Fraudband - Blinkered Vision and Blurred Horizons

Outlaws live outside normal prescriptors, so they don't need to conform.  That means they're free to create their own rules.  With that comes freedom, and sometimes an overt spaciousness that can spook anyone who is used to keeping a whole lot more company.

When you ride out, it can get wild and the laws change.  You have to be adaptive and wily.  You stand out and you have to blend in, but not in a way common folk understand. 

Fraudband changed the rules, writing whole albums without lines, like soundtrack skeletons that never beat to a movie.  Sometimes sun-bleached bones can look the same to someone who has not been out on the plain for too long.  But Fraudband tell stories with sinister angles and ghost-trap memories.  

Everyone needs a soundtrack to get out of town, especially when you're on a one-way ride. You've got Fraudband's Blinkered Vision and Blurred Horizons.

You can listen there, while you read here.

"You Never Said" opens the album with an easy out and just the right kind of overdrive.  The drums belie the frenetic intentions, while the guitars keep their cool then catch up as it pulls in to refuel.

  

"Better Loosen Up" gets a little dirtier, revealing the album's intentions.  It's more distorted and a little more sinister, and while there is a whole lot of space and more light in the second half, you can tell where they're headed.

"Little Joys" starts with a grudging reluctance, but finally opens to the theme of its title with some curvaceous guitar work.  But sometimes when you're this far out of town, little things get lost on the road, and a whole lot of things start looking the same.  But there are always small differences that you have to keep track of even if they seem like they are going to "Let you away".

"You Confuse Me" sits on a peak in the middle of the album, all distant and hazy and blurred.  Even with a double take, you don't know what it is, but it's sitting at an advantage.  The drums know where it's at, while the guitars take their time to size it up then lope up to the backline. They keep up the freneticism until the tom resets the pace with about 30 seconds to spare.

When you have crossed this many lines you're more prepared for "What Comes Next".  You're accustomed to the territory and it's apart of who you are.  This darker track fits where it belongs on this album -- right at the climax as it changes like a shapeshifter.

"Getting Up" is like driving through a bad headache and is challenged with the right amount of counter-menace that takes control and puts everything back in its place.  But some things are difficult to beat unless you get up enough pace.  

"On a Rant" starts with looping guitars that emulate its title, going broadside on the plain.  Again the lines are blurred and the vision is not resolved by the end.

"Losin' It" sways and distorts, with heavy repetition that is right in place.  It swings and changes, but it knows what it wants and how it's going to get there.  You don't want to get in its way. 

"Making Things Better by Making Them Worse" outlines the paradox inherent in this album.  Like a narrative arc, this song introduces new instrumentation on its longest track that brings its resolution.  Like a fitting conclusion, it encapsulates everything this album has collated, but is left still standing with a story to tell, even if it is dark and distorted.

Fraudband do not brandish their identity in lyric or likeness.  They stand out when you don't expect it, but for the most, they're forbiddingly understated.  Like an exile, there isn't rhyme for justification.  Instead, this album embodies malefactor.

You can get your copy here: https://fraudband.bandcamp.com/album/blinkered-vision-and-blurred-horizons

Pony Face - Deja Vu

When music and lyric transcend the literal they can become the language of the esoteric.  Each person interprets them differently, each can find their own respite, their own revelation, what they thought they had lost, what they had always been looking for.

The legacy of contemporary communication forms, the brevity, the speed, the need to create identities in all forms of social media, has co-generated a collective nostalgia for the crystalised memories of what we thought we had lost, what we didn't realise at the time, what we feel we're missing but cannot describe.

In our relatively affluent society, we try to buy it back.  It is impressed on us that our currency is the gatekeeper to our happiness.  But increasingly we find the visions and meaning have to go deeper -- it has to be about reclaiming the innate.  It comes back through the attempt to relive through memory, through aspiration, through deja rêve (previously dreamed) to deja senti (previously felt).

Deja Vu is an eclectic mix of songs balanced with wry humour and insight.  They transcend the literal through past lives; in perpetual loops of misfortune; in youth and the biographies of the understated; in loves and the choices we may or may not have made; what we want to forget, and what we are waiting to realise. 

You can listen to the whole album here.

