VERDANI – THE ILLUSION IS GONE; ICECREAM HANDS – PINEAPPLE PIECES; THE INSTITUTIONALIST – ALL THE BRIDGES BURNED: REVIEW
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VERDANI
The Illusion Is Gone (Dobridust)
ICECREAM HANDS
Pineapple Pieces (Independent/bandcamp)
THE INSTITUTIONALIST
All The Bridges Burned (Independent/bandcamp)
GOOD NEWS FOR THOSE with reduced spare time or shrinking attention spans or a need to “turn the record over” every 20 minutes or so even if there is no record: relief or reward is at hand.
Here’s a batch of local releases which offer no more (and no fewer), than four tracks, can be digested in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette (actually, I have no idea how long it takes as I don’t smoke, but it seems long enough) and offer guitars in various forms of action. What’s more, if you’ve got any history with left-of-mainstream music in Australia you’re gonna find entry points galore.
Verdani bring the organ/guitar build to intensity that fuelled Died Pretty and early-ish Triffids, a mix of psychedelia and pop where space feels just barely contained but there’s little chance to look back as you’re always being sent onwards. So you’ll find the band are chugging with insistence in Stories Of Love where there’s even a hint of surf atmospherics, though more rolled up jeans than board shorts, while in Can’t Feel Sorry the locale is more semi-urban, a kind of pulling past the paddocks momentum matched with darker hues in the melody, shot through with surprising moments of prettiness. Like Brisbane was being viewed through Sydney eyes.
When In A Lifetime takes its pace more leisurely: not slow but with more a roll to its gait, vocals less anxious and the threat, if any, at bay for now. By contrast, Welcome My Fate grows more anxious the further it goes: beginning like a road trip in the dead of night, it clears the city lights, only to realise there may be something lingering, and then in a rush and a push, puts the pedal down without realising it is happening.
For Icecream Hands, this EP may be a bit of clearing the decks a bit after their most recent – excellent – album, Giant Fox Pineapple Tree, but you’d not call them leftovers so much as coulda been contenders if that record had had more space, or more b-sides. The big timpani-like boom in I Miss You is balanced by the coo-ing of the backing vocals that sprinkle dust over the languid melody to complete the Beach Boys comparisons, but that cooing becomes energised in Shakespeare Always, a packet of zest that carries you through before you’ve really set your feet down in the EP.
A delicious bit of soulfulness and country combination, complete with strings that could have been intended for a Glen Campbell record, makes Her Swan more meaningful than it might well deserve, but then a George Harrison-esque slide guitar introduces a proper sense of Friar Park around the turn of the ‘70s, but instead of looking for the gnomes you’re sucked into increasingly lush surrounds. Very pretty indeed.
Studio veteran Ernie O’s project – or confirmation of what life is like when you live in the studio – The Institutionalist, is not interested in anything as pretty or sweet as the other two releases. These are shot more in dank rooms than any exteriors, more certain of their fate than the anxious tones elsewhere, more abrasive than cutting.
Garry Gray’s growling vocals in All The Bridges Burned reinforces the heavy tread of the guitars that lean industrial, even after an organ solo that almost dances its veils off, and only get heavier and more pummelled by the double-bass drum rolls. If you pick up some post-new wave edge to this track you would feel validated later by a cover of Song From Under The Floorboards that takes Magazine’s spikiness and bulks it up like steroids replaced the original sulphates. No one is mistaking this for affection even if the la-la-la-las in the latter half hint at something almost soft.
There’s no softness to be found in Ward Of The State, a lean leather-pants-and-vest rumble that resets its engines for a choppy Ed Garland vocal, but maybe that is a romantic hue showing through the amusing and unnervingly danceable take on Roland S Howard’s Shivers. Maybe, a bit.
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