Album reviews: Making musical horse sense

The Yearlings’ packaging might be plain, but the music is anything but.
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ALT COUNTRY

THE YEARLINGS

All the Wandering (Vitamin)

****1/2

SOME records arrive on a wave of hype.

From the other end of the spectrum is this new album from Adelaide duo The Yearlings, which arrived on my desk without fanfare inside a plain-looking cover.

But when you open up the package you find a richly detailed booklet inside the sleeve.

It looks great and feels beautiful in the hands as you flick through. Veteran Australian bassist Harry Brus uses 30-year-old La Bella flatwound strings, it informs us. The people who care about such things, and that the album was recorded on a 24-track tape machine in an age when most people use digital, will find much to reward them when they play the music.

It has the same feel as the cover: a little stark at first, slowly opening up to reveal the same kind of loving attention to detail. And one of the best roots rock records I’ve heard from Australia, or anywhere, this year.

The core duo is Robyn Chalklen, who plays acoustic guitar and shares vocals with Chris Parkinson, who plays most things with strings on (and ’50s Fender amps, the booklet notes).

The album opens with the lonesome title tune, with lines like “Every sinking sun going down/Every lucky star, each candle blown/All the wishing I have ever done’’.

Parkinson’s stinging electric guitar lines nestle in close to Shane Reilly’s slow-mo pedal steel swells.

It’s an extraordinarily powerful song, and of course any artist would want to put something that good first. What the casual listener might not be expecting is that they have another nine songs of a quality to back it up.

Parkinson takes on the lead vocals for Heart of It All, which might be addressing the same defeated character as the opening tune.

Heart of It All is one of several tracks that feature brass, the kind of arrangements which could have once graced a record by The Band. Full of regret, yet somehow reassuring to hear something so solid, so timeless, amid all this uncertainty and sorrow.

The horns are there, suitably enough, on Blue Sky Boy, since it’s a Memphis story, complete with a gospel-charged backing choir. It could be The Sweet Inspirations on an Elvis Presley record, although in this case among their number are Chalklen, Taasha Coates and Sara Tindley.

Things take a darker turn on Way Out East, sung by Parkinson, with room for a lengthy electric guitar solo from him. Here’s something you don’t see in record reviews anymore, but that solo is great. Think Cortez the Killer and you’re in the ballpark.

Oh, and Valley of Souls, as tender and bruised and beautiful a song as you will hear in 2014.

If you’ve loved any of the country-rock records I’ve reviewed this year, from Halfway to The Mastersons, trust me on this. You should hear All The Wandering.

Noel Mengel

ROCKABILLY

BRIAN SETZER

Rockabilly Riot! (Surfdog/The Planet Company)

***1/2

IT’S 35 years since his first band the Stray Cats caught Britain’s new wave after being ignored in their homeland US, but Brian Setzer’s mission remains the same: keeping authentic 1950s rockabilly alive. Taking a break from his big band, the ace guitarist and his three-man

Riot Squad summon up that Stray Cats spirit with Rockabilly Riot!,

recorded live in the studio (apart from Setzer’s vocals) and dripping

sweat, energy and wit. It’s subtitled “all original”, though there’s nothing unique about the material: Setzer’s been churning out this stuff in his sleep for decades. Still, amid the lightning licks, slapping bass, pounding Jerry Lee-style piano and kinetic drums, there are plenty of zinger lines. Take Lemme Slide, a song for sticky fiscal situations: “It ain’t that I ain’t got the fundamentals (Yeah, you got ’em)/I just can’t seem to pay my incidentals (You ain’t got ’em)”. The cliches mount up after 12 tracks about fast cars and faster women with names like Calamity Jane, but you just can’t fault the kilojoule count. Let’s rock!

Phil Stafford

Trials and Cape Tribulation by Paddy McHugh

COUNTRY ROCK

PADDY McHUGH AND THE GOLDMINERS

Trials & Cape Tribulation (Independent)

***1/2

McHUGH is part of the long folk tradition in Australian music, his songs filled with struggle and rough justice. There’s The Snowmen, who worked with asbestos sheeting at the James Hardie factory, washing down the dust in the pub after work: “Of the blokes who started work here there’s only seven of us left … with this cough I will be the next,’’ McHugh sings in his gritty, earthy style. Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre recounts how otherwise decent fellows can end up behind bars, after a bar-room fight or crashing the truck at the end of a long shift. John Kanaka Blues an up-tempo country-rocker about the plight of those blackbirded from their Pacific Island homes to cut cane, while Mistress on The Floor is old-time country with sawing fiddle. Pick of the bunch is Dan O’Halloran, the tale of a boy adopted four times before he was 11 who spends his 20s inside and drifts up to the Daintree. A long way from Redfern, but not far enough to escape the bikers who are after him. This is music that’s raw, dusty and authentic. Nashville? Never heard of it, mate.

