Holly Throsby – A Loud Call (2008)

Sometimes I forget how to sleep.

It happened a few weeks ago for no good reason. Me and my jammies were freshly laundered, my sheets folded back just so, my phone alarm already set for the next morning (‘Your alarm will go off in 13 hours and 43 minutes’). Like a literature-eating bedsnake, I’d slithered between the sheets and burrowed into a good book. My first mistake was that it was too good a book: 900-page The Passage by Justin Cronin, which I read in about four days. My second mistake was that ‘literature-eating bedsnake’ simile I dropped just now. I’m so sorry.

The goodness of this novel was such that I unwisely pushed past the sleep barrier until I gained my second wind. Unfortunately the second wind was nothing like the sweet, lazy first wind that carries me through most days: this one was sour and bitter and a bit soupy, like a lonely old man farting on a hot train. As soon as that turgid, gelatinous tide of wakefulness washed over me I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. Why was I such a stupid reading nerd? Why hadn’t I given into the gentle tug of sleep? Note that I am fully aware of the things I could do with ‘turgid’[*] and ‘gentle tug’ – fully aware – but I’m choosing graciously to move on.

I don’t find it easy to get to sleep at the best of times…actually, that’s a lie. The ‘best of times’ tend to happen after a few drinks, which is, coincidentally, when I’m most likely be near, in, or beaten into unconsciousness. But most of the time, falling asleep is a bit of a chore. When I’m asleep, it’s the opposite: it takes many hours, decibels and brave men to drag me out of a good snooze. Mornings confuse and irritate me, as do the people who cheerfully inhabit them.

I have reason to believe that morning people are insane. This is based on personal experience: I know all too well the terror of living through an entire morning. And I mean an entire morning – from those preternaturally still pre-dawn hours to that final gratifying slide into midday, when ice cream and alcohol become socially acceptable once again. It happened to me that night, when, like a gypsy groom to his bride on their wedding night (I have no evidence to back this allegation, not even hearsay), sleep briefly teabagged me and then fled into the night. At the risk of revealing how sheltered my life has been, it may have been the worst experience I have ever had. There is something, though, nauseatingly frightening about lying in the dark, feeling the pillow grow hot beneath your head, folding and twisting sheets in different combinations, willing the glowing red numbers on your clock to slide backwards, watching the darkness slowly abate and realising, finally, that sleep will never come, that you’ve just spent eight hours lying awake doing nothing but wishing for oblivion, that the day is here and there’s work and things to do and people to be civil to and it’s unreasonably bright for so early and goddammit the birds are loud and how the fuck can anyone say they like this time of day?

There is one thing that can make a night of insomnia almost bearable. It’s not sleep (well, actually, it should be sleep, but I didn’t think of that when I wrote the preceding sentence, and I’m not changing it, so just go with me). Nor is it Jedi kittens. It’s A Loud Call, the trophomore album of underrated Sydney songstress Holly Throsby. Forget Enya (if you hadn’t already) – this is the ideal sleepytime soundtrack, guaranteed to blunt your bitterness when sleep is elusive.

It’s hard to describe what makes Call such a good adult lullaby album without sounding dismissive. For starters, ‘lullaby’ is probably the wrong term. It doesn’t usher you into sleep so much as drown you in comforting restfulness. At the first soft swarming of strings at the start of Warm Jets I can feel tension seeping from me, like interstitial fluid gently flowing from a lymph node into the left or right subclavian vein (sorry, I’ve just been wikiing…) Throsby’s voice is soft, almost conversational and technically unremarkable, but it resonates with something that strikes me as primitive, or at least very old: a deep and weary wisdom wrapped in the tremulous fragility of her words.

It seems to me that in folk music, or one of the many folk hybrid genres (filk music, anyone?), there’s a lot more room for character in vocals. Singers like Joni Mitchell, Regina Spektor, Devendra Banhart or Colin Meloy of The Decemberists (the first four that came to mind) can definitely hold a tune, but more importantly their voices are distinctive and flexible enough to convey a range of personalities and emotions. Technical perfection can be impressive, but more often that not it’s just boring. That’s probably why I don’t give a crap about opera.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that if Holly Throsby’s voice was ‘better’, her songs would be worse. Her lyrics are profound largely for their ordinariness and simplicity. There’s a haunting, familiar quality to her words and a melancholy eloquence in the things she chooses to leave unsaid.

The time it takes to make hearts break
Is the same as for a girl to skip a stone.
And any chore, or a shirt on the floor
Is enough to make a person feel alone.
Enough to make a person feel alone.

I don’t have a favourite song from this album. To be honest, if you mentioned the names of the songs to me, I probably wouldn’t know what you were talking about. Everything about Call – music, lyrics, production – is spare, simple and unprepossessing. One thing just flows into another. This isn’t an album to pick and choose from; it needs to be listened to in its entirety. This is an album to gently inhabit, for a day or an hour or a sleepless night; a small, neat, soft-lit cottage of an album.

