Reviews: Parkway Drive

Life-and-death battles of biblical proportions are a recurring theme

METALCORE

Reverence

Parkway Drive

Resist Records

4.5 stars

Reverence, by Parkway Drive

In 2003, a group of five kids from Byron Bay started a band that took its name from the street where its jam space was located. It played its first gig at the local youth centre because the drummer was too young to get into pubs — and also because it plays metalcore, a pub-unfriendly genre of heavy music that mixes the guitar riffs and screams of metal with the energy and tempo changes of hardcore punk. Fifteen years of relentless touring later, Parkway Drive is Australia’s most successful guitar-based musical export. The band has sold hundreds of thousands of copies of its albums and plays to huge crowds of eager fans in Australia and Europe. Its previous album, Ire, was its most commercially successful (and commercial-sounding), and new album Reverence, its sixth, takes the band’s experimentations on Ire and 2012 album Atlas and elevates them.

Life-and-death battles of biblical proportions are a recurring theme here, from the cover art — Rubens masterpiece The Fall of the Damned — to the choral vocals on Cemetery Bloom and I Hope You Rot. In opener Wishing Wells, singer Winston McCall does his best Leonard Cohen impression as he vows to have his revenge on the Devil and God for their part in taking his loved ones. The tough-guy mask soon slips and his crazed grief boils over: “So ask me how I’m coping / And I’ll smile and tell you ‘I’m just fine’ / While down inside I’m drowning in the f. king rain.”

Absolute Power is the weakest song here, mostly because it is full of riffs and lyrics the band has cribbed from Rage Against the Machine’s Calm Like a Bomb. It will probably be a huge success live for exactly the same reason. Cemetery Bloom is the first jaw-dropper on the album. It’s all strings, synths and booming tom drums, with barely a guitar to be heard. This is a new Parkway, and the band wants you to feel the shock of the new.

Shadow Boxing fuses together the double kick drums, breakdowns and screams from the band’s roots with its fresh string-filled direction. Parkway Drive first tried this combination on Atlas, but this time it has finally made it work. It’s also the first time McCall has sung a clean vocal melody on a Parkway Drive record, and it’s a true highlight of the band’s career. Final track The Colour
of Leaving returns to where Wishing Wells left off. “You never know how small your voice is ‘til you’re arguing with God,” McCall sings plaintively, accompanied by an acoustic guitar, cello and the sound of a shovel cutting through earth.

It’s far away from his roared demands in Wishing Wells that God and the Devil face his wrath. The album ends with the sound of McCall’s footsteps walking away from the freshly dug grave, and it’s more crushing than any breakdown the band has ever written.

Reverence is a stunning and brilliantly executed showcase of how these five
men have grown as musicians and people.
It’s the best Parkway Drive album since 2007’s Horizons.

SOPHIE BENJAMIN

Rituals, by Amaya Laucirica

INDIE POP

Rituals

Amaya Laucirica

Kasumuen

3.5 stars

“We could dream it all away,” sings Amaya Laucirica in Still So Young, a CD-only bonus track on her fourth album. That escapist sentiment hangs over much of Rituals, which finds the Melbourne singer-songwriter fully committing to the lush, shoe-gazing pop that appeared on 2014’s Sway.

Following a sojourn in Berlin, here she reunites with guitarist and keyboardist Andrew Keese while enlisting a new rhythm section: bassist Giles Fielke (Lowtide) and drummer Hugo Cran (Devastations). Though Laucirica has always sung with drowsy softness, this album’s chiming guitars and star-dusted keys encourage a new-found sense of
the cosmic.

Opener Little Clouds even rides a sedated Jesus and Mary Chain groove under what feels like an expansive planetarium canopy. While undeniably gorgeous, that same spacey crawl dampens the album’s second half. Partly that’s because on the first two singles both band and leader shake off their sleepiness with stunning results. Anointed with an unexpected bloom of distortion, More Than This explores the darker side of dream pop by pairing her gossamer vocals with more pronounced psychedelic flourishes and a hypnotic forward push.

Yet it’s on the breakthrough All of Our Time that the album really peaks, thanks to a sighing, nostalgia-steeped chorus that could retroactively adorn a classic John Hughes film. An under-the-radar earworm lodging in the head and heart alike, it gives Laucirica ample room to exult without lulling the listener into
too deep a dream state.

DOUG WALLEN

The Bluebird, The Mystic and The Fool, by Joseph Tawadros

ROOTS

The Bluebird, the Mystic and the Fool

Joseph Tawadros

Planet

5 stars

The prolific Egyptian-Australian prodigy of Arabic lute Joseph Tawadros has procured four ARIA awards from a dozen nominations. Repeated plays of the Cairo-born, Sydney-raised and currently London-based oud maestro and composer’s latest waxing leaves little doubt that he’ll be in the running for another come November.

