- The great sneer on the face of Australia, directed at dolewave and its po-faced, offkey, fashionably talentless stylings, has -perhaps, I hope?- just about slipped pop-culture’s rather short memory.
However reasonable or unjust you might think the torrent of disapproval drowning dolewave and its slightly more upbeat and go-get-’em cousin, jangle-pop, there are a few bands in that loose collection of misanthropes who, if you really listen to them, are absolutely immune to any of the criticisms levelled at their maligned genres. A couple of obvious examples are provided by Twerps and The Stevens. No discordant twinges can truly disguise the talented instrumentalism and fine songwriting that has underwritten the lowkey but solid careers of those outfits.
The reason I bring them up in particular is because both bands feature one Alex Macfarlane: as drummer in Twerps and one of the core songwriters and guitar leads in The Stevens. Alex is one of those musicians who can’t help jam out song after song. His bedroom back-catalogue is as long as your arm and you can find a number of Macfarlane mixtapes, EPs and other paraphernalia mixed in with the rest of the output of his own label -Hobbies Galore- on its Bandcamp page.
To hear Alex tell it, half the reason he formed The Stevens with Travis MacDonald was so that his bedroom output could actually be performed with a backing band. So, it’s like there’s a whole bunch of raw Stevens’ material out there. Raw it is, even with Mikey Young giving it a bit of spit and polish. Still, the indistinct AM warmth both plays to the stereotypical jangle-pop sound, but also to the deeper music history which Macfarlane taps into.
There’s a classic psychedelia, country-rock and Americana sound on latest EP, Planetarium Nights, that is a million miles away from today’s indie-rock and the bedroom recording context doesn’t detract from it, quite the opposite: this is how this music was meant to sound.
If that sounds a bit too Crosby, Stills And Nash, you’ll quite a few snatches of other things: Pavement and strangely upbeat echoes of Elliott Smith and even stranger synth snatches, warping momentarily into an alternate, kraut-rock universe.
I hope Alex won’t be upset when I let on that I recently heard him refer to his record label as a “thoroughly unprofessional operation”. As such there’s bugger-all promo going on there and you’d be quite forgiven for overlooking Planetarium Nights along with so much else that he’s put out. That only makes the really rather excellent guitar-work and songwriting on this little EP the more pleasantly surprising and welcome.
- Chris Cobcroft.