Mess Esque: Mess Esque | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Strumming that’s both meandering and moody and the wandering symbolism of dreams overflow the boundaries of one record, seeping into this year’s second, by Mess Esque. Why two in one year? The truth about many things here may, perhaps, only be puzzled out by scholarship in elemental symbolism and the strange logic of the unconscious. Different tides, different flows have taken over our recent lives and they rule the music too.

The charmingly self-deprecating moniker titles the collaboration of Helen Franzmann’s McKisko and Mick Turner, famous in his own right, but also legendary guitarist of the Dirty Three, other bands like Venom P Stinger and innumerable collaborations from Cat Power to Will Oldham. I wonder if they were trying to manage expectations for a project cobbled together in bedrooms and over email, wiling away the lockdown hours. No worries there though, the libidinal forces the pair have tapped into clearly resonate, with the new album getting a wider release through Milk! And Remote Control in Oz and Drag City in the US.

Turner’s riffs and accompaniments are something like the post-rock of Dirty Three, but slower-burning, or perhaps like his extensive solo work. In line with his more recent output, the material on Mess Esque has evolved from the primordial id of his proto-rock rambling and into something that more often resembles traditional songcraft, which is, as it happens, the reason he was looking for a singer.

There’s something atavistic that Franzmann brings too. Her lyricism, though quiet, timid even, has long felt ruled by old, strange forces: elements of earth and water pulse through her understanding of self, coursing through the dreams and strange emotions that run beneath the concerns of the modern world. That was certainly going on in McKisko's pre-COVID records, like 2019’s Southerly, but her capacity for understanding the weird forces at work inside ourselves seems uniquely fitted for making the music of the past couple of years.

Together, Franzmann and Turner meet each other at a pace which often has a slow, rolling gait. It’s almost like they don’t have conscious control of it. Turner says he was ‘feeling’ The Slits or X-Ray Spex as he was making early single Take It Outside, although the wistful, dreamy, arty indie sounds very little like that (maybe like a really DIY Stereolab?). Snatches of interpersonal connection blend with mundane routine, like walks along the local creek, traipsing through the shedding Jacarandas “don’t stand on the flowers! / They can’t see you like I do...” float in an atmosphere that Franzman describes as “[f]eeling underwater in lockdown.”

Elemental symbolism isn’t always in play, sometimes it’s purely the meditative qualities of our necessarily limited lives, as in the contemplation of time passing in isolation on opener Wake Up Yesterday, which makes repeated mantras out of lines like “Study your shadow / It leads you to yourself” or “Study the sunset / It leads me to tomorrow.” The song is another one of the more urgent on the record, conveying an underlying, half-hidden neurosis about the passage of time, where every day is yesterday.

The mental journeys, though sometimes as simple as a gentle drift to the bottom of a suburban pool, can actually be pretty fantastical, like the bizarrely optimistic sublimation of grief and loss into a package wrapped in gold leaf and stored, safely in the soul Forever or an epic drift away from self and solar system, floating toward Jupiter.

Is there actually a thread joining these elemental overflows, astral treks and ethereal unravellings of everyday existence? I think it may be an emotional one. There’s a gentle acceptance that unites the travails of Mess Esque. It’s as though the long slow tumble we’ve all been through is not a cause for grief, but maybe, once we embrace it, even an excuse for the tiniest hint of elation. I have no better answers to the circumstances of the world than most people and I’m certainly no scholar of the symbols of dreams, but the path Mick Turner and Helen Franzmann wend through it all is intriguingly interesting; I don’t think we should be at all surprised there was a sequel.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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