop-punk thrills are what really makes them incandescent, especially on the ’78 international-market pressing that added the surf-laced TV casualty anthem “Aloha Steve & Danno” and its omniscient-being’s-unrequited-love b-side “Anglo Girl Desire.” And while some of their kicks hit hard because they’re so direct — the opening three-fer of “What Gives?”, “Non-Stop Girls”, and “Do the Pop” is possibly the closest any ’70s recording artist on either side of the equator ever got to making the Ramones sound mellow by comparison — their added layer of art-garage weirdness, best embodied in mutant-future transhuman shout-along “New Race” and Poe-hangs-ten horror story “Descent Into the Maelstrom,” made them the best exemplars of apocalypse-confronting Aussies this side of Mad Max.