After saying all that it seems wrong to leave you with any particular song from Call, so here’s one of her best from her first album On Night.

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[*]I also just learned that turgid can mean “tediously pompous or bombastic” when applied to writing. Shut up.

Westmoreland St

It was the summer of 2008 – the Year of the Potato.

To celebrate, Bry and I were roasting ourselves in spud-like fashion in the sweat-foundry (what’s a foundry?) that was his car. We were young and nearing the end of our first degrees[*], full of convictions and the comforting knowledge that no one expects a student to follow through on his convictions. Only a few hundred metres away, in the dingy study-mines hidden away beneath our uni’s Hogwartsian facade, class was happening; rows of bright-eyed students still somehow fresh-faced and eager after three years or more of grinding away under the yoke of 80% minimum tute attendance. The smart ones – those who would go on to Masters and PhDs, not because they wanted to defer real life for a few more years, but because they actually wanted to do the work – would be asking complex questions to show that they’d understood/done the readings (usually met with a blank stare from the lecturer, who, with twenty years’ teaching experience, hadn’t expected anyone to do the readings and hadn’t bothered to do them herself). The dumb ones – those who make you question the validity of every good mark you get by somehow managing to pass themselves – would be asking if Jane Austen wrote Elizabeth Bennet with Keira Knightley in mind (in an Egyptian Archaeology class). The mature-age ones would be sitting in the back, chatting obnoxiously to one another, talking about life experiences, cracking baby boomer jokes that you could track by the cringes that spread like ripples through surrounding students – and then having the temerity to be really interested in the subject and put enough effort (i.e. any) in to make the rest of us look slack.

That’s would have been happening inside the classroom, but we didn’t care about any of that. Outside, in the baking car in the tree-lined street, we were experiencing other kinds of happenings. Sunlight. Music. Friendship in all its forms: palness, croniage, chummitude. The blissful harmony of two people happy to be perfectly still, knowing that talk will ruin the unspoken conversation. The radio (I want to keep this unbiased, so I won’t mention the station, but its name has 3 Js and it’s Triple J) was serenading us with the soothing discordant caterwaul of some Middle Eastern music, best transcribed as: WWAAAwwawwaWWAAAWWwwawawawEEEEEOOOWWWWWAwwwawaaa. WA! Our legs were hanging out the open windows, sweetly blistering in the hellish sun. Whenever we shifted in our chairs we left furrows of ass sweat behind – the moist g-strings of summer.

A brief lull followed the Middle Eastern yodel – WAAAWweeWAA! This time a bri – WOOllleeOOO! That’s not even how it soun – BLORG!

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A brief lull followed the Middle Eastern yodelling. A hesitant breeze licked our rancid toes. The world was drifting into a doze, a daze, a sweltering haze. The sunburnt silence held until, subtly, seamlessly, it was gently invaded by the friendliest, cheeriest whistling y’ever did hear, cutting through the humidity easy as a pickle through mustard. It was as though the summer, pregnant with its own possibilities, had given birth to a child of pure song, and that song’s newborn cries went a little (aka exactly) like this:

Ever since that day, ‘5 Years Time’ has been, for me, the very essence of summer. It’s instant teleportation to slow, lazy days back on Westmoreland St. Any time I hear it it’s like a strain of freedom, of open spaces, of unscheduled, boundless time, rustling greenery, steam-wavy streets, easy friendship, and staying wild.

I was going to do a music review, but I think I’ll save it for next time.

May you always find love in the bodies of the elephants, too.

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[*] Arts. While the rest of our friends were wiling away the precious years learning about things that society not only understood but also valued – and would also earn them serious NASDAQs (what? I really should have taken economics) – like toxic torts and the synthesis of Keynesian and neoclassical economic theories (actual things), we had taken the scenic, and also circular, route of the eternal student: a magical path of leprechauns and rainbows where there is no such thing as mornings and you only have to walk it three hours a day for three days a week.

On Splendidness

I: In the Grass

At Splendour in the Grass there’s a small stage, no more than 10 metres wide and 7 deep, tucked off to the side of the crowded path that rises to the main tent. A small, grassy slope runs partway around it in a truncated hemisphere, not quite succeeding in sheltering a tiny, bare dance floor, a few hay bales and boxy seats and the meagre audience scattered between them. Twenty or so people lie on the hill, chatting and dozing, seeking refuge from the dust and noise and activity in the peace of shade and stillness.

Underneath the shelter of the peaked stage canopy is a small band. They play accordions, flutes, strings, soft drums. Nothing is electric or synthesised. The singer’s voice is swift and strident, barking and ululating in Hebrew or Arabic, punctuated now and again by stomping and handclaps. This isn’t like the bands that play beneath the huge tents or in the immense amphitheatre: no one sings along and wolf-whistles, there’s no sweaty jostling for space. Three women dance. They are different, remarkably so, but they dance together, then apart, then together again. It’s hard to tell whether they know each other in the real world or whether they only know each other in this tranquil side-place.

