The Boat People – DearDarkly

Thu 22nd Jul, 2010 in Music Reviews

Dear Darkly is album number three for this hard-working quartet. It proves difficult to categorise, except to say that it is one of the most uniquely Australian albums I have ever heard. It’s not the Australia of Barnesy, AC/DC and sweaty pubs, but the Australia occupied by The Go-Betweens, The Triffids and wide open roads throughout the country.

The comparisons are valid if for no other reason than the album’s production, which joins countless others in revisiting ideas last seen during the 80s. Tracks like You Are Adored sound like a whole bunch of bands I can’t quite put my finger on, and Dance To My Pain – one of the album’s highlights – is exactly the sort of minor-key dance music that sits comfortably alongside We Have Band’s 80s revivalism.

But beyond those more superficial comparisons, what makes this album seem like such a throwback is that it is defined by space, by emptiness. Unlike many other new releases, packed tight with noise so as to deny you an opportunity to change the radio station, this album allows itself some room to move, to breathe, to present songs rather than jam them down your throat. Songs are allowed to fade out, to ebb and flow, and tend to seduce rather than attack.

In Antidote, as in much of the album, there’s an intimacy in the hushed vocals, the unobtrusive guitars and the rolling drums, all of which serve to draw the listener in even closer without them even realising it.

It’s an eclectic mix of styles that find their home here. Echo Stick Guitars opens with a Nintendo-esque synth that could easily have ended up on Hot Chip’s most recent effort, but then the chorus busts out clap-happy playground sing-alongs with a touch of INXS in the 8-note guitar solo. The sweeping guitars of Soporific remind me of nothing so much as The Church’s classic Under The Milky Way Tonight, while the lyrics “Boy you’re soporific,/But is that your fault or mine?/Things they used to be terrific,/But now they’re barely anodyne” give me a bit of a giggle every time and back up my long-held belief, that you should never use a short word when a longer one exists.

In stark contrast is Hidden Busses, with singer Robin Waters sounding small and defeated accompanying himself on guitar. The chord progression calls to mind The Book of Love, one of The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs and one of the best love songs of all time, and the whole experience is just devastating. To hear Waters’ voice waver and break, and struggle to hit some notes is a heartbreaking experience made all the more poignant by the lyrics:
“I’m trying the best I can/ Or at least harder than I would if I wasn’t with you/ And it’s making me a better man/ But baby tell me what’s the use/ If it’s not gonna be for you…”

All in all, this is an interesting and varied album. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it great, but the obvious advantage of an album that leaps around from genre to genre is that the band can distill all their best ideas into one or two tracks that have a more dancey feel to them, and then go through the same process with ballads, vaguely electro-pop numbers, and whatever else they the band decides to tackle.

With Dear Darkly, The Boat People have proved beyond all doubt that they are a band with some excellent ideas and a knack for getting those ideas across on record.