Claire Birchall: Running In Slow Motion

- Apparently, if you live in Melbourne, you’ll know Claire Birchall a lot better than I do, thanks to her band, Claire Birchall & The Phantom Hitchhikers. Well, while you may know their gnarly blend of heartland rock with a little Magic Dirt rubbed into it, that won’t prepare you for Claire’s latest solo record, Running In Slow Motion.

Actually, her extensive back-catalogue is a wild ride through all sorts of sounds: folk, country, deathrock and more - it’s really quite impressive. Its latest stop makes more sense in that context; I mean, what’s left to do? Electro, as it happens. Cheap synths and snapping drum machines are the accompaniment to Claire’s husky voice which, appropriately, sounds more beaten-up than ever before.

In the PR gloss the new direction is compared to Alan Vega, natch, with a little bit of The Beach Boys rolled in and, well, you may have to listen quite closely to hear the latter. What I haven’t heard mentioned, like the musical elephant in the room, is how closely Running In Slow Motion stalks the songbook of Sarah Mary Chadwick. At the beginning of the record, on its opening and title track, the resemblance is almost uncanny. It’s possibly a little unfair to call it out, I mean, if every band that sounded like the ‘Stones had to be struck off the register, about half of all rock music would be done. Still, when you inhabit the kind of highly iconoclastic micro-genre that Chadwick does, it’s hard to ignore when someone else tries to shove in there.

It’s an approach that is very difficult to emulate, too. Chadwick’s melding of bargain-basement musicianship with Bukowski-like depravity, self-debasement and soul-destroying honesty is close to being unique. So, unsurprisingly, Birchall approaches it just a little differently. The lyrics hint at the same topics, but are less wrenchingly confessional and the songcraft, as if to compensate, is a cut above.

You won’t really get it from that opener, which is at the level of a Casio preset, musically. Doesn’t stop it being a pretty great song, though: full of a cold longing and broken melancholy; “I don’t know where you are / I don’t know where you are.” Recent single, Dead Air, immediately sets itself apart from what preceded -and from the most overt Chadwickisms- by adding a level of electro punch, a seductive buzz and a wail of lead guitar that squeezes what’s sure to be a short-term pleasure from the brow-furrowing life choices on offer; “Not strong enough / Not strong enough.” Hang It Up leans more strongly back into the SMC stylings and, y’know it’s pretty good, but it’s hard to mimic those emotive qualities without seeming a little generic by comparison; “You don’t know what’s up / Because everything’s down, down, down” sounds a bit like an extremely unlikely cover of a Coles commercial, yeah?

The middle of the record is pretty great, as Birchall goes to work on more florid arrangements. The slow clip and buzzing synth of The City And The Sea is rich, like a less lofi version of Suicide and an almost Julee Cruise level of bad romance. Another good choice for a single. The sub-two-minute whisper of Small Town Kid sounds like more Suicide, or perhaps like Transivision Vamp with the sound turned down to a spine-tingling whisper, no wait I’ve got it: it’s Peaches all the way and it’s great; I wish this one had gone on for longer! Song For The Man In The Moon is lush and, it’s funny, if Birchall weren’t restricting herself to a gravelly whisper so strictly, there’d be echoes of the likes of Belinda Carlisle. The restraint is quite deliberate though, allowing a strain of vulnerability to run through this curiously naive, distressing lovesong. The tracking is on the money, building through the record to the electro-rock anthem of, appropriately, Electricity. “I’m gonna plug into the power grid and turn it up, turn it up!” Again, it’s the stage-whisper delivery which is the only thing which makes this subtle, but it wouldn’t be bad, either way.

Birchall uses a rather excellent Randy Newman song as an opportunity to turn the sound back down again. Her cover of the menacing but vulnerable Pretty Boy is unsettlingly good. It necessarily lacks the layered homoeroticism of the original but adds a whole new quality when delivered by a woman. Interestingly, I don’t think that Running In Slow Motion ever comes closer to the sound of Sarah Mary Chadwick, than this brutal, intimate love song from the wrong side of the tracks.

The piano-bar starts to wind down with the easy-going waltz of Lullaby, throwing a little grit into the eye of its sentimental harmony. The coda lets the instrumentation off the hook and I get that this is supposed to be a quiet record, but wow, the powerful harmonies make you wish Birchall had played to her louder strengths a little more often. It’s another drunken three-four stumble to finish with, Rain is a kind of a Tom Waits ode to better times and possibly dying from exposure; well, what did you expect, a happy ending?

Running In Slow Motion makes me wish, for a second, that Sarah Mary Chadwick didn’t exist, because, standing on its own quivering pins, it’s a deceptively strong record; there’s a reason It has released so much of it as singles. I’m sure, if Birchall reads this, she’ll be quite frustrated at how much I’ve focussed on someone else’s work. To me, it’s like two homeless drunks fighting over who gets to sleep on the bus-shelter bench, there should be enough space for both. I commend you then, spend the time looking into this dimly lit and dingey world: there’s the glitter of more than one diamond, lying in the rough.

- Chris Cobcroft.
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=585130102/size=large/bgcol=ff…; seamless><a href="http://clairebirchall.bandcamp.com/album/running-in-slow-motion">Running In Slow Motion by Claire Birchall</a></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZG760-To8Rg" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>