Album review: Daniel Johns reinvents himself on FutureNever, his surprising solo set

These 12 tracks are not easy to digest on first listen, but that’s part of its appeal: it mirrors the complexities of the former Silverchair frontman.

Former Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns, whose surprising second solo album FutureNever mirrors his musical and personal complexities. Picture: Nic Walker

Album reviews for week of April 29, 2022:

 

POP/ALTERNATIVE

FutureNever

Daniel Johns

Reclaim Your Art / BMG

★★★★

The release of FutureNever this year has acted as a cap on what’s been a tumultuous return to the spotlight for former Silverchair singer, songwriter and guitarist Daniel Johns. A song like Reclaim Your Heart sets the tone perfectly: haunting keys open the way to a vocal performance that toes the line of earnest and self-indulgent in the way only Johns can. Some would say he’s at his best when his orchestral concepts meet his visceral and vulnerable lyrical chops, and when assessed on those terms, this album is a slam dunk. FutureNever’s eclecticism is beautifully highlighted by a mix of R&B and electronica (Mansions, D4NGRSBOY) alongside moments of operatic loftiness that are balanced by guttural distortion that hark back — but never fully lean into — Johns’s hard-rocking Silverchair past (Where Do We Go, Stand Em Up). Collaborations with his longtime mentor Van Dyke Parks (Emergency Calls Only), Peking Duk (Cocaine Killa) and a young female singer known as Purplegirl on the eerily addictive eighth track FreakNever prevent this album from landing in a space of musical complacency.

It’s not foreign territory for Johns to explore new sounds with a range of collaborators, but the way FutureNever has been sequenced makes it obvious that Johns was not in the mindset of making this a classic single-driven record. Instead, listeners are invited to strap in and let the album take them where it needs to — which perhaps reflects how the process was for him, too. His second solo release was always going to be met with a certain amount of pressure and expectation. His 2015 solo debut, Talk, established that Johns was very much still active in the years since Silverchair entered its “indefinite hiatus” — but also, that the art he was creating was done in a unique, new vision. FutureNever captures the spirit of Johns in a way we haven’t heard before. Creatively untethered, it is not devoid of the ability to reflect on myriad life experiences both good and bad. These 12 tracks are not easy to digest on first listen, but that’s part of its appeal. It mirrors the complexities of Daniel Johns the musician and the human: finding beauty in darkness, healing through pain. Finding brilliance among the mess, and letting the honesty of it ring out in its truest form.

Sosefina Fuamoli

 

CLASSICAL

Advice To A Girl

Music by Anne Cawrse

ABC Classic

★★★★

Anne Cawrse is a composer whose name and music is too little known outside her native South Australia, but this new release will help advance her reputation as one of the more distinctive and accomplished female composers of her generation. The five works here, mostly for voice, guitar and string quartet, traverse a landscape as restful and restorative as a long walk along a deserted beach. Her music emerges as clear-focused and uncluttered, with a kind of openness reminiscent of Aaron Copland, interrupted by occasional flashes of rhythmic energy recalling Ross Edwards. It settles gently on the listener after repeated listens. In fact, with nine tracks amounting to 57 minutes, it sounds incomplete; I wish it were another 10 minutes longer. There are standout performances from Slava and Sharon Grigoryan (guitar and cello), two string quartets and, presumably, the distinctive clarity of the University of Adelaide’s Elder Hall. This release will serve as a splendid calling card to enhance an already impressive career.

Vincent Plush

-

 

JAZZ

Songs For Habitual People

Inlay Ensemble

Creative Sources Recordings

★★★★

This is an unusual but very interesting album from brilliant double bassist Elsen Price, leading a string trio including himself, Susie Bishop (violin) and Carl St Jacques (viola). It features 11 Price compositions, most with inscrutable one-word titles such as Gratuitous, Frivolous and Abating. With this instrumentation much of the music necessarily has the sound of classical music, but there is a strong jazz sensibility in operation. Each composition is based on a brief written motif, and created through what Price calls “modal improvisation”. Expecting the music to be difficult to comprehend, I listened to this album many times over several weeks and found the music growing on me, and to be pleasingly melodic. There is a yearning quality in the music, which overall is atmospheric and infectious. A variety of moods is captured: Ingeminated, for example, is very moving; Importunated is jolly and rollicking; Aciculate is very sad; and so on. Note the exceedingly resonant sound of Price’s bowed double bass, highly reminiscent of the iconic didgeridoo.

