- It’s been a rocky eighteen months for the enfant-terrible of Australian, avant-garde pop-rock. If a duet with Jimmy Barnes was ‘divisive’, flashing his tackle at the ARIAs was even less well received: Callinan walked away with a year’s good behaviour bond, only narrowly avoiding a conviction. The lowest point had to be getting flicked from the Laneway Festival lineup teamed with a fiery broadside from -among others- Miss Blanks who was quoted as saying “His reckless and insensitive actions reinforce entitled male behaviours which normalise sexual assault.” While his publicity team would much prefer you focus on “nominations for the Australian Music Prize, support slots for everyone from Crowded House to Tame Impala, a role acting in Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake and an ARIA Award Nomination” I honestly don’t know what to think about Kirin at this point. He doesn’t seem to be a sex criminal a-la Rolf Harris. Is he “not guilty” in the Geoffrey Rush sense? Has he done stuff that I don’t know about? He’s really got a whole bunch of people offside. Am I apologising for an abuser, just because I like his music?
Where is he in all this? Has he just gone to ground? Quoting Miss Blanks again: “There hasn’t been any accountability process, there hasn’t been any apology, there hasn’t been any steps towards learning and unlearning, and there’s been no willingness to right wrongs.” Kirin J. Callinan often fails to make sense to me. I love his demented approach to pop’s hoary tropes, but how that equals a major label signing I do not know. Someone at EMI clearly still likes him, because they’ve held onto his contract, where another artist might have been dropped like a hot’n’rotten potato.
Again, where is he in all this, after a lot of silence? Well he’s back, with an album’s worth of … other people’s music. Is that like a soft impact return? Getting the gaze of the press and the people back on him, but diffusing it just a little. Is he using other people’s words to try and justify what he feels? Or, as per the title, is this just the way to return to the fold, the center? All of those things are easy to imagine, but does any of it really work and should it? Well I wonder.
The choices of song are very left-field and, even if they weren’t, Callinan's treatments are as off-the-wall as you’d expect. His take on Life Is Life by Laibach is halfway between the cheesy, martial industrial of the original and, thanks to Kirin’s syrupy voice, an even cheesier vocal anthem. There’s a bit of a blueprint for the record here. Bursts of strangeness cut with soulful, even tearful, intimate pleas. Having said that, some of the choices don’t seem penitent at all. Momus’ The Homosexual is an odd song. It’s got a kind of reverse-LGBTQI thing going on: a straight man trying to pass as queer and having lots of illicit sex with women in the closet. Not sure what kind of message that sends.
Perhaps, behind the soulful anthems and the searching for loving connections, defiance is the key feeling here. The most well-known number here is Public Image Ltd.’s Rise. Johnny Lydon great big non-apology for being himself “I could be wrong, I could be right” is a ‘neat’ fit for Callinan and he even manages to suture in a snatch from the TV news, discussing his own woes.
Return To Center, for all its anthemic, roaring qualities, is produced to sound intimate and raw. This is Kirin, after the show and jamming at the bar, with the band. So, who is that person? Probably exactly the same one as before: provocative, soulful, bizarre, cheesy, unexpected. Wrong? I still don’t know. It should be concerning that he’s found so much music from other people that so succinctly matches his own positions. Perhaps there’s something wrong with music. Even after several years of soul-searching the fiery controversy still burns: for better or worse, that's Kirin J. Callinan and that's entertainment.
- Chris Cobcroft.