The marketers must despair. The Drones have made their third
superb album in a row, a rich assortment of compelling stories told
with a novelist's eye and a poet's heart, delivered with such
controlled power that it leaves your body feeling bruised but
unmarked and your brain alive.
Greatness awaits the Melburnians. But, most likely, so does
obscurity. At least at home.
Why? There is nothing pretty about the Drones. Not their sounds,
not their songs. They don't have '70s denim grafted on; you won't
find a soft and sensitive singer-songwriter under any track here;
the only dance moves likely to be engendered involve almost
involuntary movements and burrowing of heads into speaker boxes to
soak it in more.
And no one is going to confuse Gareth Liddiard's harshly
textured, nasally voice with that of, say, Guy Sebastian. Hell,
no.
Yes, the Drones have a definite '80s flavour, in keeping with
this century's dominant influence. But this isn't post-punk
jerkiness, synth pop or tight rhythms played in tight pants. This
is the Moodists and the Wreckery more than New Order; Nick Cave,
not Michael Jackson.
"I have the same old dream/about a tunnel by my bed/from where
the stench of shit of minotaurs/yawns likes lewd and evil breath,"
Liddiard sings in one song. "Like thunderheads creeping down the
hill/and pretty soon everyone gets ill/but I slip the net, being
tall and thin/and pretty soon the dark turns to dim," he says in
another.
So the musical and physical terrain of Drones' songs can be at
best rugged but more often than not harsh and testing. Not
unforgiving, not impossible and in its own way rather beautiful but
bearing little relation to tree-lined streets, Saturday broadsheets
spread out and coffee alfresco. Heavy, dragging basslines and
spiked guitar lines will appear, the pace sometimes will take on
the feel of a runaway road train on a downward slope, the vocals
are wrenched out and sometimes are so intense as to practically be
foam-flecked.
That's only part of the story of course. In 'Luck In Odd
Numbers', a measured mix of old folk love song and existential
despair, the rat-a-tat drums are the only overt signs of heaviness,
though there's no hiding the grip on the soul. In relatively gentle
songs such as 'Careful As You Go' (acoustic guitar, Liddiard
almost crooning, regret a more significant factor than anger or
fear), or 'Cold And Sober' (sung as if from a bed of soiled
sheets and old memories), you are reminded that loss and pain can
be slow, silent killers. There's even a cracked country song to
finish the album in 'Your Acting's Like The End Of The
World'.
Stuff the marketers. Strength, sublime lyrics and music
that demands your attention: it's never easy but this is as good an
album as you will hear anywhere this year.
Bernard Zuel