Eric Myers

-

 

SOFT ROCK / SYNTH-POP

Oxy Music

Alex Cameron

Secretly Canadian

★★★½

Sydney native Alex Cameron built his solo career on a knowingly sleazy persona, so it makes perfect sense that his fourth album would chronicle a gradual awakening from toxic masculinity. But that new-found repentance doesn’t spoil these winking soft-rock vignettes. At least half the songs detail assorted self-medication, including the title track, on which Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson sharply chimes in. Another guest turn proves more surprising, with rapper Lloyd Vines chiding Cameron’s character for past transgressions on Cancel Culture. The album suffers a bit from being front-loaded with its two best songs: the automatic singalong Best Life and the raspy, brooding synth-pop anthem Sara Jo, an ode to familial protectiveness delivered with more conviction than usual. Still, repeated listens bear out some pleasing details, such as the Vegemite reference and sax solo on Dead Eyes. Now based in the US and a repeat collaborator of arena-fillers the Killers, Cameron reasserts his smirking star power across this mixed bag.

Doug Wallen

-

 

METAL

Impera

Ghost

Loma Vista/Concord

★★½

In The Wizard of Oz, the mythos of the titular character comes crashing down on the revelation that it’s just a man behind a curtain. A similar trajectory befell Swedish metal giant Ghost when enigmatic leader Papa Emeritus was revealed as simply Tobias Forge following a lawsuit from former bandmates (aka, no joke, the Nameless Ghouls). Ghost has never quite recovered artistically from this unmasking and its lingering attempts at regaining mystique ultimately flounder on album No.5. A lot of its issues fall on Forge’s artistic vision, which has grown increasingly muddled in the throes of hard rock and show tunes. Twenties is the worst example on offer, in which the band’s chugging metallic furore is funnelled into a Broadway-style chorus number that includes the word “hoo-has”. The rest of the near-50-minute record offers some brief riff-based highlights but mostly plays as a furthered identity crisis. Impera poses far more questions than it provides answers, chiefly: if Forge isn’t Papa Emeritus, then who exactly is he?

David James Young

-

Album reviews for week of April 22, 2022:

 

ROOTS

Just Like That...

Bonnie Raitt

Redwing Records

★★★★

Bonnie Raitt’s career turning point was a song about her midlife crisis. Nick of Time was the title track of the 1989 album that finally broke her as a solo artist after a near 20-year slog, and significantly, the composition was her own. To that point, the Californian singer and slide guitarist had made her name largely as a worthy interpreter of others’ songs, by the likes of John Prine (notably Angel From Montgomery), Randy Newman (Guilty), Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. Her only hit had been a cover – a smoky reading of Del Shannon’s Runaway – but now Raitt was fully invested in her own material. The three self-penned songs on her 21st album, Just Like That …, are also its strongest, two of them inspired by real events. The title track retells a news story of how a young man tracks down a bereaved mother whose dead son’s organ donation saved his life: “I’ve spent years trying to find you / so I could finally let you know / It was your son’s heart that saved me / and a life you gave us both”. In Down The Hall, Raitt paints herself as a prison lifer who bonds with terminally ill inmates in the jail’s hospice, offering comfort in their dying days: “I don’t know about religion / I only know what I see / And in the end when I hold their hand / It’s both of us set free”.

The album’s third Raitt original, a funk-rock ode to the pitfalls of recovery (she’s been sober since 1989), lifts the mood with a litany of temptations for the righteous (“don’t matter how much time you got / it’s still a slippery ledge”). There’s also a co-write with guitarist George Marinelli, dedicated to friends and family who’ve passed on (Livin’ For the Ones), but for the most part, Just Like That … is a celebration of Raitt and her crack band of longtime collaborators being back together — and now, back on the road again — after two years of lockdown. As on her last album, 2016’s Dig In Deep – which included a hot-under-the-collar cover of INXS’s Need You Tonight – there’s an Australian connection: Blame It On Me is a heartfelt blues from the pen of John Capek, co-founder of ’70s Melbourne boogie band Carson, and it’s Raitt’s finest vocal performance on the record. Another highlight is the Little Feat-flavoured Here Comes Love, an out-take from Dig In Deep, featuring New Orleans denizen Jon Cleary on piano.

