- Wives is something of a Canberra underground powerhouse, pooling the efforts of local artist Anja Loughhead and Jordan Rodger of Melt, who both previously performed together as Sex Noises, and Gus McGrath of solo synth-pop band California Girls. After a brief hiatus, they return with their second colourful full length LP Doomsday. On Doomsday Wives cultivate a sound that sits comfortably somewhere between Gang of Four’s first two legendary post-punk albums and their closely following duo of new wave, drum machine riddled sell-outs.
The album starts a bit on the wrong foot with Break A Sweat. Over some five minutes it’s drawn out and repetitive structure doesn’t deliver a great deal of intrigue or excitement. The repetitive drum machine and bass pulse, with restrained guitar harmonics and jarring, slightly off-key vocals just don’t give the best impression of what Wives are good at. It feels initially claustrophobic and confused, but the track manages to expand down the line the notable change to a more relaxed bass line and the liberal addition of some nice dissonant guitar riffing. Many of the songs have the same kind of plodding pace, but White Dogs ups the atmosphere with dissonant guitars taking the lead with a more spacious beat and confidently clear spoken vocals.
The lyrics on Doomsday often revolve around one or two phrases, repeated with different inflections or slight modifications. It’s an approach that isn’t so unusual, but here it seems quite drastic. With few changes and the oddly stiff instrumentals on tracks like Eclipse, the vocals don’t reach quite adequate intensity to keep up or compliment the instrumentation. The production is slightly flat at times making the arrangements feel more minimal than they are, dragging on a little too long without clear drive or interesting intervention. The title track Doomsday is perhaps the best utilisation of time on the album, and its seven minutes pass pleasingly over a doomy bass line with exploratory synths and a catastrophic breakdown. Other highlights include the super dissonant Mob, the synth-poppy dance-punk Set Sail and the post-punky Whipping Boy.
Conceptually, Doomsday tends towards the cliché and ambiguously dogmatic. It adds to the already teeming and comfortably time-worn space in Australian punk music where artists attempt to tackle mainstream cultural and political issues, but it doesn’t provide a new or interesting approach to the discourse. There isn’t a clear conceptual frame to enrich it, just a vague, bitter tone that doesn’t add much of anything to the album but does make it rather exhausting. There’s something to be said for the style of repetitive and anthemic vocals, but lyrically they deliver less of a relevant and clear political charge than most of the songs on the forty-year old debut Midnight Oil self-titled record. Doomsday just doesn’t address any one of its key conceptual ideas – politics, culture, or Australiana particularly well.
That’s not to say that Doomsday is unenjoyable, there are some great songs across the album, and the ambition of the work itself is doubtlessly impressive. But there is the sense in listening to it that it could be much more conceptually realised as well as somewhat sonically improved, given the vastness of what it attempts to address and the level of established talent involved.
- Jaden Gallagher.