The Dishevelled Gentlemen- Calling In Favours

Sun 17th Jan, 2010 in Music Reviews

The Dishevelled Gentlemen have wrenched torn suit jackets out from under the couch cushions and enlisted a few friends to help iron out strong ideas, tell real stories and perfectly capture that growling Melbourne sound for their debut, Calling In Favours.

Declaring Secondhand News to be no news at all, The Gent’s wear their influences unashamedly, having clearly sprouted from the Neil Young bough of the rock tree. There’s more than that in there though.

The sounds of dropped-arm guitars, warm female backing vocals and a professional looseness actually conjure the image of a live band, familiar and appealing. What really appeals to me, though, is Bus Stop. It keeps up the album’s opening pace with a great fusion of rock and soul, skulking with an almost predatory bassline behind the question – œwhy we can’t just get along?’ making the prospect sound positively dangerous. A brass soul injection and striding groove keep it sexy. Like really sexy.

One More Time is brisk walk down the main street of a country town. Seriously. In dusty chaps and an akubra. It’s a country velvet story-telling jaunt told through a Mick Jagger vocal filter. Clocking in at 7 minutes it’s not likely to get a run on JJJ but they don’t seem the type of Gents to give a fuck.

The big highlight after Bus Stop is Bay of Booze: evolving from a squinty-eyed hangover into a belligerent, full blown drunkard – swallowing pots, knocking over barstools and snapping, snarling, brawling. Excellent.

The whiskey-strained growling vocal is corralled into an early-times rock show on How Are You Sleepin’ but sounds cleverly live and uncontrived, in the same way Call Your Name does, even though it’s a clearly layered studio event with howling winds and headless horseman.

The oh-so-Melbourne sound gets truly dipped into during the pedal steel lament of Because of You but A Heavy Heart picks up the pace again, getting downright rambunctious with swirly guitar, the distant sound of handclaps and the raucous use of megaphone which turns the single growl into a momentary pack. State of Emergency shifts the scene again to safer alt-country territory with, gasp, actual singing, still with that desperate strain. Not the strongest track on the record, for mine, and following, Freewill is another one that has me scratching my head. True barn dancing material – colonial times, fiddle – I wouldn’t be surprised if they used a double bass on this one.

I admire the story telling in How We Arrived but the painful Redgum-esque bush poetry documenting the meeting of settlers and indigenous Australian’s, complete with wooly-sounding spoken word set to a rock country soundtrack is not my bag. I reckon it’s a risk and given that the next song, New Faces, opens with a groovy rock riff and soul cushioning that inspires crowd participation, taking me full circle back to the stronger start of the album, I guess you can say they get away with it. An inspired effort, however you like your stories told.