A Country Practice: I Will Leave This Town While There's Still Light

- The sentimental glow of A Country Practice’s debut album is more than an ironic referencing of much-loved, low-quality Oz TV drama. It embraces memories of sun-beaten little regional towns and evokes, in a fulsome way, the biggest country burg of all, Brisbane/Meanjin. There’s a lot to take in, from the echoes of aspirational glass towers, to the old country frontices amongst which they're nestled, still lurking along Queen Street. You can hear it all in the synthetic skeletons, digital noise and the country-folk ramblings of I Will Leave This Town While There’s Still Light.

There was a warm dose of nostalgia in the recent Spirit Bunny record, Uncanny Valley and Joel Saunders, who straddles both bands, has dragged it over into A Country Practice’s full-length debut, much like he’s imported SB’s sonic building blocks, too. The circuit-bent casios chirruping odd synth melodies and stranger burblings of noise are here, ‘digitally deconstructing’ more familiar popular music. However the kaleidoscope has been given a shake, the angle of refraction altered, just slightly, the skip-hop, indie-pop sounds take on a folk lilt and a country twang.

The sounds of A Country Practice very much belong to Joel, Kelly and Andrew -they built a bunch of the instruments they play on, after all- but there’s a surprisingly strong connection on this record to freak folk, that very particular fusion sound from the first decade of the twenty-first century. The references are many: in the free-spirited combination of sounds and styles, the surreal results ranging from “pastoral ambience to skip-hop fused folk and drone-country” and perhaps most of all, the quavering vibrato that I think comes from both Andrew’s grainy baritone and Joel’s reedy tenor which is deeply reminiscent of Devendra Banhart and Will Oldham.

In line with the country-folk, the heartstrings that A Country Practice are playing on are just that little bit different, too. Themes of place that can’t help but feel appropriate over strummed, nylon strings, take center stage. Inner-city herb gardens, rural childhood homes and famous suburbs are the stock in trade here. It isn’t blind reverence, however. Again, it’s something that suffuses all the off-the-wall musical choices, recollections of once-in-five-year floods and odes to Indooroopilly: a wry, subversive sense of humour that may well be the most quintessentially Queensland thing about all this; it’s the gentle mocking which lets you know these are the things we hold most dear.

Australia’s a big place, there's a lot of ground to cover. I guess it's the more surprising how much loving detail there is in all the sun-beaten territory traversed here, between the little basil plants of Gardening Concerns and the cattle drives of The Longest Drought. It’s remembered in long stints on the Ipswich Line, with time for existential musings on life and music and only nearly washed away by cataclysmic weather events. For all its wide vistas, its patchwork sophistication and self-deprecating, surreal humour, I Will Leave This Town While There’s Still Light is one of the most honest and heartfelt local records I’ve heard.

- Chris Cobcroft.