- Joe McKee is a strong pedigree in Australian music, that’s despite barely seeming to be here. The last time I checked he’d just returned to Perth from London, but then I read he’d headed back. Now four out of every five social media sites say he’s in LA. I think what I’m trying to say is that if you don’t remember who this eternally displaced Australian Alien is, I understand.
He had a band called Snowman that was a pretty interesting and arty addition to the shoegaze scene in Australia, for a while, but it broke up around the beginning of the decade and anyway their sound isn’t much like what Joe does for himself. If you do remember Joe’s first solo record, Burning Boy, that’s at least one point of continuity you’ll have because despite the passing of six years -an ocean of time in alternative music- there’s a remarkable similarity between Joe’s sound, then and now.
Perhaps that sameness was a rock on which McKee could ground himself as everything about him, moving from Perth to LA, was in a state of flux. Much of the record was not only penned but recorded while on the move, some of it even captured in-transit, travelling by cargo ship of all things, five years back. It seems a little difficult to believe that there isn’t more variation, working its way in, across the years.
Maybe it’s just the viscous lashings of reverb which do it: taking all the focus and clarity of both Burning Boy and Joe’s second LP, An Australian Alien and just drowning them, like these records are slipping away from you, towards the bottom of the murky sea. Actually it’s more like Joe surges in and out of sight. His romantic gestures lunge -his voice, the guitar, the synth too- with as much syrupy emotion as Jeff Buckley, or, well, a very odd shadow of Buckley, or perhaps more like Scott Walker, with all those string sections and glittering piano keys flying around the melodramatic vocals, which are just starting to develop a Walker-ish wobble.
I found the roar of the reverb a bit much to bear on Burning Boy, but either I was being too harsh or there’s just more to An Australian Alien, once you get in there and clear away all the vaseline from the lens. A-la Scott Walker there’s a bit of an oddball psychedelic and glammy masterpiece primping and preening away in here, if you listen closely. Even then there’s still much that’s hidden, in the decidedly cryptic lyrics, though I’m told there’s a lot of Joe himself in here, traversing topics as weighty as the death of his best friend, the birth of his child and, of course, fleeing across the planet, to have that baby with a woman he barely knew, apparently. That all may be but he’ll really make you work to apprehend it. The level of intensity you’ll encounter, experiencing Joe McKee, is difficult to express: I feel like I have to lean into it to avoid being swept away. It’s strange, because I really do think that for Joe, this music is his rock in the midst of the maelstrom. Perhaps this is just what it’s always like when you encounter an alien.
- Chris Cobcroft.