The Devastations - TheDevastations

Thu 31st Mar, 2005 in Music Reviews

Rowland S. Howard, it could be argued, is a man who knows music. More specifically, he’s a man who knows poignant, dark, highly emotive music. (Quick, Phantom-style for-those-who-came-in-late update: he’s the bloke who penned a little ditty titled Shivers, before being a member in more influential bands than you could wave a hipster at.) So you know that when he gives a band the thumbs-up, it’s going to be worth your while checking them out. Melbourne trio The Devastations have earnt such an accolade – and their album, simply titled The Devastations, is startling proof of exactly how they came to top a luminary’s list.

Put simply, The Devastations is an album of the type that’s rarely made – at least locally. Sure, there’s been Howard-approved bands like Hungry Ghosts, and Dirty Three remain top of the dark-and-stormy charts, but it’s relatively rare to see new talent release albums of such solemnity and blunted hope as this one, and live to tell the tale – at least without accusations of being too po-faced for their own good. This could be due to the fact that the band arose from the ashes of renowned rockers Luxedo – not exactly fresh-faced and unknowing of the ways of rocking – or it could also be due to the unforced nature of the album. Organic, it seems, is the best description of what’s on offer here.

For the album, the band’s live lineup of three – Conrad Standish, Tom Carlyon and Hugo Cran – is joined by Emilie Martin, another ex-Luxedo muso. The instruments played – banjo, percussion, harmonium, optigan, guitar, bass, violin and keys -should give an idea of exactly what sort of music to expect. Straight four-on-the-floor rock this ain’t; this is more in the line of Tindersticks – the less-is-more school, that’s suited for those nights on the couch when you’d rather curl up with a bottle of red and your sorrows than contend with the world.

Opening track He Wasn’t Like That When I Knew Him places the listener firmly in The Devastations’ heartland. An instrumental tune, it’s a waltzing, gypsy-styled piece that features plucked banjo, mournful violin and thoughtful piano, with a melody and wandering feel that seems akin to the immigrant-leant soundtracks of The Sound Of One Hand Clapping composer Cezary Skubiszewski. It’s a wistful introduction to the band’s world, but it’s one that’s contrasted with the muscular kick which opens Loene, a Calexicolike song that opens with the flow of blood and tears, and is ridden to heaven with a female vocal that sounds near-as-damn to Francoiz Breut riding towards a spaghetti western heaven.

There’s a distinctly countrified, dramatic feel to the album, though it doesn’t necessarily manifest itself in a yee-haw kind of way. Rather, this is an album through which the vastness of rural spaces is communicated with a sort of small-community honesty. It’s difficult to explain; just know that this is non-big-hat country, of the ilk produced latterly by Tex Perkins. We Will Never Drink Again is a great example of this; Standish’s deep, smooth voice conjures the night sky, huge and terrible, as he considers the end of things, the title repeated over and over again in what could be a show of quiet regret, or in an attempt to convince oneself of the reality of the situation. There’s something flowing through these songs that sounds like the tiredness, the timelessness of the country. It’s not fast, city-based music; there’s a world-weariness here that somehow manages to distance itself from a world of built-up housing and fifteen-minute parking zones – something the band have in common with both Hungry Ghosts and Dirty Three.

The other mode that’s favoured by The Devastations is that of lamentations – of lamentations sung from a tattered stage in seedy cocktail bar, where the patrons and staff alike cry into their drinks. Most notable of these is Previous Crimes, with its musing on what could happen in the future, laid above an ethereal, sad violin line.

I could not conceive
Your setting sun
There’s no setting sun
There’s no setting sun…

Hopelessness unspools in a most painfully attractive way through plaintive calls for a lover to stay, through martial drumming, through the ghostly, almost human wail of a tremulous violin solo. It is, to be plain, fucking beautiful, and it’s a pattern repeated elsewhere.

An easy comparison for The Devastations is Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. It’s also particularly lazy. Yes, tracks like You Can’t Reach Me Now sound very much like the velvety embrace of that band, but there’s much more of a sense of hopelessness, of peculiarly cotton-wool-shrouded satisfaction with despair (with maybe a hope for something better) here. Maybe it’s that Cave, with his reacquainted-with-the-Lord or fiery-anger dichotomy-of-deliverance, is a little more cut-and-dried: The Devastations allow for more prevarication in their tunes, and as a result, sound a little more flawed, a little more dazzled by life, and a little more human.

Closer to the mark would be to refer to American Gothic – no, not goth – rockers 16 Horsepower, whose dust-shot tunes of redemption and hell mine the same sense of uncertain questing, while maintaining a feeling of almost untouchable space. Where other acts press sadness and despair upon you like Mack the Knife, The Devastations are content to be the combo in the corner, or the jukebox in the hall – slowly, surely, indelibly working into your senses.

The influence of Tom Waits’ work is felt across the disc, also. Ausenica, in keeping with the opening track’s folky bent, sounds very much – with its spidery banjo, wheezy harmonium and curiously queasy optigan – like a track from Swordfishtrombones that’s escaped its album cell. It’s a reminder that the band are willing to crack the mould of dudes-done-wrong; folky turns seem to fit into this world just as well as lover’s despair.

The band, while staying low-key for most of the album, aren’t afraid to move into moments of chaos – more often found in their live show – when required. In the otherwise solemn Hold Me, with its tremolo-laden guitar and plodding bass, a solo of some ferocity stands in stead of a scream; in Under, the creeping-spy atmosphere is cut by bursts of doubled, wailing guitar that erupt without warning, cutting a hole in the Blue Velvet world of the vocals. It’s a side of the band that’s not especially on display throughout the album, but the mere presence of it sets the band apart from similar slow, measured groups such as Spain by proving that there’s a flickknife up The Devastations’ collective sleeve, and they’re not afraid to use it.

The Devastations is an album that’s won an idol’s ears. It goes without saying that it should win yours also.