- If asked to name the biggest bands to come out of Brisbane in recent years, An Horse would probably not be the first to come to mind. Yet the duo who left Queensland for the US a decade ago have an impressive list of indie artists they have toured with, and are now back with their first album in eight years, Modern Air.
It’s a long time since they called Brisbane home, and reading between the lines of the song Get Out Somehow it doesn’t seem like they miss it too much. Still, I don’t know that many of the band’s US fans will pick up on the reference in the song title Fortitude Valet.
The first of those big indie names the band connected with was Tegan And Sara, and that duo remain a pretty good musical reference point; though An Horse have stuck to punchy guitar pop rather than going the way of sugary keyboards that Tegan and Sara have.
Still, pop music is definitely what this is. Modern Air opens with This Is A Song, an infectious fuzzy bubblegum cheerleader chant for outsiders - “This is a song for all the times you didn’t belong” goes the chorus.
There is something very teenage about the sentiment, not just in its naive optimism, but also maybe in its lack of self-awareness that there are plenty of things out there worse than “the times they got you wrong”.
Still, it’s hard to dislike the enthusiastic peppiness of Modern Air. Next track Live Well has a riff reminiscent of The Stooges I Wanna Be Your Dog, and is probably the angriest An Horse get complete with yelled swears. Yet the chorus is “Live well my friends, I forget to tell you how much I love and need you”.
Modern Air is a pretty good snapshot of the life of young queers in the twenty-first century. It’s proud, but anxious. Politics sits on the album next to positive thinking and a tribute to television art teacher and internet meme Bob Ross. The much-travelled queer pilgrimage out of small towns is depicted in Get Out Somehow, but there is little Mardi Gras style camp and glamour. Instead there are lyrics like “you pushed me up against the bathroom stall, I told you that’s not how I roll.”
The charm of Modern Air is that simple vulnerability of everyday life and feelings set to bouncy pop melodies. That probably also describes the limitations of its appeal, but this is a record that feels very 2019 and I have a feeling it will be an album many form a close attachment to.
- Andy Paine.