The Long O

For all the newly accessible melodicism and seemingly heartfelt sentiments of Peter Escott’s new album, there’s so much lurking just out of focus, writes DOUG WALLEN.

Peter Escott is well known around these parts as the vocalist and melody man for cult Hobart duo The Native Cats, but his latest solo album puts him alone among his piano, synths and other instruments, threading profound outsider balladry through various experimental impulses. Of course, sitting down at a piano while singing opens you up to some easy, if not always instructive, comparisons. For instance, NME cites both Perfume Genius and Rufus Wainwright, and for me it’s closer to the Footy songs where singing creeps in. But Escott doesn’t fit comfortably alongside anyone else and, well, this isn’t a comfortable record either. It’s an open invitation to puzzlement, filled with lyrics prone to baffle and amuse, but it just so happens to be heartbreakingly beautiful too.

The follow-up to 2008?s Slowcoach*, *The Long O* also follows some instrumental output as well as The Native Cats? masterly 2013 LP *Dallas. But it really does stand on its own, even within Escott’s own canon. It draws on some of his most sincere, most traditional ?pop? moments to date, yet accompanies them with oblique touches like the minute-long instrumental ?Kid 88 Moves On?, which wobbles between the left and right channel for disorienting effect, and the unrelated first minute of submerged garage-rock organ (think ?96 Tears?) that kicks off ?O?, only to be discarded completely before the proper song begins. Gnashing guitar creeps into the closing ?The Bell?, and the seven-minute ?Desmond Ballantyne? culminates in waves of competing samples, but both songs integrate those characteristics with Escott’s more ballad-oriented side.

All of it is worthwhile, but on some tracks the brilliance burns white-hot. Lead single ?My Heaven, My Rules? uses a jaunty bed of piano rumination to launch a focused pop song that does everything right. ?You never had to live by my rules/You never had to love my law,? sings Escott in the chorus, his voice threatening to waver. Yet the verses are downright debonair, and the line ?I’ve been training – for years? was enough to inspire a video themed around cross-training. Second single ?Mealymouth? is another few minutes of off-kilter perfection, a murky meditation amid starry synths. The opening line – ?The malaise of the chase is your new trouble? – is enough to chew on for the remainder of the song, but the rest of the words invite just as much parsing.

?These songs thrive on the words we can’t make out and the messages we can’t quite glean.?

?I’m trying to be direct,? he sings on that one, but these songs thrive on the words we can’t make out and the messages we can’t quite glean. Sometimes it’s collecting breadcrumbs, like the evocative image of a ?self-fulfilling nuclear bunker? on the sighing ?Every Afternoon is Holy?. Still, anything that gets us listening more closely to Escott’s work is a plus. That’s because there’s so much to explore: not just the broader context of those slanting lyrics, but the changing modes of synth and piano – which range from nakedly sparse to heavily textured – right down to the quirks of Escott’s phrasing. ?You forgot about/got about/got about number one,? he sings on ?No One?, while his voice distorts quietly on ?My Arm is True? as he inhabits a devotional love song peppered with such left-field boasts as ?I was a cloud of pure persuasion/I could talk you ?round anything.?

One of the album’s absolute best lines – ?My bed sits in the corner like a low priority? – is treated like just a fleeting musing on ?Angel?, while the opening statement ?Nothing on my body is a reason to be proud? and the later line ?I’m nothing like those other meatheads? are bound to attract more attention. But all this fawning over Escott’s way with words shouldn’t overshadow the rippling, tentative beauty of his piano playing, or the frayed anxiety mined by the other instruments. With a drum-machine beat puttering away, ?I Believe in Devil World? eventually falls into a mesmerising interplay between choppy piano and fuzzy synth, while ?Desmond Ballantyne? opens with such stately, moving piano that it’s hard to believe this is the same guy who has led The Native Cats with a handheld Nintendo console repurposed as a DIY sampler.

Similarly, Escott’s trademark prickliness in The Native Cats – which works so well against Julian Teakle’s brooding bass lines – is subdued on The Long O. Instead we hear a mellowed presence, someone who can disarm us as easily as in the image conveyed by the lyric ?All the others fell away in an instant from my touch.? The Native Cats may often hinge on a certain jaded volatility, but here Escott experiments with tear-jerking sincerity. If irony still plays a role in these songs, it’s downplayed in comparison to his regular band’s snarkier turns.

More than seven hundred words later, I still feel like this album is resisting me, eluding my pesky examinations. Maybe that’s why I obsess over it so – because, beyond its newly accessible melodicism and seemingly heartfelt sentiments, there’s so much lurking just out of focus. Escott comes across not just as a thinking person’s romantic, and not just as intelligent as he does on the page, but as a drifting soul that we can never quite corner and confront. He’s given us an album ruddy with poetic detail, only to fog all that detail with eccentricity and uncertainty. And so again I listen, again hoping for illumination, even as I relish the many shades of grey looming in the way.

+

##?The Long O? is out now on digital and vinyl through Bedroom Suck. Launch tour dates below.

Fri, Aug 22 – 4ZZZ Happy Fest @ Underdog, Brisbane, QLD [w/Fatti Frances, Melt Unit, Cobwebbs, Thigh Master, Martyr Privates + many more]
Sat, Sept 27 – Surry Hills Festival, Sydney, NSW
Sat, Oct 4 – Bedroom Suck fifth birthday @ Format Festival, Adelaide, SA
Sat, Oct 11 – Bedroom Suck fifth birthday @ John Curtin, Melbourne, VIC