One, the most arresting, is willowy and blonde. Long, clinging dresses, pink and brown and blue, cling to her slender form. Her hands weave elegant patterns through the air, as if she’s strumming music from the wind. Even when she moves to sit on the hill her booted feet skip her along with assurance and grace. She leaves behind a brown-haired woman in a feathered cap who occasionally interrupts her arrhythmic dancing to admonish two small children terrorising some of the sleepers on the slope. Both kids are shining-haired and barefoot, and when they pass nearby I see that their blue eyes are beautiful and clear, rich with a frightening vibrancy. It delights me to discover that such purity can exist, crushes me to know that it can’t last.

Or maybe it can. There is a touch of innocence, a childish energy and glee, to the third woman who dances. A touch of innocence, or a touch of drugs – either way, there’s something touching about her as she kicks off her Crocs and glides through motions that are more worship than dance. ‘Elegant’ isn’t the right word for her. ‘Dumpy’ is closer, but then, she’s pushing 65. She resembles a flesh-coloured beanbag filled with jelly. But there’s quietude, a serene self-assuredness to the old woman, and she radiates unconcerned nobility. ‘There’s a hippy from way back,’ say the girls. The other women, apparently, are fakes, faux-hippies in clothing expensively tailored to look cheap and homespun. They seem a bit tawdry now, the ethereal Maiden and the free-spirited Mother, outshone by the saggy-breasted Crone. They’re imposters. They don’t quite deserve this stage, this hemp-tinted spotlight.

The irony is lost on me as the singer announces the band’s last song and I, my $5 hippy headband perched above my $200 Oakleys, run with the girls to the dance floor. We wave our arms and fling ourselves into the air, propelled and surrounded by the swift vacillating whine of the Middle Eastern melody. Our muddy shoes thump down onto the wooden floor, and each time we jump and spin there are more feet stomping, more bodies twirling, more souls winging and swinging through the cool clean air. Some of the people trudging up the main path look around at the noise and movement and a few point, peel away from the pack and run to join us. We dance together, hippies and hipsters, shaking it and faking it, and we’re all chums, we’re long-lost friends, we’re brothers and sisters, we’re dancing to the same pulsing of the blood and that pulsing is the beat, the beat, the euphoric beat.

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II: The Splendour

There are other, bigger stages too, where thunderous music vaporises thought and you rise and fall to sweet loud voices amongst sweaty waves of flesh. In the press of the ecstatic crowd there’s none of the unity that the smaller stage offers. Unity is the joining of disparate things, and there’s no space for that here; individuality is simply eradicated, swept away by the devastating roar of the music that beats at the throbbing masses beneath the cloud-tattered sky.

They must feel godly, the bands and artists who can command such a feverish response from the legions of jaded youth. My pulse beats faster just thinking about it: imagine looking out over a horizon of flailing arms, camera flashes, open mouths screaming out the lyrics that you wrote and rewrote and crossed out and salvaged in your bedroom or hotel room or the cafe or the train. Pausing to hear your own words flung back at you from 30 000 throats that tighten and burn from the strain. In my mind it feels like cresting the highest rise of a rollercoaster with that sickening excitement stirring deep in your belly. In my mind it feels like perching on the edge of a monstrous bluff and hearing the wild sea sing. In my mind it feels like flying.

Image courtesy of Vinni123

The Bluejuice tent is packed, and we’re right in the middle of it. The air is thick and hot, and we sweat and don’t care. There’s a charge running through the crowd, a taut thrumming thread that binds us all with excitement. When a song begins we holler and jump, we slip against the slick skin of our neighbours and don’t care. Lights flash chaotically on stage. It’s hard to see anything in the confusion of darkness and radiance, between the bobbing, swinging heads of those in front, and we sing and dance and don’t care. We know this song! We only need to see our friends around us, to see them singing and thread our voices through theirs. It’s primitively, crazily exhilarating to sing and scream as loud as you can and hear not your own off-key warbling but the frenzied howl of the entranced swarm around you.

Every performance is different, every performance incredible. A handful are so phenomenally awesome that at times I feel something deeply essential within me shift and change key. Temper Trap. Florence and the Machine. Passion Pit. Mumford and Sons. They send me reeling, leaving me off balance for days. We all feel it. That’s what makes it so powerful. That’s what makes it okay, sort of, to go home again – because it’s not just me, because we all know it and sense it, and there’ll always be conversations and Youtube videos and texts and Facebook status updates and we can live it again, or at least a fraction of it, and we won’t let each other forget.

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III: After

I feel adrift for a little while. A little while – I haven’t even been home for three days. It’s not only coming down from Splendour. There’s a new semester, new things to learn, to do, there’s new people around. It’s one of those shifts you go through where it seems everything is changing all at once and you panic and lament the way things used to be until you realise that things aren’t really all that different and they’re probably actually a bit, or even a lot, better than they were before.

