From the merry-go-round murmurings of The Maw to the slash-guitar shanty Woah
Oh, there's no doubting songwriter Marcus Teague's storytelling credentials.
He always seems to be going somewhere: out of the mountains
("crawling on my thumbs"), towards the dawn ("with our black hoods down and our
headphones on"), or coming back from a long strange night (where "no one would
wake up and be unsure how they felt so vindicated at this once off orchestration
of ourselves"). This whole record feels like a grand journey, the songs its way
stations. Teague's music is similarly mobile, pop rock that echoes fellow Australians
like You Am I and Something for Kate — but with a curiously transistorized,
longing sound, as if their angularities have been taken apart, recombined and
raggedly colored with violin,
xylophone, banjo, space. The likes of Modest Mouse, Built to Spill and Archers
of Loaf might also serve as fine and arty comparisons.
There's something gangly and graceful in this. Boy-into-man music maybe? Listening
to it I get the feeling someone has died: it's there in the big change sound,
the emerging intensity this driven music gives off like sparks. But that has
as
much
to do with Teague's awareness of how everything — everything — he and
his friends are experiencing is inevitably passing away. It's an awareness that
imbues the mundane or everyday with something noble even as it slips from their
grasp.
A band press release references the writer Jorge Luis Borges, and it isn't at all pretentious when you hear the songs and appreciate their imagistic vitality, all these torchlight fragments that add up to a picture without ever directly revealing the whole situation. Every time you think you know what is happening, the pace changes
musically too. Things gallop ahead, or stop, or another image blows your mind open: "Come up to the city when you can watch the neon banks of the city beat back the night time."
Yeah, come up and into this city of Teague's, beat back the sky. Melbourne, Australia has found a poet laureate for its dreams. With him Deloris aren't just good, they're great. It makes me feel my heart in my chest.
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