The Airborne Toxic Event- The Airborne ToxicEvent

Sun 20th Sep, 2009 in Music Reviews

This is an album that grips you right from the start, with opening track Wishing Well bursting out of the speakers just brimming with riffing guitars and a rollicking ‘ole chorus. It’s rather hard not to like and get caught up in.

You just can’t escape the fact that singer Mikel Jollett has pretty much exactly the same voice as Bruno Brayovic of Sydney stalwarts Peabody. The single Happiness is Overrated in particular could comfortably sit amidst the tracks of Professional Againster. Where The Airborne Toxic Event differs from Peabody’s then tight and precise three-piece guitar/bass/drums sound is the recruiting of some classically and jazz trained musicians to add many musical flourishes to the traditional indie-rock mix.

Jollett is also bit more pained than our Peabody mate too, with his lyrics documenting his wayward love life and extensive emotional scarring that has been dished out to him along the way. In particular on Sometime Around Midnight where the song narrates a particularly bleak and drunken run in with a former flame who is already re-stoking the fires with someone else.

But when you dig a bit deeper you find that Jollett has endured an utterly wretched period in his life that inspired the formation of The Airborne Toxic Event and provided fuel for the lyrical fire that burns within this, their debut album. Within a short space of time Jollet’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, his girlfriend left him and he contracted an autoimmune disease just to top it off. What at one point could have turned into a particularly harrowing novel was cathartically expunged into the songs instead.

The band seem to have struck a really good balance between keeping the songs dense enough to be engaging and interesting, yet still not overbearing enough to hide the messages within. There’s that time honored routine of hiding the suffering with singalong melodies and big rolling choruses going on, so you can easily just pop the album on to nod and tap away the 50-odd minutes and 13-tracks, or conversely you could really intently listen and get right into it if the mood grabbed you. Though if you did dwell too long on the lyrics you couldn’t help to feel anything but pity or sympathy for poor Mikel as his many self-destructive episodes are described. It’s not so much a break up album as a break down one. These songs are almost too perversely revealing at times, yet they remain intriguing and upbeat throughout, and no doubt would be performed particularly powerfully live.

The Airborne Toxic Event is available through Island Records.