Phil Stafford

-

 

JAZZ

Another Dance

This World

Lionsharecords

★★★★½

Mike Nock (piano), Jonathan Zwartz (double bass), Julien Wilson (tenor sax) and Hamish Stuart (drums) recently named their band This World, the title of their celebrated 2019 debut album. Other than a session for ABC Jazz, now largely forgotten, Another Dance is their second album, and it’s more of the same: eight compositions from four great musicians who’ve shown that, as composers, each produces highly distinctive works. The result is an album of diversity and contrast. Other than beautiful improvisations, that diversity includes episodes of solo piano, where Nock is a master; the unusually sensitive drumming of Stuart; the huge sound and mellifluous playing of Wilson on tenor; and the full-toned brilliance of bassist Zwartz. An innovation in the composition Headlands is Stuart’s use of the ocean drum, a circular drum filled with small metal beads producing the restful sound of waves. This band, one of the most impressive Australian all-star quartets in living memory, is an irresistible combination of four renowned musicians.

Eric Myers

-

 

POP/COUNTRY

Light It Up

Casey Barnes

Independent

★★

There’s no official rule stating you need to stay in your own lane as a musician. As a tip, though: it helps if you know how to drive. Gold Coast-based Australian Idol alum Casey Barnes might have one of the flashiest-looking cars in Australian country, but his sixth studio album Light It Up indicates he’s more interested in stunts than precision. A blatant cash-in on the boyfriend-country trend, Barnes’s latest set almost feels embarrassed to be country. It attempts to soften the edges at every turn, replete with snap-tracks and processed production, becoming more of a twangy pop record in the process. There’s fun to be had with the horn section of Kiss Me Like You Mean It or the guitars on the title track, but elsewhere it just comes off as awkward. The fact no one from British act Jamiroquai is credited on Love Fool, which heavily lifts from the former’s Love Foolosophy, might well mean a lawsuit is on its way. Or at least it would be, were Barnes remarkable enough for anyone outside of Australia to notice.

David James Young

-

 

CLASSICAL

Women of Note Volume 4: Celebrating Australian Composers

Various Artists

ABC Classic

★★★★½

Since 2019, ABC Classic has been issuing albums celebrating Australian composers as part of International Women’s Day. This fourth edition continues the tradition of its predecessors, mixing generations, genres and styles and positioning short works alongside more substantial pieces. It is pleasing to rediscover several heritage pieces, such as Margaret Sutherland’s quartet and Miriam Hyde playing in the 1975 recording of her Second Piano Concerto; the first appears on the initial release. Fire Dances collect attractive short works for piano trio by eight composers, conveying their responses to the bushfire seasons. Two brief works by Indigenous composers, Lou Bennett and Brenda Gifford, bookend this 76 minute set. Among the works of some 14 composers, personal favourites are pieces by Rosalind Page and Andrea Keller. It’s a pity that the booklet did not contain details of the earlier albums, and a boxed set of the first several volumes would make a wonderful addition to the recorded repertoire.

Vincent Plush

-

 

ELECTRONIC

Diplo

Diplo

Sweat It Out / Mad Decent

★★★

From his pop-electronica productions alongside Sia and Mark Ronson, and Jamaican reggae and dance hall-inspired output as Major Lazer, to his somewhat wayward foray into country music as Thomas Wesley, Diplo — one of the few remaining EDM-era drawcards — has never been shy to experiment. On his fourth album, he sticks to well-produced, accessible house music that straddles the pop and, to a much lesser extent, underground realms. A serial collaborator, Diplo has gone to town here, enlisting a heaving roster of guests that creates a mixtape-like feel across 14 tracks. Don’t Forget My Love featuring Miguel is worthy of earworm status, while Right 2 Left featuring Busta Rhymes and Mele revels in darker, more tribal confines. His work with Seth Troxler and Desire on the hypnotic Waiting For You lends the album an air of underground respectability. Damian Lazarus’s involvement in Don’t Be Afraid does too, but an appearance by London act Jungle takes it down a more commercial route, where one senses Diplo feels most comfortable.

Tim McNamara