Ashley Naylor - Notes from Pig City

Even: Reverse Light Years

It is a truism of popular music’s album-oriented era that great double albums are rare. In Australian indie rock – at least since the waning of the compact disc’s market dominance and vinyl’s revival among collectors – they have become close to non-existent.

So Ashley Naylor, leader of Melbourne stalwarts Even and a rock & roll classicist to the core, would have known full well the scale of what he was attempting to pull off with Reverse Light Years, his band’s eighth album. The band’s first, released back in 1995, was called Less Is More.

Well, as it turns out, more is more. Reverse Light Years sounds imposing: 17 songs in 80 minutes. Even have always been consistent, but this is by far their most impressive album, a cornucopia of musical delights where everything singer-guitarist Naylor, bass player Wally Kempton and drummer Matt Cotter try comes off.

I have been listening obsessively to Reverse Light Years almost non-stop for the last month, and every time, I’ve walked away humming a different tune. You can listen to it in one long trip, you can break it up into its four sides, or you can just dip in anywhere and hold up another jewel to the light.… Read more..

Paul Kelly: Life Is Fine review

Music / August 24, 2017 / 3 minutes of reading

In the A–Z of Paul Kelly’s career – something he spent some 550 pages discussing in his excellent “mongrel memoir” How To Make Gravy, which obliquely discussed in alphabetical order the inspirations, motivations and memories lurking behind more than 100 of his songs – attention always turns back to his third album, Post, the one where he found his true songwriting voice.

Post was recorded as a solo album in 1985 but it featured the core of his band the Coloured Girls, later renamed the Messengers. It was this album and the ones that followed (Gossip, Under The Sun, So Much Water So Close To Home and Comedy) which cemented Kelly’s stature. Gossip, especially, was towering, packed with an astonishing 24 songs that never flagged.

Those albums were made a long time ago, and Steve Connolly, the guitarist whose stinging, economical leads were the linchpin of the Messengers, died tragically young in 1995. Kelly has made more than 20 albums since then, all of them studded with gems – but while he has surrounded himself with great players, he has never had a band with quite the same chemistry.

Life Is Fine is an unabashed attempt to recapture the feel and energy of some of those early records.… Read more..

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