When we speak of Australian music sharing qualities with the continent’s landscape, usually we’re talking about roads. Rarely do the likes of the Triffids or Icehouse or Ganggajang resemble the rugged grandeur of the nation’s interior: it’s always the endless tarmac, chiselling through landscapes few settlers will ever attain familiarity with.
These groups sound dreamy – cinematic – because they recall the tranquility of long-distance travel, the calm of witnessing a strange world unfold without the need to step into it.
Shining Bird belongs to this tradition. The Austinmer group’s 2013 album Leisure Coast displayed some fledgling ethereal leanings, but now the seven piece is more prepared to flaunt them. Black Opal mostly abandons the folksy demeanour of breakthrough 2012 EP Shades of the Sea, trading in its place the sort of textured, contemplative rock Icehouse perfected with Great Southern Land. Like that song, this album bears the dreamy countenance of a leisure driver, and also like that song, it doesn’t sound Australian so much as it sounds like a mysterious, postcard version of it.
It’s easy to be moved by the FM nostalgia of Morning Light, which channels the Church’s best work, while I Can Run recalls a period of Australian rock music when the tiring masculinity of the form was starting to (temporarily) smooth away in favour of something more serene and psychedelic.
The album isn’t a rote practice in style, though: Rivermouth inherits traces of dappled beachside folk from the group’s earlier work, and Love Shadow sounds like It’s My Life-era Talk Talk, accompanied by a fed up drummer. The spectre of the 1980s looms heavily, though there are exceptions like Buried, where bright vocal harmonies join a playful mix of live and electronic instrumentation.
Shining Bird doesn’t sound limited by its influences, but Dane Taylor’s lyrics sometimes struggle to live up to the ensemble’s elegance. Helluva Lot shares another trait with Icehouse’s Great Southern Land: under its celebratory, vaguely patriotic surface lies a critical note, listing the Great Dividing Range and the Murray River as examples of treasures we’ll lose in an inevitable (but not explicitly referenced) climate disaster.
Usually comfortable with universal yearning, this is Shining Bird’s only brush with topicality – an absence which feels odd for a group commonly celebrated for its “Australianness” and known to reference the likes of Murray Ball’s Footrot Flats and Henry Lawson.
Shining Bird trades instead in textures, surfaces, sweeping and ruminative mood pieces for directionless interstate travel, and the group is very good at them. Their approach is borne of a fondness for these once outmoded synth-laden excursions, and they lack the irony or auto-critique which seems to drive other groups – like Client Liaison, for instance – to revisit forms from this era.
It’s nice to hear a band elicit this sentimental quality without resorting to heavy-handed tactics, or without framing their practice as conceptual revision – but it also removes any currency or urgency from Shining Bird’s music. The notion of their sound being intrinsically Australian is one worth questioning in 2016 in a nation that no longer has a claim to the quaint, freewheeling self-image of the 1980s, if indeed it ever did.
If they interrogated their affection for Australiana more critically than they do here, or allowed more traces of the nation’s contemporary life through their filters, Shining Bird could one day be great. For now, Black Opal sounds like a listless, meditative journey; often haunting and evocative, sometimes even beautiful – a view of Australia through tinted windows.
• Black Opal is out 7 October through Spunk