"So Much Said" opens like a shooting star or a firework screamer, taking us back to July 1967.  Inspired by Patti Smith's Just Kids, the song travels vicariously through New York paying homage to those she loved and cameoing others who changed the course of art and music.

While Pony Face inscribe this rarified environment, they simultaneously enable us to make our own connections.  The opening verse draws on those sleight moments when light and sound transfigure our perspectives.  Images scattered through the lyrics remind us of times when we could not place intentions; when actions belie meaning; when our reality is redefined by new beauty.

The fourth stanza offers unexpected grace, reiterated in the prelude to the title and the coda.  From here the song shifts focus to love requited, reminding us of those moments of profound emotional memory.  This is reiterated from 3:21-3:43 by the guitar ringing out in two eighths, then a quarter note like the perpetual and emphatic promise of those three little words.

"Justine" was a judicious choice for the pre-release single of the album, dealing with the familiar feelings of incredulity and disbelief when we are rejected by a lover for somebody else.

Simon Bailey and Shane O'Mara open and close the song with satirical guitars that accentuate Justine's disregard of the protagonist.  His perspective is evident in the guitars between 0:46-0:55, and unfinished but axiomatic lyrics signalling resignation.  The song draws parallels between the impenetrable mindset of Justine with the joining of a cult -- hinting to the site of the Manson family house in Chanoga Park (which was dubbed The Submarine due to its yellow paint).

The song ends with the play on the emphatic in the protagonist's final plea, appositely highlighted by the cymbal riding at 2:56 to the end of Bailey's ranging cry at 3:11.

"Neptune Twins" is a tribute to the Gibbons sisters.  It is believed they developed their own form of cryptophasia when they emigrated to the UK and were shunned and bullied by their new community.  The girls became selective recluses and stopped communicating with those around them.  They wrote plays and stories in their room, from which they took a short-term respite when they became interested in some young American sailors.  From their detailed diaries there remains conjecture about the nature of the relationships, but it was evident that they were heartbroken and possibly abused by the boys.

In a form of retaliation, the girls became pyromaniacs, leading to their incarceration.  This became a long-term sentence as the psychologists and staff were baffled by their speeded patois and slowed behaviours.  Ironically, the girls' diaries evidence heightened tension between them, each willing the other out of their lives, culminating in attempted sororicide.  Despite this, the girls maintained a deep understanding of each other, honouring their idiosyncratic pact in mysterious circumstances.

The premise of "Undercover" is self-evident.  It paces and races like its theme while the lyrics create fragmented coherence.

The eponymous "Mt Deja Vu" was inspired by a story of how the allies sent service dogs to wounded men, strapped with morphine and cigarettes.  The sitar and mellotron in this song evoke the ethereal state of mind of the soldier as he wrestles with liminality.  The beautiful transition after 2:08 is highlighted by the drums and percussion, and after 3:50 with effects signal the crossing between deja vu and deja vecu (previously experienced).

"Red Revolver" conflates the iconic and the classic of 50s greaser.  Working class love is a model for everyman who has watched the object of his affection seek love somewhere else.  All that counts is social cool, a good car and maybe a little contraband to change the course.  This song is gonna catch you waist down with swamp rhythm and Hawaiian guitars.  Opening with Mickey Thompson's ghost, Pony Face take you back to the drag track where girls lost their hearts to the fastest boys that sometimes didn't live long enough to tell the tale.

"Stitches" is my favourite song on the album.  I've spent a long time trying to work out why.  There aren't any overt hooks.  Then I realised that its beauty is in the subtlety of the beautiful effects and structural integrity - both musically and as a lyrical composition.  But it's more than that - the metaphors are open, each one is something to which we can link some of our greatest affect.  It's true though, some of them may slip away.  The most visceral comes from the music like an unexpected lover.

Listen to the first minute.  In contrast to the rest of the song it's composed of two minimalistic guitar lines, like the heartbeat and the voice.  This changes around 0:56 when it gains momentum and a haunting back line that evokes deus ex machina.  This song stands close to "Stars Are Bright" in relation to form, bringing it home in the last quarter.  You're gonna have to listen to them both to know how it feels.

"Turnaround" is an episodic ballad set over seven incarnations, like a feline emulation.  In this song, each stanza exquisitely evokes the overarching theme of the record - the unlikely and the likely, how these both run like parallel tracks, strangely tractable; unable to be distracted or detracted by fate.

