Suffering? That’s entertainment

ROCK

Nick Batterham, Self Inflicted, No Sympathy

(Popboomerang) ****1/2

Interiors. On the inner sleeve of Melbourne songwriter Batterham’s latest album there’s a photo of a room in an abandoned house, paint peeling from the walls, floors stripped, curtains gone, a shoe resting in the dust on a desk. Through the window panes the scene is equally bleak, leafless trees overgrown outside, and the chill of winter — and something lost — hangs heavy in the air.

It’s a beautiful picture though. Same goes for this album.

As suggested by the title, which reflects the sometimes lacerating but clear-eyed self-assessments inside, this is another breakup album, whether real or imagined we are not told. The point is, it certainly seems real, and these are the kinds of insights that resonate with most of us. As Batterham observes, the darker he writes them, the more the audience seems to like it. Which should mean people are going to really love this.

We admire someone else out on the ledge, but sadly, some of the masters of melancholy, Elliott Smith and Nick Drake, aren’t around to hear the applause. Batterham is though, and Self Inflicted, No Sympathy is a triumph, if that’s the right word for 16 songs in all the autumnal shades of melancholia.

We first met Batterham through ’90s bands The Earthmen and Cordrazine. Lucky Cat, his 2014 solo set, returned to the power-pop electric guitar aesthetic of The Earthmen, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. Or a song.

That album’s title tune returns, minus the synthesisers and beat, now with acoustic guitar and cello. Here it’s more like something on Nick Drake’s Pink Moon.

(PB:108) Nick Batterham: Self Inflicted No Sympathy by Popboomerang Records

Close attention to these songs reveals a song cycle where the writer works through the aftermath of a breakup, from anger and shock to despair, self-awareness and philosophical acceptance.

Human repair is not a straight line though, and neither is this album.

Opener Dead End arrives with the shock, a vigorously strummed guitar and a despairing vocal as Batterham sings, “I keep making the same mistake all over again, dead end’’.

All the Hearts You Break brings in electric guitar and drums, but it doesn’t spare the rod. Batterham sings in a voice that sounds like sleep has been a stranger for a while now: “Time has no mercy/Life never waits/Or magically helps you/Mend what you break.’’

Batterham switches to piano for Make Up Your Mind, the kind of soul-baring ballad that was a specialty from his labelmates The Underminers; Now or Never sweetens, or at least soothes, the raw emotion with violins. By this time, acceptance is starting to rise (“Everything has its place/The past was no waste/It brought me to you’’).

On Liar, the strong melody — the melody is always king with Batterham — sits atop an undercurrent of nagging violin and cello, more John Cale with the Velvets than English folk; Snowflake is delivered like a lullaby (believe me, it’s not). And so it goes, an album delivered with all the clarity and crispness of the morning after the morning after.

How many ways is it possible to say this stuff, you might be thinking? When distilled to this kind of dew-drop-about-to-fall intensity, there is always another way.

Noel Mengel

ROCK

Guards of May, Future Eyes

(MGM) ***1/2

Brisbane’s Guards of May describe their sound as earthmoving, heart-wrenching and no-holds-barred. You could add hypnotic, whether it’s the Edge-like guitar of The Rest of Them, or the atmospheric percussion and synth effects of Beacons, two of the tracks from this, their debut album. They present as a heavy rock band — and there are some heavy guitar moments here — but the heaviness is tempered by the melody of clean-cut frontman Richo Harvey’s singing from the heart, on first single Annotata or the title track, and almost reaching falsetto on opener On & On. And they have a firm grasp on what’s important in life: on Ephemera, Harvey scolds: “Your life is out of focus, ruled by the trivial things.” The album reaches peak rockingness on The Observer, Arcadia and the penultimate Numbers. With one foot in each of the indie and mainstream rock camps, Guards of Mayare part of a new crop of crossover artists, including Brisbane’s Dead Letter Circus. As debuts go, this is impressive stuff.

John O’Brien

ROCK

Jim Keays, Age Against the Machine

(Rocket) ****

Keays kept rocking to the end, completing work on this final album only weeks before his death last year. The title is one last dig at the difficulties career artists like Keays face (his friend Russell Morris lived to finally have a hit album again, 45 years after his first commercial peak).

