Reviews: Allan Browne Quintet, Kate Burke & Ruth Hazleton, Opolopo, Oh Mercy, Raised by Eagles

It’s sad to realise that Allan Browne unknowingly recorded his own epitaph, but this is a eulogy of which he would have approved.

Ithica Bound, Allan Browne Quintet

It’s sad to realise that Allan Browne unknowingly recorded his own epitaph, but this is a eulogy of which he would have approved.

JAZZ

Ithaca Bound

Allan Browne Quintet

Jazzhead

4.5 stars

This fifth album from the Melbourne quintet led by drummer, composer and poet Browne sadly will be the last. After launching the album at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival on June 1, Browne died in hospital last Saturday, aged 70. He had undergone a lung transplant in 2002, subsequently releasing an album entitled Cyclosporin, the name of a drug Browne claimed saved his life.

Courageously he kept playing drums, often while connected to an oxygen cylinder. An irreplaceable stalwart of the Melbourne jazz scene and a fascinating human being, Browne led a house band weekly at Bennetts Lane for 15 years and enjoyed a career in traditional and contemporary music for 50 years. His many fans will remember not only his marvellous drumming but also his original poetry recitations. It was his love of poetry that led to two previous original albums portraying poems by Arthur Rimbaud: A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat. The new album celebrates Browne’s favourite poem: Homer’s Odyssey, featuring compositions from each band member in a vast and impassioned suite.

On the Deck, the first of eight tracks, begins in an out-of-tempo leisurely mood with guitar, sax and trumpet notes, as gradually drum rolls arrive and a rhythmic theme develops featuring Eugene Ball’s trumpet. Phil Noy’s alto sax and Geoff Hughes’s guitar join in as Nick Haywood’s bass emerges and Browne lays down a medium-slow tempo using multiple diverse effects. Noy’s masterful solo introduces another from Hughes’s hastening guitar as the ensemble then wanders freely to a conclusion. Noy’s composition Calypso features a post-bop theme over a subtle Caribbean rhythm and vivid solos from sax, trumpet and then guitar with ceaselessly inventive drums. Memory and Kharis begins briskly with the two horns underpinned by adroit guitar chords ahead of a lift-off trumpet solo interwoven with spectacularly effective drum stick-work.

The Lotus Eaters opens with mysterious trumpet and alto, giving way to a guitar riff under some swift bass work from Haywood. There are long-held cryptic harmonies from trumpet and sax while the guitar picks out a mystical motif.

At the launch, Browne announced he thought this piece must have been written by Ball while staring into a lava lamp. There is smart guitar and percussion duo work in The Suitors, as drums maintain imaginative mobility under high-register trumpet and continue during a bass solo’s added action. The finale, Peace at Last, supplies a dramatic soundtrack of a steadily marching beat of bass and drums for Browne’s husky reading of the closing stanzas of Homer’s famous work from 800 BC.

John McBeath

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FOLK

Declaration

Kate Burke & Ruth Hazleton

Independent

4 stars

While Kate Burke and Ruth Hazleton are accomplished instrumentalists and songwriters, it’s their prowess as singers — solo and in stunning harmony — and as interpreters that’s primarily on display in Declaration.

Their intricate yet intrinsically spare guitar and banjo accompaniment allows optimum absorption of a well-chosen selection of traditional and contemporary songs, and two excellent self-penned numbers. Luke Plumb’s production sensitivity and expertise and his judicious backing contributions on mandolin and bouzouki guide the Australian duo’s exploration of lightness and darkness — mostly the latter — through the prism of folk song. Fidelity and infidelity are recurring themes throughout Burke & Hazleton’s fifth studio album and, by osmosis, the resilience of women. Their renditions of two trad ballads of Scottish origin, Bleezin’ Blind Drunk and Katy Cruel, offer sound alternatives to the cover versions by English songstress Linda Thompson that inspired their interpretations.

The ladies’ reading of Queen Of Hearts, a haunting 17th-century song that compares love to a game of cards, might not match Martin & Eliza Carthy’s extraordinary rendition on last year’s The Moral of the Elephant album, but it’s nonetheless riveting.

Although they’ve modified lyrics and melodies to suit their own purposes, they’ve done so with reverence to the source, overtly so in Dean Younk a Gernow — an 18th/19th-century emigration song that the pair partly deliver in the arcane language of Cornwall.

