Headland – What Rough Beast
Press:
Vinyl edition (Ltd 350) pressed at Third Man Pressing Detroit USA. Feat: Amanda Brown (Go Betweens) **** - MOJOHeadland is a collective of Australian musicians that
compose, record and perform soundtrack music for surf films in
various forms. The group leader is Murray Paterson, an old
surfer himself, who in between wrangling two red-headed boys,
finds time here and there to record bits and pieces of guitarbased
music. Mostly he heads to Nashuaville where his longtime
colleague from a previous life in arts education, Les Dorahy,
has set up a small recording studio in the old Booyong General
Store, situated in the Byron Bay Hinterland. Whenever friends
visit their part of the world, they drop past and join in. Most of the
music remains instrumental but this new album is a collection of
songs. One of Murray’s comrades from his days with Tex Perkins
and The Dark Horses is Joel Silbersher. Joel has been a longtime
Headland collaborator–playing bass and guitar–but while
recording material for the new album, vocal melodies kept finding
their way into Murray’s instrumentals. Soon there seemed
enough of a coherent lyrical theme to build an album around.
There’s a song about installing a dishwasher. There’s one about
a soccer ball filled with blood, and one from the point of view of a
lizard. The topic of love among the elderly gets a look in, and
there’s a drone called Face in the Sky, which is about a face in
the sky.
There is some nice instrumentation touches here too with cello
(Tahiti Jones), pedal steel (Danny Widdicombe), double bass
(Melissa ‘Curly’ Hunt), violin/melotron (Amanda Brown – GO BETWEENS),
percussion (Luke Peacock) and organ (Whitey White) fleshing
out the core band of Paterson, Silbersher, accordionist Les
Dorahy and drummer Brock Fitzgerald.
During the recordings, a good friend of the band, Australian rock
legend Spencer P. Jones sadly departed. One of his melodies
and lyric was dovetailed to a Paterson instrumental and Ode to
Death Trip became an emotional tribute to mark his passing. A
couple of other covers appear on the album. There is a
surprising, acoustic rendition of Motörhead’s Deaf Forever
and a version of John Sebastian’s Darlin’ Be Home Soon.
This last is a relic from 2007 when following a hard-drive meltdown at Nashuaville, the only remaining recording of a late night jam was an unedited headphone mix. It seems though, it was impossible to exclude this from the collection.
There’s still enough of the spacious Australian land- and seascapes to satisfy fans of the previous Headland albums (sound/track 2013, Cosy 2015, True Flowers from this Painted World 2017), journeys through a sonic architecture centred around the motion of the ocean and it’s meeting with the coastline. But a narrative of loss and longing sits on the surface here: Silbersher’s voicing is an emotive thread that breaches at all the right times.
There are references to the likes of Alex Chilton, Nick Drake and Daniel Lanois but Christian Pyle (Prawn & Spanner Studio) brings a sensitivity to the mix so that any references float rather than reveal themselves in bold relief. What Rough Beast marks the development of an ensemble and documents a sense of meaning embedded with the tone of place. File under Salty.
Tracks:
01. Let's Get On With It02. I Will Fix This03. Reverse Painting04. Ode To Death Trip05. O Tulip06. Deaf Forever07. Build A Good Bubble08. Clattering Thing09. Betrayal10. Komodo11. What Rough Beast12. Face In The Sky13. Darlin' Be Home Soon
Label: Agitated Records – AGIT054