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Everything's a Thread review: Exuberant Brisbane boys' second album a hit

Date: November 09 2013

Plus Gossling, Renee Fleming, Corrina Steel and more


The John Steel Singers

Everything's a Thread (Dew Process/ Universal)

It's true, in Brisbane at least, that everything's a thread. How else to explain how Brisbane has latterly become the home of bands playing pop music with guitars and synths, full of tunes and harmonies and a light rather than fuzzy tread? Here's just a quick list of them: Hungry Kids of Hungary, Cub Scouts, the sadly gone Yves Klein Blue, Ball Park Music, Jungle Giants and, not least by any means, the John Steel Singers. While different in many ways, one thing that defines them is exuberance. It's the sound of young kids at play but it's obvious that there's also a desire to grab whatever opportunities pop music offers. So the second album from John Steel Singers has fluid Afro-pop basslines a la Vampire Weekend as well as choruses with spacey psychedelic phasing; choppy power pop guitars-and-drums suggesting skinny ties and tight suits but also Eno-esque weirdness; high, boys-on-the-beach vocal lines and dance moves reminiscent of Manchester's late '80s E-peak. And just for fun, a ballad which is part '70s soul and part Pink Floyd and a song which jokes of being offered ''too much culture for a Brisbane boy''. The quirkiness of some instrumental choices is not only deliberate but almost provocative at times. Importantly, there's never a moment where you feel somebody stopped thinking, but it's never at the expense of the pleasure of playing - and hearing - a pop song.

Bernard Zuel

LIKE THIS? TRY THESE XTC, Oranges and Lemons; Hungry Kids of Hungary, You're a Shadow.




Balkan Spirit (Alia Vox/Fuse)

The latest instalment in Jordi Savall's Odysseus-like musical journey around the Mediterranean rim is typically glorious, but here his stately ensembles recreating the ancient music of Spain or Turkey give way to lively smaller bands and tearaway improvising.

Savall embarked upon this project with a point to make. From the outside the Balkans are seen as a hotbed of strife between diverse ethnicities who fundamentally dislike each other. History teaches a different lesson: one that is born out by the overlaps tying together the region's musical culture, from Slovenia to European Turkey and from Romania to Greece. Part of that overlap may be attributed to the enriching Gypsy influence.

Savall has selected compositions not just from across the region but across eras, and, as ever, his outstanding Hesperion XXI ensemble is augmented by virtuosos on instruments that define the sound of the different countries. So we have Gyula Csik playing cimbalom on a Romanian tune, Bora Dugic playing the recorder-like frula when we're in Serbia, and Yurdal Tokcan playing oud for a 17th-century Ottoman piece.

The resultant music is much more polite than the wild brass-band strains often associated with the area, and is stupendous in both its range and beauty. An intriguing aside is that one piece, Ciocarlia, was penned to help celebrate the opening of the Eiffel Tower in 1889.

John Shand

LIKE THIS? TRY THESE Ross Daly & Friends, Kin Kin; Orkestina, Transilvania Express.



Guilty Pleasures (Decca)

Superstar American soprano Renee Fleming must have an extraordinarily tender conscience to consider any of the 17 tracks here a ''guilty pleasure'', unless it's a richly deserved repentance at unleashing the 806,197,453rd version ofDanny Boy on an unsuspecting world. Do we really need another? Perhaps not, but forgivable when it is sung with such radiant tenderness, her Rolls-Royce voice scaled back with no loss in richness or purity. Some may think it overblown, but this song is always overblown.

According to the sleeve notes, her guilt comes from plundering chunks from larger works, as she sings arias and songs in no fewer than eight languages. There are some famous tunes: the flower duet from Lakme (with mezzo Susan Graham), Traume from Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder, the Villanelle from Berlioz' Les Nuits d'ete. There is also much music most listeners will never have heard of, let alone heard: Marie-Antoinette's final aria from the Ghosts of Versailles by American composer John Corigliano, the poignant Italian art song Ombra di nube, and Vendulka's Lullabyfrom The Kiss by Czech composer Bedrich Smetana. There are also Spanish songs from Falla, French songs from Canteloube, and opera arias from Tchaikovsky and Dvorak. Fleming, adding an extraordinary intimacy to her famous opulence, is ably accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Sebastian Lang-lessing. Texts, happily, are included.

Barney Zwartz

LIKE THIS? TRY THIS Renee Fleming, Poemes.


Alternative pop


Harvest of Gold (Dew Process)

Artists - hopefully - change as their careers unfold, and where a record sits in the timeline of that evolution often determines how they're perceived. In the case of Melbourne singer-songwriter Helene Croome, who performs under the moniker of Gossling, her debut album Harvest of Gold catches her at a turning point, as the intimate clarity of folk-pop gives way to electronic initiatives.

The shorthand might be a transition from Missy Higgins to Goldfrapp, but that wouldn't properly credit the delicious tension of songs such as Never Expire, where the crisp bite of Gossling's vocals sits above a sturdy melody underpinned by synths.

It helps that Gossling and producer John Castle craft impeccable recordings. Alongside the club-inflected pulses, there's a feel for ornate 1960s pop productions matched to contrasting subjects: on Songs of Summer, a duet with

Alexander Burnett, a couple's domestic routine is lamented as they drift apart, while Vanish grows increasingly tense as the safety of the song's protagonist is threatened.

That Feeling has a loping Motown groove that belies its lyrics. Gossling, who is drawn to pessimistic realism, warns, ''You won't get that feeling again,'' but that is exactly what makes a recording and its ability to freeze time great.

Harvest of Gold is full of such deliberate, telling contradictions.

It runs deep.

Craig Mathieson

LIKE THIS? TRY THESE Air, The Virgin Suicides; Ladyhawke, Anxiety.




Borrowed Tunes (Snakedrive/MGM)

The last time Corrina Steel was seen hereabouts she was rocking both the leather and the high-visibility electro blues. Did it well, too. But three seconds into this stripped-back covers record and you realise she has a voice for country. Old-style country. The kind of voice which has a hint of hiccup hidden beneath its deep power, a dollop of tears behind that febrile strength and a way of smoothing the path that never settles into easy listening.

Listen to her sing Smoke Along the Track and, especially, I Don't Wanna Play House, which Tammy Wynette owned, and you drop back four or five decades and hear the low pain afresh. Ease into Kris Kristofferson's Lovin' Him Was Easier (than Anything I'll Ever Do Again) and the smoky Ain't Like They Use to Be from the Black Keys and she's got you crying into your morning coffee. But she'll also surprise you by finding a dangerous delicacy in I Wanna Be Your Dog - yes, the Stooges - and, thanks to her trusty sideman through all this, the mood-making guitarist Mike Anderson, recreating a lonesome southern hemisphere night in Damaged, from those leather-trouser-wearing Scots, Primal Scream.

Whether double-tracked gospelling in Life's Railway to Heaven or gently finding a little rugged way into a mandolin-picked Different Drum, Steel and Anderson borrow and then bring something new.

Bernard Zuel

LIKE THIS? TRY THESE Kim Dellavedova, City Keepers; Corrina Steel, Wayward.


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