I miss it. I miss the bad food, the expensive alcohol, the obnoxious trendsters, the dust, the mud, the exhausted drives to and from the hotel inevitably interrupted by a police RBT. I’ve been listening to Splendour music for so many months that I find it hard to lever myself from that rut, and I don’t even know if I want to. I hope they announce next year’s line-up soon so I can start preparing.

But I’m also happy to be home, where there’s fruit and vegetables in abundance, clean clothing, air con, warm beds, a dog, a family, normality. I’ve always been pretty content with normality, and that contentment hasn’t changed; if anything, normality has. There’s a new element to it now, a different flavour. It tastes a bit like a small piece of awesome. Nowadays I like to think I take a bit of Splendour everywhere I go, injecting it randomly into those I encounter, like a surprise flu shot.

Image courtesy of Vinni123

In reality I probably go around rubbing people’s faces into the fact that I was there in the first place and demanding sympathy for having to return to my pretty fun life after such a ridiculously good holiday.

It’s okay though. This kind of behaviour won’t last. It’s only 12 months til the next Splendour, and I’ve already got my hippie headband packed.

Til next time, Splends. Til next time.

P.S. I love you.

The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love (2009)

I think I’d be obsessive-compulsive if I wasn’t too lazy.

I’m probably not chronically lazy. ‘Chronically’ implies an investment of time and energy that I’m frankly not interested in making at this juncture. No, I certainly don’t put effort into it. Sometimes it sort of feels like laziness isn’t even a conscious decision on my part; it’s like I was born with abnormally deep wellsprings of lethargy, which, combined with the cynicism native to my generation, manifests itself as a kind of apathetic listlessness.

It wasn’t always this way. I was a pretty bright kid, the type who could mentally compose a delicate haiku while solving complex equations and then walk into a glass door or get tangled in a bean bag and fall down some stairs (child prodigies don’t have time for anything mundane like physical dimensions). My parents did their best to instil me with a decent work ethic and nurture the budding flower of my intellect. There were books in abundance – oh, such books! – and gifted and talented classes – oh, such classes! – and times tables set to music in the car – oh, such music! I imagine that’s what they play in heaven’s elevator. Though my nine times tables are a distant memory, I will never forget the sweet strains of the angelic melody to which they were set: nine times one is / nine (ninetimesoneisnine!) Once in a while I’d be regaled with tales of squandered potential or motivational proverbs. ‘Don’t hide your light under a bushel!’ they’d say. ‘Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings!’ But it was all for naught: the ravenous aphids of puberty set in and gnawed away at the dainty blossom that was my innocent brain.

I suspect Dad, ever the realist, adopted a laissez-faire approach to my gentle careen into redundancy a while back, but Mum, bless ‘er ‘eart, still clings to a faint thread of hope. Every now and again she’ll brave the fumes of my room and cast a wrinkly-nosed glance at the dusty jumbles of crap on my shelves and the festering knots of clothes on the floor. I’ll feel her glare graze the side of my head and take a deep breath. We both know what’s coming and we both understand the futility of it, but we know we can’t avoid it: we are propelled by the cyclical weight of history, forced into the roles that our lives have defined for us. Together we dance to a tune that only we two can hear, and it’s the sweetest, saddest tune you can imagine.

Mum says, ‘This room’s a bit of a mess,’ or some variation. When she’s in a more sprightly, frivolous mood she’ll suggest that I clean out my clothing drawers or order my bookshelf. I dismiss these subtle hints with unsubtle scorn, but also sympathy. Mum and I both know that there’s no point to me cleaning out my drawers – I’ll just compile more crap from somewhere and fill ‘em up again. For Mum, though, it’s all about the principle, whatever that may be. Clean drawers open new doors! or some such quaint saying. She has noble aspirations, and I pity her even while I delight in crushing her optimistic spirit. It’s like she’s fighting an uphill battle, and the battle is taking place on a downwards-moving escalator, and the escalator has banana peels on it. And over the hill there’s a cliff.

And yet, against all odds, it’s a battle she sometimes wins. Which is how yesterday I found myself sifting through two decades’ worth of shit that’s accumulated in my room, miserably destroying priceless receptacles of countless childhood memories under Mum’s ruthless cleaning regime. It’s also how I came to embrace my obsessive-compulsive streak: while arbitrarily dividing my t-shirts into ‘chuck’ and ‘keep’ piles, I came to realise that I like them folded a certain way (lie one on its front, fold in one arm then the other, then kind of concertina it up thricewise from the bottom into a little square – that way, you can see the pattern on the t-shirt when it’s in the drawer!) and that I also like them ordered according to the probable frequency of which I will wear them.

