Cabins
Bright Victory
(Ivy League)

A laundry list of Aussie indie rock bands have chimed in with high-profile debut albums this year, including Parades, Cloud Control, Love Connection, Rat Vs. Possum, Tame Impala, and Otouto. What’s surprising isn’t so much the volume of output as the quality and variety – and the year is only half over. Next in line is the Sydney quartet Cabins. Bright Victory is technically a mini-album, having just eight songs. But at 34 minutes, it’s as long as many albums these days, and the songs certainly warrant closer inspection.

Lead track ‘Hounds’ makes for a spooky start, setting frontman Leroy Bressington’s craggy old-man vocals and warning lyrics to the atmospheric, reverbed roll of two-guitar rock. The song is up for grabs as a free download if you join the band’s mailing list, and there’s a cartoon-pillaging video for it that makes the song feel even creepier. There’s a real Walkmen thing to what Cabins do, from the slurred singing to the swampy reverb, but these songs are well-constructed and also vague enough lyrically to keep us wondering. If the lyrics can seem somewhat arbitrary, whether citing Christmas trees and whiskey or The Goonies and The Catcher in the Rye, Bressington’s brooding delivery sells them.

Despite this being the sort of mysterious, rambling record to enjoy losing oneself in, there are moments that really stand out. ‘Ocean Blues’ has an ancient-sounding 12-string twang, while ‘Father Ripper’ finds a cool contrast between wafting vocals and menacing guitar. ‘The Moon’ is the record’s high point even before Ennio Morricone-style trumpet perks up through the rumbling fuzz and crashing cymbals. Piano provides an early undercurrent for the single ‘Catcher in the Rye’, which has enough twang in the guitar to recall Morricone all over again. And following the overlapping vocals and ramshackle folk of the brief send-off ‘Calling You Home’, there’s an instrumental hidden track that fleetingly revisits those cinematic trumpets.

Of course, an amateur production job could have rendered all of these touches inert. Woody Annison (Red Riders, Children Collide) does just the opposite, always summoning new sounds from the band’s murky depths. Bressington’s opaque lyrics and similarity to the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser will be tough for some listeners to overcome, but Bright Victory is very much a step in the right direction for Cabins.

Doug Wallen