The Night?s Deeds Are Vapour
Ross McLennan’s first album in five years is more a grower than a shower, writes ANDREW P STREET.
Let’s start with the most obvious thing: God, it’s good to hear that voice again. Ross McLennan’s drawled, breathy, vaguely English-inflected (OK, middle-class-southern-Australian-inflected) vocals were one of the biggest drawcards of the much-missed Snout and from the second he starts laying down the vowel sounds on the opening ?My Brother Stoats? it’s like getting a call from an old friend.
It’s a strange choice for an opener: it limps along on a fractured rhythm, sounding like bits of song gaffa-taped into shape: pounded piano line, woozy brass, drunken guitars more akin to the kitchen-sink arrangements of Venus Traps Fly-era Machine Translations rather than the smooth, ?60s power-pop of Snout. Then again, the song sums up the ramshackle charm of an album that’s definitely a grower rather than a shower.
That’s not to suggest that McLennan’s grasp of pop has abandoned him: there’s no song here without a melodic hook, and I defy anyone to hear the chugging 5/8 time of ?Get This!? and not have their brain cursed with a circling refrain of ?Your monkey cousins! Your monkey brothers! Look at their ugly faces! Look at their crooked bodies! Beautiful to their mothers!? The album’s more pared down than 2008?s Sympathy for the New World: there’s still plenty going on, but there’s a lightness to the arrangements that gives the record a lot more breathing space.
Ross McLennan – Get This! by Mistletone
?Machinehead? is a more straightforward (and yes, fine, kinda Snout-y) effort, containing the album’s neatest couplet in ?The sharks are on board, they call it consensus/It’s been ramping up since Galileo ground lenses.? Now that, friends, is a rhyme – matched only by the charmingly convoluted ?Don’t worry, I’m not playing victim/I lost all my rabbits, and habits? I kicked ?em.?
?Too much of the second half is nice without being memorable, and the continuity of a subdued mood makes it too easy to miss the highlights.?
The album’s first half maintains its quality with the sinister ?Grim Faces at the Caravan Park? (?Those calls are coming from – upstairs?), which matches a progression on what sounds to be a well-loved acoustic guitar with a character-filled vocal line ahead of a coda that the Beach Boys would be proud of. However, the thin-sounding ?Sheila Remembers? reaches for a grandeur it never quite grasps, despite some guitar licks that are legitimately tasty.
And that’s indicative of the problem with the album as a whole: there’s not an actual dud to be found, and any one of these tracks would enliven your iPod’s shuffle playlist, but when they’re bunched together – mainly mid-paced, mainly a bit toppy in the mix, mainly vocals right up front – it all gets to be a bit much by the midpoint.
In fact, the main thing that delayed this review was that each time I listened to the album, I’d get distracted after a while – if not genuinely lulled into a torpor by McLennan’s soothing voice. There are times when that juxtaposition is wonderfully effective – as on ?Newsprint Day?, which opens with ?Got my rifle down and out by the shed? delivered like an affectionate greeting – but too much of the second half of the album is nice without being memorable and the continuity of a subdued mood makes it too easy to miss the highlights.
Ross McLennan – Clarity by Mistletone
?Sunkissed??s ode to Australian coastal landscape sounds like a middling late-period Go-Betweens album track, which undercuts the beautiful strings of the subsequent ?Blackshirt?. Which slides into the piano lullaby of ?Deep in the Night?, which seems like the perfect album ender. That makes the actual closer – the slow-building ?Travel Arrangements? – sound like an exhausted, late-night encore, despite its intoxicating, almost ?Space Oddity?-style ebb and flow.
As a collection of songs, there’s precious little to fault about The Night’s Deeds are Vapour. However, a single pop-chorus banger in the second half would have elevated this album from good to great.
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