so long and thanks for all the

After some thought and an excessively long period of inactivity, I've decided to put this blog out to pasture.  Any future blogging will occur at my new website (still under construction at present) at oliverdownes.moonfruit.com

Thanks for visiting and feel free to enjoy the archived posts!

I Am Eora

Wesley Enoch is a busy chap.  Taking the time to chat from Sydney Airport before heading back home to Brisbane, the first Indigenous Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company has spent his morning in meetings, finalising the creative details of I Am Eora, the musical show that has bubbled away at the back of his mind for the last four years, set to premiere at the upcoming Sydney Festival.

I Am Eora seems set to extend what is seen to be possible in Indigenous theatre, incorporating music (including that of desert balladeer Frank Yamma, jazz singer Wilma Reading and hip-hop poet Radical Son), performance and large-scale projections to suggest a story without relying too much on overt narrative.  Enoch, who contributed to the opening ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games, describes it as being “like an opening ceremony to a big athletics event”, which although celebratory looks “at the underbelly of things, trying to tell another kind of story, not just the obvious stuff.”

Taking as its point of departure the biographies of three historical figures, Barangaroo, Pemulwuy and Bennelong, the show promises to use their stories to explore the predominant responses of Indigenous people to contact with Australia's colonizers: hostile resistance, a quiet refusal to conform as well as active assistance.  “The dominant narrative is that Aboriginal people just rolled over and let it happen,” says Enoch, “but Pemulwuy resisted and there's been a huge resistance in this country since the very beginning...  What the[se] figures represent is still manifesting today, the warrior, the nurturer and the interpreter.  Many Indigenous Australians experience those three spirits, those archetypes, really in who we are in this country today.”

Although speaking passionately of the ongoing continuities with the deep historical past, Enoch is quick to argue that Indigenous culture is not static but is dynamic and constantly evolving.  “The people who have a vested interest in creating an image of Aboriginal culture as static or authentic thing from hundreds of years ago are people who cannot deal with the fluidity of even the Multicultural Australia... in a pluralist society like Australia, we deserve and should have a pluralist perspective on what Aboriginality is.”

With the show's title, Enoch, who confesses to having a 'tortured relationship' with Sydney, has sought to excavate the meaning of the name traditionally given to the peoples around Sydney Harbour ('Eora' translates as 'people of this place') has traditionally referred to the Indigenous peoples of Sydney Harbour, interrogating what it may mean to say 'I Am Eora' in 2011.

“I think it's actually the people who live in Sydney who are the Eora,” says Enoch.  “That's contentious ... The proposition I'm trying to put forward is that this country can only go forward when we can all say, I am a person of this place, I belong here ... I'll get some flack for it, but I love the idea of art being a little bit contentious … There are lots of different ways of being here and ultimately to be true to an Aboriginal spirit of being of a place, people must feel ownership for a place, care for it, feel responsibility for it as well.”


First published in The Brag

Yum Yum Tree Records Launch

Bellyache Ben and the Steamgrass Boys
with The MFW and The Noise, launching Yum Yum Tree Records
@ Caravan, 9th December 2011

Sydney is now one record label the wealthier with beguillingly named Yum Yum Tree being launched at Caravan last week.  Aiming to support the disparate breeds of music cropping around the warehouses of the Inner West, from the jazz-hued pop of the Elana Stone Band to the kitsch retro of The Cope Street Parade, the label seems set to wreak havoc.  Or make a talented group of friends very happy in any case.

Tucked behind the carwash on Addison Road (smokers hurriedly scattering every time a vehicle rolls through), ceilings adorned with spaceman-costume alum, Caravan certainly provided an appropriate atmosphere of roaches (both kinds) 'n rollerdoors for the evening's entertainments.  First up was experimental jazz / alt-rock trio The MFW (an acronym of the artists surnames, or the descriptive phrase 'motherfucking wankers' depending who you ask) launching their album Sus Scrofa.  Aaron Flower (guitar), Evan Mannell (drums) and Ben Waples (bass) seem to have a habit of establishing rather laid-back indie pop song riffs that are then systematically dismantled into strangely funky blues-influenced improvisations.

Less funky though piling on the experimentalism were second support The Noise, a string quartet (tonight trio) refreshingly unreliant on covers of metal songs, instead ultilising their extreme instrumental ability to create a series of shifting textures, elegant but laden with primitive foreboding.  Delivered at all times with immaculate control, this was improvisatory string playing at its unconpromising best.

For the last umpteen months, those in the know have been adjourning to Madame Fling Flongs of a Wednesday eve, to sip booze 'n Bourbon-based cocktails, lounge on the comfortingly mismatched comfortable lounges and listen to the angel-voiced neer-do-wells that form Bellyache Ben and the Steamgrass Boys.  Having completed their case study investigating the "regular gigging is really the only way to really nail a sound" rule (turns out it's totally true), the fellas tonight moved into phase two with the launch of their self-titled debut album, a modest (7 track) selection from the dozens of traditional tunes and James Daley (mandolin) originals under their collective picks.

Highlights included Bellyache Ben's (otherwise known as Ben Daley) curmudgeonly rendition of unofficial theme-tune Willie Dixon's 'You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover', the fatalistic stomp of traditional 'O' Death' as well as the obligatory kazoo solo from bass player John Maddox.  The Steamgrass Boys have come a long way in the year since coming together; aside from the thrashing they give their instruments, the real attraction here is their vocal chutzpah, the five producing harmonies of unwavering tunefulness and genuine soul – expect to see them hitting the folk festival circuit in the coming year.

The Rescue Ships

Brian Campeau is a jumbling mass of contradictions: a writer of experimental folk who is also an avowed metalhead; a sublimely generous soul (Campeau insisted on purchasing this starving writer lunch.  Score.  If you see him, buy the bloke a beer) who genuinely believes in the rightness of the writings of Ayn Rand; a singer of rare levity who enjoys deploying a similarly punchy bluntness of tongue in casual conversation.  Indeed at first sight, it seems he gets off on giving the impression of being a total jerk.

Thank goodness then for the tempering influence of Elana Stone, jazz songstress, lover of slip 'n slide and awful cheese-related jokes ("what did the cheese say to itself when it saw itself in the mirror?  Hallo Me."  Shudder).  Highly respected soloists in their own right, together they are The Rescue Ships, one of the most exciting pop acts to emerge from the warehouses of Sydney's underground in the last ever.

Named after their song of the same name ("like Iron Maiden" Campeau helpfully clarifies), the two halves of The Rescue Ships originally met through Stone's brother Jake (sometime Brag contributor and Blue Juice mastermind), first contact provoking "hot chemistry - musically and otherwise" (although "the otherwise is not so much anymore") and resulting in numerous instances of both sitting in on each other's solo projects before songs slowly began to be written in tandem.

