Clicking through Tex Perkins’ Facebook page, it seems like this venerated singer – Beasts Of Bourbon, The Cruel Sea, Tex, Don and Charlie (the country-blues Aussie supergroup formed with Cold Chisel’s Don Walker), among several others – has carved out a second career for himself as a singer with cover band projects.
Notably, his salacious, velvety growl has seen him portraying Johnny Cash and Lee Hazelwood on separate national tours. Both bad men, with a love for liquor and slicked-back hair.
Tunnel at the End of the Light is the fifth album from the Dark Horses – the band Perkins originally formed to fulfil a (solo) record contract, featuring long-time collaborators Charlie Owen, Joel Silbersher and Murray Paterson. The album is fine, faultless in a way – languid, regretful and steeped in the lore of the open land, the sound of closing prison gates welcoming in the melancholy title track.
On songs like Blind and the stand-out instrumental, Only One, you can hear the influence Perkins and, in particular, guitarist Owen have exerted on a generation of serious male Australian bands, from the Drones downwards. Why then, does this music feel clichéd?
The trouble is, you can hear the effect portraying other men has had on Perkins’ own style: this is music nearly overwhelmed by the tradition it came from and, in its own way, went on to define. There is none of the Drones’ unsettling imagination or political bite, no blood-letting. The Dark Horses have all this power and skill, but instead choose to follow the same musical paths that have by now been trampled into nothingness.
Appropriately, a flawless cover of Racing Cars’ soulful, and very manly, 1977 hit They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is included. So flawless and so appropriate, it feels like the emotion has been sucked right out of it.
The Dark Horses are frequently booked for the cabaret circuit, and you can hear that too. Refined, adult entertainment for late night brooding.
How much enjoyment you extract from the ominous, country-influenced grooves of Tunnel at the End of the Light depends on how much you buy into its imagery of the Dark Horses being hard-livin’ men. Look at that photograph! Would you want to meet any of those men down a dark Melbourne alley late at night?
The emphasis is on the word “men” here. This is a very male album, from the bluesy harmonica wailing in the background to the eight-minute long, Slide On By, to the drawling languor of, Oh Mercy – this music evokes the rugged terrain of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti westerns and Nick Cave’s Stagger Lee.
But there is none of Cave’s devilish humour or dorky demeanour. Perhaps this is what the Bad Seeds might sound like shorn of Cave and conspirator Warren Ellis’ demented lead. A great band with a great singer, perpetually underachieving.
• Tunnel at the End of the Light is out now on Dark Horse Records/Inertia
