Pop Filter: Donkey Gully Road | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Just about midway through Donkey Gully Road comes In A Dream. With a molasses-rich delivery akin to RVG’s Rommy Vager, Curtis Wakeling sings that “[he] had a dream again/together, forever on tour again. No tidal wave, no pool of sweat/just all of us again.”

Recorded between Melbourne lockdowns, this LP is the second offering from Pop Filter, a band of friends who originally played together in The Ocean Party, and who continue to be united by their love of music. In A Dream speaks to Wakeling’s desire for the return of tour life just as much as it does to its listeners’ collective longing for the restoration of life’s normal rhythms and quiet golden moments, after this particularly calamitous year.

Released just over three months after their debut LP, Banksia, there’s a sense of abundance within this collaborative collective. In the streaming-era age of bloated albums and bonus releases nobody asked for, the adage ‘less is more’ should probably be paid more attention. But in this case, I’m chuffed that the group is spilling over with songs - there are no flops here, and not a whiff of navel-gazing. Instead of gearing up to the release with traditional singles and marketing, Pop Filter sent the entire album to community radio stations in November with the directive to play whatever they fancy.

From the start, it feels like you’re there with the band, jamming inside a historic former pub in regional Victoria. We open on Hindsight, guitars and then drums building firm before Lachlan Denton’s vocal comes in at the one-and-a-half minute mark, reflecting on the death of his brother, Zack, who he used to play alongside. “I wouldn’t change a thing/If I knew what time would bring,” he sings, buoyed by his band.

Waiting To Be Now skews country, with its twangy meditations on romance and anxiety of modern life, while Tree Change offers a reflection on band member Nick Kearton’s relocation to Castlemaine from Melbourne. Light piano melodies and strings settle like morning dew over the bed of brushed drums and folky acoustic guitar.

Some of the band’s members have now hit double digits of musical projects together. It’s evident they have no problem sharing the spotlight, evenly splitting vocal duties throughout. The record is stronger for it - the push and pull between individual contributions is distinct, but the songs bleed seamlessly into eachother, making them a real pleasure to fall into.

Donkey Gully Road closes as unassumingly as it began, on Fitzmaurice Kincaid, with a kinda novel, kinda poignant sketch set at a Wagga street intersection, sung by Mark Rogers: “A pedal case, the NRMA, a window, a frame, a weird thing to say on opening night backstage / A fear, a wish, a joke, a sack race, a baseless claim / I got drunk on Fitzmaurice Kincaid / everything cool gets taken away.” He stops short of throwing in the kitchen sink, but the lyrics work well to finish up this album, where lines rejecting colonial Australia sit beside those about love and loss and dishwashing liquid. There mightn’t be a hidden meaning at the heart of Donkey Gully Road, but the release is anything but throwaway. Fingers crossed for another one by Christmas?

- Aleisha McLaren.