Album review: Perry Keyes comes out swinging on Black & White Town
This Sydney artist’s sustained lyrical beat has been observational songs concerned with urban underclass life. True to reputation, Perry Keyes comes out swinging on Black & White Town.
Album reviews for week of December 15 2023:
ROCK
Black & White Town
Perry Keyes
EH Records
Sometimes I get a feeling this country slowly murders its finest poets and songwriters. For every Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil or Paul Kelly there’s a dozen damned. We tend to be a cruel, actively amnesiac nation not favourably disposed to those who sing too deeply of who and what we are. I don’t know how such artists keep going, apart from the fact they just can’t help themselves. Lauded as “the Bruce Springsteen of Redfern” when he began writing and performing, Perry Keyes’s sustained lyrical beat has been observational songs concerned with urban underclass life and spent figures in need of recognition and romance in lieu of being short-changed most other ways. Like all great writers, Keyes watches closely, and keeps in mind his songs might actually reach the ears of those he writes about. He understands all too well that you can colonise people with sympathy and steal their suffering. Whether he is writing about street kids, broken families or community history being swept away, Keyes delivers his bitter truths with a vein of respect, mixing hopelessness and hope in a knot that lingers and uplifts.
At 57, the artist has released album No. 6 on his own independent label, EH Records. I still think his fourth, Sunnyholt, might be his masterpiece, marked by the introduction of brass into his classic rock sound, offering a surging new brightness right when most artists would be settling into predictability. I am simply amazed Keyes can come out swinging again on Black & White Town like his life depended on it. Opener Last Night in Redfern Park goes off like a hybrid of Elvis Costello and The Clash, riffing off jump-cut images of junkies, punks, drunks and kids in trouble, chillingly suspended by a few half-spoken lines – “Stand up, son / Empty your pockets / Keep your head down / Now look up at me” – that nail cop procedure. Album closer Abandoned Car Problems is similarly tough and precise, another rain of images with the grand feel of a Jimmy Webb song. Between them, a journey is implied, conceptually akin to a collection of short stories about disenfranchised regional youth running to the big city. The authenticity of detail draws from Keyes’s years as a taxi driver and observing life around the housing estates of Waterloo, but that doesn’t capture the smoky defiance in his voice or how he leans towards the singalong and punch-the-air protest. Influences such as The Pogues, The Clash and Lou Reed signal a profoundly intelligent songwriter. Beside each of them, Perry Keyes holds his own.
Mark Mordue
INDIE ROCK
Light, Dark, Light Again
Angie McMahon
AWAL
Embracing the cleansing potential of dramatic life changes, Melbourne-based Angie McMahon’s second album arrives four years after her career-making 2019 debut Salt. Much wider in scope, this follow-up beats a mostly triumphant path through life’s most daunting challenges. Letting Go evokes the propulsive heartland rock of US band The War on Drugs as it culminates in the impassioned refrain “It’s okay / Make mistakes”. McMahon has a real knack for such intense mantras: see “I hope that I’m always exploding” on the self-affirming standout Exploding. By the time she’s repeating the album’s title phrase on the closing Making It Through, it’s hard not to feel swept up in her personal cycle of emotional exhaustion and resolution. Her penetrating voice rises and falls accordingly, bolstered by a robust choir of peers on Music’s Coming In and intermittently thundering arrangements on the piano ballad Fireball Whiskey. It’s not always an easy listen, but across 50 minutes, McMahon follows through on her promise to lead us out the other side.
Doug Wallen
INDIE ROCK
God Games
The Kills
Domino
As The Kills, Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince ruled the 2000s with cult classics like the snarling Fried My Little Brains and uber-cool U.R.A. Fever. Its profile was, however, eclipsed in the 2010s – not by new musical trends, but by Hince’s tabloid-fodder relationship with Kate Moss. With both that and its heyday in the rear-view, what do The Kills offer circa 2023? Its sixth LP, and first in seven years, attempts to recalibrate their original NYC cool for a modern era. It’s not entirely smooth sailing: Blank and My Girls My Girls are dire, inconsequential ballads that offer precious little substance. To its credit, however, God Games largely nails the brief – particularly across the first half, where opener New York and the slinking Love and Tenderness provide highlights that match Mosshart’s sultry vocal with Hince’s pedal-stomping guitars to full, decisive effect. Throw in numbers like the rattling, persistent Wasterpiece, as well as Paul Epworth’s wide-screen production approach, and you’re getting eerily close to the band that once helped to define the so-called “indie sleaze” movement.
