Cured Pink: Current Climate | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- A fatal terminality accompanies the fourth and, apparently, final album from the Brisbane-bred Cured Pink. The title of the album, Current Climate, reflects the bleak outlook for the world it is entering into, one that no one could claim Cured Pink didn’t try to prepare for, but which may be too late in it’s arrival for it to embrace. Once the nascently cathartic solo-project of then Brisbane-based Andrew McLellan, who now mostly records under the name Enderie, Cured Pink propagated into a live four-piece band culminating in the release of their last album, As A Four Piece Band, in 2015.

Current Climate fills in the margins of the band’s previous album, committing to record disparate recording sessions from a period of over eight-years; containing sonic remnants from the band’s formative moments and well into their recent period of inactivity. Taking cues from primitivist industrial-rock groups like Einstürzende Neubauten and a more general dub reggae via post-punk, studio-as-instrument bombast, the four-piece Cured Pink is centred around a drum-and-bass rhythm section, augmented by the clang of found objects, reverb soaked trumpet, and McClellan’s incongruous vocals and spectral guitar playing. As self-producer, McClellan applies liberal use of overdubbing, looping and studio effects reflecting dub and electronic production techniques along with a touch of cut-up dadaist sound artistry, filling in the required gaps in often distant recording sessions.

Sometimes this space between recordings is evident, particularly where the vocal overdubs are somewhat incongruous from the rest of the band, not connected by acoustics or sometimes seemingly intent. It feels most noticeable on the more up-tempo and dense tracks like Drone Pleasure, but it isn’t true across the board and McClellan's aphasic vocals sound well-placed elsewhere, even on similarly complex and up-beat tracks like The Surveyor. Given the uniquely ritualistic, sometimes isolated, and drawn out recording process, the overall sound and intent is surprisingly well-handled in its atmospheric breakdown; the intentionally inept patter and drones of Pop Up Shop reminding us that congruity was never the objective anyway.

The addition of more vocal, synth and other instrumental overdubs this time around brings an added playfulness to the mix, and the songs overall being a more broad and expansive representation of the totality of Cured Pink’s musical output. The reliance on overdubs may seem like a casualty to the passing of time and the alienation of the band that produced the music, but it offers moments of more unusual instrumental and vocal intervention that might not have emerged before if not for the required warping of time to make it work. A good example is the vocoder-driven vocal on Sunshine, which, rather than pulling away from the band brings them off into a transcendent moment of studio-driven, high-pass filters and loops.

Current Climate is bittersweet, a culmination of years of work condensed into a moment that it can’t quite feel at home in. It’s a great document of the band as it was, and also of the breadth of ideas it enabled McClellan to explore as producer and leader. But by not shaking off the live band feel entirely to focus wholly on the wide realm of studio exploits and overdubs the two parts feel somewhat at odds, forming something of a recognisable hybrid, across the album. It’s an interesting and often compelling result, one that could get better with time, but it’s unusual as a document of the group as it was.

- Jaden Gallagher.
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