PERRY KEYES – THE ALISON BEND: REVIEW
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PERRY KEYES
The Alison Bend (EH Records)
MOMENTS DON’T TELL YOU EVERYTHING; too many things happen, have happened, can still happen to be definitive. We know this, right? See someone at their worst and that’s not them; catch a slice of bad luck and that can’t be the only luck you’ll get; a word hurled mid-fight isn’t the way you really feel, or not all the time, or not the only thing you’re feeling anyway; mistakes you’ve made are not impossible to recover from, won’t be held against you forever. We understand this, right?
Hmm. Yeah, maybe. Probably.
Honestly … I wouldn’t bet on it.
Perry Keyes songs are about people whose moments are like days, whose choices last long past any statute of responsibilities. Judgements come and stay, usually self-imposed – the hardest verdict to shake off – rippling out effects for years. They’re not special people but they’re not amorphous forget-me-nows, detailed better than any of the Toranas that cruise by in a dirty engine coughing haze on the streets of Randwick and Chippendale, Woy Woy or the industrial parts of town that sit between worlds and between names.
Sometimes the perspective is from the front seat of a cab, watching a young bloke passed out on the back seat, sometimes it is from the window looking down on Lenton Parade where a body sits, “his head up against the back tyre of a Mitsubishi Charade”, but it’s always clear-eyed. Like the knowledge that “Easter felt like some kinda beginning” but really “It’s always been about the end”. And on this record – not Keyes’ first or fourth or fifth rodeo – his voice often sounding deeper and more intense, but not gravelly; hurt more than damaged.
Switching between a kind of boisterous, front room of the Hopetoun rock’n’roll clatter and a slower, backstage at the church hall natter, Keyes and his one-man-band of multi-instrumentalist/vocalist/producer, Michael Carpenter, fill the sound without seeming to load up. There’s scope for subtleties, like upright bass, as well as the kind of obliqueness-with-clarity captured in Johnny Barker’s front and back images, so that it feels very urban and yet open to space.
And within that space you can indulge in seeing the curlicues of language and references that push the songs beyond your regular “street” storyteller, with a flash of humour or a smack of reality. Like adding a smile-inducing reference to Teenage Fanclub’s (still brilliant) use of verisimilitude or The Go-Betweens desiring Lee Remick, catching someone fielding the call between Machine Head or Diamond Dogs and another realising this moment of possibility “was more Up The Junction than Valentine’s Day. Elsewhere there’s the ultimate literary football declension of Henry Miller FC, dropping in the old man’s advice about “the internets” or a living of “Carpal Tunnel and a slow-moving heart attack” and a specific “A rundown Chinese take-away/Tucked inside the Eastlakes shops”.
It’s minutiae, mere moments maybe, but then moments add up even when you’re not looking. As Keyes says, “Who could remember?/Who could ever forget?”
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