These nine albums share something. A line from Anthrocene on Nick Cave’s record Skeleton Tree kept coming to me as I wrote this column: “Animals pull the night around their shoulders.”
These are albums you can pull around your shoulders. None have singles that tower above the rest but each has succeeded in making and maintaining a distinct universe; a space you can – or must – enter into and exist in for the duration of the album.
Angel Eyes – The Never Album
Imagine a bunch of 80s synth ballads have splintered apart. The filler is shed, leaving just shards of pure glistening sentiment. That “bit” in the song that gets you every time. Imagine holding a kaleidoscope full of these fragments to the light as they settle into strange new shapes. The music of Angel Eyes (Andrew Cowie) has no hooks, choruses or earworms. The kaleidoscope revolves, revealing configurations that are beautiful but too fleeting to grasp.
Pastiche of the 80s is overplayed, as is music trading in nostalgia and homage. You must be very good to cut through, and Cowie is a master. He knows when to let a single sound or beat ride out alone and precisely when to seed in the next. Bent, stretched and warped sounds bleed into each other, as melancholic as William Baskinski’s decayed tape loops. I’m reminded of Bjork, too, saying that making Vespertine’s “microbeats … was like doing a huge embroidery piece”. The Never Album has a similar intricacy but no hard edges. It’s possible the whole thing’s been dipped in afternoon sun.
The Nation Blue – Black
The Nation Blue play heavy rock with heavy themes. Live, they are tight and mean with the locked-in chemistry a trio can really own. Singer (OK, shouter) and guitarist Tom Lyngcoln’s head often bleeds, victim to his habit of bashing it with a mic in a way that appears grimly, personally punitive.
Despite these masculine tropes, it is masculinity The Nation Blue seem to abhor, buckling under the weight of the worst of their gender’s sins. “Packs in cars, packs in bars and staring in the street/AVOs, big black eyes from nice guys, nice guys, nice guys,” Lyngcoln sings on Erectile Dysfunction. On Beat That Man he nails the reality of domestic violence: “Behind closed doors lie third world wars.”
Black was released alongside a second album, Blue, after seven years waylaid by projects including Harmony and High Tension. Perhaps the break allowed them to return purged of any misapprehensions as to what The Nation Blue does best: political punk rock intent on shoving us into the roiling guts of all we have to be angry about in Australia.
Carla dal Forno – You Know What It’s Like
When you listen to the other women Carla dal Forno’s voice is suggestive of – Laeticia Sadier (Stereolab), Zoë Randell (Luluc) or Victoria Legrand (Beach House) – you realise she makes these restrained singers approximate divas. Nico would be a fair call if dal Forno were stern but her voice is serene, inscrutable and more than a little feline. Or, as it was described by Emily Bick in The Wire, “the voice of the eternal observer”.
In an era over-heated by over-sharing and identity politics, dal Forno’s detachedness is an inhalation of cool, fresh air. Trained as a visual artist and living in Berlin, she shares Ela Stiles’ instinct for minimal beats with maximum mood and some of the best songs are instrumental, such as the hypnotic DB Rip, made mainly on a vintage synth.
The record’s best quality is a stillness at its core that can’t quite be fathomed, as if its songs are disturbances rippling silkily outwards while a lake’s centre regathers its calm.
The Peep Tempel - Joy
A flock of corellas squawks as a car revs to life; a Land Cruiser, probably. Singer and guitarist Blake Scott (originally from the country himself) gears down into a talk-sing, heavy on the ‘strine: “My wife’s father was the family patriarch, a detective Sergeant, that’s how I started”. The song, Constable, ends with the purr of an idling motor.
The Peep Tempel follow in the grog-rock tradition of The Cosmic Psychos without banking on our fondness for the boorishness. My soft spot for the Psychos is a legacy item – newcomers don’t get that latitude. Not that they need it. The Peep Tempel’s brilliance lies in inhabiting what they critique. They crawl inside the dusty, drunken skin of the constable and the repellent, cricket-loving miner on Kalgoorlie who slurs: “I’m salt of the earth, assaulting the earth”.
Scott’s voice swaggers from burly punk bully on Rayguns to affected git on Totality and while the characters are bleak the songs boil over from verse to shout-a-long chorus in a way that’s pure pleasure.
