Alex Macfarlane: Waving | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Alex McFarlane is back in typically self-deprecating form: “Hey folks. New cassette release! Sorry, it’s by me!” Even for a man as prolifically all-over-the-place in his artistry, there’s little here that’s self-indulgent, however. A member of Twerps, Stevens and very many other bands, as well as Hobbies Galore label boss and solo artist, he adds another low-key but fascinatingly patchwork creation to his ever growing collection.

Macfarlane says he was dragooned by his ‘failed folk musician’ dad into playing old Neil Young and Troggs covers in a duo at his school assemblies, which, first, what kind of school was that? Also, ouch, sorry dad! But it should go some way to salving his father’s hurt feelings to realise that the sounds of the ‘60s pervade pretty much everything Alex does. Well, nearly everything, maybe not the death metal of Faceless Burial; like I said, this guy really gets about.

I had an epiphany when listening to some of this stuff: the jangle-pop sound championed by bands like Twerps actually has a legacy that reaches much further back than the Dunedin sound of outfits like The Chills to which they’re so often connected, right into the original crop of bands, like The Byrds, for whom the term jangle-pop was coined in the first place. You can hear this historical arc winding its way through Macfarlane’s latest release, Waving, and, in fact, growing new connections, to other epochs of sound. It doesn’t really come as a surprise that Macfarlane, with all he knows, would music make such unusual fusions, but it’s always an ear-opener to hear where his latest jaunt takes him.

To begin with, it’s a quintessentially 2020 record: Macfarlane, recently seen sporting a lush, lockdown beard, turned to banks of synthesisers and electronics to stand in for all his absent, musical mates. So much is obvious from the opening track, One Hundred And Two Difficult Thoughts, bonding tuneful ‘60’s psych-pop to synthetic beats and harmonies, pushing the sound ahead a decade or two into luscious prog. The theme is immediately teased out on When Backcasting which, today would be called synthwave, but here you’re reminded that krautrockers like Tangerine Dream were already busy pumping out such hypnotic, sci-fi jams, forty years ago. Alternately sandwiching genres together and teasing them apart is a wonderful, kaleidoscopic way of reminding you of the history, how one period links into another and how those sounds harmoniously echo each other.

I know that Macfarlane has a bunch of country under his belt himself (because of course he does), but Club Hagibis is much more immediately reminiscent of the work of Brisbane experimentalist Andrew Tuttle, pairing a fragmented soundscape with an ambling banjo melody. It’s an outlier on the record, but I guess everything here is, in its own way.

I have a little trouble making out the lyrics Macfarlane delivers in his reedy voice through the rich, psych haze of Turntail Way, which I suppose is kind of appropriate. Anyway, it does nothing to detract from the feeling of contentment and wry wisdom, a kind of pleasant nirvana leaking out of the vibe - an uncommonly centred gesture for the pandemic year. It’s one that’s counterbalanced by the cool awe of the returning krautrock and its efficiently machine-like lines. The yin and yang of the fusty old psych-folk and the synth futurism is a key success here: a cyborg music, suturing the organic and the technological in weird but ultimately pleasant meetings.

The sound keeps seesawing back and forth between its two extremes, but is bridged or perhaps backgrounded by ambient soundscapes, like on The Principality Of Wy, bringing even more of a sense of space to this already wide-ranging record. Waving capitalises on this in its big finish, dispensing with some of the sweetness in a tense psych-rock jam, Bleating, Laughing, which serves as an energised jumping off point into the final epic, Fighting Windmills: a mind-bending soundscape, revolving like a solar system, replete with galactic sitar breezes from Mikey Young and interstellar saxophone whale-song by Raven Mahon.

Waving makes journeys between divergent sounds that are mystical and wild just like the feelings they evoke in the listener. To think that such an adventure could have taken place in a year where we couldn’t travel at all. Like his back catalogue attests, even if the outer world is inaccessible, Alex Macfarlane can always dive into the rich, cosmic depths hidden in his own mind.

- Chris Cobcroft. 
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