The Bluebird, the Mystic and the Fool merits an award on the score of organic ad hoc music-making alone. Considerable imagination as well as exquisite musicianship and camaraderie characterise Tawadros’s seventh studio album in eight years. Renewing acquaintance with a quartet of Australian associates with whom he enjoys a symbiotic relationship has resulted in an inspired set that seamlessly combines Middle Eastern modalities with classical and contemporary jazz elements.

Along with a handful of short pieces in which Tawadros demonstrates his unparalleled brilliance as a soloist — a capacity that has earned him a concert at the prestigious London Proms later this year — are ensemble gems that elicit the excellence of the leader and his sidemen as players and listeners. James Tawadros supplies his usual sophisticated and supple percussion platform on req tambourine and bendir frame drum, creating mesmerising rhythmic undercurrents with double-bassist Karl Dunnicliff. Upfront, jazz pianist Matt McMahon and clarinetist Dimitri Vouros exchange elegant figures with the leader’s lute.

The resultant dynamics are full of light and shade, redolent with reflective lulls and thrilling, rocklike peaks. Indeed, the interplay between all five players and the standard of composing and arranging are of such uniformly high order that no number outshines another on this magnificent album.

TONY HILLIER

Loudmouth Soup, by Cosmic Psychos

PUNK

Loudmouth Soup

Cosmic Psychos

Go the Hack

3.5 stars

Just as jokey and blokey as ever, Cosmic Psychos populate this 11th studio album with
all the comically crude, self-deprecating punk we’ve come to expect across the past few decades.

Lionised by fans such as Eddie Vedder and Garbage’s Butch Vig in the winsome 2013 doco Blokes You Can Trust, the famously raw trio hasn’t changed an ounce since that relative uptick in cult status.

Named after a slang term for beer, Loudmouth Soup was recorded right on frontman Ross Knight’s family farm at Spring Plains, Victoria. The album doesn’t skimp on casual swearing or cheeky punchlines, whether the band is mocking a lousy guitar hook (Better in the Shed), saluting arse cracks (Moon Over Victoria) or depicting daily life through encounters with different animal faeces (Dogshit).

That’s not to say it’s some throwaway novelty: lead single Feeling Average stands out as one of its most universal songs to date, while Moonshine Shuffle is a gruff badge of pride about valuing simple country life over social media and other emblems of modern malaise. Musically, the songs revel in the bracing glory of John McKeering’s pub-wrought riffs, Knight’s fuzzed-out bass lines and Dean Muller’s hard-hitting drumming.

If the classic Psychos-style opener 100 Cans of Beer seems to flag Loudmouth Soup as a one-note victory lap, the album actually spans a decent range of emotions — from the petty vengefulness of Mean to celebrating marinara pizza in Rat on the Mat.

DOUG WALLEN

Geography, by Tom Misch

NEO-SOUL/JAZZ

Geography

Tom Misch

Beyond the Groove

4.5 stars

Widely regarded as the spiritual leader of a blooming resurgence of jazz, hip hop and soul in south London, Tom Misch’s debut sees him capitalising on a steady wave of hype that has surrounded his mixtapes for years.

Barely into his 20s, Misch is already an enviable triple threat. A formidable jazz guitarist, self-taught producer and soul-inspired vocalist, his music celebrates instrumental 1970s jazz and 90s neo-soul, while filtering it through the prism of modern hip hop. Geography is an album built on chops but driven by groove, where Misch showcases his extraordinary talents without letting them get in the way of a song. His dexterous licks sit side-by-side with danceable disco beats and guest rapper Goldlink on Lost in Paris, while South of the River invokes the joyousness of Earth, Wind & Fire and nods to D’Angelo without the indulgences of either.

Joy is the operative word across this excellent record, where Misch also elevates long-time collaborators such as his sister Laura, Carmody and Loyle Carner. It’s an album full of bouncing bass lines, live handclaps, sweet melodies and jazz-influenced syncopation, produced with the crackling warmth that has become Misch’s signature.

Few could pull off a rendition of Isn’t She Lovely in the middle of what is ostensibly a pop record with such conviction. This is the real power of Tom Misch: he casually makes the uncool hip again,
which makes him as likely to do for his chosen genres what Jamie Cullum did for piano balladry in the early 2000s.

Easy to like and even easier to love, he’s a crossover artist who seems born for the limelight.

JONATHAN SEIDLER