Album Reviews - May 07

help she can't swim,Words - Suzy Sims
First published on Native.tv http://www.native.tv in May 2007
(c) Niche News & Publishing Ltd


Help She Can't Swim - The Death Of Nightlife
Antidote Records, 7th May 2007

After months and months of annoying delays, Help She Can't Swim's second album 'The Death Of Nightlife' is finally on shelves.

‘Pass The Hat Around’ gently buzzes its way in with feedback and smooth vocals. HSCS almost sound laid back for the first minute before turning all their instruments to 11 and crashing along. ‘Can we just enjoy this please’ plead Tim Denney and Leesey Frances. Urgent keyboards mark ‘Idle Chatter’. ‘Strangle you with the telephone cord / just cos you’re making me feel bored’. It’s the sort of music you should dance around in your pants to, which we know Miss Leesey would approve of.

‘Kite Eating Tree’ has the same quirky keyboard tones and brooding guitar. The keys are almost soothing but played in a mildly horror-inducing way. Last single ‘Hospital Drama’ is one of the key tracks on the album. It's powerful and complex with dark lyrics giving us a window into the personal subject matter.

‘Apes and Pigs At The Vulture Coliseum’. "And you feel different now and you feel happy now." Tom manages to sound bored and angry within a short space of time, while Leesey's voice stays calm, but in an ominous way.

‘I Think The Record’s Stopped’ has a catchy guitar riff. ‘Midnight Garden’ thrashes around in some pain then cruises glacially before being brought back to life with some howling. ‘All The Stars’ ends in an cacophony of pretty much every instrument within reach, while ‘Dragged Under A Wave’ is a stop-start kind of song which is particularly enjoyable.

‘Never the Right Time For Us’ is a slight departure from the norm. It’s still fast-paced but more mellow and the perfect track to end on. It’s all frenetic, cool and angsty art punk with plenty of anger, once kept in and now seeping out at a rate of knots. Worth the wait.

Help She Can't Swim

-----

Josh Pyke - Memories & Dust
Ivy League Records , 21st May 2007

"Sometimes I know I become all that’s weak in a man," begins Josh Pyke on ‘Lines On Palms’, one sentence guaranteed to make all women screech ‘yeeeeah!’ while their menfolk are nodding their heads along and drinking beer. "But I keep trying and I won’t quit and that must be worth something more…"

Pyke is usually described as an 'Australian troubadour'. It’s all very warm, singer-songwriter, but don't let that description throw you. There’s something full about this – it’s not a wimpy One Man And His Guitar, there’s more orchestration, resulting in strumming, singalong, echoing majesty. There’s swearing and plenty of confidence and powerful music, not weedy strums. Must be a result of all those stubbies. It stands out of the singer/songwriter field like Uluru glowing in the dusk (bad Australia comparisons over with, we promise).

We did enjoy ‘Middle Of The Hill’ when it came out. ‘Mannequins’ has some smooth slide guitar ascending and some quirky chord changes which keep it lively and stop it sounding too commercial.

There’s always something fulfilling yet slightly downbeat about acoustic guitars. Some people find it incredibly miserable but I really like it. ‘Someone Else’s Town’ makes nice use of gently weeping strings to give a dreamy air. "There’s not time to fuck around for too long."‘Private Education’ contains the line "Forgive me for what I’ve done, and forgive me for what I might do" may just become my new motto for my coat-of-arms (or MySpace headline, which is the same thing nowadays). ‘Buttons’ is one of the high points for me, as it carries and swells, led along by a gently steering bass.

"It’s funny how you can miss someone even when they’re sitting next to you." Nice humour there in the up-and-down ‘Beg Your Pardon’. ‘Vibrations In The Air’ is a mournful, looking-into-the-disappointing-past sort of song. ‘Regret is like a filter that colours all of your endeavours’.
I think there’s a banjo at the start of ‘Monkey With A Drum’, which is usually an offence punishable with a lightning strike of loud electro, but this one doesn’t sound too bad. Pyke displays a surprisingly deep and rich voice on this song.

A lot of the tracks sounds similar, which isn’t a bad thing but which makes our usual track-by-track reviews redundant (it sounds a bit like this one, which in turn sounded like this one…) but it’s not individuality and completely different sounds you need here. Memories & Dust’s main purpose is to create some sort of atmosphere, not to be randomly crazy in style, and it does this well. It's warm, soothing, satisfying. Imagine sitting round your evening campfire on a sandy Gold Coast beach. There’s a few people playing volleyball, or drinking beer, or picking jellyfish out their sandals, but they’re all watching this guy who’s sat concentrating on his guitar.

