- If you follow the folky circuit you may be quite familiar with Tin Star, who’ve been working it hard over the last eighteen months. I have to admit that I used to follow it a lot more closely than I do now which is why Tin Star’s very polished debut full-length blindsided me completely. It’s so polished it’s a little bit shocking: as if I were gabbing with someone about music at the pub and they had to tell me, a little patronisingly, that there’s this classic Australiana band, beloved by all, only I have no idea who they are.
The three members of Tin Star have certainly put in enough hard yards to be considered classic. With storied careers in Australia and the US and membership in bands like Spot The Dog, Mythica and The Poachers, which ought to jog a few memories. They’re steeped in the history of the music they love: the lists of influences in their bio are longer than the bio itself: from the sounds of Greenwich Village folk and Dylan, down to a reverent worship of Gillian Welch.
Funny thing though, Tin Star talk about themselves as a country-folk band, which I only half get. All of that mandolin and fiddle, this was always going to be folky. There are country sounds too, but they’re often -for my ears at least- harder to hear. It does my head in a bit, especially because it can be a bit of an insult to say what I’m about to say. I get much stronger connections to this country’s folk-rock-pop tradition. I can’t be the only one who listens to Tin Star’s debut, A Better Way To Do Things and hears reverberant echoes of Crowded House, Things Of Stone And Wood or even Hunters And Collectors.
Just to be clear, I don’t mean it as an insult and the trio of Cathy Bell, Penny Boys and Dan Grant are exceptionally good at this kind of thing. Listening to Boys’ voice ring out atop the anthemic modulation of opener A Letter From Your Mother or Grant’s peeling out high As like he was Neil Finn on Bulletproof; well! This is classic songwriting and Tin Star have the chops to make it really catch fire.
Thematically the record draws a lot on life’s little challenges: personal confrontations to be faced down with a helping hand from the power of uplifting music; it’s there in the title: A Better Way To Do Things. If the record has a problem it’s that it’s a little too focused on just how pleasurable it is to revel in that bittersweetness. Emotionally it can be a bit monochromatic, like attending a group self-esteem building session. It makes you glad for the few covers mixed in, like the tentative and haunting folk tale of The Slant or the rambling ‘60’s sounds of Birds Fly South. That said, Tin Star really are so very good at what they do.
Like I said, folkies probably already know Tin Star. Their album launch show has been sold out for a while, so, yep. If I’m preaching to the (folk) choir, I wonder if the rest of Australia has space in their heart for a band that can remind them what was so good about the folk-rock-pop of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Given the esteem which Paul Kelly is held in right now I think that might be the case. I certainly didn’t know I did and I’m quite pleased Tin Star happened along to prove me really wrong.
- Chris Cobcroft.