- Melbourne quartet Mares have been playing around the edges of the city’s music scene for roughly four years with a fluid line-up, and have emerged triumphant with their debut Wherewithal. Somewhere betwixt the searing interplay of the guitars and the solid, grinding rhythms, the sounds and imagery conjured by Melbourne’s concrete mazes blend and merge with that of rural country; vast swathes of scrub and grassland, lonely stretches of coastline, the cold ocean at night collapsing onto the shore in repeat, and the seemingly endless roads that criss-cross this iconic landscape, shimmering with heat.
For the most part, the songs on display show a focused exploration of atmosphere and emotion. Guided by the softly spoken prose that veers wildly between the actual and the abstract, the instrumentation mirrors that same exploratory tone: crashing, receding, and crashing again, like waves. This approach is championed on songs like Aeroplane Mode, Side Stepping and New Slow, the result being an intricacy and depth of emotion on display that many bands try to capture, and yet where many have failed Mares have succeeded, perhaps due to the longer gestation period they’ve given themselves and to these songs.
Songs like Ill At Ease and You Can Miss may have a more “conventional” rock structure, but the members still push and prod at the boundaries in which they’ve been confined with calculated execution. These songs also expose a precious few of the inspirations that have led Mares to their musical water, the works of Rowland S. Howard, PJ Harvey, postpunk revivalism and that fusion of melody and dissonance that many Australian bands have such a unique knack for capturing, from past to present, from the likes of Eucalypt and MY DISCO to The Drones and Spencer P. Jones. Yet it feels unfair to mention the names of other artists, since Mares have captured a sonic collage that they can proudly say is entirely their own.
- Clayton Bick-Paterson.