Because that took me so long, I found myself in this weird situation where I wanted to clean some shit up but I was just too burnt out (fifteen minutes of sorting out t-shirts will do that to you). As a compromise, I decided to tidy up my iPod. That seemed like a great idea until I realised that I really just wanted to listen to my iPod. So I did that instead. And that’s how I rediscovered The Decemberists.

I was once involved in a serious relationship with The Hazards of Love, The Decemberists’ fifth and most recent album. Oh, we had our ups and downs – what couple doesn’t? – but we were young, and redonkulously in love, and for three or four sparkling, wondrous months the world was ours. But then I messed it all up. I became possessive and weird. Every day I’d come home bitter and grumpy, raging at the cruelty of a life that would foist 6 hours of uni a week upon me. I’d demand constant attention, seethe and snark when I didn’t get it. When my advances were gently rebuffed I would mercilessly force it to play for me, over and over again, while I sat there listening in the dingy darkness, weeping at what I had become. Then one day I came home and Hazards was gone – no message, no note, no nothin’. The worst thing of all was that I just didn’t care. How could such profound attachment have dwindled so swiftly to apathy? It was a question worthy of Dr Phil.

So yeah, I was pretty chuffed yesterday when The Decemberists snuck back into my playlist and thence into my heart. Allow me to explain. Hazards is more than just an album; it’s also a story, simply told, but with incredible emotion and energy. According to Wikipedia it’s a rock opera, but to me that just conjures an image of a robust-yet-skeletal, shaggy-haired androgynoid wielding an electric guitar, wearing a Viking helmet and eating bat heads while singing in an incomprehensible tongue (either Italian or just generic rock-screeching). Hazards belongs in its own genre, a genre which I will coin for The Decemberists now: rock n soul folk-popera. Okay, that’s wildly inaccurate, but doesn’t that sound great?

The premise of Hazards is sort of geeky – kind of like an aural game of Dungeons and Dragons (I imagine!) – which is maybe why it isn’t that popular. Or it could be not that reason at all. I’m not your reason-maker! But I can pretty much guarantee that any creature capable of compassion and feeling will be entirely defenceless against the musical, emotional onslaught that The Decemberists hath wrought (that was a little sample of the lyrical style of Hazards, which includes brilliant lines like, ‘Fourteen lithesome maidens lay alone in their bower’ and, ‘What irascible blackguard is the father?’) Colin Meloy, the band’s frontman and songwriter, has a decent voice, but his true talent lies in threading his incredible lyrics together with the haunting, atmospheric score.

The story is light enough: Margaret, a young woman, meets and falls for William, a shapeshifter, but their love is thwarted by the queen of the forest (William’s possessive, scheming stepmother) and a lascivious rake who preys on women. The narrative’s simplicity isn’t clumsy or obtrusive – it seems intentional, as though the band decided that anything more complex might detract from the music. The undemanding plot also means that Meloy gets to weave some of the most beautiful, lyrical language I think I’ve ever encountered. I was trying to find some good illustrative excerpts, but it’s hard to isolate the words from the story, music and the power of the singers…so I won’t.

Instead, I’ll say this: the range and breadth of emotion captured in this album is just…ace. It’s ace of base. The parts of Margaret and the fairy queen are played by Becky Stark and Shara Worden, who are apparently staples of the US indie folk-rock scene…so nobody knows about them. But that’ll all change with this blog (although I may be grievously overestimating my influence). Stark is gentle and understated as Margaret, and is exactly what the role needs, and Worden is an off-the-charts psycho powerhouse as the vindictive queen, and is exactly what my soul needs. Worden’s ill-concealed rage bubbles just beneath the surface of every furious word she sings, her deep, tremulous voice turning slower songs like The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid into violent, frothing sound-cauldrons of boiling hot wrath. Stark’s passive Margaret doesn’t get much of an opportunity to match Worden’s primal emotion, but the rake (Meloy) comes close, the menace beneath his sweet, almost Brian Molko-esque drone exposed by his frigid (and chillingly cool) nonchalance towards killing his own children. If you’ve heard anything from Hazards it’ll probably be The Rake’s Song, and while it’s a great track, it gives a weird impression of the band out of context. First hearing it on the radio, I assumed that The Decemberists were some kind of goth-punk-rock band, which is a style they might occasionally borrow from (along with many others), but definitely not one which defines them.

Just to reinforce, I really like Hazards. There was a period of my life, when I was living away from home, in which I think this album sort of defined me. That makes it sound like I had some grim, directionless existence, which isn’t true at all; but there was something about the fragile, lingering sadness of it, the way the beauty of the music clung to my thoughts and my feelings and everything I did for days after listening to it, that gently marked me in some enduring, subtle way. And, despite these past raw months of separation, those indelible marks are still there, somewhere between ear and heart, unfaded.

