Springtime: The Night Raver | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Seething supergroup Springtime unleash a new EP, Night Raver as a harbinger for their national tour. Harbinger, such an apt descriptor for this band, giving vent to the darkest ichor spurting from the id of frontman Gareth Liddiard, an atavistic roar, regaling us with the evils of this world, dragging it down to destruction. Not that we need any more portents of the end-times right now, but amidst the disease, disaster and global doom, the judgemental horror this trio produces thoroughly qualifies them to ride amongst the other horsemen of the apocalypse.

Tour EPs are usually pretty throwaway affairs and Night Raver’s three cuts might seem, initially, like fairly slim pickings; a famine? Look closer, however, you’ll see these little grubs are fat with corruption and squirming with unwholesome purpose.

While we’re busy drumming up dusty technical designators for the latest COVID-19 Omicron subvariant, Liddiard flips through his own nightmare codex, offering some more colourful descriptors in incandescent opener The Names Of The Plague. The different sensibilities of the trio (with the welcomed addition of Drones bassist Dan Luscombe) come together just as fruitfully and easily here as on their debut, perhaps more so. Chris Abrahams’ expansive and hypnotic, jazzily repetitive keys, Jim White’s post-rock range, travelling from near silence on the skins to towering fits of rage and Liddiard’s own unhinged blue-rock shredding, all of these clenching, shuddering and screaming in the demonic jam-band tendencies of everyone concerned. Every now and then Liddiard will start shrieking a litany: “The brave killer, the grave filler, the buck passer, the eye glasser”. Every couplet is a knowing wink and sour condemnation of some little human foible that might finally be the straw that breaks the back of civilisation. Like rhyming slang, there’s a lateral slide in meaning in every quip, into something even more horrible. Suddenly “The night raver!” of the EP’s title is cast in a new and ghastly light.

There seems to be a creative role reversal here: this relentless shopping-list of accusations, though it more closely resembles Liddiard’s own name-calling on 2021 single Will To Power  was penned by Liddiard’s uncle, the poet Ian Duhig, the man who previously supplied the crushing narrative lyrics that powered Springtime’s devastating follow-ups Jeanie In A Bottle Up and The Viaduct Love Suicide. Here, however, the wrist-opening story-telling comes courtesy of Liddiard in a reprise of The Radicalisation Of D, which first saw action on his 2010 solo record, Strange Tourist.

The world seems -momentarily- to have forgotten its obsession with terrorists and the middle-east, but that hardly detracts from the power of this semi-fictionalised recreation of the life of homegrown jihadist David Hicks, which features such incandescent lyrical gems as “If East Timor can't be middle class / It can't really be there” and “You are driving the Jeep Cherokee / Burning Arabs For Fuel / But you are driving the new Cherokee / And that’s good enough you”. The slowly undulating accompaniment doesn’t add anything, creatively, to the original, although White and Abrahams play it like it was purposely written for them. Somehow, at nearly twenty minutes in length, it manages to be even longer than the original and, if you were to be ungracious you might say the endless vamp of the single ‘verse’ is unbalanced; but what a verse it is.

At only eight minutes -Penumbra, previously only heard at Springtime’s handful of gigs- is, comparatively, blink-and-you-miss-it. At its core this is a sedate ballad but it vomits minutes of noise from its centre section, because Springtime. I must admit that I can’t make out enough of Gareth’s snarling, slurring and drooling of the lyrics to fully understand what the song’s about. Oh well, I guess I can look forward to some future meeting of dark conspirators on genius.com, deciphering the diatribe.

I’d feel guilty about giving so much copy to what is essentially a monolithic single, but I know that Springtime feeds off our guilt, spraying it back at us, who proceed to sweat it out again: a crescendoing feedback loop that heralds the end of humanity. Since the 2016 hiatus of The Drones, the resultant vacuum seems to have drawn ever more cock-eyed and savage material out of Liddiard and whatever cohort he can convince to aid and abet his soapbox ravings. Of all of these outpourings Springtime may be the most incisive and compelling. The world is slowly sliding off a cliff and what can I do? I'll continue to draw as much of a crowd as possible to hear these prophets of our times rant about it till they're hoarse.

- Chris Cobcroft.