"For ages we just played each other's songs," says Campeau.  "And then we decided to go to New Zealand, as a writing trip specifically ... During the day we'd go sightseeing and do whatever, during the night we'd just write.  We finished with seven or eight songs probably, of which we've kept three or four ... Since then it's been more of an idea like, one of us will have a snippet of an idea and bring it, talk about it, work on it together, rather than bring a finished song ... Elana's been really focussed on getting a good song together, whereas I've been really focussed on getting really good arty production.  I think we have that common interest in making it as arty as it is songwritery."

"It was quite hard," continues Stone, "us both being lead singers - not [that we have] classic lead singer personalit[ies] or anything - but we were both just set in our ways of doing things.  And we both have very clear ideas of what should happen and sometimes they didn't meet up, so it was at times difficult and someone would have to capitulate.  And a lot of the time that would be Brian ... I've never made an album that was consistent before, and this one is consistent.  I mean, we're not like great radio songwriters together.  We don't really write hits.  We just write things that we think are really beautiful and hopefully quite different from everything else."

Cooperation is clearly paying dividends though, the pair's live sound, set to grace ears at this year's Peat's Ridge Festival, being a vivid blend of the catchy and the oddball, Campeau's frenetically precise acoustic playing being gracefully complemented by Stone's accordion, the instrumentals being topped by the luscious harmonies of two of the city's best live vocalists.

In between seeking further avenues for musical employment (including taking on the Musical Directorship of Underbelly) and making ends meet juggling half a dozen side-projects each (engineering gigs for Campeau, work with Tripod, Blue Juice and even the odd wedding for Stone), the process of polishing the final mix of their upcoming self-titled debut has become a somewhat extended one.  With the end in sight however, Stone is keen to move on to the next stage: "I just want to play really, play as much as possible.  And hopefully to see people enjoying that."


First published in The Brag

Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow

There's only a few people kicking around with the time, money, skill, guts or inclination to pull off an album such as 50 Words For Snow.  It's that rare thing: a musically and thematically unified song cycle.  Tori Amos has given it a stab (somewhat wide of the mark) a few times in the last decade; Björk pulled it off recently with her striking Biophilia; Kate Bush has managed something of similar ambition, the seven tracks presented here unravelling with pristine and unhurried beauty.

It begins in isolate, Bush half-whispering half-crooning a snowflake's descent, falling helplessly through the void over a static piano ostinato.  The listener is immediately plunged into an otherworldly, almost cinematic, space – a filmic preoccupation suggested by this year's Director's Cut.  The music summons a peculiarly northern hemisphere idea of winter, Bush spinning yarns around the fire while outside the ice tumbles on the still, frozen world.

Wilder, far less mannered than 2005's Aerial, Bush has brought her uncompromising talents to bear on cathedral-size canvases, bringing to the foreground a wonder at the missing, the intangible.  Whether it be the girl on 'Misty' waking to find her snowman lover vanished, leaving nothing but “dead leaves, bits of twisted branches” or the Shepherds and Sherpas who find no trace of the 'Wild Man' but “footprints in the snow”, everywhere there is an aching pain at a vanished presence.  See for confirmation the surprisingly palatable duet with Elton John, 'Snowed In At Wheeler Street', in which immortal lovers are destined to forever cross paths that moment too late.

50 Words For Snow is the work of a perfectionist awed by the miracle of something coming from nothing, “born in a cloud”, dazzling and impermanent.


First published in The Brag

The Hunter

Julia Leigh’s debut novel related a wrenching parable unfolding in simple, crystalline prose. It netted her a generous basket of awards while earning her fans in Frank Moorhouse and Don DeLillo, notables who were subsequently joined in their praise by Toni Morrison and JM Coetzee on the release of her eerie second effort, Disquiet.

Indeed, Coetzee’s thoughts on the latter—“[it is] so infused with the practices of film that, while each scene is fully and even vividly realised in words, it also translates quite naturally into film”—are equally applicable to The Hunter, Leigh’s coolly impersonal third-person voice in the novel mimicking the all-seeing eye of the camera, the story developing through smoothly contained cinematic chunks.

Although Leigh has since moved into filmmaking in her own right (see Sleeping Beauty), the author has remained outside the adaptation process of her first novel, the film instead being steered by director Daniel Nettheim, whose television work on shows such as Love Is A Four Letter Word and All Saints seems to have prepared him well for the challenges of feature direction. Shooting from Alice Addison’s screenplay (whose credentials include several episodes of My Place, based on Nadia Wheatley’s award-winning book, as well as the Cate Shortland-directed 2006 police procedural The Silence), Nettheim has produced a smoothly mesmerising film that absorbs without ever quite becoming gripping.

An American mercenary, operating under the name Martin David (Willem Dafoe), is given an assignment by a shadowy biotech company, Red Leaf: travel to Tasmania and find the last Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, kill it, then harvest its blood, skin and reproductive organs to be used for undisclosed research. Operating under the cover of “researching [Tasmanian] devils for the university,” Martin settles into the ramshackle house of Lucy Armstrong (Frances O’Connor), bereft after the disappearance of her husband, and her two children, the beguilingly foul-mouthed Sass (Morgana Davis) and silently watchful Bike (Finn Woodlock), using it as his launchpad into the bush. With Lucy in a self-medicated stupor, Martin is forced to negotiate with the children whose assistance seems dependent on his promise to search for their father, though his interest in them sharpens as he realises that the unspeaking boy may have sighted the elusive Thylacine.

Nettheim has heightened the bitter tensions between conservationists and forestry workers, a stand-off that also formed a backdrop to the novel: in a loggers’ pub a sticker has been amended to read “Save Our Native Jobs,” Martin finds his car with its windows smashed and “go home greenie scum” smeared across the bonnet in faeces after his initial excursion into the wilderness, while the filmmakers apparently used activists’ 2010 blockade of the Upper Florentine as a ready-made set. Martin is steered between the faultlines of Tasmanian society by Jack Mindy (Sam Neill), a rough-spun local who turns standoffish as Martin’s potential as rival for Lucy’s affections becomes apparent.

Although Nettheim has suggested that his treatment of the political forces at work within the state doesn’t take sides, the occasional shot of bark being stripped from a tree trunk like a body being flayed cannot help but have a strong political resonance. Indeed, neither can the 360 degree panoramic helicopter shots of Dafoe trudging through the spectacular landscape of the central Tasmanian plateau. While such footage allows the land to speak for itself, it also emphasises the character’s isolation within it, highlighting the tension that lies at the story’s core: between those who see the world and the creatures that inhabit it as a resource to be utilised for the material ‘progress’ of humanity and those who view it as holding an inherent value and right to exist in itself.