I’m not going to link a track from Hazards, because I really feel that it needs to be listened to as one complete work (at least the first few times), but here’s a song from The Crane Wife, which is also awesome:

P.S. I’m going to be away for 10 days while I tumble down some New Zealand slopes and then get my festy on at SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS! Expect ecstatic, exuberant postage when I get back.

Dan Sultan – Get Out While You Can (2009)

It’s funny how the internet works (note: I have no idea how the internet works) (other note: I decided to embolden the first sentences of my posts to give them a bit of intellectual punch – consider yourself punched in the brain).

I’ve been thinking about this for at least a few minutes now, since the conclusion of yet another riveting family dinner conversation (topics covered so far this week: taxes; urinary tract infections; the state of NSW hospitals; which parts of a human would be best to eat). Mum was telling us how my Nan likes to read the paper from cover to cover, including shipping news and court schedules. While my mind was conjuring up reasons for my Nan’s weird interest in legal cases (secret litigator? nonagenarian crime lord? a fluffy wig fetish?), the following exchange ensued:

Brother: Why would anyone read that?

Dad (sagely): Well, back in the days of yore (*brother tunes out*) before electronic communications (*Mum tunes out*), people had to read the paper (*I tune out*)…

I consider my friends and I to be members of the luckiest generation, by which I mean those born between, say, 1985 and 1990. Children of that era (yes, I consider 5 years an era) are old enough to have the pleasure of boasting that they were around before the internet but young enough for it to have kicked in before adolescence. Our memories are redolent with childhood images of Aggro’s Cartoon Connection, classic Simpsons, Captain Planet and the immortal sounds of the Spice Girls, may they rest in peace (‘I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna really really really wanna zigazig ah’ – unbridled genius). Back then there were trees to climb, not power lines, and we frolicked through lush meadows untainted by global warming. Disney, in the first flushes of its renaissance, lovingly crafted movies that entertained and educated us, providing a hand-drawn backdrop to our primary school years. The boys had multitudes of strong-chinned heroes and the girls (and some boys) had intelligent, pretty princesses of various ethnicities. There were never photos of Jasmine flashing her training bra posted on Twitter. Nala never made a sex tape. Gaston never boasted about his purity ring. Our heroes weren’t junior high tweens who blogged about, like, their varsity crushes (I assume that’s what iCarly is about) or three stupid-looking brothers who formed a band (uh, except Hanson); they were tiny blue-skinned gay people, or the kids who managed to get onto A*mazing, or anime characters who went around trapping cute animals in tiny balls and forcing them into ferocious battles that I’ve only just realised are pretty unethical. But that was the early 90s, and people didn’t really know what ethics were yet. How could we? We didn’t have Wikipedia.

By contrast, our teenage years were a jumble of horrible email accounts (lollipop_smileygalz88@yahoo.com – DISCLAIMER: this is a joke example email address, do not try to email it because I get enough spam already), ICQ, and the strange, exciting and sexy (right?) world of online chatrooms. We all had mean facial tans from basking in the light of our hazy, boxy computer monitors. Girls delighted in barraging everyone in their contact lists with chain emails, especially ones that predicted your future domestic situation. Boys feigned exasperation and secretly completed them (or this boy did, anyway). Common but unwieldy phrases like ‘rolling on the floor laughing my arse off’ were handily abbreviated. As a generation we turned our backs on traditional television in favour of watching our favourite shows in smaller, slower, more expensive, more pixellated form.  Truly, it was a time defined by LOLs and WTFs.

All of which sort-of-but-not-really brings me to this life-altering video:

That’s right: John Butler, Missy Higgins, Megan Washington, Katy Steele, some chick with tattoos, a ranga behemoth that can only be Clare Bowditch, Paul Dempsey and Dan Sultan sharing the one stage (with Paul Kelly, kinda). It’s an Aussie folk-pop fan’s wet dream (except for the glaring absence of Sarah Blasko and Holly Throsby). It’s everything the ARIAs could be if they stopped inviting Jessica Mauboy, The Veronicas and that one random bemused American B-lister who can’t figure out what level of hell she’s been condemned to.

Despite my undying love for Missy Higgins’ nasal drawl and my occasional love for John Butler’s chilled-out swagger, Dan Sultan’s smoky pipes own that stage. It doesn’t help that Missy’s dance convulsions and spazz hands make it look like she’s been tokin’ from Johnny B’s stash. Dan Sultan’s little charades gestures are much cooler, at least until John Butler sings ‘beef was his business’ (I can think of some actions to that!) and he can only clasp his hands together in graceful capitulation – almost as graceful as this segue into my review of his album, Get Out While You Can.

I’m a shit first-time album listener. Usually I’ll get the album, excitedly load it up on iTunes, click play with baited breath…and then get distracted by reading about like ‘Space Jam’ or ‘Canadian people of Norwegian descent’ on Wikipedia. The tracks zoom past and 50 minutes later I’ll notice the awkward silence (I sometimes share an awkward silence with myself) and think, ‘Well, I don’t remember anything from that album. Must’ve been shit.’ Which is why I’ve instituted a policy of not making a firm judgement on any album until the 4^th or 5^th listen – and even then I’ll keep changing my mind about it.

