Life/Thrills
Following the surprise breakout ?Hard Rubbish?, Lower Plenty’s third album shrugs off any weight of expectation, writes ANTHONY CAREW.
Lower Plenty’s 2012 LP Hard Rubbish* was peak dolewave, but we didn’t even know it yet. When the Melbourne quartet landed atop *Mess + Noise?s Critics Poll, it was a sign o? the times, a high-water mark for the steady rise of laconic, suburban jangle. But dolewave, as it were, didn’t yet exist: the snappy handle genrefying a bubbling sound yet to be coined; the think pieces yet to be typed; the grassroots Australian of the Year campaigns yet to be mounted.
Named after a nondescript Melbourne suburb, Lower Plenty penned songs evoking rundown sharehouses and their ephemeral inhabitants; fitting for a band who sound like a musical sharehouse, members (writing songs around a kitchen table, according to one-sheet lore) chipping in songs as housemates would leave gas-bill money on the fridge. That a band so unpolished, so uninterested in bombast or grandeur, achieved critical consensus – if only in this little corner of the internet – still seems like a sweet quirk of history, and Life/Thrills, for some listeners, will come with expectations of repeating it.
Those anticipating a next-level record may be puzzled by what’s actually on the third LP. Contrary to the usual discographical progression, it’s looser, scrappier, more haphazard and patched together than its predecessor. The album was assembled from songs recorded through 2012 and 2013, but the sonic qualities of Life/Thrills* aren’t merely a product of circumstance; its wonkiness a considered artistic decision, a mark of audible difference. If *Hard Rubbish* suggested backyard lawns and wide open roads, *Life/Thrills* sounds smoggier (or, if you’ve just been *Sewn to the Sky, Smog-ier), dirtier, darker; the glinting, golden tones and outright Australiana of a song like ?Nullarbor? absent. Here, the guitars of Al Montfort (also of Dick Diver, Total Control, et al) and Jensen Tjhung (also of Deaf Wish, Exhaustion, et al) are less classic indie jangle and more outsider art.
Rather than reminding of comparable peers like Dick Diver or Camperdown & Out, Life/Thrills summons shadowy figures from the underground’s dark past; its loosely strung, questionably-in-tune acoustics evoking early Charalambides and even Jandek. ?You Pushed Me?, where Sarah Heyward’s vocal nestles amidst guitar wooze and cutlery-drawer clatter, has the scrawled, outside-the-margins feel of Loren Mazzacane Connors? collaborations with Suzanne Langille. ?Took a Trip?, in which melancholy pools around Heyward’s murmured words, has a quality reminiscent of the first Movietone album. ?Waiting on a Tram?, which uses Montfort’s double-tracked vocals and unspooling guitars to create a sense of disorientation, sounds as if found on some lost Xpressway tape.
?Voices bumping into each other like a pair of drunks slow-dancing in a half-emptied hall.?
That disorientation is doubled by the fact that Lower Plenty are employing ?Waiting on a Tram? as Life/Thrills? opener. Once it’s set the tenor for the set, then something like the cacophonous ?Concrete Floor? is unsettling, but not unexpected. Even ?On the Beach?, the album’s single, strums so hard that it momentarily clips a clag of discordance. The one true ?pop? moment is the glorious title track, a four-minute epic-in-the-context in which Lower Plenty’s claim of making ?suburban country? comes brightly to life: Tjhung offering both a dapper croon and a natty whistle, his sinuous guitar all fingers sliding down strings. As its rabble rouses, he and Montfort mount a caterwauling chorus, voices stumbling and bumping into each other like a pair of drunks slow-dancing in a half-emptied hall. The lyrics seem to be about returned servicemen (something the war-themed video suggests too), but hearing Tjhung and Montfort unreservedly holler ?Life! Thrills!? works best when unmoored from song meaning; the simple joys of being alive, of living on, shouted unto the heavens, a mantra turned two-word refrain.
What all this amounts to may disappoint those still attached to Hard Rubbish*, may confuse those newly arrived at the Lower Plenty (kitchen) table, and may genuinely confront listeners unused to audio so lacking in varnish and guile. Calling music ?personal? is a meaningless critical adjective – when is music not? – but here Lower Plenty sound particularly personal: individual, idiosyncratic, specific; filled with faults but still worth loving. *Life/Thrills may not be what many were expecting, but to sound so unaffected in the face of expectations is its own kind of virtue.
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####?Life/Thrills? is out now on vinyl and digital through Bedroom Suck (Aus/NZ), and later in the year through Mexican Summer (US). Lower Plenty launch the album tonight (July 11) in Melbourne at the John Curtin Hotel with Hit the Jackpot, Crude and Leighton Craig (Primitive Motion). More info here.