Range Anxiety
Twerps? much-awaited second album complicates beautiful pop songs with a wider range of feelings below the surface, writes LACHLAN KANONIUK.
The surface mood of Range Anxiety, Twerps? second fully realised album, never really dips below a certain buoyancy. Feelings of unease and inadequacy – fertile grounds for Twerps – are parlayed into simple, direct guitar-pop songs. Truth is delivered with tempered balance, more mitigation than contradiction and a form of particularly Australian wryness that dictates the nickname ?Bluey? for your redhead mate.
The ruse of obfuscation, resolutely innocuous here, is a fruitful modus operandi for Twerps, nestling into reductive rhyming chains with undeniable charm. Range Anxiety is calm and complacent, that balance present in the opening of ?I Don’t Mind?: ?I don’t mind if you stay/I don’t mind if you go.? A meditative counsel and air of platitude is the result, not the cause. The most genuine love song on the album is presented with the title ?Fern Murderers?, the track plaintively entertaining matrimonial thoughts but no direct allusion to herbicidal tendencies. It’s nostalgic and lovely, a spacious, tonal invocation of Australiana synths, something like an introspective take on ?Wide Open Road? triumph.
The announcement of Range Anxiety coincided with the release of the surprise EP Underlay, which coincided with the announcement that Merge Records would handle Twerps? Stateside release. The EP was put together in between the recording and the reveal of Range Anxiety (the timeframe you can imagine it took for the Merge deal to be locked in) – an exercise in maintaining creative momentum, perhaps, but the dark tone is a world away from its corresponding two LPs, marking a confessional offset to Range Anxiety that presents actual anxiety.
It took time for The Twerps to become Twerps, but in the ascendency from Melbourne knockabouts to international touring band (mainly by supporting likeminded North American kin), any trial of transition isn’t apparent on Range Anxiety, purged instead on a marginal scope with Underlay. Spirits are high on the album, and acceptance heralds the spritely bliss of ?Back to You? (?Somebody out there is doin? better than me?). It’s brilliant, carefree pop, combining the rollicking impact of ?Dreamin? with the communal resonance of ?Who Are You?, two of the previous Twerps album’s finest moments. The songwriting acumen feels hard-earned, never overreaching in craft. Everything sounds lovely, rich with subtlety, the underlying ambience of organ instrumental ?House Keys? segueing into ?I Don’t Mind?. Chiming mandolin folk breezes through ?Shoulders?, a waltz-y vehicle for Julia MacFarlane’s steady vocal that achieves measured triumph.
?These are good songs, some bloody good.?
?Love at First Sight? throbs like a deathly hangover, almost belligerent, a terrific setup for Marty Frawley’s exaggerated, not quite comical, croon, compounded by inebriated backing squawks. It’s my favourite song on the album, uninhibited and dreamlike.
The album’s tone sours on the bum note of closer ?Empty Road?, denoting a stalker protagonist trailing an incapacitated object of affection, relayed with uneasy detachment. The aim is true, but the track is a misfire in narrative tone, a victim of Twerps? reductive pathos. It’s not present in the actual text, but the intent of ?Empty Road? was to project Marty’s boyish, rock ?n? roll fantasy of voyeuristically following the footsteps of Television Personalities? Dan Treacy. Again, there are no clues in the song, its meaning left only to supplementary interviews or to the new wave of lyrical annotators, if Sasha Frere-Jones gets around to it. The characters of ?Empty Road? aren’t gendered, but the connotation is; at best it’s idealistic and artless, at worst it’s conceited, not so much a bait to those with an eye for the problematic, but a pre-emptive flash of the misunderstood-artist card. It falls short as both a stalker meditation and as a love letter to an idol, and would have worked had it gone all in on the latter.
?I miss seeing you around/But our love goes round/Round ?n? round.? That’s real, and comes from a real place, on ?Simple Feelings?. The track title is a misnomer but it’s also not, if that makes sense. As complex as you need, really. Again, the beauty is in balance, maybe through contradiction, but a beauty all the same. These are good songs, some bloody good. Twerps? motivation is their own, the songs impervious to the shuffling of rhythm-section personnel (a new drummer and bassist sourced from Melbourne’s consolidated musical family) and the intangible notion that musical success could be a discouragement. (Frequent Twerps reference point The Clean gained their widespread, slow-burn resurgence over a decade ago with a compilation released via Merge, decades after their debut.)
But for the time being, any frustration or ill mood, no matter how apolitical, is parlayed into something radiant, something relatable. Something beautiful.
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##?Range Anxiety? is out now on CD, vinyl and digital through Chapter Music (Aus/NZ) and January 27 through Merge Records in the rest of the world. Upcoming gigs below.
Wed, Jan 28 – The Tivoli, Brisbane, QLD [w/Belle & Sebastian]
Thurs, Jan 29 – Enmore Theatre, Sydney, NSW [w/Belle & Sebastian]
Sun, Feb 1 – Palais Theatre, Melbourne, VIC [w/Belle & Sebastian]
Tues, Feb 3 – The Astor, Perth, WA [w/Belle & Sebastian]
Fri, Feb 27 – Melbourne Zoo, Melbourne, VIC [w/Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks]
March 7-9 – Golden Plains, Meredith, VA