Album Review

Blackchords – Dust Devil Music

• 3rd Oct 2009

Picture this. It’s a snowfall outside. The white sheets frost everything in a sparkly mysterious glow. It fills you with wonderment, wonderment too at how such a fragile, such a–well–basic thing can make you shiver, make you notice the natural beauty of objects and their lines. Then it carries on snowing and suddenly the lines are erased, those shadowy trees disappear under a perma-white and the dusting turns into blocks of saccharine overkill.

That’s the line between ethereal and bland, between spine chilling affecting and soppy sodden clichés, between, arguably, Doves and Coldplay. And it’s a dilemma Australia’s Blackchords, with a musical tendency unusually sentimental—given the acts that fair continent usually exports–, face across debut Dustdevil Music here.

It starts with ‘World’s Ends’s’ stately fragile rock- a whispered sparse rock with pylons far in the horizon and piano’s in the foreground or muffled chord progressions, By ’These Light’s it turns fully orchestral, along the lines of a more acceptable Coldplay, much like Nick Milwright’s slightly nasally, earnest tones which teeter without cracking. ‘Switch’ turns to jauntier Ryan Adams country-rock rhythm with glistening end-notes like stars and vocals turned towards a muted Buckley impression, until two minutes thirty in, the drums and guitars become suddenly assaultive, spiced with a hitherto (too) well concealed urgency.

But the rock out is sporadic, tempered by a precarious sensitivity which strains never to be too angry, too personal, to its credit to communicate outside of its lovelorn and heartache inspirations into the lingua-franca of half-lit mass gigs with cellos, an independent rock independent of—a band really, as opposed to musicians digging into the same old general gestures pretty well.

If it has an identity, then cover and record alike circulate around the image of departure spaces in the half- dark, private moments in a public place— which works neatly as an analogy for this kind of populist torch-singing. ‘22’s’ night airport acoustica- which sounds like cold-hands clasped over wiry strings, turns to a sombre ’my sweetheart’ waltz—atmospheric but a fraction too tasteful to completely chill. ‘Raise my hands’ turns even woozier, like intense conversations in far-off stations at 2.30am, and at its heart has a chiming Elbow-like figure against the soft-cello which, matched with those ever softer vocals, threatens a quiet eruption but hangs ever coiled. Even as the orchestra rises.

Yet at other times, the strings swell when you’re tensed for them to hover and keep the moment lingering, over-reach and over-state the moment as on otherwise effective-and affective- closer- Disappear. Agonizingly at times it threatens to be off-kilter rather than the acceptable face of that maligned sub genre ‘ soundtracks for romance and car-commercials’ . An electro-beat pulse opening on Diplomat, bizarrely akin to Death in Vegas’s ‘hands around my heart’, raises the prospect of riskier fare, but they’re happy to let it mutter as an extraneous studio trick over the otherwise monolithic power-indie downcast model.

Only at the middle eight do we see a distortion pedal vortexing up the song with trick dynamics, livening it up like the ghost of Johnny Greenwood expelling The Bends, another misty antecedent of this flu rock. Plummeting guitars thud against enlivened drum neuroticism- repeated at the coda, and for a few moments even the production lets them go, into post-rock and rebel noise living up to the album title finally, an impulse never to be repeated before the last mid-tempo stirrings of ‘blackchords’.

For all that the Blackchords go through the genre motions with more taste and nuance than most of their erstwhile competition and if you ‘like this sort of thing, you`ll—like this’, for the rest of us hearing the ‘chords’ burst out of themselves a little more on this record would have heightened the urge to revisit it.