Record

Despite that band name, electric-piano duo Footy aren’t a joke. But there are touches of the absurd on their second album, writes ANTHONY CAREW.

Calling an album Record* is, in theory, a bit of droll comedy, a sardonic step below calling it *Unit. But if your band name is Footy, then there’s layers to that comedy: the Footy Record the match program sold outside AFL grounds by carnival-barkin?, cap-wearin? kids. Were their label ever in search of a publicity stunt to shift units of Footy’s Record – the second album for the Melburnian duo – they could, indeed, set up shop outside the MCG and flog them in such a fruit-market manner. Whether any punters-in-the-outer are ready to have this Footy in their lives is another question, given that their name, too, is its own kind of joke, comedy ever more droll.

Without wishing to bury the lede: this is a band named Footy. If you’re from Melbourne, calling yourself Footy is akin to calling yourself, like, The Weather: it’s something everyone talks about; a word omnipresent, a name generic. It’s no surprise Footy, as a band name, is a joke, but here it’s one of expectations. Whatever you might be anticipating of a band named Footy, it’s undoubtedly not an improvised electric-piano duo steeped in Michael Nyman, Erik Satie and Terry Riley’s The Harp of New Albion; the ?comedy? coming in the juxtaposition – and implied cultural, classist clash – of handle and sound. When Footy play somewhere sticky-carpet-ish like The Tote, you see that joke in its optimum environment: modern-classical minimalism delivered in the Tim Hemensley Memorial Recital Hall.

The question then begs: if both band name and album name are jokes, does that make Footy a joke band? On 2013?s Mobile Cemetery, the answer would seem a firm ?no?, with Footy’s debut finding Paddy Gordon and Lewis Mulvey using their plastic ivories to create a melancholy sound-world out to evoke the eeriness of semi-abandoned low-rent Western suburbia: the post-apocalyptic uncanniness of depopulated industrial zones, the sadness of decaying weatherboards.

Record* – which plays on its handle with banal artwork that’s less unadorned-minimalism and more generic and pro-forma – essentially follows suit. It opens with ?Consciousness,? seven minutes of forlorn chords left to ring and linger, with Gordon and Mulvey soon trading philosophical, poetic murmurings over top of each other; its stirred-up climax of soft voices and loud pianos having almost a shamanic quality, a ritualised attempt at cracking into the subconscious. *Record later closes with ?The Violence of the Letter,? in which the melancholy of those plastic ivories stretches out into sadness and loaded silence – the pregnant pauses between each cluster of minor-key flurries carrying great weight.

?Past its comic setup, a place dark and desperate.?

In between those totemic bookends, there are similar sounds on ?Burial? and ?Heard Today?: the former carrying quasi-anthemic echoes of ?70s singer-songwriters; the latter making the arch minimalism a little jazzier, more wandering and improv’d. On beyond their fondness for ironic titles of both band and album, there’s little here, musically, to live up to the expectations of Footy, and Record, as being the work of a joke band.

But then, right in Record?s middle, there comes ?The Price is Right.? If Mobile Cemetery was about blessing Hills-Hoist Australiana with a kind of desolate, agonised grace – dolewave as if played by Keith Jarrett – here Footy go for a more smirkin? picture of suburban angst: Mulvey drolly, dully crooning a first-person short story whose narrator is haunted by a failed appearance on the titular television program. ?If I had my time again, I’d value those steak-knives/but the show’s long off air,? he sings. ?Take me back to the Channel 9 studio, April 1992/The last time I saw your face.?

As far as percussionless power-ballads written as absurdist devotionals to Larry Emdur go, I can hardly think of a better one, and Mulvey deserves credit for pushing the song past its comic setup, tapping into a place dark and desperate. But if Footy are a joke band on a conceptual level, here they seem close to literalising it on a musical one, ?The Price is Right? playing like a Triple J novelty song from another dimension. If this Footy record were to get flogged outside the ?G, then this would be the crowd-pleaser; Footy’s song for those in the cheap seats.

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####?Record? comes out tomorrow (Oct 31) on CD, digital and vinyl through Lost & Lonesome. Footy play a free gig tomorrow (Oct 31) at Polyester Records on Brunswick Street in Melbourne; more info here. Read our 2013 interview with the band.