VARIOUS ARTISTS – SHAKE YER POP BOOMERANG VOLUME 4: REVIEW

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Pop Boomerang Presents: Shake Yer Pop Boomerang Volume 4 (Pop Boomerang)

UNLIKE THE FORTUNE FLAKES on the cover, being poured out into and over a bowl in a shower of cholesterol, type 2 diabetes and tooth rot, this is an album which will do you no harm. No harm at all. Better yet, it will bring joy to your house and alleviate symptoms of the common cold, raise your heartbeat enough to activate almonds but not enough to blow your heart monitor, and it will balance your existential budget without the aid of a wellness influencer.

Trust me, I’m a pop fan.

How can I be so sure? Australian acts across 22 tracks and 70 minutes, and no one quotes Dave Hughes. Tick! Guitars are present and well accounted for and no one is using a Linn drum except maybe to hold open the toilet door. Tick! It doesn’t pretend all the news is good, all keys are major or sunshine must be a default, but it says not one of those things is a reason why melodies would disappear. Tick! Almost all of these songs are previously unreleased but most should have been. Tick!

So Emily Ulman brings an acoustic knife to an electric gun fight with the low-humming/dark-browed Kindling and walks out not just intact but having left a few emotional scars. Immediately after her, Field Monuments come running down the hall – one guitar choppy, the other ringing, tensions winding up slightly, and You Am I in the rearview mirror – and pay more than lip service to absent NZ friends with The Bats. And then KTV find a snottier, lower-riding route to the clouds with Melt.

A wholly solo Marcus Goodwin pulls in alongside you on a horse with no name like a sad but diligent cowboy, saying yes maybe that’s a harmonium in the wagon behind me, maybe it’s my wheezing but otherwise silent sidekick, but either way I’m going to lead you home, sad eyes and all. Meanwhile in his other life, as a member of the finest Icecream Hands, Goodwin appears as one part of a buzzy little swinger that coos, glistens, asserts with piano and then interrupts the song for a dinky little toy keyboard nod to an older Hands’ song before returning to its main job of making you knot silk ties over paisley shirts.

If Halfway move a little stiffly and a little generically in the R.E.M. world of Never Let Me Go, and Holocene pump up the inner-city Sydney ‘80s with a bit more riff than whole song on balance in Without You, The Trafalgars are all arms and legs pumping/hair flying at an imagined Who/Easybeats packed room with Hip Young Man, and Tamas Wells bring the lost boys of the bedsits to the fore in Daydream Of Thylacine, complete with woodwind. As you do.

In the manner of Scott Thurling’s label and previous iterations of Shake Yer Popboomerang, Volume 4 finds minor gems – which reminds me, The Delvenes’ Backtrack is just such a one – and burnishes them not by adding a gloss but by associating them with others that glitter too, the reflections helping everyone. It’s why the big sounding Another Summer, from The Valery Trails, perched between the close-quarters Go-Betweens tones of Annual Leaf’s Unmechanical Mind and the dreamy California-isms of Hexham Heads’ In Time, feel like different angles of a central idea.

A good idea too. Like a good breakfast. And this compilation.

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