TEX PERKINS & MATT WALKER – BEFORE THE SHOW: REVIEW
TEX PERKINS AND MATT WALKER
Before The Show (Cheersquad)
THIS ALBUM IS PARCHED. Like drier than any part of a dead dingo, but especially that part. Certainly, it’s cracking underfoot a set of songs constantly scanning the horizon for any signs of a break – in the scorching still air, in the cloudlessness, in the solitariness.
Mind you, you’d hardly call this blue-sky music; more like bleached to the colour of bone-sky, your eyes squinting at it in suspicion and pain, the bone-weariness of the heat somewhat offset by the voice in your head saying “hey, at least it’s a dry heat”.
(Yes, the voice you picked up in Adelaide when you explained you came from Sydney or Brisbane. Yes, the one with the plummy accent that always makes you think of the perfumed Alexander Downer practically mouthing the word “peasant” down the camera lens as he explained suffering was good for you. But I digress.)
Matt Walker’s guitar walks into each space with certainty but not swagger, Perkins’ six-string accompaniment the friendly offsider sometimes echoing, sometimes humming along. In I Have My Doubts it could be a dobro sticking its head out the door and surveying, swaying slightly in the breeze as it makes up its mind, while in A Good Man it flows rhythmically and repetitively, a vehicle on a road with no diversions and hardly any impediments on which the other voices (and vices) ride. In Still Fishin it bends around the rocks and trees, adapting to its environment rather than imposing itself, while A Little More Time has both tension and enquiry, space pressing down on the solid body and listening you can’t help but wonder which will cede ground first.
Even in Maybe Tomorrow, where a 12-string comes forth with some boldness, it feels like an opening gambit in a discussion rather than the first and last word. But then Tex Perkins is not making claims to finality, to definitiveness with his vocals and storytelling either. That just wouldn’t do, not least because of the album’s origins as home recordings: two men and a portable system so close they can exchange breaths and count the beads of sweat on the other’s brow. Two men who have been in discussion for some time and probably speak in half thoughts (the other half already known) and feel pretty comfortable with that.
The characters they sing about are nothing special, their foibles and fears nothing new either. But that doesn’t make them any less creakily interesting, the bones of their tales and misadventures familiar because they feel like truths rather than fanciful creatures made to appear “honest” by their plainness, like cheap actors in contrived modern westerns. The once-warring parties in The Truth may have shame and hurt, accusations lying on the table like worn out weapons, but even when he flings “you’ll never know the truth”, Perkins isn’t trading in villainy, just the bitter smallness of the end.
Amusingly, given the aforementioned sonic landscape, water and river metaphors pop up frequently, almost as if offering a counter – or is it a teasing refreshment? – to the parched surrounds. But they can’t flood the zone, not even close; this remains a land of exhausted plains, broken ranges and narrow, nondescript houses, populated with not particularly damaged but not particularly intact people still getting on with things.
Because no one else is going to do it for them are they?
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Tex Perkins and Matt Walker are currently touring Australia. For dates and tickets go to texperkins.com
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