Sweet Whirl – O.K. Permanent Wave
Sweet Whirl is the solo project of Esther Edquist (Superstar, Geoffrey O’Connor, Scott and Charlene’s Wedding). Recorded after-hours at Polyester Records, the album captures traffic, trams and people walking by on busy Brunswick Street. Aside from these ambient interlopers it is just Edquist and a languid bass guitar. The album is achingly simple, guided by a shared vision between her and Simon Karis (recorder and producer) that favours a smudged and spatial approach to sound inspired by musicians such as Grouper and Fennesz.
Edquist’s voice is beautiful but shy. Doused in reverb, it never meets your eye but is reminiscent of Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies all the same. The songs duck and weave too, bashful about their beauty, happy to be half-heard in the lo-fi murk. The record’s imperfections are its charms: a blown-out speaker buzzes on Girl, U and Half Moon ends too abruptly. Like Cat Power playing live, however, an abrupt end is choice that illustrates, and resists, how easily we are lulled by cliches like a fade-out. With music this soft on your skin, small acts of rebellion feel big.
Corin - Virtuality
Virtuality strikes you most when a track from it comes on in a shuffled playlist. Compared to anything, really, Corin Ileto’s songs gleam as sterile and silvery as a tool plucked from an autoclave. Play Vexations loud enough and it makes mincemeat of the air. It is electronic music that’s been atomised, analysed and recast harder, better and stronger. Stubbornly devoid of soul and utterly futuristic, it is reminiscent of Kode9’s 2015 record Nothing.
The deconstructed/reconstructed theme persists relentlessly across Virtuality’s seven songs. The chiming synth cascades on Hyperdrive could imposter onto a new age compilation, Point Zero could be the swipes and stabs of a lightsaber in a videogame, and Void is grime on botox with sharp, shellacked nails.
It is a record that poses a question: if this is music made by a human to mimic music made by a robot, would the reverse sound the same?
Oren Ambarchi – Hubris
About a decade ago a friend introduced me to the concept of a “tone poem” with a 10-minute piece called Corkscrew by experimental musician and guitarist Oren Ambarchi. I never verified if the label was correct but I loved the idea; it indicates that Ambarchi’s work is best appreciated via deep listening.
That changes with Hubris, which yields its gratifications far more generously and features a cast of collaborators including Jim O’Rourke, Crys Cole, Arto Lindsay, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Joe Talia.
While Hubris 3 will enthrall fans of heady skronking noise-jazz, the airier Hubris 1 appeals most to me, playfully revealed only in its last moments to be centered around a loop (presumably) of muted guitar plucking. Its mood is light yet hypnotic; it could soundtrack a film sequence in which a high stakes code-cracking marathon ensues. While it is similar in kosmiche flavour to the effervescent synth jams of Edition Mego labelmates Emeralds, it is truly satisfying to hear it build so seamlessly over 20 fast-passing minutes.
Thigh Master – Early Times
Some critics say a gig mustn’t inform your evaluation of a record, but they haven’t seen Thigh Master. When the Brisbane band played late and loose at the Union Hotel in Sydney the mood spilled right across the room, freeing everyone of their inhibitions. When I heard their debut record a few weeks later it summoned the same sense of short-lived liberation; a weirdly desperate conviction that you must take that free feel when you can and ride it for all it’s worth.
Mostly, it emanates from singer, guitarist and hot mess Matthew Ford who also runs goal-kicking Brisbane label Tenth Court. The record was written in a Milton share house shadowed by the 4X brewery with “the stench of rotting hops in the air”.
There have been line-up changes since then, and these days the dense guitar tones come care of Innez Tulloch (no surprise given her previous band Roku Music made 2014’s best shoegaze track). Fans of Dinosaur Jnr’s melodic fuzz will delight, while fans of a good old laugh-sing routine will find no better example than Ford’s chorus on Flat City.
Some Jerks – Strange Ways
The inspirations of Brisbane surf garage rock band Some Jerks are worn as loud and proud as a hibiscus print button-up: Dick Dale and The Del-Tones, The B-52s, The Shangri Las and the 5.6.7.8’s.
On the trio’s second record – the first release on new Brisbane label Pig City Records – they kill the Slayer sacred cow by adding handclaps to a cover of Raining Blood and Stratocaster-ing it into a song to do the stomp to. The record’s surf guitar gallop ends just 25 minutes after it begins with a cover of Blondie song Dreaming that sounds a lot like the original but marginally, miraculously better, as Victoria Watson sings it like she’s been perfecting it privately all her life.