GOWYC surprised me because it hooked me pretty much straight away – and then sort of lost me again. I added it to iTunes, sent it over to my Splendour playlist, pressed play…and found that I suddenly couldn’t pay attention to the YouTube video of a cat riding a turtle that I was watching. The only thing I knew previously about Dan Sultan was that he was half Aboriginal, so naturally/racistly I assumed that his music would include didgeridoos (or half didgeridoos) droning away in the background somewhere. Thankfully, his music is didgeridoo free, but what it does have are funky ‘get down tonight’ guitars, gentle, soulful melodies and Sultan’s impressive voice, which can leap from gravelly power to delicate sweetness within the span of a chorus. He’s like the thinking man’s Daniel Merriweather (minus that t-shirt-and-waistcoat thing that all the kids are into nowadays). But better.

If rock n roll and country had a head-on collision and kind of partially fused with each other and then fell in love (it was inevitable) and gave birth to 13 songbabies, that family would be something like this album. A few of the babies are charismatic and loveable little scamps, the kind that win your heart with their twinkly eyes, cheeky ways and awesome toys. Some are the shy, retiring types that never impress you front up but gradually win you over through intelligence and quiet persistence.

Then there’s…the others. Obviously rock n roll and country are a little too closely related, because these are some inbred babies. They cry and wail for attention and all you can do is fix your mouth into a frozen rictus of false appreciation and subtly try to break your own arm so you have an excuse to get out of there. You never insult them in their presence – that would be inappropriate – but once you leave you turn to your friend and say, ‘Awww. That’s a shame.’

Alright, none of the songs are quite that bad. But there’s a bit of a disparity between the hits and the misses. Obviously. Goddess Love, a hit, is an ambling country number with layers of funk and soul and funky soul and souly funk that amiably eases you into the album. Dingo is a rollicking Western romp with echoes of Charlie Feathers; I can imagine it swinging and bumping along in the background of a Tarantino film, the musical equivalent of a khaki-clad sheriff driving along a lone desert road with his aviators lined up across the sun-soaked dash. Old Fitzroy has a beautiful nostalgic feel to it, the sound of beers and wistful reminiscences shared between old pals, and Cadillac and a Mustang is an awesomely jazzy, toot-flutin’, reet-pleatin’ way to round it all up.

None of the songs are particularly bad; there’s just quite a few that aren’t especially memorable. Much of the album dawdles by in the background, which, to be honest, is the best place for it. That probably sounds a lot harsher than I mean it to be, but it’s not really a criticism. GOWYC doesn’t try to demand your attention – it’s quite happy to cruise along and entertain itself while you check your emails (in vain) or Google image search ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ or maybe even talk to real people. Don’t ask too much of it and it won’t ask too much of you. Sounds like a pretty good philosophy to me.

Standout tracks: Goddess Love, Dingo, Old Fitzroy, Cadillac and a Mustang

Band of Horses – Infinite Arms (2010)

Music festivals are all about nature: sleeping in it, chilling in it, puking in it, chopping bits of it down to make stages and orgy clearing and blasting it with soul-trembling trip-folk psych-hop grooves (best genre ever). Or so I imagine.

Here’s my list of previous festival experiences:

1. Homebake, 2009
2. TBA

So I’m working partly off assumptions here. I did notice though that this year, Splendour in the Grass offered carbon offset tickets for like $1 extra. Naturally, I didn’t pay that. Why should I pay the price when the environment can? It’s way richer than I am, in precious minerals if nothing else. Mother Nature craps gold. And farts, like, noble gases (because Mother Nature is a lady).

It’s therefore unsurprising that, in tribute to Gaia, spirit of the Earth, the Splendour 2010 lineup includes an impressive array of animal-themed artists, including Gypsy & the Cat, Boy & Bear, Frightened Rabbit, Grizzly Bear, Tame Impala and Lisa Mitchell (she has doe-like qualities). If we want, we could also throw in The Pixies due to their affinity with woodland critters. In for a penny, in for a pound, I always say!

I’m a fan of each of these artists, but the bestial band that’s really struck me is Band of Horses, who I’d shamefully never heard of before seeing them on the Splendour list. Firstly, I like that they have a good, strong name that just puts it all out there. It’s not a bevy of horses. It’s definitely not a conflagration of horses. And, sadly, it isn’t a pantheon of horses, even though that sounds cool. It’s a band, and they’re pretty good at being one. And while not all the band members are horses, and some aren’t even odd-toed ungulates (thanks Wikipedia), there is something horsey about their music – in a good way! Picture a bunch of chilled-out horses getting together on a Sundee arvo to bash out some melodious alt-rock with a subtle and pleasant country lilt. Feel that heart-nudging vocal harmony reverberating through your blood? It’s Band of Horses.