Noel Mengel

CLASSICAL

VALENTINA LISITSA & MICHAEL NYMAN

Chasing Pianos (Decca)

****

UKRAINIAN American pianist Valentina Lisitsa can play with a ferocious power, the determined purpose that drove her to produce her YouTube “selfie’’ clip when her career foundered after a prize-winning start. It brought world fame and hasn’t stopped since. She demonstrates her ability in these 25 piano vignettes from Michael Nyman’s extensive film music portfolio, outlined in Paul Morley’s engaging notes, a bonus inclusion and a joy to read, discussing the music and the piano as an expressive instrument of multi-moods. A fierce clarity informs Lisitsa’s playing, through soft filigree moments in Diary of Love from The End of the Affair film score, quiet contemplation in Candlefire, If and Why from The Diary of Anne Frank. Momentum gathers in the brief 51 seconds of Fly Drive (Carrington) and the minimalism underscoring Time Lapse (A Zed & Two Noughts), ahead of the pounding force unleashed on Deep Sleep Playing and Here to There of The Piano fame. Lisitsa found piano fame her own way.

Patricia Kelly

Nothing to be frightened of by Stephen Cummings

ROCK

STEPHEN CUMMINGS

Nothing To Be Frightened Of (Head)

****

SOMETIMES it feels like we are drowning in clutter: objects, ideas, threads, distractions. Pop music is too, layered, tailored, highly polished. Cummings’ 20th or so solo album goes the other way, as spare and crisp as a Hemingway paragraph. Recording engineer Shane O’Mara plays electric guitar, unfussy drums, a few whisps of organ. Cummings writes the songs and sings them. And that’s enough. In other treatments, these might have been feisty rock ’n’ roll songs, or soul songs. Honeybee takes on the blues form. First In Line could have been a Sam Cooke song from ’63, with a sweet O’Mara solo that, like the material, says much with a little. It’s the only solo anywhere here. Cummings is in great voice; there is an elemental kind of force to it that is different to being merely technically powerful with some big notes to impress the judges. Van Morrison and Eric Burdon have that force too. Cummings pours it into these songs of hurt and loss. The title tune is a meditation on the artist’s life where he wonders “How many times has the light gone out?’’ Not dark yet at the Cummings house, I am pleased to report.

Noel Mengel

ROCK

ACE FREHLEY

Space Invader (eOne/Shock)

***1/2

HARD on the (platform) heels of Ace Frehley’s induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame as an original member of KISS, his latest solo album finds him still stuck on that part of his career. As with his 2009 effort Anomaly, the cover of Space Invader hints heavily at his “Space Ace” persona from the band, though legally he can’t fully display it. It was painted by Ken Kelly, who did the covers of KISS’ greatest album Destroyer and its follow-up Love Gun. And first single Gimme a Feeling is straight from the KISS playbook. Reckless, meanwhile, could be from Frehley’s first solo album back in ‘78. Space Invader might not be as strong as its predecessor, but has its fair share of tuneful tracks, including I Wanna Hold You and What Every Girl Wants. “I’m running out of oxygen but I’ve still got my guitar,” he sings on Past the Milky Way. Toys and Inside the Vortex have similar Hendrix-esque riffs and, as on Anomaly, there’s a token (tokin’?) cover version, this time Steve Miller Band’s The Joker with yet another space reference. Starship, a seven-minute instrumental, closes the album in stellar style.

John O’Brien

ALTERNATIVE

WHITE SEA

In Cold Blood (Inertia)

****

WHITE Sea throws down the gauntlet with an album that analyses desire in its complicated forms. A solo project of M83 collaborator Los Angeles-based songwriter Morgan Kibby, the album throbs with synths, beats and her powerhouse vocals. Smouldering with anticipatory lyrics and a clashing bell peals opener, They Don’t Know gives way to the lustful Prague as Kibby deftly puts herself at the centre of the song and ponders, Does this ever end/can I stop the want over simple bass and beats. While the album’s lyrics can be quite amorous there’s more to it as Kibby plays different characters. Warsaw shows a tongue-in-cheek Kibby calling herself the ultimate troublemaker while the stripped back Small December deals with the desire to lose the lingering doubts of a failed relationship from a bed of piano, strings and acoustic guitar. However, none is better than upbeat pop of Future Husbands Past Lives where she cannily defines a relationship and essentially says, “but let’s pretend otherwise”. Kibby has delivered a complex album which is worth more than a cursory listen.

Bill Johnston

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