The Nation Blue 'Rising Waters'

by DougWallen on Aug 07 2009, 06:00AM

The Nation Blue
Rising Waters
(Casadeldisco/Shock)

Now a dozen years running, Melbourne trio the Nation Blue have by no means exhausted subject matter for their brutal, defiant songs. Far from it. Picking up where 2007’s self-explanatory Protest Songs left off, the band’s fourth album is riddled with “examples of terrible things we’ve done,” according to shouter/guitarist Tom Lyngcoln. Sitting uncomfortably with 16 songs in 54 minutes, Rising Waters is a bit of a slough to get through in one sitting, but shorter visits illuminate a roiling, white-knuckle affair with lots of brash intelligence just beneath the surface.

The album begins with its minute-long title track, a dark instrumental jag featuring double bass from Andrew Tanner of Vulgargrad. (It’s later revisited on the closing ‘Rising Water Outro’.) Then it’s directly into the fire with ‘If Not For The Good Things I’ve Done’, a misanthropic anthem roped along by a monster bass line from Matt Weston. Lyngcoln’s guitar screeches over Dan McKay’s decomposed drums while he injects vitriol into hoarse verses. He commands the mic with a sharp Aussie accent, and musically the band plays on tension and a bass-driven tightness as well as My Disco does.

Housed within this flinty record are some real treats. The hospital-haunted ‘I See Colours’ is surprisingly hooky, whereas the Collingwood Choir lends an eerie opaqueness to the backdrop of ‘Restless’ and ‘Uprisings Off’ flexes its muscles without restraint. None of that quite prepares us for the tiptoed beauty of ‘Love Is Darkness’, on which Lyngcoln proves he can nearly wrench tears from us with his voice when he’s not busy hollering. Without a shroud of noise over it, the song also brings each instrument to the forefront and very nicely wanders a while without any vocals at all. On the other end of the spectrum, ‘Follow Your Phone’ is 21 seconds of disconcerting spoken-word inspired by mobile phones and brain cancer.

Fueled as the Nation Blue are by life’s prickly miseries, the Drones-esque ‘This Nine’s Mine’ plows without hesitation through Lyngcoln’s vision of the nine levels of hell. The trio roars all the more on the loping ‘I’m Inbred’, which includes Dead Kennedys-esque vocals from Gentle Ben and Geoffro Corbett of the band’s current tourmates, SixFtHick. The guest vocals on ‘Cold Cluster’ are of a different variety: Magic Dirt’s Adalita Srsen joins NinetyNine’s Laura MacFarlane and ex-Sodastream member Karl Smith – Lyngcoln’s bandmates in the Melbourne supergroup Lee Memorial – to create a slow-burning unease that’s exacerbated by the sloshing instrumentation.

Between Protest Songs, 2001’s A Blueprint For Modern Noise, and 2004’s Damnation, the Nation Blue have carved themselves a definite niche in Melbourne’s music scene, despite sizable gaps of time between albums. Rising Waters is an endurance-testing exploration of that niche. If on first listen the band seems to be treading those very waters at times, further exposure highlights some much-needed variation. And engineer Matt Viogt, who helmed Protest Songs, brings a terrific openness to the trio’s claustrophobic presence. Through it all, the Nation Blue seem more and more like Australia’s answer to Mission of Burma: hard-bitten, unyielding, and satisfyingly grim.

Doug Wallen