The Spoils - GoodnightVictoria

Wed 26th Oct, 2005 in Music Reviews

The Spoils make dour, damp, deep-welled music that the glossies would confusedly refer to as European. It’s about time to reconsider that geological genre, implying as it does that The Spoils sound in any way un-Australian. This kind of suit rock, with violins, pianos, accordions and so forth seems to come from a peculiar working class, convict background. And since the late seventies, try telling me anyone has done it better than unemployed Australians. The Bad Seeds, Blackeyed Susans, Died Pretty, Laughing Clowns, The Moodists, Dirty Three, stop me now before I turn into an index.

The Spoils make dark, ambered, forlorn music that finds itself forever in debt to unrequited love, alcohol, and a sense that life is a trial in which you are lucky if you can avoid tragedy on a regular basis. A six piece fronted by Sean Simmons and finding his perfect foil in Bronwyn Henderson – what his crochety Mark Lanegan vocals drag down in menace and threat, her multi-instrumental flourishes colour with a sense of drama – The Spoils seem to know what they’re doing. Am I losing you here? It’s too easy to start using floral words, they jump out of your pen when confronted with music of this calibre. (Soon I’ll rip out lines about bruised clouds growling hungry on the horizon, or some such nonsense.) The themes are not new, nor the poses. But the execution is close to faultless. Goddamn they do it well.

The Spoils make the kind of music that send reviewers blind with the need to jerk off their poesy about how great it truly is. Ingenue and Music For Olde Time Magic Tricks are two of the highlights. And they both happen to be instrumentals. When did you last say that about an album, hey? When not sounding like Lanegan’s drinking buddy, or at his most sombre maybe Lanegan’s liver, Simmons channels the spirit of the Snarski boys and delivers lines such as

“No I won’t cry for you, just drink you off my mind”

in a way that only Tom Waits ever really had the right to. With a strangled desperation that is missing in these times of ironic stares and the open heart surgery that has become (scr)e(a)mo. The effect is that it makes you lean in closer during each verse. If you’ve got enough time in your life to sit yourself down in front of the fire of Goodnight Victoria then you will surely heed the call of these old fashioned tales of love, crime and punishment. Vaudeville tears, mariachis, Uncle Vania and supplications to the moon, all on show in front of the red-curtained stage.

The Spoils make music that Europeans love (fact) and that Australians will by and large ignore because they’re too busy being told they love shit albums like In Your Honour and that latest Franz Ferdinand one I have already forgotten the name of (seriously, just put on the first couple of The Cars albums if you want fine upstanding quirky rock). No wonder the glossies will refer to it as European.