It’s in the way this struggle plays out in the character of Martin that most differentiates the film from its source material. Brilliantly cast as the bland, craggy everyman, Dafoe seems to completely inhabit the role, predatory eyes hinting at a coldly utilitarian intelligence. Martin moves through a staggeringly beautiful landscape with profound disinterest, his mind completely focused on his task, constructing snares and traps for the creature with meticulous patience. Each action unfolds with an unerringly ruthless logic: in one scene the hunter guts a wallaby only to throw the body away once a particular organ has been conserved as bait. The possibility of love with Lucy is similarly sacrificed, Martin maintaining the fiction that the children’s father is simply ‘missing’ for as long as it suits the needs of his mission.

This notwithstanding, the demands that commercial cinema have placed on the plot seem to have fundamentally altered the emphasis of the narrative. Unlike the novel, in which Leigh allows her character’s callous and implacable nature to remain ascendant through to a sublimely bleak conclusion, Nettheim and Addison subtly transform the narrative from a story of the consequences of exerting dominance over nature to that of a man becoming aware of his ethical responsibility towards the natural world. While other alterations to the narrative—such as injecting additional tension by heightening the animosity with the loggers and the hidden presence of Red Leaf—result in strong cinema, this larger change sits uneasily with the material, a fact compounded both by the deeply ambiguous resolution that the filmmakers have given their version of the narrative, but also by the cloyingly saccharine coda that manages to undercut all that has gone before.

Anna Krien concluded her superb 2010 overview of the Tasmanian forestry debate, Into The Woods, musing on Edward O Wilson’s vision of the “Age of Loneliness” that will surely follow the Holocene Extinction Event through which we are currently living: “a planet inhabited by us and not much else…no apocalypse, no doom, no gates of hell, no wrath of god or mass hysteria, only sadness. I wonder if perhaps the Age of Loneliness has already begun, its effects far more complicated than we realise.” A similar melancholy pervades The Hunter, settling in the hollows of Dafoe’s ravaged face, the stillness of the trees. Narrative niggles notwithstanding, Nettheim's film is an important contribution to Australian cinema.


First published in RealTime Arts, Iss. 106, Dec 2011-Jan 2012, p 17

Björk - Biophilia

Biophilia is easily Björk’s most ambitious project to date. While it’s easy to get distracted by the technological innovations that she has facilitated around it – the educational iPad apps alone may have far-reaching effects on future artistic endeavours – the fact remains: Biophilia is also Björk’s most musically potent record since 2004’s Medulla, and arguably since Homogenic back in 1997.

It begins unassumingly enough, the unhurried descending harp line that opens ‘Moon’ soon giving rise to tendrils of melody, with gradual accretions of texture blooming into some of her most luminous and pained vocal harmonies. Björk seems characteristically preoccupied with the hidden processes of the universe, whether that be crystal formations ‘spread out like my fingers’ (‘Crystalline’), the mystery of ‘Dark Matter’ or the sombre hymnal of ‘Cosmogony’. The clustered dissonance of ‘Hollow’ may stretch some listeners’ patience, but the artist mostly seems to have reached a reasonable balance between pop accessibility and experimental excess.

'Biophilia' loosely translates as ‘love of the world’. While Björk’s lyrics are indeed saturated with a sense of wonder at the mind-boggling forces that permit life to continue, she uses much of the geo- or biological imagery as a metaphor for human processes. Take, for instance, the soft optimism of a virus wooing its way into a cell (‘Virus’), or the grinding dirge of ‘Mutual Core’, a relationship being refigured as the inevitable drift of tectonic plates, with Björk creating a lyrical synthesis between the forces that compel the human heart and the molten dynamo that drives the planet.

A brilliant return from one of Iceland’s few remaining sustainable exports.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 437 November 7th 2011

Cass McCombs - Humor Risk

Cass McCombs does things his way: if he feels like abstaining from the circus of the music media cycle then he will; if he wants to write a screenplay awash with semi-prophetic rant (think Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain – an excerpt is available on his absurdly clunky website) then he will; if he feels like releasing two collections of unobtrusively original songs written in his comfortingly familiar yet bizarrely idiosyncratic style within the space of six months, then he damn well will.

Taking its name from a Marx Brothers’ film, Humor Risk has been touted as the sunnier counterpart to the claustrophobic Wit’s End released back in April. Though it’d be a stretch to call it optimistic, first single ‘Robin Egg Blue’ is easily the most upbeat track McCombs has written since ‘Dream Come True Girl’ from fourth album Catacombs, a levity perhaps stemming from a letting go of former melancholy, with McCombs admitting “what’s done is done”. Unlike the uncanny stasis towards which Wit’s End groped its way, most songs here possess some measure of energy and groove, whether it be the grunge of ‘Love Thine Enemy’, the supple warmth of ‘The Living Word’ or the mid-tempo rock of highlight ‘The Same Thing’.

But McCombs seems incapable of ignoring inner darkness completely. Straddling the album’s mid-point, ‘To Every Man His Chimera’ provides the doom-laden rock on which the other songs pivot, McCombs crying with a strangled yelp “it’s you again”, as though catching sight of his own steel-eyed doppelganger in the mirror. It’s the exception however, ‘Mariah (Sketch)’ closing the record with a tender, lo-fi beauty.

If most pop music is Rice Bubbles, then Cass McCombs writes musical quinoa.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 437, November 7th 2011

Music Is Sound And Anything Is Possible - The Flaming Lips

“It inevitably ends up looking like some woman’s vaginal parts… that’s what usually happens,” says Wayne Coyne, of the doodlings that are taking shape on his kitchen table in Oklahoma City. Chatting amiably ahead of The Flaming Lips’ upcoming appearance at Harvest Festival, their frontman’s thoughts on the creative process are revealing. “I usually just start with like, no idea,” he continues affably. “When our mind is not completely engaged it’s a little bit freer. It’s like these are not our thoughts, they’re just thoughts. If I dreamed that I killed my mother and fucked her corpse, [then] it’s a dream, get it over it. But if you think that in real life, you’re a horrible person. I think there’s probably something to that.”

Matricidal necrophilia aside (the picture he drew while we chat, later posted on his Twitter feed, is a doozy), giving his right brain free reign has certainly served Coyne well. After two decades peddling off-the-wall, occasionally high-concept, psychedelic weirdness, the band reinvented themselves with the lushly orchestrated pop of 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, before erupting into the mainstream with the much-loved Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in 2002. Acclaim and commercial success followed – Yoshimi’s ‘Do You Realize??’ was even voted in as the official Oklahoma state rock song in 2009 – which continued with 2006’s At War With The Mystics, though that record’s syrupy singles suggested a creative cul de sac had been reached.

“The worst thing that can happen to musicians is that they begin to believe that they’re songwriters,” Coyne says, of this impasse. “Then they suddenly get thrown into the untouchable realm of The Beatles or the Bob Dylans and then sit there and think, ‘I’ll just sit here and put together these little phrases and these little chords and they’ll become songs’… But a lot of times we’ll be working on a song… and quietly, while we’re doing this thing, something else starts to happen. If we’re smart or if we’re listening, we will drop what we were trying to do and go with what is actually happening.”