Tony Hillier

ELECTRONIC

Superconductor

Opolopo

Z Records

4 stars

Under his Opolopo moniker, Hungarian-born Swede Peter Major has used the soul, funk, jazz and fusion influences of his youth to forge a career heavily influenced by the past, but always nodding to future sounds. The fact Opolopo is Yoruban for “plenty” isn’t lost as one listens to Superconductor, for the producer’s fourth original album contains an abundance of quality grooves. Major has channelled the sounds of 80s-era funk, soul and boogie to fashion a synth-heavy and up-tempo electronic album awash with positivity. The influence of Z Records head Dave Lee is hard to ignore through co-writing credits on tracks including Round and Round, where the vocals of Diane Charlemagne evoke the vibes of Lee’s Sunburst Band side project, of which she is part. Other regular Z collaborators including Pete Simpson and Taka Boom also feature, the latter on the funky Feels Good 2 Me and the more menacing Just Feel the Music. The studio talents of Major loom largest. The Best opens proceedings on a feel-good trip, as the smooth vocals of Colonel Red pair with house beats to create an uplifting tune. First single Get On Up does what it says on the box, and is notable for its bumpy bassline and piano vibes interspersed with outerworldly effects. Monolith, with its keys, squelching synths and instrumentation — all performed by Major — speak to the level of sophistication throughout Superconductor. There’s so much to like. Major’s productions have a real warmth to them. There’s delicious irony in the fact the up-tempo Spare Me the Details featuring Erik Dillard closes the album, for one gets the feeling no detail has been overlooked on Superconductor. It’s a tightly produced and altogether original package.

Tim McNamara

ROOTS

Diamonds in the Bloodstream

Raised By Eagles

Sliprail/Vitamin Records

4 stars

Melbourne Americana four-piece Raised by Eagles delivers a second album with its influences still very much on its sleeve, while never failing to impress with the quality and abundance of ideas. The songs’ very Australianness is one of their main foundations, The songs are filled with universal thoughts, but the lyrical detail locates them in our wide brown land. More energetic and lively than forebears such as the Triffids and the Go-Betweens, RBE uses the same sense of space and stifling heat. Gorgeous harmonies, including guest spots from Liz Stringer and Van Walker, and the ever tasteful guitar work of Nick O’Mara lift every song to being the best they can be. Moving between country and rock and at times showing off some of the confident energy of Under the Sun-era Paul Kelly & the Coloured Girls, their search for their own place makes for great listening. From the tough edge of Jackie, with twin guitars and all, to the lush, dreamy sound of Waterline, to the overwhelming sadness that leaches out of the booty call Doorstep, where the point is driven home by O’Mara’s mandolin, every one of the eight songs makes its presence felt. Many songs reference drinking in a way that suggests the years of their youth are stretching out like a long Australian summer. The characters feel just one hangover, just one big mistake away from the cold realisation that, as Jimmy Buffett once put it, they are growing older but not up. It is against that backdrop principal songwriters Luke Sinclair and O’Mara have (mostly separately) created a set of solid quality songs that take their time, but ultimately win you over play by play.

Polly Coufos

POP

When We Talk About Love

Oh Mercy

EMI

4.5 stars

Nothing fuels a songwriter’s fire quite like a broken heart; and, boy, has Alex Gow been through the mill if this, his fourth album under the Oh Mercy banner, is any gauge. “Things have changed since you’ve been gone / The sun don’t seem so bright” are the first words we hear on When We Talk About Love. Strings underpin that song, Without You, and add a dollop of melancholy to Gow’s misery on the bulk of the remaining 11 tracks. By the time we get three songs in on the brisk Sandy (“I’d rather be dead than be on my own again”) we’re in no doubt about Gow’s agenda. To offset the heartbreak, crucially, Gow has penned some stunning pop tunes, including a couple of earworms in I Don’t Really Want to Know and If You Come Around Tonight, the latter a simple refrain set over a seductive guitar-pop jangle. Other than strings, Gow plays all the instruments (guitar, keys, bass, drums). His rudimentary rhythm section serves the songs well, however, letting the melodies breathe and the nuances of his voice (with traces of Ian McCulloch) cut through to sell his weary heart, particularly on the exquisite, strings-driven ballads Iron Cross and Lady Eucalyptus. Oh Mercy’s previous three albums tap into a variety of genres, from country to glam-rock. When We Talk About Love benefits from its singular vision lyrically, but also musically. Less is more here, thanks to Gow and producer Scott Horscroft, who lends a delicate, empathetic hand to the sparse structures.

Iain Shedden