It’s a nice, mature sounding, well-rounded album, which is surprisingly short, lasting just over 38 minutes. The lyrics are beautifully written, very thoughtful and it's a pleasure to listen to. And for anyone whose Australian musical education starts at Kylie and ends at Jason, there’s a name here who I think will have much longer-lasting respect.

Josh Pyke

-----

Maps - We Can Create
Mute, 11th May 2007

'We Can Create' is the debut album from atmospheric music wizard Maps. It fizzes into action with overdramatic synths on ‘So Low, So High’. Chapman's voice is soft and understated, covered in fuzz and whispering quietly in the background. He’s not the focus of the song, rather the instrumentation is. This song is beautiful, sweeping the listener along as it soars majestically into the clouds.

‘You Don’t Know Her Name’ starts with a trapped mouse trying to fight its way out a keyboard before the dancey beat kicks in. By 'dancey', I mean it's more chilled than some sort of TECHNO TECHNO TECHNO thing and there are organs and teasing buzzes.

Glorious beeps and fizzes dance across the background. ‘Elouise’, which we believe was recently given away free on iTunes, comes honking in with soft bass and smashey percussion. Single ‘It Will Find You’ is so intense it almost leaves you drained at the end. ‘Take what you choose / to leave behind you / love what you use / and it will find you.’ It finishes with a catherine wheel crackling away to nothingness.

‘Glory Verse’ seems a bit of a downer, on a par with early Coldplay in the misery/thought-provoking stakes, but with far nicer instruments. ‘Liquid Sugar’ sort of swells in and out with a shining drone and tinkles. ‘To The Sky’ is another buzzing on a razor edge but this time also features soothing guitar and ‘Back & Forth’ is a highlight.

‘Lost My Soul’ isn’t as intense as some of the others, it’s a bit of a wind down track. ‘Don’t Fear’ sounds a bit of a hark back to ‘It Will Find You’ but slightly simplified, just voice and keys for almost the first minute. After a while it explodes and becomes far more multilayered with feelings of happiness, want, sadness and peace.

‘When You Leave’ is another 6 minute epic. ‘When you leave / I ain’t coming / what you have / comes to nothing’ he sings below the electronic clouds.

Judging from the credits and thanks, plenty of this was made with help from Maps’ friends in Iceland, home to much experimental music. The artwork also features peaceful fibre-optic orbs designed to set your mind into calm.

This is a beautiful album. It’s a stunning work of meticulously-crafted art with understated power. You wouldn't believe it was made in someone's bedroom, would you...

To visit Maps website click here

-----

Wheat - Everyday I Said A Prayer For Kathy And Made A One Inch Square
Ever Records - 21st May 2007

"Scott (Levesque) and I started Wheat as an art project, and the second we let other people's opinions slip in is when it started to come apart. We needed to walk away from the whole thing. The things we loved, the art of what we did, the control of what we were about seemed to be slipping, so we had to jump," says Brendan Harney. After various legal wrangles and a brief hiatus caused by their unhappiness at the remixing of 'Per Second, Per Second, Per Second... Every Second', Wheat has returned.

But is it any good? To be honest, I had to listen to it in two sittings because I found it dull.

Opening track 'Closeness' is angsty with urgent guitar punctuated by thrashing cymbals. It's soft, rocky and slightly questioning. The vocals are brought to the forefront rather than being drowned out by the music. 'Little White Dove' is mellower but slightly uninteresting; some hand claps are brought in to liven things up.

'More = More' has spacey percussion and a gently bouncing synth before the over-familiar, tired guitars pound in. This one plods slightly, but i rescued by the good 'I Had Angels Watching Me'. 'Saint In Law' is peaceful with fluting synths, and is the sort of soothing tune you'd get in a garden centre or one of those spiritual shops where you go to buy your incense/semi-precious stones and that malarkey. The music is simple and gentle, though the vocals do sit slightly clumsily on the top. The end takes on dancing overtones and it sounds like it could be echoing through your bathroom.

'What You Got' sounds nothing like the similarly named Little Man Tate track. Instead it's half a minute of the same two notes, which can be peaceful or pestering, depending on your viewpoint. It's quite percussion-y, which has the effect of putting you in a trance. 'To, As In Addressing The Grave' has an unsettling name and warm yet uncomfortable tones surrounding it. The long notes sound almost religious. 'Round In The Corners' is another slightly down, organic-natured track. 'An Exhausted Fixer' is pretty hard going to begin with, and sounds too repetitive. 'Courting Ed Templeton' (do they mean the skateboarder?) is one of the nicest tracks, with soft-sounding electronic and acoustic tones.

I just couldn't get into this album. It's not to my taste. I found it a bit too mellow, with overbearing percussion and the lick of melancholy made it sound slightly dreary, though in places it sounds almost experimental and improvised, and I found it slightly dull and uninspiring.

Wheat