Evidence of Pony Face's ability to translate themes into music is so evident in this song.  The Celtic rhythms and turn of the drums and percussion evoke consolation through its beautifully perpetual cadence.

"Heartbreaker" epitomises the most familiar and most poignant.  The simplicity of the music and the lyrics belie the intention.  It encompasses everything we wish for, and what we'll put on the line for it.

"Trinity River" incorporates the same affecting musical devices of the opening to "Stitches" with a haunting mellotron and ghosting double vocals as the chorus opens at 1:54.

This is an apposite concluding track to the album.  After travelling through memory, through what has been strange, and close to what has been most important, we come back to a marginalised reality that seems inherently familiar.  Like deja vu.  The use of spoken word and the outline of misfortune are things we all know well.

In this song the drum, bass and mellotron craft it perhaps even more strongly than the lyrics and guitars.  This song is subtly entwined with the macabre, lyrically and thematically, but it stands as impossibly beautiful because of the grace afforded by the instrumentation, that closes with the gentle anticipation of release from 4:45-7:07.

Pony Face craft songs that go beyond everything we know to give us day-dreamscapes that enable us to follow our heart.  In those pervasive moments, we don't always find the words or the time to be objective.  We are so immersed in our experience we don't see the light, or the darkness.  But in each of these songs Pony Face integrate words and sonic intuition to find a resonance with those experiences and reclaim what we had lost, or to send it carefully on its way.  To reconsider the repercussions and to change the course.

You can get one of the few remaining copies of the coloured vinyl here, or download a digital copy of their full discography from here.

See them live in NSW in April and Victoria in May.



Additional dates have been announced for NSW in August, and their Ten Year Anniversary gig in Melbourne on 10th August.

Girlatones - Fitting In Well

This post was transferred from Somnambulus.

Pop songs are easy currency.  And like small change, they are often as worthy.

But pop songs can be a very astute media.  Especially when they are more complex than easy lines and hooks.

That's why we are grateful for bands like The Modern Lovers, for The Cannanes.  For those perspicacious folk who have given us impossibly upbeat songs that defy the meleé; because they they are wry, and they artfully combine the guileless with the percipient.

Girlatones are canny modern lovers because they are insightful and because they are not afraid to entertain the affectual and the goofy; they bring it to light and give it a rightful place.  They remind us of what we care about, but may not want to admit.  That is what we magnetise to in the great songs of Richman and in the Gibson/O'Neill collaborations.

You can listen to the album here.

The album opens with Share the Love.  Love is about idealism, and in good measure -- realism.  Share the Love is a bright ode to the unquestionable credence that the idealistic can measure the realistic.

Girlatones are also well grounded and can weave brightness with careful twists of seemingly inadvertent irony.  And it is here that the pop song becomes art that stands time.

You're My Friend is a brilliant play on reflection, attraction, and aspiration.  Like Share the Love, the song builds toward the end of the song.  In the first song, it is just one word that is a testament to their belief -- at 1:36 -- "Share".  One word, that could almost go unnoticed, that stands alone.  Similarly, at 1:57 in You're My Friend, the chord change simulates the transgression through the glass, as the unreal becomes the unreal real: the double negative that fulfils the protagonist's positive.  And the break through is honestly and fallibly reflected in Jesse Williams' voice at 2:23, precisely on the right word, because of their common vision.  The premise is personified by the quirky guitars at 1:27.  Here is another strength of Girlatones that defies simplistic pop: they know how to make the music reflect the intention.

Recipes to Me is much more complex than the collage of images may at first imply.  The incongruity of the concepts cleverly captures the conflicting ideals of the protagonist and antagonist.  The contract between the led and the misleading, faith and betrayal in almost impossible circumstances.  It highlights commitment and manipulated reality for self-righteousness.  Whatever failure could be cited in justification, it is an ultimate abuse; but the genius lies in Williams' ability to paint it with his unfailing sight on love.