David James Young
JAZZ
The Eye is the First Circle
Vanessa Perica Orchestra
Independent
Vanessa Perica’s celebrated 2020 album Love Is a Temporary Madness led to her writing a suite of compositions from the album for the MSO, performed in 2021. Not bad for a debut. Her second album shows once again her two primary assets: her composition and arranging skills, and access to the country’s finest jazz musicians, many of whom — like Perica — hail from a fertile jazz scene in WA: saxophonists Carl Mackey & Jamie Oehlers, trumpeter Mat Jodrell, trombonist Jordan Murray and the rhythm section of bassist Sam Anning and drummer Ben Vanderwal. These players contribute the most notable solos, along with Melburnian saxophonist Julien Wilson, and a Sydney ring-in Tessie Overmyer on alto saxophone. Perica has the happy knack of marshalling her available forces sparingly, then writing inspiring passages which really capture the majesty of the jazz big band. The title track is inspired by the painting of the same name by the abstract expressionist Lee Krasner, who was married to the artist Jackson Pollock.
Eric Myers
ROCK
The World Don’t Owe You Anything
Luca Brasi
Cooking Vinyl
This Tasmanian band can be depended upon for delivering heartfelt and emphatic rock music that can hit your emotional core at any time. With five charming and evocative albums under its collective belt, Luca Brasi demonstrates continued evolution and maturity in sound on this sixth effort. Led by Tyler Richardson’s unmistakeable vocal weight, themes of introspection and self-realisation blend with sonic urgency and a constant feeling of yearning and desire (Rinse and Repeat; the title track). Songs like ‘Til Forever, Concussion and Habits highlight the songwriting strength Luca Brasi has been honing over the past decade: unafraid to let emotional nuance shine through, while still letting themselves play with hard-hitting, incensing rock arrangements. The band hasn’t reinvented itself with this release; instead, it ably reminds listeners of its chemistry as a group, sometimes harking back to its earlier days (Scars) while remaining clearly focused on a fresh sonic landscape still to be explored.
Sosefina Fuamoli
Album reviews for week of December 8 2023:
ROCK
i/o
Peter Gabriel
Virgin Music
In Spencer Bright’s 1988 biography of Peter Gabriel, the British singer, songwriter, film composer, human rights activist and champion of what became known as “world music” recalls witnessing his first live show. It was a date on American soul legend Otis Redding’s first British tour, and a then 16-year-old Gabriel was transfixed. “It’s still my favourite gig of all time,” he tells Bright of the night in 1966 that set him on his career course. That soul connection has regularly resurfaced since, most notably in Gabriel’s late 20th century hits Sledgehammer and Steam. It does so again on a key track from i/o, his first album since 2002’s Up. Sonically similar to those two older songs — both unabashed celebrations of the sensual — Road to Joy is a soul-funk jewel with the seemingly incongruous theme of a coma victim, unable to move or communicate, who is revived, one sense at a time, back to life, back into the world. That idea of reconnection permeates i/o, its title signifying “input/output”, the notion that what each of us draws intellectually from the world we recycle for others to absorb. Never one to shy away from the big topics, Gabriel on i/o also examines grief and mortality, injustice, surveillance and the roots of terrorism.
Opener Panopticom, one of several songs steered by the singer’s longtime gun rhythm section — bassist Tony Levin, drummer Manu Katche and guitarist David Rhodes — inverts 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon, a structure designed so its occupants can be monitored by one central guard. Gabriel’s version restores the power to the people, enabling them to supervise their masters. The Court questions the efficacy of modern justice, dismissing legal precedents with the zinger: “Your only memory’s on your mobile phone”. Four Kinds of Horses, citing a Buddhist parable about the four different approaches to spiritual practice, points to historical links between religion and terrorism. Yet i/o also has its tender moments: This Is Home, in praise of shelter and security; And Still, Gabriel’s touching elegy for his late mother; the self-explanatory Love Can Heal; and the equally uplifting closer Live And Let Live, a plea for tolerance buoyed by the sublime Soweto Gospel Choir and 46-piece New Blood Orchestra, who feature on several other songs. Overall, the music is to wallow in: additional guests include Brian Eno (synths and piano), all-male Swedish choir Orphei Drangar and compatriot cellist Linnea Olsson, plus a three-piece horn section.