What actually happened was Embryonic (2009), a sprawling high-concept double album in the mould of Bitches Brew or The Wall. Veering from implacable, crunching rock to maudlin ballads to hallucinatory apocalyptic hysteria, with the music ripped apart by spasmodic day-glo eruptions and at times eerily unsettling recordings, the record brought the group’s earlier densely psychedelic experimentalism to bear on their pop sensibilities, with mesmerising results. “I’ll be the first to say that I’m not a very good musician,” admits Coyne, “but this way of being free to play [with] wherever the dynamic of the room takes you – we know that there’s a real value in that because you [come up with things you] can never think of… We gave ourselves this self-indulgent license to do these jams, and I think that once we started to work on the jamming sections [of Embryonic], we never went back to anything that would require us to have any discipline – we just thought ‘Fuck, why don’t we just let ourselves go?!’ We were just trying to avoid the predictableness of our own stupid nature – it was a way of tricking our nature into listening to the music as opposed to being the people who were making it.”

Of course, ‘avoiding discipline’ is not the same thing as ‘kicking back’. Since birthing Embryonic, Coyne & Co. have been busy, with their 2009 cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety with Stardeath and White Dwarfs, signalling a renewed focus on collaborations and the experimental possibilities of music as a physical product. These tendencies have found full expression this year with a series of endearingly bizarre monthly releases, from ‘Two Blobs Fucking’ (envisaged as a Valentine’s Day musical orgy, the single was designed to be simultaneously played on twelve iPhones), to collaborations with Neon Indian and Lightning Bolt, to the extremely limited release Gummy Song Skull EP and Gummy Song Fetus EP, in which several originals were released on USBs embedded within specially moulded gummy body parts.

For sheer ballsiness though, even these are topped by ‘I Found This Star On The Ground’, a six-hour song written to soundtrack a lysergic journey on a slow night, and packaged in the ‘Strobo Trip: A Light and Audio Phase Illusions Toy’. Going to press, Coyne announced the release of an as-yet unnamed song with a 24-hour play time to be packaged within a real human skull… As you do. “I know some musicians who simply wanna play the music and don’t even want to mix their own songs, while others want to do everything; they want to play the music, they want to do the interviews, they want to mix the songs, they want to do the album covers, they want to make the videos – I think it was Frank Zappa that said, ‘I do everything but take the records to the store’. I can [even] do that.”

Contradictions between the absurdly expensive limited releases mentioned above and professed musical altruism aside, Coyne is eloquent about the potential of music to connect people. “[When] music becomes something that people don’t leave up to musicians, I think that music is better for it. It doesn’t belong to you or me; it’s here, enjoy it. Some people make a million dollars playing and some people don’t make any, that’s the way it is, but I think the idea that music is just sound and anything is possible – I love that.”

It’s an approach that the Lips have certainly brought to bear on their live shows; the extravaganzas involve animal-costumed back-up dancers, 50-foot-tall projections of naked dancing women and confetti cannons, not to mention Coyne’s penchant for surfing the crowd from the comfort of a giant bubble. Which begs the question: do The Flaming Lips feel some sort of ethical obligation to get people off? “For us it’s an opportunity to live in that other dimension which is just that thrill and enthusiasm,” says Coyne. “That can be very addictive, when you’re in front of the audience and you see the potential for this great thing to happen. I think our best music requires that the audience have some emotional connection to it. If we’re singing about love and death [and] the audience just wants to get drunk and scream, it’s not as powerful for us. We want, for lack of a better word, to communicate these things.

“I want the audience to know that I am this music; I mean, all the fellas are, but [I am] as much as anybody can be this thing. I wouldn’t have this life if they hadn’t let me do it and given me money and encouragement and all that, so I just fucking go for it. I really do not fear failing or looking like an idiot or drawing a stupid picture. I believe I have been given a license by our fans [who’ve] said, ‘Wayne, just fucking go for it. Better to screw up ten times and come back with one thing we haven’t heard before than play it safe.’ I think the reason why we’re worth listening to is because we’re kind of insane, y’know?”


First published in The Brag, Iss. 435, October 24th 2011

The Eye of the Storm

Filmmakers brave (or foolhardy) enough to tackle Patrick White's rich literary legacy might be counted on a couple of fingers. Although Voss has been successfully adapted to the operatic stage, nothing came of Harry Miller's proposed film in the late 60s, while Jim Sharman's The Night, The Prowler (1978) was filmed from White’s own script.

During the author’s lifetime this paucity might have been attributed to the inexorable control that White exacted over his work and legacy—to the point of denying his own official biographer access to his private journals. However since his death, a new generation has been slow to grasp the opportunity presented by the novels. Indeed, it’s an experienced team who’ve risen to the challenge with The Eye of the Storm, the novel that tipped the scales to net the author his grudgingly accepted Nobel Prize in 1973.

Former socialite Elizabeth Hunter (Charlotte Rampling) lies dying in her lavish residence by Centennial Park in Sydney. Occasionally lucid, though as often floating on an ocean of memory, her needs are attended by two nurses, the sassy Flora (Alexandra Schepisi) and saintly Mary (Maria Theodorakis), a housekeeper, the irascible masochist and Holocaust survivor Lottie Lippmann (Helen Morse), as well as stalwart family lawyer Wyburd (John Gaden). Into this delicate arrangement arrive Elizabeth’s estranged adult children: Dorothy (Judy Davis), the Princess de Lascabanes, smarting from a failed marriage into European aristocracy that has stranded her in middle age with nought but a title and some jewels; and Basil (Geoffrey Rush), a rumpled actor, knighted by the British, who floats through life playing to other people’s expectations while haunted by his failure as Lear, the role by which he measures the limits of his talent. Temporarily united by a shared plan to pack their mother away to a nursing home and generally accelerate their inheritance of her fortune, the pair descend upon the deathbed to extract what they feel is owed.

The extent to which the film is seen as a successful adaptation depends entirely on the degree to which the story is viewed as inseparable from the prose in which it was written. The pleasures and frustrations of White’s writing—which for many may amount to the same thing—unravel organically, brilliant tendrils of digression curling away from painstakingly crafted scenes, present action illuminated by streams of consciousness, prose of unrelenting precision sinking its barbs into the reader’s mind: “the women, either in loud summery shifts, apparently with nothing underneath, or else imprisoned in a rigid armature of lace, shrieked at one another monotonously out of unhealed wounds.” Writing to Cynthia Nolan in early 1970, White commented that the novel was “going to be in the shape of a spider’s web,” and indeed to read it is to trace each thread through the concentric circles of narrative that slowly orbit Elizabeth’s impending death.

The dangers in adapting a narrative of this complexity are manifold. Judy Morris, whose lengthy resume as a film and television actor is complemented by writing credits on the Babe sequel Pig in the City (1998) and George Miller’s dancing penguin extravaganza Happy Feet (2006), has sharpened the primary relationships while shearing away the majority of Elizabeth’s mental forays into the past, trimming the frumpish Jessie Badgery from her entourage and generally rearranging and combining scenes to allow a seamless cinematic flow, one that is amply realised by director Fred Schepisi.

