Chris Pickering - A SaferPlace

Sun 26th Mar, 2006 in Music Reviews

A Safer Place is the debut album from ex-Boat People drummer Chris Pickering.  It is also an album that has some critics declaring Pickering as one of Brisbane’s ‘best emerging singer-songwriters’ (Brisbane News). One listen to the album and it’s hard not to agree.

The opening 30 seconds of album opener Chalk Outline pulls the listener into a laid-back country/alt feel full, full of quiet acoustic and whimsy lap steel guitar.  If this is not normally your thing, give it a chance. Pickering’s vocals are surprisingly fragile, his lyrics more than engaging, and the album has enough of an indie pop feel – no doubt due to Pickering’s background with the Boat People) to keep it interesting.

Having introduced the listener to what the album is all about, Pickering pulls out an unashamedly country song. With harmonica, fiddle, slide guitar and quickly plucked acoustic guitar, Better Off bemoans: “Drifting out across the field and maize and corn rise before the dawn/ but this must be a dream because it’s dry as hell and the season’s come and gone”. It is one of the album’s highlights as Pickering teams with fellow Queensland musician Megan Washington for some gorgeous harmonies.

At other times, Pickering explores the acoustic folk genre. With All As It Should Be, Pickering strips it all back, with just his voice and guitar in wise storytelling mode.  It makes you feel like you are eight years old again and grandpa has pulled you up onto his lap, pulled out his guitar and is singing you a story about the world. There is a real warmth and loving feeling to this song that, as the album’s title suggests, makes you feel you have, indeed, found a safer place.

The other offerings of the album are no less stirring. There is the beautiful simplicity in love song Sleepyhead, in which Pickering and his guitar really make you believe that “it will be alright”. Then there are the frank and moving lyrics of Rattle: “This old raincoat ain’t no good to me/ it don’t keep me dry it don’t keep out the weather/ it don’t keep out the cold/ and like my broken heart it’s full of holes”.

A Safer Place is confident and accomplished, yet contains a subtlety of rawness that helps mark the sensitivity and intimate honesty Pickering uses to connect to the listener. Although the album does fall away a little towards the end, Pickering almost completely redeems himself with the heartfelt finale of Somersaults to round out an arresting, impressive and charming debut. More please.