Phil Stafford
INDIE POP/FOLK
Dizzy Spell
Alexander Gow
Independent
Few Australian songwriters wring as much meaning out of wistfulness as Alexander Gow. A lot of that sits in the soft resignation of his singing, but his lyrics do just as much heavy lifting. On this debut album under his own name, the longtime songwriter behind Melbourne indie act Oh Mercy keeps the arrangements understated and mellow. The opening pair of The Truth Is Cruel and In the Grip of Something make for a quietly devastating ambush, and yet Gow’s deadpan wit comes out to play elsewhere. Jesus Almost Got Me describes slipping free of salvation, only for Easy Marriage to riff on a Paul Simon classic when Gow dubs himself “the only living boy in Fitzroy.” Following his electronics-led 2021 album Kangourou under the guise Perfect Moment, this downbeat set once again represents Gow’s easy and accomplished way with stylistic shifts. On a similar note, he recently won a Walkley Award as part of an AFR podcast team covering the PwC tax scandal, a feat that makes him perhaps the only person to achieve both an ARIA and a Walkley. It turns out lyrics aren’t Gow’s only form of incisive reporting.
Doug Wallen
ROOTS
Long Time
Margret RoadKnight
Chapter Music
An aptly named 20-track compilation, Long Time puts a seal on the distinguished six-decade career of one of Australia’s most versatile singers and doyennes of the local acoustic roots music scene. Comprising Margret RoadKnight’s recordings between 1988 and 2023, it bookends a ‘best of’ catalogue inaugurated in 2013. As such, it’s both a fitting swan song and overview – one that spans the octogenarian’s impressively wide repertoire and vocal range, from her interpretations of Bob Hudson’s pop classic Girls In Our Town and Loudon Wainwright III’s sardonic rocker How Old Are You? to spirited choral arrangements of the hot gospel standard Till Time Brings Change and the 1930s’ torch song Stormy Weather. Novelty numbers include a scat-sung jazz samba sandwiched between gutbucket blues numbers and a hummed, whistled and thumb piano accompanied cover of the folk air Women Of Ireland. An inveterate activist who has shared a stage with Nelson Mandela, La RoadKnight also includes several songs carrying social commentary.
Tony Hillier
JAZZ
The Odd River
Helen Svoboda
Earshift Music
The Odd River contains music from the mind of 2021 Freedman Jazz Fellowship winner Helen Svoboda. Whereas her vocal ability and bass playing artistry were known through her duo Meatshell, she uses here a 10-piece ensemble of leading Australian improvisers. They include odd instruments – two prepared pianos, toy piano, music box, harmonium, zither – creating lovely soundscapes over which she employs her own singing and playing, plus orthodox jazz instruments: trumpet, alto saxophone and woodwinds. The album is mesmerising in the colours and sounds she explores, much of it freely improvised. The first short track Apple Choir is the sound of two musicians munching apples, foreshadowing sounds which are highly agreeable throughout. This music is whimsical and often subversive of common expectations, but is always entertaining and full of generosity of spirit. The album claims to be “a surreal exploration of humanity’s relationship with nature and the generational malaise surrounding climate change”. Whatever the inspiration, Svoboda has created highly innovative music that I like to categorise as New Jazz.
Eric Myers
CLASSICAL
Something Like This
Emily Granger and Sally Walker
Avie
Can there be any more perfect combination than the duo of flute and harp? For many, Mozart achieved perfection in his Concerto, an arrangement of its slow movement is the centrepiece of this splendid new album by two Australian musicians with strong ties to Canberra, the flautist Sally Walker and harpist Emily Granger. Conventional repertoire pieces by Bach, Satie, Ibert and Lutoslawski appear alongside short pieces by Australian composers Elena Kats-Chernin, Jessica Wells, Sally Greenaway and Christopher Sainsbury, all intoxicatingly beautiful in their own way, with an entrancing work by Lachlan Skipworth launching the 57-minute program. There is only one word for the performances: seraphic. The phrasing and articulation are meticulously poised and delivered in a beautifully natural way, especially the movement from Bach’s G minor sonata, which can often sound mechanical. As an antidote to life’s stresses, this music, calming and cheering, should be on high rotation. For their next release, maybe they could add a viola, giving us Debussy’s sublime Sonata, and some of its many offspring.
Vincent Plush