Salter on top with a varied career
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The multi-talented Ben Salter should be better known than he is.
Source: Supplied
THIS week’s album reviews from The Courier-Mail (ratings out of five stars):
ROCK
Ben Salter, The Stars My Destination
(ABC Music) ****
Ben Salter, as anyone knows who has kept an eye on Australian music these past 15 years, is a hard man to pin down.
There is his hard-rock self (Giants of Science), the musical director content to take the occasional turn in the spotlight (The Gin Club), the banjo-picking harmony singer (the bluegrass-inspired The Wilson Pickers), and collaborations of every stripe.
Why isn’t he better known than he is? That’s hard to explain when his first solo album, 2011’s The Cat, was a five-star classic, and a song like The Gin Club’s You Me and the Sea is one of the best songs anyone has written in the past 10 years.
He mightn’t have gold records or ARIA awards but there are plenty of people who have both who can’t do what Salter has managed, which is maintain a career that’s still growing.
For most of the past few years he has been on the move as a solo troubadour, playing everywhere from private backyard parties to extended jaunts across Europe, collecting dozens of tunes he has written on his laptop along the way.
For this album he’s followed his work method with The Gin Club, which is to return to one of his favourite spots on the planet, the Prior Park cattle station in central Queensland, with long-time recording engineer Murray Pass and, on this occasion, musician friends including fellow Gin Clubbers Angus Agars and Adrian Stoyles and producer Dan Luscombe (The Drones).
The result is certainly a rock record, not a solo troubadour one. It opens with the wide-open spaces of the title tune, no doubt inspired as much by the clear skies and the Milky Way above Prior Park as much as Alfred Bester’s 1956 sci-fi novel. “You know how much I hate goodbyes,’’ sings Salter — as an ever-travelling travelling musician he knows all about that — as a church organ cascades around him.
Boat Dreams is driven by pounding drums and scything electric guitars, in the same hard-as-nails territory as The Drones; The Sleep Stealer is the kind of rootsy rocker he might contribute to The Gin Club; Vile Rats uses elements of jazz without being jazz — chunky piano chords, skipping rhythm and superb sax from Julien Wilson.
Lyrically things are quite ambiguous thus far. It’s when the imagery becomes more concrete that things really catch fire; the country-rock of I Gotta Move, with string quartet and lonesome lap steel guitar; the existential philosophy and soaring melody of Bones Under The Dunes; the note-to-self that these are only first-world problems, after all, in No Security Blues.
There’s even room for some old-school pop fun on the ’60s-fired I Just Can’t Live Like This Anymore, where Salter ruefully admits “I’m not getting older but I’m not getting any wiser.’’
Musically at least, The Stars My Destination is evidence to the contrary.
Noel Mengel
CANTILLATION
Bohemian Rhapsody, Choral Pop
(Universal ABC Classics) ****1/2
Music director Anthony Walker and Cantillation vocal ensemble move up a notch with this collection conducted by Philip Chu. As a personal favourite in this genre, Les Feuilles Mortes was the first track I sampled from this intriguing, inviting disc produced by Toby Chadd. It does not disappoint. Memories of earlier sultry versions from the likes of the great, inimitable Edith Piaf or Charles Aznavour survive, but in Dan Walker’s arrangement of the song by Hungarian-French composer Joseph Kosma and lyricist-poet Jacques Prévert, phrasing is subtly in synch with its moods. The same restrained choral treatment reveals the elegant drive of George Gershwin’s classic Summertime to perfection. The disc’s 15 tracks, from Bohemian Rhapsody to Golden Years,How Can I Let You Go? (with yummy solo vocals by tenor Philip Chu) and Mamma Mia among many, are carefully structured. The artistic intelligence that marries well-phrased music to lyrics in this dream of a dreamy program is sheer bliss.
Patricia Kelly
Diamonds In The Bloodstream by Raised By Eagles
ROOTS
Raised By Eagles, Diamonds in the Bloodstream
(Sliprail/Vitamin) ****
Every band needs that one song that will grab people’s attention. Melbourne’s Raised By Eagles have that, Waterline, a haunting tune that’s as good as anything coming from fellow roots-rock travellers like Jason Isbell and Justin Townes Earle. Which is to say: top shelf. “There was a time when I could see us/As clear as day before the darkness took my mind,’’ the band’s frontman Luke Sinclair sings, as a guitar shimmers in the distance and a high, lonesome harmony drifts through. All eight tracks here are high quality, the Jayhawksian melancholy of Falling Through; the up-tempo Jackie with its fleet-fingered harmony lead guitar break; the sun-dappled acoustic tones of nostalgia of Honey. Pop stars and pop hits come and go, but this stuff will always be around, and Raised By Eagles are the next generation to carry on an Australian country-rock tradition that passes down from Country Radio, The Dingoes and The Black Sorrows. Catch them support Ruby Boots, Black Bear Lodge, Fortitude Valley, May 29.
