These Guy: A Long Winded Story | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- There’s no denying that isolation can take a mental toll on a person. Lately, we’ve had ample time to really live that nervy experience. If you’re only a few steps away from climbing the walls, it might help to take a page out of the book of These Guy. Frontman Joe Saxby relates that -in his formative years- he had the opportunity to prepare for present circumstances: “As a teenager I would go out for walks in the coastal QLD town where I lived. The sky would stretch out for ages and I felt like I was the last person on earth.” The description he chooses for this regimen is “bleak but comfortable”, a feeling that the band have tried to capture on their latest record. It’s a full-length they call A Long Winded Story. Well, as we’ve established, we have the time.

You don’t even need to wait, These Guy waste none of our ample time, heading straight for the mood. “Everyone, in the universe has gone to somewhere else” croons Joe in his wobbly tenor, over the sauntering, mid-tempo beat of Everyone In The Universe constructed from their trademark, bent electro-pop. If it’s the end of the world, it’s a desolation that’s met with a shrug and a wry smile.

“I don’t understand the source of the panic” Joe continues on Idle Hands, musing with equanimity about just what we’re going to get up to, now that we’ve dangerously little to do. “I’m not scared, I crawl under the blanket / and I’m nowhere, no longer on this planet / I’m up in the air.” If it’s sarcasm it’s hard to tell. Even when he concedes “was it worth the suffering? / Well maybe not, I guess”, it’s less an admission of failure than it is an easygoing surrender to the fact that it was probably always going to be something like this.

The record reads a bit like a philosophical treatise, prescribing calm in the face of life’s absurdity. That madness can come from any angle, without or within: the strange jumble of experiences bumbling around inside also gets handled with the same, relaxed feng-shui; as you’ll hear on What Happens Now. Saxby warbles: “It’s good to revisit who you used to be / What happens now? Is it all the way back to square one? / Figuring out who it is you’re supposed to become / It’s good to realise that some things never change / Although it’s bound to leave you feeling strange.”

In that way, the acceptance of life’s injustices is less a nihilism and more a nirvana, an understanding that it all meshes together and the system works, you’ll get what you need. “Gotta learn to be patient, whatever it brings / On to better things” as Saxby puts it on the song of that name.

The ability to take in whatever life drags on to the doormat may be how this trio -comprising guitarist Josh Coxon (aka Simi Lacroix), drummer Eddie L’Estrange and synth-singer Saxby- approach music. There’s a bowerbird eclecticism, collecting whatever catches their fancy from wherever it’s found -synth-pop here, psychedelia there, rolling electro-funk or angular postpunk rhythms mutated through art-rock change-ups, all daubed with yacht-rock smooth- and each new element is thrown on to the pleasantly ramshackle, ever-growing DIY pile of These Guy’s sound.

Despite calling it A Long Winded Story, These Guy present a recipe for living that’s pretty appealing; especially right now. Where others might perceive a lack, they find a lot. For the kind of guy who appears to be okay with long, lonesome walks, I happen to know Joe Saxby has done his fair share of world-tripping, rock’n’rolling, shoulder-to-shoulder in packed venues. Still, I like to think that when he’s back in Brisbane he still lounges on the CityCat, a few stops longer than he should, or walks in the twilight through Toowong Cemetery. If that sounds dull to you, I’m sorry, but did you have some place better to be?

- Chris Cobcroft.