- Contemporary jangle-pop bands like Twerps or Dick Diver take their stylistic tips from outfits that existed twenty years before they did, like The Clean and The Chills, mainstays of the Flying Nun label and its stylishly reserved, too-cool-to-care offkey sound. I was a bit taken aback when I discovered the term jangle-pop had actually been kicking round a whole twenty years before that: first referencing the tinny, trebley guitar sound of bands like The Byrds. You can hear a lineage being handed down, even though I’m not sure there’s an intentional connection between the ensuing generations of ‘jangle pop’. After all, popular musicians (and journalists) are notorious for misappropriating terms and using them in ways that have little or nothing to do with what they were originally coined for. However if you’re looking for a ‘missing link’ that ties the whole history of jangle pop together, you may find it (dangling right at the end of the timeline) in Melbourne outfit, Possible Humans.
Their debut album, Everybody Split trucks in bulk an extremely trebley, even nasal guitar sound that is nonetheless full of warmth and harmonic richness. How exactly they brought those contradictory qualities together I don’t know, but I have a feeling some of the credit, perhaps a lot of it, most go to the talent behind the boards: Alex MacFarlane of Twerps who recorded the record -and, incidentally, whose label Hobbies Galore is putting the record out- and the ubiquitous mastering magician Mikey Young. I think Possible Humans would be a good band regardless, but, I’m not sure they’d remind me quite as much of Blue Öyster Cult and it’s that unusual quality which gives them an extra surge of refreshing difference.
The riffs really are killer, especially in the faster songs, which many of them are: dominated by an urgent energy. Numbers like Lung City, Absent Swimmer or single The Thumps skitter along with a nervous, agitated gait that is actually pretty post-punk, before the harmony goes wide and wonderful in a chorus. The juxtaposition of such a skeletal frame and all that lush power is clever and almost unreasonably effective. If that’s the band’s masterstroke, they pack quite a few other pretty nifty ones, shifting smoothly through the musical gears of the late twentieth century. I’m guessing most people won’t be expecting the twelve minute psych saga of Born Stoned, but it fits in without the band even batting an eyelid.
The lyrics can be a little cryptic, but still really anchor the record in contemporary Oz, in the face of all the rest of the time-travelling qualities of Possible Humans’ sound. You’re yanked back into place by quips like “You put us down with a dose of toxic masculinity” sneered out in striyn. Or see especially “Going around in circles makes you sick / And I’ve been doing that ad nauseum around you, ya selfish prick.”
To be honest, even in the little that’s been written about Possible Humans I’ve seen them compared to all sorts of bands: each set of ears that happens by hears its own little echoes of the last half-century of music history. That being the case the band have created one of the more engaging historical epics you’ll run into. It makes Possible Humans less a missing-link and more a cable-tie, handily cinching together the great grab-bag of jangle-pop’s back story.
- Chris Cobcroft.