Since that whole horse thing was a complete red herring (if there’s not a band called Red Herring, there should be…there’s not much piscine representation at Splendour this year), I’ll elucidate.

It took me a couple of goes to really get into Infinite Arms, Band of Horses’ third (or trophomore) and latest album. Since then I’ve listened to it roughly infinite times, and when I’m not listening to it, I miss it like a junkie misses crack. I find myself craving it while walking the dog, in bed, even while I’m already listening to it. I’ve taken to sneaking my iPod into the bathroom at work so I can get a quick BoH fix. I emerge, pupils dilated, adrenalin singing through my body, hair matted with sweat, feeling dirty and a bit used, but confident that no one knows my shameful little secret, since there’s nothing unusual about me being sweaty and unfocused at work.

I dread the inevitable crash, knowing that I’ll hit rock-bottom sooner rather than later. When that happens, I’ll turn to my iPod in desperate, seeking solace in some old dependables or maybe picking up something new and untried off the street. Maybe I’ll be able to fill that horse-shaped void (Tame Impala might fit nicely), maybe not. Perhaps I’ll cry whenever I hear a BoH song, or curl up in the corner and whisper sweet nothings to myself. It may last for some time. Maybe I’ll get my life sorted, settle down, forget any of it ever happened.

Until, one day, I’ll be hoverboarding down the street listening to my SpacePod 6000. I’ll idly skip past one song, then another. I’ll look at my watch, use some future curse (like ‘Shizbot!’; future curse = current curse + robot), and boot up my hoverboard to 9 to catch my futurebus. Then I’ll hear those first stirring chords of Factory swell out of the speakers, I’ll feel the music flood my veins and invade my brain, and I’ll stop and go, ‘Ohhh, yeeaaahh!’

But until hoverboards are invented I’ll stick to riding bands of horses, and riding them hard.

The most distinctive feature of all BoH songs is, unsurprisingly, the lead singer’s voice. Ben Bridwell’s gentle American twang has a yearning purity that is weighted by layers of backup vocals and the playful pulsing of guitar and keyboard. Even tethered by the interwoven threads of vocal harmony that pervade the album, Bridwell’s voice still packs a punch, transforming the prosaic lyrics of slower tracks like Factory and Infinite Arms into something transcendently wistful.

The faster songs aren’t without their charms either. Dilly has a skip in its toe-tappin’ step that imbues the chorus with a buoyant energy, and NW Apt. is the closest thing to a straightforward rock track on the album – and is no less catchy for’t. I have no idea what most of the songs are about and the titles usually don’t help (Infinite Arms: a song bemoaning the world’s eternal state of conflict or promoting neverending hugs?), but there’s such a good energy in most of the tracks that I still get it. Or I think I do, which also works.

For me, there are a couple of misses. Evening Kitchen is too slow and uniform, and Older, the song with the clearest country influence, is a bit too twee and nasal (I’m crying horsey tears of apology even as I type this). Maybe they would be more bearable if they weren’t next to one another, if they were broken up by the sheer awesomeness of Laredo or joyful slow-builder On My Way Back Home. But they’re not, and that’s a disappointment that I will bear with me for all my days.

I guess I could understand if people can’t really get into Infinite Arms – understand that they have some kind of aural or emotional disorder! I imagine it’s an album that polarises people. There will be those dour multitudes for whom the beauty and the brilliance of this clean, sweet music just slips away, forever out of reach. There will be those who kinda like it, but aren’t compelled to obsessively listen to it for every waking moment of their lives. And then there will be those enraptured souls who, like me, hunger for the distant world this album conjures: sad, empty places beneath winter stars, the warm lights of home somewhere in the distance, and a ghostly pantheon of horses looking down on it all, gently nickering in benediction.

Standout tracks: Laredo, On My Way Back Home, Dilly, NW Apt.

Workin’ on my NIGHT CHEEEESE!

I haven’t really decided what this blog is yet. What’s it about? Where is it going? Will it cure my crippling loneliness?

Originally it was going to be about food. Then it was going to be about music. After that I decided that I’d create an awesome hybrid of the two and name it ‘muffo’. Muffo is all about tasty music and food with phat beets (typo, but it works). Finally I decided that it would just be about music, since food requires the effort of cooking and lifting shit to my mouth and music requires sitting on my arse, although it will more than likely also include eating.

Then there was the trouble of thinking up a name. Again, it was a question of effort, and the answer was: I didn’t want to put any in. So, rather than thinking up an apt but clever blog name, I merely stole a random and hilarious phrase from 30 Rock. I would say laziness and plagiarism are my hallmarks, but I think there’s like a ten-post minimum before you’re allowed to claim a hallmark. Who regulates these things? Is there a handbook?

Anyway…

I hereby launch my blogoplane into the blogosphere!