Misunderstood has been my favourite song in Girlatones' set this last year, and is perfectly placed on the album.  It is multivalenced, and here, everything Girlatones do so well, everything they believe in, is tested.  It is the most untypical song on the album, it is the most untypical song that I have heard them play since I saw them at their first gig -- a year ago almost to the day.  But it here that everything shines.  It takes the challenge with conviction in lyric and some excellent musicianship.  Listen to it playing understated to 2:16, then listen to the cymbals chime in brilliantly, and then face down at 2:30.  They begin to come into their own at 2:33, then that indefatigable guitar starts to twist it around at 2:39, to come out, so coruscating, at 2:45.  Listen to the drummer driving the ride all through that, and build ominously through the bass drum to 3:42.  Then the guitars take over, and Booty comes back in as brilliantly as before.  Though the guitars take the lead, listen to Tam Matlakowski (Tam Vantage) on the bass.  Williams has chosen the most apposite musicians to realise his score.  Ironically it is here, on the bass, where Matlakowski holds onto the brightness -- where he emulates the hope -- the lifts the whole song through this complex and beautiful cacophony.  So understated and strong.  So perfect.  To the close.

Misunderstood, deliciously long at 4:51, is the volta on the album.  Williams, as in lyric, knows how to craft form in the shape of this album.  Misunderstood is a considered choice at the fourth song on the album.  We have been treated to unconditional love, and despite that, we have seen it's faith in breach, and misunderstood.  Then listen to the opening lines of Fever.

Fever opens with stomping guitars.  But Williams and Leah Senior (Leah Senior) pivot their musical lines too, to bring the brightness in.  If you know Girlatones, you know the nature of these guitarists' collaboration, and it is all about bright landscapes.  Despite the opening lines, they profess love in lyric and Williams' unswerving harmonica at 0:59, 1:56 and 2:49.

Put Me Back Together illustrates the fragility felt when we believe we are defined by being loved.  Perhaps it also shows the redemptive power that is capable in love.  Girlatones seemingly simplistically, but carefully, craft the incongruence through a musical helix: the bass works up as the guitars work down and vice versa, creating uncompromised harmony.  They depict the conflict between who we believe we are, and our perceived sense of wholeness from the relationship.

Park Crowd seems to call out the pretension that permeates the north side.  "You make decisions to switch off your awareness" also calls it for everyone who follows convenience over awkward reality: "I've gone and lost faith in you".  Sometimes calling it and staying true can be a lonely path.  Williams depicts it with his indomitable optimism, "Just when you think you're all alone / Then you find a friend."  There'd be many who'd be happy to be outside "the circle", and where "the party starts again".

One of the endearing elements on this album are in the moments after the songs finish - an additional drum beat, the fade and bend of a guitar note, and here, Senior's beautiful laugh!

2 Become 1 is an ingenious play on words, and it's focus on equality in relationship.  The baritone tuning contrasts Williams' register in this song, again claiming balance and equality between them and the final lyrics.  The guitar switches ironically before the close to a bright glissando.

Fitting in Well is what Girlatones do.  But with the right folk, because "there is more than market analysis on [their] mind".  Their irreverence is sweetly proto-punk.  They are controversial in as much as they are contra verse -- against the standardised pop songs, because their's is infused with a deeper meaning.

You're going to love Girlatones.  You can't help it.  But when you get your dose of goodness with them, it's only going to be good for you.

You can get your copy here.

Photos - Northcote Social Club - May 2017

© JoAnne Frances

RVG - A Quality of Mercy

This post was transferred from Somnambulus.

It's a long time between posts, but music that opens the periphery in our musical landscape doesn't come along readily, even in our active music scene.

Sometimes a lot of good creative work gets held behind the palisades of cultural immaturity.  Sometimes it takes a while for things to evolve, ripen and manifest.

When I first met Romy Vager, she assumed a different monicker.  Her band was smaller, the first time I saw it.  Since then a lot has changed.  RVG has come out with more than a first album.

Listen to it here.

A Quality of Mercy (AQoM) is a long time coming.  Compassion, forgiveness and forbearance take a long time to find their place in everyday lives.  That is what Vager brings to us in final overview, but not without the evidence of the bitter trail.  These condemnations are foisted by fear, intolerance and prejudices.  They are often a sordid vilification of gang mentality.  Sometimes we spend time in dark landscapes imposed by others to understand that the root of their intention is more closely allied to their own deficit, rather than our own.  This time, in the shadow of death, also lets us demarcate who we are, if to no-one else but ourselves - to whom, of course, it is most important.  But great art is an elucidation.  Vager shares hers with us, so we can follow her journey through the heinous spaces into the light that she is rightfully owed.  Hers is a pathway that fewer have to travel.  The way she describes it fearlessly, but with the understanding that comes with having to endure rancid testimonies of humanity, provides us with a desperate, keening narrative.  Vager's song-lines also express penetrating sensitivity of uncomplicated desire that vouchsafes true intimacy.