Having made his name at home directing films such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), Schepisi departed for the US where he solidified a reputation for producing films both critically respected and commercially robust. With Eye he is less analeptically trigger-happy than might have been expected, relying on loaded visual imagery to suggest the barely supressed corruption in which White revelled, the camera lingering on mould formed on a dish of preserves, two kilos of beef rotting in a garbage bin, and worms “lashing themselves into a frenzy of pink exposure” beneath rose bushes “at the climax of their beauty.” The film combines lush costumes and decor—gilt bed frames, colonnades and chandeliers. The house at Centennial Park is an exercise in opulence. Adding a smoothly vapid jazz soundtrack, Schepisi succeeds in capturing the crass indulgence of the period without aiming for the florid ruthlessness with which White represented his countrymen—although Colin Friels’ lascivious politician Athol Shreve comes close.

One of Schepisi’s most obvious achievements with this film is simply assembling a cast of such calibre. Judy Davis is superb as Dorothy, the perennially disappointed princess, murmuring the correct formalities through sour lips, roiling insecurities being permitted meagre outlet as she kicks her mother’s tasteful furnishings. Trained by Elizabeth in pursuit of wealth, Dorothy takes none of her mother’s unalloyed pleasure in the material; in one brilliant scene, she is surprised by Mary while rubbing her face on a sumptuous rug, Davis’ face collapsing from mortification into self-disgust on learning that the fur is platypus. Rush is equally good as the fumbling, narcissistic actor: “I think I might be ready for something real” he tells Flora with sublime self-delusion after their mutual seduction— though his presence tends to overwhelm the whole, a fact not helped by his unnecessary narration.

Charlotte Rampling is also excellent as the still-regal Elizabeth, her features displaying both the collapsed beauty and inner steel of the dying matriarch. Even from her death bed she is capable of slicing through the affectations of her love-starved children, out-performing the debonair Basil in their excruciating reunion or reducing Dorothy to sputtering incoherence with a sweet enquiry: “Are you going through a difficult time again?” However it is in its representation of Elizabeth that the film runs against the limits of the medium. In the novel, White accessed scenes from across a lifetime of casually unthinking egotism and the brutal pursuit of status, offering her character both as it was and is perceived in recollection all at once. Rampling, though brilliantly cast, can only gesture toward such psychological depth.

This is made manifest in the way both texts deal with Elizabeth’s moment of revelation, where, battered by the hurricane of the title on the fictionalised Brumby Island, she relinquishes her own unyielding hold on life and experiences a moment of sublime grace. In the novel, her rambling mind persists in returning to this moment, which both anchors the novel and her character, the insight into her own selfish refusal to open herself to love casting its illumination across the rest of her life. “She was no longer a body, least of all a woman,” White writes. “She was instead a being, or more likely a flaw at the centre of this jewel of light: the jewel itself, blinding and tremulous at the same time, existed, flaw and all, only by grace.” Limited as he is by the eye of the camera, Schepisi is merely able to capture the image of Rampling standing in the surf, dappled by the shadows of seabirds, her face upturned and exaltant. Although beautiful, the moment is perhaps unavoidably stripped of much of its psychological and indeed metaphysical resonance.

“The worst thing about love between human beings,” declares Elizabeth early in the novel, is “when you’re prepared to love them they don’t want it; when they do, it’s you who can’t bear the idea.” Over the course of nearly 600 pages of vividly imagined prose, White meticulously traces the destructive effects of attempting to impose one’s will on the heart. In contrast, Schepisi and Morris have managed to dramatise the essentially meaningless theatre to which relationships descend when denied loving sustenance.


First published in RealTime Arts, Iss. 105, Oct-Nov 2011, p 21

Big Scary - Vacation

Since coming to the rather sensible realisation that playing in a band is preferable by far to dealing with things like jobs or rent, Melbournians Tom Iansek and Jo Syme have been quick to get on with it: half a dozen EPs, including the themed ‘Seasons’ releases, supporting tours with acts like The Vasco Era and Midlake, as well as numerous solo shows. With their debut long-player, the pair have assembled a solid collection that sums up their work to date without quite hitting the electric rawness of their EPs.

Loosely unified around the thought that Big Scary are on a holiday from the ‘real world’, Vacation is rife with images of uncertainty. “I can quote my favourite line / I can calculate the distance in sine” Iansek declares on second single ‘Gladiator’, before recognising his inability to effect events: “it makes no difference anyway”. Though some of the material here seems a touch adolescent, Iansek is able to inject a whole universe of frustrated vigour into a line like “I’m just bored / I don’t know what to do with my life” (the piano-powered ‘Mix-Tape’) with a throaty yowl that is completely convincing.

Though the genre-tripping for which the pair quickly became known is less flambouyantly displayed here, Iansek’s writing retains all its versatility; the stripped down blues of ‘Purple’ is followed by the synth-blurred ‘Child In A Tree’ and the contemplative downer ‘Bad Friends’, in which Iansek’s beautiful upper register lends “my friends are all getting drunk somewhere without me” a genuine poignancy. But the highlight is a re-recording of ‘Falling Away’ from the Autumn EP, which casts a small shadow across the rest of the record.

Impressive as much for the wide-ranging breadth of Iansek’s songwriting as the clear-eyed certainty of the pair’s performance, Vacation is a promising debut LP.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 432, October 3rd 2011

Ganglians - Found Sounds 'n Sad Slackers

Fun fact: Sacramento has one of the highest unemployment rates in the United States. Given that, it’s perhaps not so surprising that friendly local psychedelic popsters Ganglians are somewhat preoccupied by the realities of life under late capitalism. ‘Drop The Act’, the track which opens their euphoric third full-length effort Still Living, is nothing short of a slacker call to arms, singer Ryan Grubbs hollering with frenzied glee: “this is a sad, sad song / for all you sad, sad people / why don’t you pick up the phone / and tell me what you’re gonna do?”

Recovering from the flu contracted on a recent tour, guitarist Kyle Hoover is chipper about the band’s situation. “Worklessness, joblessness, feeling as though you should be doing something with your life but are completely unable to do so. On [‘Drop The Act’] I know that Ryan’s trying to capture an ‘inspire our generation’ [vibe], but … there’s sort of like a mocking sort of feel, like, ‘Yeah! Let’s get together and do nothing, guys!’”

A double irony, as in a few short years Ganglians (a play on ‘Gangly Aliens’ or ‘Gang of Aliens’ – take your pick) have compiled a small but impressive discography, their most recent effort being preceded by the sprawling lysergic spatter of Monster Head Room as well as their self-titled debut. Coming together over a shared love of Brian Wilson’s sixties songwriting (particularly the creepily beautiful Smiley Smile), Hoover also cites The Millenium’s Begin – “the most perfect studio pop record of the sixties” – as a vital touchstone.

