Lucy Roleff & Lehmann B. Smith: Dark Green

- Full disclosure, Lucy Roleff & Lehmann B. Smith are two of my favourite musicians, certainly in Australia, probably further than that. Their subtle, quiet endeavours of depth, skill and beauty make them quintessential musicians’ musicians, the sort of artists you expect to consistently delight and never in their whole lives storm up any kind of music chart. For all those reasons and a few more besides, it makes sense to see them together on the masthead of a new record, even though their styles are a little disparate. That makes me all the more keen to hear what they’ve been doing together, hidden away in an artists’ retreat, up the Great Ocean Road, presented here, in Dark Green.

Smith is prolific, with a barrow-load of records reaching back more than a decade. He’s versatile and a regular collaborator, not least in the bands which he’s played, the most recent I think was Totally Mild? Perhaps it’s that sensitivity to the sensibility of others which is the reason why Dark Green more instantly reminds me of Roleff. As I’ve said before, she has something of the sound and poise of Joni Mitchell or Nico, gentle folk from the ‘60s, with a touching elegance and a sad sweetness. At the risk of repeating myself some more, her background as a painter of objects and still lives, seems to frame her songwriting, producing vignettes that suggest simple scenes and memories. Indeed, as I was listening to this new record it was hard to escape feeling like I’d come across a bundle of someone’s old photographs, a series of people together, caught in the moment, with emotions and connections between them that are at once evocative and a little mysterious.

Opener Offering is exactly like that: “See the tall boy standing there / Dark and gentle with his hands / He smiles and it’s not surprising everybody wants to sing along / Call the name of a favourite song / I know, this isn’t much of an offering.” Except it’s all you need: the tableau of a gathering and the key figures, barely acknowledging each other and yet suggesting so much. That wistful wonder Roleff makes so much of is still hard at work.

Smith leads the next one, Warning, and he’s reined in the uniquely unhinged rock’n’roll tendencies he’s lately been indulging, instead matching Roleff’s quiet finger-picking. However he doesn’t open up quite as much as she does. It sounds like a song of unrequited love strummed out in aching phrases like “now I’m wrapping my heart like a ribbon around your wrist.” The slightly more cryptic gestures are like memories which are only half shared, or personal mnemonics that uncork old passions and heartache. This effect is helped along by some truly beautiful duetted harmonies.

As matches my own recollection, Roleff is the drier of the pair, even when singing about regrets and sadness she’s more circumspect and collected. Lehmann, by contrast, seems like he’s really restraining his natural melodrama when he only quietly mopes out phrases like “try to get myself drunk, can’t get drunk enough / Though my cup, it runneth, wasn’t for long / By the time you get this note I will have … forgotten what I wanted to say…” or “all that I see is, all that is rotten now!” Sometimes, however, even Roleff’s measured tones deliver truly unsettling stuff, like “I woke you to the bells of a bushfire / The windows were blackened and the walls were red / I lost you where the flame took your footstep / The children were crackling and the walls were red.” My, if that’s a metaphor it’s a mighty dark one, especially when paired with the fleeting melancholy and parting chill of the song it comes from, Walls Were Red. Every now and then, it’s like I remember I’m going through a pile of somebody else’s old photos, that I’m trespassing on something quite private, even as I'm wishing I knew more.

If these really were images I’d say it was Roleff’s gift for framing which imparts their subtle beauty. As it is I know exactly what both she and Smith can do, infusing so much that’s not immediately obvious, in the songwriting, in the carefully layered orchestration, in the whole lot. I’m still not wholly clear what happened, in these moments, half hidden in the sunlit dappling and shadows of Dark Green, but as you put the collection down and move on, something tugs at your heart, begging you to come back again.

- Chris Cobcroft.