At the beginning of this week, surfing man and lover of music, Aaron Curnow, founder/grand poobah of the independent label, Spunk, announced he was shutting down the company after 25 years.
It was a shock but maybe not a total surprise – how anyone runs an indie label, even with help from a major as he has had for a while, for a couple of years is mad enough, let alone decades and more than 700 releases to the name – and it isn’t an abrupt stop. As well as farewell shows at the Sydney Opera House in May, featuring acts that the label has brought to Australian ears, Explosions In The Sky, The Middle East and Aldous Harding, Spunk still intends releasing albums for Charm Of Finches (in April) and Shining Bird (in June).
However, after that it will be back catalogue only. But what a back catalogue, and what a good excuse to look into it. Wind Back Wednesday goes back 20 years to the first full-album sighting of one of the undoubted gems of the Spunk roster, Holly Throsby. In this case a double-header review with the then vehicle for Sally Seltmann, who would years later join with Throsby and Sarah Blasko in the don’t call us a supergroup supergroup, Seeker Lover Keeper.
For once a prediction did turn out pretty close to right.
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HOLLY THROSBY
On Night (Spunk/Inertia)
NEW BUFFALO
The Last Beautiful Day (DotDash/Inertia)
IF DECODER RING HADN’T ALREADY DONE such a fabulous job of it, I’d be recommending Cate Shortland, the director of Somersault, consider Holly Throsby for the film’s soundtrack. On her debut album, the Sydney singer/songwriter works a rich vein of intimate, close to the ear and even closer to the skin music which is laced with a clear but never over-stated sadness. There are many times here where you can almost recreate in your mind’s eye one of those scenes of a wordless Abbie Cornish adrift in muted Jindabyne light.
Musically it could be called folk, though there’s also room for this in the quieter end of country and rock, with the emphasis on acoustic sounds, space and a genuine organic tone (there are even accidental ambient bird sounds on some tracks). Think a little bit of Kathryn Williams, Jolie Holland and Beth Orton. Though not deliberately archaic like Holland, Throsby certainly does not feel tied to any contemporary sound: you could have heard this at any time in the past 40 years really.
More importantly though, while the songs sometimes come with band and sometimes with little more than a guitar, the prevailing mood is one-on-one, as if Throsby and her attractively imperfect voice have pulled up a chair alongside you. She’s had a bad run, a bitter end to a love affair and she’s not pretending to be coping well.
Thanks to the sympathetic production of Tony Dupe (who is leaving his mark on beautiful low key music this year with both The Woods Themselves and his own Saddleback album) there’s nothing between Throsby, her emotional rawness and you.
Don’t be scared by the rawness though, it’s done with restraint and a writer’s ear. And like everything else on this captivating album it’s done with grace, intimacy and an awareness that sometimes you just want to be soothed, to be caressed, to be laid down gently, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to feel.
Sally Seltmann, aka New Buffalo, wouldn’t be astray on the Somersault soundtrack either, though her area is closer to Decoder Ring than Throsby, being more electronically treated music of sometimes surprising gentleness. (In this case you may remember a German artist reviewed here a while back called Barbara Morgenstern, or even touches occasionally of Bjork.)
There are intriguing samples which fall between orchestral and machine, woozy, windy old keyboards and bits and pieces of guitars and other more recognisable noise makers. Those combinations hold the line between the smoother end of the alt.rock beard strokers and the childlike sweetness of people like Mum.
In keeping with this, Seltmann’s voice works a narrow band, often leaning towards an ambient drone in the backing vocals, which encourages a sense of summer haze or maybe the morning’s half awake/half asleep moment. It’s easy to drift into and be lulled.
This can sometimes work against her, particularly towards the end of the album, where things start to slide away. But for much of The Last Beautiful Day Seltmann brings an affecting warmth to her songs and creates her own little out-of-its-time world.
It’s why both she and Throsby, exciting talents quietly percolating away on the fringes, could find their way into little pockets of the mainstream.
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Tickets are on sale now for the Spunk Records 25 Finale at Sydney Opera House, May 24-25.
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