Integral to Ganglians’ take on hooks and harmonies is their incorporation of found sounds and samples, lending their songs a cinematic edge. “[We] like to give it that element of escapism,” says Hoover. “When you circulate that sound collage stuff, it makes it feel like you’ve created your own little universe … we use [samples] for that purpose, [establishing] atmosphere … But on [tracks] like ‘Things to Know’, they’re just plain silly – like you know, where the motorcycle builds up and he’s like, riding off into the distance.

While Still Living is rife with tongue-in-cheek touches, Ganglians are just as capable of offering songs up straight from the heart. “’California Cousins’ and ‘Sleep’ are much more personal songs,” says Hoover, “especially for Ryan, he was dealing with relationship issues and whatever else … Half of the album is us getting together and jamming stuff out; half the [songs] were probably written in one night,” he explains. “Then there were songs like ‘Sleep’ that took us like weeks to figure out how we wanted it to work. It’s kind of a bit all over the place.”

Despite his recent brush with the lurgy, Hoover is keen to get back on the road – anywhere’s better than Sacramento. “We’ve been stuck at home, I’m at my folks’ house and Ryan’s able to couch surf wherever we are, but there’s a large period of time where we’re both jobless and homeless. We’re like, ‘When can we get on tour again so we don’t have to worry about life!’ That said, we’ve always both known that the best part about being in a band is writing a record and being in a studio and recording,” he says. “It’s the most magical experience.”


First published in The Brag, Iss. 428, September 6th 2011

Pajama Club - Pajama Club

The first and most important thing to say about Pajama Club is that they are not Crowded House. Nor should they be seen as simply another vehicle in which Neil Finn might practice his songwriting mastery. Rather, they are a band in their own right, Finn being joined by Auckland songwriter Sean Donnelly, drummer Alana Skyring (ex-The Grates) and his better half Sharon Finn, whose contributions here, both on bass and vocally, combine to ground the project (as they undoubtedly have her husband’s career) while lending it a dark, sultry edge.

Opener ‘Tell Me What You Want’ sets the score in this regard, Sharon singing “tell me what you want / show me how to do it / tell me what you need / I can do anything” in a breathy mantra over an oh-so-smooth bassline. Indeed, Pajama Club is a surprisingly bass-heavy listen; the punchy power-pop chorus of ‘Daylight’ is reached via a verse punctuated with deep and menacing eruptions, with a sense of earthing also true of the simmering ‘Dead Leg’ or ‘TNT For Two’.

Finn has obviously gotten a kick out of experimenting with his friends – everything is coloured with sampled sounds and electronic ornament. That said, it is the stripped-back acoustic ‘Golden Child’ that forms the record’s emotional core, dealing with touching eloquence on the pains of letting one’s offspring go. The album highlight, it is also the odd one out, being more reminiscent of Ghost Of A Saber-Tooth Tiger’s Acoustic Sessions, Sean Lennon’s serially underrated project with Charlotte Muhl, than the night-life flavours of the rest.

Pajama Club provides an equally invigorating and oddball answer to the question of what to do when one’s excessively hirsute offspring flies the coop.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 425, August 22nd 2011

Fruit Bats - Tripper

The preoccupations that Eric D. Johnson chews over on Fruit Bats’ fifth record are summed up pretty much perfectly on Tripper’s cover: a small band of antelope stand on a sun-dappled prairie, a dirt track disappearing over a low hill below a big sky, cumulus roiling gigantic away towards the horizon. It’s so striking that Sub Pop have been thoughtful enough to blow it up times five on the accompanying fold-out poster-cum-lyric-sheet – normally these things aren’t worth commenting on, but if ever an image said ‘freedom’, this is it.

On 2009’s excellent The Ruminant Band, Johnson threw the emphasis of his one-time solo project onto the talents of Fruit Bats’ full band; with Tripper he’s wound it back a bit, biting off harder, richer, but lonelier fare. Unlike the invented mythology of fellow indie folksters Blitzen Trapper, or the meandering musings of Vetiver’s Andy Cabic (whose longtime producer Thom Monahan has done a stellar job here), Johnson spins rangy yarns of characters seeking a path into the wide blue yonder.

‘Tony The Tripper’ sets the score: life led on the fly and chance meetings with random sorts, over a simple propulsive riff and Johnson’s Robert Plant-ish cries. These ideas are also covered on ‘Heart Like An Orange’, or the organ-powered ditty ‘Dolly’, an equally organ-powered persona talking the title lass into hitting the road… The flip-side to giving free-rein to feet with a mind of their own – expulsion to the “fucked up world” – is charted in a surprisingly effective Bee Gees falsetto in ‘The Banishment Song’. But as he sings in late album highlight ‘Wild Honey’, “to own nobody / to owe nobody” is, for some, an end in itself.

For Johnson freedom comes at a price, but it’s one that is ultimately worth paying. Much like this excellent record.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 425, August 15th 2011

Devendra Banhart, Husky @ The Metro Theatre, Wednesday July 27

Considering that it's one of the most stable professional venues in the city, there's an eerie tendency at the Metro for the mechanics of the place to become tangled with unfriendly results.  Tonight's example was a doozy: make it compulsory to cloak bags AND charge punters three bucks for the privilege.  Although it's possible that the crossed wiring existed solely in the mind of one endearingly confused security guard, that would go against the working theory that the venue will soon be issuing oxygen masks (with attached meters) at the door, thus allowing them to charge by the lungful.

Not that they would have made too much tonight, a sparse constellation of starry-eyed lasses and beardy-faced lads arrived right on time, to sit cross-legged and stare wanly up at Brunswick-ites Husky. With a sound that seems to encapsulate perfectly the nostalgic rural folk in vogue thanks to the likes of Fleet Foxes (which allowed them to get away with a rather nice cover of America’s ‘A Horse With No Name’), it’s unsurprising that their warm vocal harmonies and solid, albeit workmanlike, songwriting was well received – though the Matt Bellamy-channelling keyboard solo that at one point spontaneously erupted seemed rather unnecessary.

Earlier fears of the venue being strewn with naught but tumbleweed courtesy of the competition over at OAF (Wild Beasts) proved unfounded by the time Devendra Banhart (Patron Saint of Jesus Beards, Journeys-To-Find-Oneself and Hacky Sack) took the stage. A group of acolytes as diverse as they were enthusiastic managed to generate the kind of coming-together-love-fest vibe not normally seen outside of American teen dramas. Looking considerably more clean-cut these days than indie mythology might have one believe, Banhart didn’t really hit his stride tonight until backing band The Grogs left him to it for a bit, his quavering solo croon setting hearts (and ovaries) trembling. Make no mistake: Banhart is the real deal, a consummate performer and patchouli-scented heart throb, whose at times patchy songwriting is more than compensated for by a live presence both inimitable and utterly magnetic.