The title track, 'A Quality of Mercy', opens on a five second aural streetscape, which is taken over by the echo of surfing guitar.  This brilliant song reveals the psychotic trammelling of small-mindedness that tampers reason, and is compounded by fear to whitewall the perception of difference.  The brilliance comes through the questioning and investigation of hegemonic condemnation, and opens like a catharsis of self realisation and self-justification to rend strappings asunder at 2:50.  At 2:00, I am reminded of the renegade guitar work and vocals of Jeffrey Lee Pearce.  As Pearce did with The Gun Club, so does Vager: She defines new territory.

'Cause and Effect' (CaE) has some intelligent lyric twists.  It could almost be 'Cause and Affect'.  It opens with "You're gonna have to lose somebody else's mind", reclaiming the space Vager heralded in AQoM, and expanded through that imagery recurring in "You're gonna have to turn off someone else's life".  But she knows the fight is not over yet, and language like "it won't be pretty" are so apt for the ground she intends to make her own through the inversion of sensibility, and the inversion of love which can "destroy a fellow life".  The wry humour in the dearth of its wake lifts the song with the lyrics, "And my love ... you know you're the only one ... that I ever despised ... in the whole of my life.  I used to wish you would die.  Cause and effect."  After this, at 2:00, the music breaks through in redemption, and similar lyrics change their meaning with intonation to demonstrate the inversion, and evincing the reclamation of identity.

IBM changes the tone set by AQoM and CaE to anthropomorphise a lover and digital hardware.  The humour again belies poignant observations, which can be interpreted across the evolution of the digital landscape from the 1980s (reflected in the retro computer sound effects) to the present.  This seems relevant too, to Vager's deep interest in the music of this time, and how it concatenates in her music.

'Heart Paste' follows the lighter musical theme of IBM, but which belies the darker lyrical intentions.
 The "personal charm" of Vager is evident.  Wanted and attained.  We all know the conflict of austerity and luxury.  For some, what is socially-rited can seem almost unattainable to another.  Vager tells us about those irreversible actions we feel compelled to take to accord us space and distance.  The stark alienation that comes with that, but then how that space can be refilled with the reclamation of identity, as Vager does so beautifully at 1:45.  Vager doesn't care about common sense, but who would when the sense of the common majority is warped or myopic.

'The Eggshell World' again crosses liminality and contrasts diametrical opposites.  The want to be two people to fulfil incompatible desire effectively shows the protagonist's conflict, but also her awareness of the sensibilities of both extremes.  What seems to be so exclusive of the other is a strange but apt metaphor in the eggshell - the fragility of persona when neither of those states, nor anything between them can be inhabited; and the thin and brittle membrane set to protect the vulnerable.

'Vincent van Gogh' reiterates the themes of opposition, and of cause and effect.  It's about disillusionment with what we have emulated, and the resultant faux martyrdom.

'Feral Beach' follows on similar themes, albeit on a more personal and carnal level; where intimacy becomes perverted, noxious and unrecognisable.

'That's All' is beautiful closure on the dark themes of this album.  It has that naive intimacy that has import: we bring so many of the feelings and sentiments Vager deftly describes into our adulthood.  But they have come without name because perhaps we didn't know how to, or were too embarrassed to give them a monicker.

And here we come full circle.  Back to Vager, back to all she has achieved, and all that she can name because she has travelled and mapped that road that so few of us know.  This is what makes her work seminal - these places we have not been, but are so important to understand.

This is RVG's first release.  It is only a few months old, but they have already returned in the studio to make their second album.  If you follow RVG on social media, you know they promise it will be even better than their inaugural release.  As we know, it is about the journey.  This is a fine premise and a worthy edition to have as part of the pending RVG catalogue.

You can download your copy here.

Photos from the Quality of Mercy launch at the Tote - March, 2017.
© JoAnne Frances