As with 2012’s Dirty Dirty, Keays records with a young band including You Am I’s Davey Lane. The garage-rocking spirit remains although the track list features some more well-known songs this time like The Flaming Groovies’ Shake Some Action, while vintage tracks like Come On (by The Atlantics) and It’s Alright (Adam Faith) surge with the energy Keays brought to his early work with The Masters Apprentices. The voice sounds as youthful as ever, incredible really considering he was in the final stages of cancer. Most poignantly of all, the album closes with a mighty version of Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight, a song that would have been right at home on the Masters’ classic Choice Cuts. One of our rock ‘n’ roll greats. What a gift to leave behind.

Noel Mengel

ROCK

Katie Noonan’s Vanguard, Transmutant

(Kin Music) ***1/2

Naturally, Noonan’s ethereal voice assumes the central role in most of her musical ventures. In her solo career she has collaborated with greats from the jazz and classical worlds but she started in bands, with George, and that’s still where she feels most comfortable. Vanguard grew out of the line-up of her band The Captains for 2010 album Emperor’s Box, although the sound here is more lush, with layers of ambient keys and voices and some jittery drum machines. Quicksand is the kind of song she might once have written for George, although the layers of instrumentation and voices, with marimbas and a boy soprano, give the result an orchestral grandeur.
Running pulses on an electronic beat and ambient textures with accents from French horn; Island unleashes the band in full technicolour. The track that hits hardest is In The Name of the Father, with Jordan White’s Antony Johnson-like vocal and a choir beneath. Yes, war is hell, but when Noonan sings about it she swathes it in all the beauty she can muster.

Noel Mengel

ROCK

Bill Wyman, Back to Basics

(Proper) **

This month Bill Wyman was the subject of the internet’s latest death hoax, though on the strength of Back to Basics — his first solo outing in 33 years — the jury may still be out. While the former Stones bassist has kept his hand in with part-time R & B band the Rhythm Kings, this album is a curious grab-bag of songs he’s had lying around for the best part of four decades. It starts promisingly enough with a handful of quirky tracks that posit Wyman as the self-appointed heir to late fellow Londoner Ian Dury. All sport snappy arrangements, witty wordplay and

the self-effacing humour that made Wyman’s first solo single, 1981’s Je Suis un Rock Star, a one-off novelty. Sadly, however, the remaining eight tracks are simplistic tosh, with the faintly creepy Seventeen not quite erasing the memory of Wyman’s dodgy ’80s relationship with 13-year-old Mandy Smith, whom he married as soon as she was of legal age. As the title of

another song from this collection might suggest, until then, she was Just a Friend of Mine.

Phil Stafford

CLASSICAL

Aurora Orchestra, Insomnia

(Warner Classics) ****

Great to see Aussie music mixing it with the Brits in this CD from England’s Aurora Orchestra directed by co-founder/principal conductor Nicholas Collon, who likes devising programs with “some kind of narrative and flavour’’. Insomnia fits that bill. Tenor Allan Clayton’s vocal timbre and clear diction catch the moods of Benjamin Britten’s distinctive Nocturne settings of verses from major poets. Haunting imagery colours She Sleeps on Soft, Last Breaths, and he delivers a masterly up-tempo Blackbird (John Lennon/Paul McCartney arranged by Iain Farrington). Sally Pryce’s harp is a perfect fit for Encinctured with a Twine of Leaves, and Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony is the stuff of nightmares, gritty and harsh. Couperin’s Les Baricades Misterieuses, Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes (Gyorgy Ligeti) and Richard Tognetti’s arrangement for voice (Clayton), strings and bass drum of the REM song I’ve Been High complete these intriguing nocturnal reflections.

Patricia Kelly

Good Work by Big Strong Brute

EP

Big Strong Brute, Good Work

(Independent) ****

BRISBANE songwriter Paul Donoghue’s keen eye for detail fuelled his Avalanche of Truth album and now this five-track EP. The ace in the pack is Wedding Pages, a surging anthem which, apparently, bounces off a wedding photo in The New York Times with lines like “What do I care where your daddy works?’’. Like everything here, it has an edge, with excited drum pattern and a substrata of sonic surprises. Clearly, Donoghue is enjoying having an electric guitar in his hands, thundering along on two chords for Heavy Mountain as he tells a short story in song form that boils down to this: crank it up and go for it before it’s too late. Even when he gets out the acoustic guitar on The Roleplay he eschews any temptation for sweetening: the result is caustic and nervy. “Start making sense,’’ he observes as the opening line to Wait, but Donoghue isn’t about to do that with any cliches. All of Good Work is strong but check Wedding Pages first: a bracing antidote to pop’s seemingly limitless capacity for bland repetition.

Noel Mengel

www.news.com.au/entertainment/music