A reduced version of this was published in The Brag, Iss. 424, August 8th 2011

Film Review - Toomelah

Toomelah is a speck on the map between Moree and Goondiwindi in north-western NSW.  A former mission, its history reflects that of Australian black/white relations in eerie synecdoche: policies of assimilation, church intervention and the Stolen Generation; recognition of legal rights, cultural amnesia and the social corrosion of drugs and alcohol; political apathy and ineptitude, interrupted services and decaying infrastructure.

Toomelah came to national attention in 1987 when it was visited by Marcus Einfield, then president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, to see first-hand its appalling living conditions, then again in 2008 when its district nurse resigned, exhausted by twenty years of bearing witness to endemic neglect and abuse.  It’s also where director Ivan Sen’s (Beneath Clouds, 2002, Dreamland, 2010) mother grew up. His third feature is a quietly gripping portrait of the community and paean to childhood. The film opens with a young boy, Daniel (Daniel Connors), waking to an empty house—and fridge. His mother spends her days in a haze of marijuana smoke, while his grandmother sits quietly in the sun, alone with her memories. Free to fend for himself, Daniel wags school, dreaming of becoming the boxer that his father (Michael Connors) was before alcohol claimed him, or a ‘gangsta’ like Linden (Christopher Edwards), the local dope dealer and default father-figure to Daniel.

The film unfolds gently, what plot there is arising from the sluggish rhythms of daily life in the settlement. Daniel’s Great-Aunt Cindy returns for a visit, decades after having been stolen from her family; Daniel valiantly pretends he doesn’t care whether 10-year-old Tanitia (Danieka Connors) likes him or not, while nursing a grudge against another child, Tupac; and Linden struggles to maintain control of the local drug trade when Bruce (Dean Daley-Jones) is released from prison and returns to town.

Connors is excellent as the mischievous Daniel, a wide-eyed observer in an adult world, discovering its limits with thoughtful curiosity. It is at times a brutal world however, and Sen is unflinching in his depiction of the community’s degraded circumstances—some may be turned off immediately by some extremely coarse language—while simultaneously showing tremendous compassion towards his subjects: the elderly, burdened with a history of dispossession and cultural destruction; their addiction-ravaged offspring; and the new generation who seemingly face a bleak future of stunted opportunities and more of the same.

Sen wrote the film after visiting for several months, his observations of daily life and transcriptions of local conversation providing the raw grist for his script. Despite the spectacular natural beauty of the surrounding country, monumental landscape shots are few and far between; Sen instead shoots his script using a handheld Panasonic 3700 in a rough and ready naturalistic style that suits the material. In this respect, the film employs techniques Sen explored in his experimental second feature film, Dreamland, allowing the story to develop to some extent as the film was shot. Although he doesn’t strive for the kind of visual poetry achieved in Beneath Clouds, Toomelah brims with unobtrusively observed visual detail: black and white photos of people in traditional garb hanging on the school library wall; late afternoon sunshine cutting across kids playing footy in the dusk; a broken exercise bike lying discarded amongst rusted car bodies.

Some may feel the film’s technical limitations detract from its overall impact, however the benefits gleaned outweigh the advantages of a full production unit. Sen’s approach is personal and direct, allowing a level of community engagement that would otherwise have been impossible. Most roles are played by local non-professional actors, their efforts bringing an immense sense of authenticity to the film. That said, the acting, although generally effective, occasionally sags, a fact not helped by Sen cramming historical information into dialogue, to the detriment of the film’s otherwise mesmerising realism. Also, at 106 minutes, it goes for a quarter hour longer than necessary, its pleasing messiness sprawling into flab.

Ivan Sen has remarked that the film should “not be seen as political finger pointing”, and indeed it stands on its artistic merits. However, once the reality represented in Toomelah is accepted, politics must inevitably intrude. “What are you going to do with yourself?” Daniel is asked. “I dunno—what can I do?” is the ingenuous reply. Answering such a question is impossible for Daniel without having any perception of the realities of his circumstance—it is to Sen and the people of Toomelah’s credit that the beginnings of such an understanding might be gleaned from this wonderfully ragged film.

Toomelah was screened at 2011 Cannes International Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard Official Selection and at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival. Australian cinema release date to be announced.


First published in Realtime Arts, Iss. 104, Aug-Sept 2011, p 35

Film Review - Sleeping Beauty

For all the hoop-la that has greeted it, both at Cannes and the recent Sydney Film Festival, novelist Julia Leigh’s directorial debut is a strangely lifeless affair.  Marketed as an erotic reimagining of the classic fairy tale and bearing a stamp of approval from Leigh’s cinematic mentor Jane Campion, Sleeping Beauty might have been mesmerising.  Unfortunately it perturbs more than it engages, elliptically gesturing towards a significance that it steadfastly refuses to represent.

The somnambulist of the title is Lucy (Emily Browning), a 20-something university student. Juggling various casual jobs as a waitress, photocopy clerk and participant in medical experiments, she breaks up her brittle routine by picking up businessmen in bars or visiting her bookish friend Birdmann (Ewen Leslie), an alcoholic misfit with whom she shares some measure of platonic intimacy, the pair united in mocking a comfortable middle class existence from which they seem excluded.

Behind in the rent in her shared house, Lucy answers an advertisement for a position requiring “mutual trust and discretion” from Clara, an imperiously coiffed madam (Rachael Blake). Initially, wearing little but her knickers, she is required to provide silver service to three extremely wealthy old men (Peter Carroll, Chris Haywood and Hugh Keays-Byrne), but is soon offered a ‘promotion’: to lie naked in a drugged sleep while each man does what he will with her. Lucy glibly accepts, blithely asserting that “my vagina is not a temple” to Clara’s oddly prudish assurances that no sex will ensue.

Leigh has said that she strove to create a “tip of the iceberg” feel to the film and indeed, at times it seems to consist entirely of immaculately gleaming surface. Shot in Sydney, the film is bereft of any clear indicators of place, what action there is unfolding within anonymous public spaces or bland, depersonalised private ones. Although many scenes are inflected with unmistakably local touches, for all intents and purposes it could be set anywhere in the western world, Leigh striving to hit an allegorical note unmoored from historical reality.

The script draws heavily from literary touchstones, the tender but impotent nostalgia of the first old man self-consciously echoing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Memories of My Melancholy Whores and Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, both cited by Leigh as important influences. However, her heroine’s determined complicity also recalls Angela Carter’s supernatural version of the tale "The Lady of the House of Love." Like Carter’s vampiric protagonist, Lucy is wilfully passive, “indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming.” In this sense she might be considered what Carter referred to as a “Sadeian Woman,” Leigh using her character’s self-destructiveness as a means of tracing the logic of sexual and economic exploitation. It’s hardly accidental that once she obtains her first payment Lucy burns the money.

