tisdag 10 Apr 2007, 14:55

A package arrived from Australia this morning, containing the new albums from two Melbourne artists: Sir and New Buffalo.

First up, New Buffalo's Somewhere, Anywhere.

Since departing from Modular (then just another indie label, now Australia's premier punk house label, and mentioned in the same breath as DFA) for not being sufficiently electrocoolsie, Sally has locked her husband (Darren Seltmann of The Avalanches, who collaborated with her on her first EP) out of the studio, dumped the layers of beats, analogue synths and drum machines, and made a career of making smiley, sunshiney lullabyes backed by a piano. This album continues that. It is rather on the twee side, so much so that it makes Architecture In Helsinki sound like Norwegian church-burners by comparison. The first song is titled "Cheer Me Up Thank You", and sounds pretty much as you'd expect it to; there is more gently concentrated niceness that follows, with subtly reverbed piano (a piano which, as the booklet points out, has been in the Seltmann family for a century) and the odd saxophone line that may have been borrowed from an old Acker Bilk record found in a thrift shop. The songs vary from gently cheerful to gently wistful. Don't expect to rock out to this, but if you put it on quietly as you go to sleep, your dreams probably will be pleasant.

Sir's The Brando Room is a darker record. Since husband-and-wife duo Sir recorded their first album, (The Night I Met My Second Wife; a slice of noir-tinged songcraft that could be described as The Paradise Motel on valium, or Portishead without beats), they broke up, and after the second album, they stopped working together. As of this album, Sir is just Jesse Jackson Shepherd, a gloomy, lonely divorcee with a dirty mind. The fact that this album cranks the sleaze knob up a few notches is evident at first in the cover art, which has a VICE Magazine-style amateur-porn aesthetic, or at least would if VICE hired David Lynch to direct their shoots. The seaminess is echoed in songs, like Spent Time With A Woman (about paying for sex, or at least intimacy), and Time Machine ("she's a time machine, I swear that it's true, cause each and every time I'm inside her, I'm back inside of you"). Is Jesse the Australian Serge Gainsbourg or the Benny Hill of sadcore?

The music? It's much like the previous Sir albums, only of course without Elizabeth's contributions (her lazy guitar and gorgeously sleepy vocals). Which sounds a bit one-sided, though Jesse has drafted in a host of Melbourne musicians (including shoegazer guitarist Seth Rees) to help out, and experimented a bit with different sounds. Men Who Lie sports a (somewhat understated) 4/4 drum machine loop and synth bass, making a tokenistic foray into electro territory, and The Doll That Cries Real Tears is a 1980s power ballad (reminscent, perhaps, of Malcolm McLaren's Madame Butterfly) with the production scaled way down into lo-fi territory (and the vocals down to little more than a whisper). The standout track, IMHO, is Bloodsport, an understated ballad Jesse has been playing in live gigs since 2004 or so, which he carries off with a vulnerable beauty, accompanied on slide guitar. This is the penultimate track, and is followed by a bizarrely naive piece of doggerel, sung tunelessly over a monotonous piano scale, and varying in tempo as the narrator gets more excited. It sounds as if he's attempting to imitate the style of Ivor Cutler, whilst retaining his fixation with marital infidelity; the overall effect is somewhat deranged.