Noel Mengel
ROCK
June Low, Exhale
(Sugarrush) ***1/2
June Low is the new working title for Brisbane songwriter Emma White.
This is an album that’s intimate and understated yet with plenty of emotional fuel to burn.
It is music that fits in with new English folkies like Olivia Chaney, always with plenty of room left for White’s striking voice and her crisp acoustic guitar work.
The band sound works a treat on opening cut Alone, with drums and organ from producer Skitch behind White’s soulful vocal.
In Walked My Conscience needs only White’s crisp acoustic guitar fingerpicking as the setting for her passionate delivery.
Jane Elliott’s cello weaves through two of the standout tracks — Rome, which resembles Patti Smith in her more acoustic moments and June Low, a timeless elegy that could have come from the golden era of English folk-rock.
Oh, and what is burning lament Pour Some Sugar On Me?
A Def Leppard track, it turns out, sounding as far from Def Leppard as it is possible to get.
Noel Mengel
WORLD
Angelique Kidjo, Sings
(429 Records) ****
Though only two of the tracks on Sings are new, you won’t have heard the other nine in as lush a setting as this. That’s because African soul, funk and jazz diva Angelique Kidjo is backed by the 110-piece Luxembourg Philharmonic. Opening with Malaika, a tribute to her heroine, Miriam Makeba, Kidjo somehow surpasses her three previous versions of the song, sung in Swahili. That’s the thing about Sings; though Kidjo vocalises across a range of African languages, in French (a new rendition of Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur) and in her native Yoruba (on her unique reading of Santana’s Samba Pa Ti, an instrumental to which she added her own lyrics), you soon forget she’s singing in tongues and just go with the sounds she’s making. The music is underpinned by a duo of African backing singers and the electric guitar of Kidjo’s Beninese compatriot, Lionel Loueke. The new songs, Otishe (adapted by Kidjo) and Nanae, featuring Brazilian acoustic guitarist Romero Lubambo, fit seamlessly into the mix.
Phil Stafford
(PB:100) by Popboomerang Records
POP
Various Artists, PB100
(Popboomerang) ****1/2
Why mine the past for the sake of nostalgia when there’s deeper seams? That’s the approach popboomerang founder Scott Thurling has taken with the indie label’s celebration of its 100th release, with artists such as The Earthmen and The Little Murders delving into their archives for a compilation of previously unreleased material. Opening with The Killjoys’ new
Marching Out of Time and closing with Brisbane act Grand Atlantic’s Never Say Goodbye
, the album serves as an entry point and archive of various bands. Similarly, the compilation’s liner notes are a look-behind-the-curtain and give insight to the artists such as Mick Thomas self-recorded take on Patti Smith’s The Mermaid Song for his infant daughter and The Underminers’ first airing of Brave In Other Ways the night after it was written. The bonus disc also brings more moments of bands rediscovering themselves, with Celadore’s final recording 10AM In A Lion’s Den and rediscovered ’80s gem Happy Together by Brisbane band Curiosity Shop, featuring The Courier-Mail’s Noel Mengel.
Bill Johnston
ROCK
Darts, Below Empty & Westward Bound
(Rice is Nice) ****
Melbourne five-piece Darts have been steadily building a reputation for their stellar live shows since winning Triple J Unearthed in 2009 and although it’s taken almost six years for their debut full-length, it’s been worth the wait. The band members proudly wear their ‘90s influences on their sleeves, with Sonic Youth-esque distorted guitars, rapid-fire drumming and dual vocals from Ally Campbell-Smith and Angus Ayres. Opener Commanche starts out with a few melodic guitar strums, before the hard-hitting drums and Ayres’ aggressive vocals kick in. The Pixies influence is evident throughout, but nowhere more so than on first single Westward Bound
. Conversely, latest single Aeroplane provides one of the most reined-in, melodic moments
. Another highlight is slow-burning closing track My Darling/Bendigo. Although the band’s points of reference are easy to spot, there are enough idiosyncratic flourishes to ensure it sounds original and the delivery is so earnest it’s hard not to embrace.
Daniel Johnson