Sleeping Beauty is a visually sumptuous and technically assured film. Julia Leigh has benefited from the strong support of an experienced team, including production direction by Annie Beauchamp (Disgrace, Praise), editing by Nick Meyers (Balibo, The Bank) and exquisite cinematography by Geoffrey Simpson (Romulus, My Father, Shine). Their talents combine to lend the film, particularly the scenes in the lavish mansion in which Lucy’s slumberous encounters occur, a plush but austere beauty.

Leigh’s penchant for immaculately composed shots, held well beyond the requirements of narrative, conjures a mood of brooding watchfulness reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s brilliant Hidden (RT75). In that film the director meticulously crafted an air of patient stillness, the implacable, unseen camera reversing the historical power dynamic of French colonialism with eventually devastating results. Sleeping Beauty is similarly deliberate, the camera being as unwavering on the withered bodies of the men as on Browning’s naked form. Although it may be at times uncomfortable to watch, Leigh seems willing to only go so far—her depiction of the sole instance of outright physical abuse (a cigarette burn) is constructed to obscure what it simultaneously depicts, an approach characteristic of the rest.

It may be because of this that Sleeping Beauty frustrates. The enigmatic aura that Julia Leigh carefully nurtures is both painfully affected and needlessly obscure, squandering an intriguing scenario by lapsing into cryptic torpor. Worse, at the screening I attended, a number of moments weighted with an otherwise overbearing seriousness elicited, presumably unintended, laughter. Although not without its pleasures—the performances, particularly that of Browning, are excellent—it is difficult to be seduced by Sleeping Beauty, the film aiming to make a much greater impact than it seems capable of delivering.


First published in Realtime Arts, Iss. 103, web edition, July 12th 2011

The Black Angels, The Laurels, Joel Gion @ The Metro Theatre, Friday July 1

Following an enthusiastically deadpan set from The Laurels, the good officers of City of Sydney brought a rather friendly black tail-wagger inside The Metro to check out all the sights and smells: spilt beer, fake smoke, stale sweat. Although the sight of four policepersons stalking their way through a sea of black t-shirts could never be anything but a welcome one, as an exercise in protecting gig-goers from themselves it seemed to be remarkable ineffective – at least judging from the aromas that began to circulate as soon as the houselights went down… Maybe they were just taking shelter from the drab evening outside.

Former Brian Jonestown Massacre tambourine man Joel Gion provided the soundtrack for an enjoyable interlude of standing-around-and-waiting-for-them-to-get-on-with-it, spinning a bit of ‘60s girl-pop, a little spaghetti western, and generally mixing it up. Considering the raffish charm with which he leads his own group The Dilettantes, it was somewhat disappointing that crowd interaction stayed off the menu for this stint of DJing, Gion limiting himself to mincing gormlessly between the turntable and his box of records, with the occasional pout at the offstage sound engineer. We didn’t think it was loud enough, either.

Neither, for that matter, were The Black Angels. Although they routinely get lumped in with groups such as Wooden Shjips, Dead Meadow or The Warlocks, the Austin quintet’s take on nu-psychedelia relies almost completely on throwing down layer after layer of menacing, scuzz-riven drones, chasing a relentless purity all their own. What was lacking in volume tonight was made up for by the group’s sheer inexorability, a needless cameo from Gion the only thing interrupting an otherwise mesmerising endurance test. Though hardly made for dancing, rhythmic torso gyrations were enjoyed by many, emerging from the darkness energised, sweat-drenched and grinning.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 420, July 11th 2011

Liam Finn - FOMO

Liam Finn’s been a busy chap since dropping his debut, I’ll Be Lightning, back in 2007. With multiple world tours with the likes of Wilco and Pearl Jam, and fingers in half a dozen musical pies (unfortunately the less said about BARB, last year’s collaboration with the wonderful Lawrence Arabia amongst others, the better), Finn The Younger generally takes full advantage of the opportunities offered by some fortuitous family connections.

Which is not to say that he hasn’t proven himself as a solid performer in his own right. His debut contained some lovely moments, imparting with manic energy a vital sense of the world opening up. Such points are few on angst-fuelled second album FOMO (= Fear Of Missing Out), the prevailing mood instead being one of subdued melancholy, occasionally riven by a barely contained agitation. A prime example is first single ‘The Struggle’, in which Finn is perhaps aiming towards the misanthropic excesses of uncle Tim’s darker moments but instead comes off, well, adolescent. It’s a problem that also besets ‘Little Words’: “desire / now it has gone / you’re pretty much dead to me”. Wow… Harsh. That said, he never lets you forget his talent: ‘Roll of the Eye’ is excellent, ‘Cold Feet’ is a surprisingly upbeat slice of power pop, and ‘Chase The Seasons’ possesses all the self-deprecating generosity so conspicuously absent elsewhere.

Given the length of the shadows he’s working under (Liam is not Neil, nor should he be expected to be), it’s unsurprising that Finn has a few insecurities to shake out. But by the time FOMO hits frenetic album closer ‘Jump Your Bones’ he’s managed to convince you that though he’s not quite there yet, it’s only a matter of time.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 417, June 20th 2011

Vetiver - The Errant Charm

The Errant Charm is Vetiver’s fifth full-length release since their self-titled debut back in 2004. The first two largely lived up to the freak-folk moniker that rubbed off from a productive symbiotic relationship with Devendra Banhart, playing The Band to his Dylan, before Vetiver’s songsmith Andy Cabic flaunted his musical erudition with Thing Of The Past – an unassuming but sublime collection of covers of the folk-pop of yesteryear (c. ’68-’73). 2009’s Tight Knit bore the fruits of this back catalogue-mining, and Cabic’s latest collection continues the trend; it’s an exquisitely mellow crop of chillaxed day-glo pop.

Opener ‘It’s Beyond Me’ sets the tone, with Cabic “just a passerby” watching “shameless games”; “I used to understand them / til the rules were changed” he sings, vocals blending inconspicuously into the mix, washed over by quavering licks of pedal steel before Cabic ultimately admits defeat with a bemused smile in the face of the world’s fickle moods, remaining aloof in a world of his own. Things don’t stay downbeat for long, as Cabic muses on receiving the blunt end of reality’s stick (‘Wonder Why’) or getting ready to fight back (‘Can’t You Tell’), with both tracks benefiting from his talent for concocting instantly catchy hooks.

Elsewhere, ‘Right Away’ exhibits pleasing country inflections, though nowhere near the degree of the pounding stomp of ‘Ride Ride Ride’ – it would be difficult to accuse Cabic of originality, but that’s hardly the purpose of the exercise. Before its dissolution in the lava-lamp-lit glow of ‘Soft Glass’, The Errant Charm manages to encapsulate the spirit of searching whimsy that’s suggested by its title.

The Errant Charm is a record that demands to be lived with, its depths slowly revealed a dozen spins down the line.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 417, June 20th 2011