- Cul De Sac Breakdown is the second album by Perth nine-piece folk-rock band Salary.
A band with nine members could be expected to make some pretty grand music, and Cul De Sac Breakdown does contain a few big choruses and epic buildups, as well as a couple of almost psychedelic sounding jammed out passages. But Salary are mostly quite restrained, and in fact songs like Scrublot Banksia and Pogo are beautiful in their sparse simplicity.
Cul De Sac Breakdown is an album with a distinct sense of nostalgia. Sean Gorman’s story-telling style numbers are mostly told in first person and set in the past. Several of them are overtly about youth and teenagehood, and the many references to places around Perth locates these songs in the memories of listeners familiar with the geography in the same way specific memories can be triggered by the physical space we inhabit.
The music doesn’t sound particularly retro in the sense of aping old styles, but the woozy saxophone, flute and violin give a feeling of being from the past – like the aural equivalent of a faded photograph or fuzzy half-retained memory.
Nostalgia can get a bad rap these days. Music critic Simon Reynolds sees it as both a cause and effect of a pop culture that has stopped progressing forwards. Sociologist Hugh Mackay recently described it as one symptom of what he calls our anxiety epidemic – the seeking of familiar comforts to shield us from our harsh present reality.
The past and the future do not always exist in opposition though. A couple of Cul De Sac Breakdown’s highlights sit next to each other in the middle of the album. In Polite Rebellion, the song opens with Gorman reflecting on leaving school in year ten, but the reminiscing empowers his resolution for facing the future – the song ends with the line “this time I’m gonna change”.
Pogo meanwhile is a beautiful gentle folk song about being young and having punk rock change your life. I can’t speak for what it would be like to listen to this song without having had the same experience of being transported out of your mundane surroundings by the promises of punk music. Yet, while the song seems intentionally locked in the past by its specific references of dates two decades gone and bands of another era, it simultaneously shines a light into the future. It holds on to the possibility that music can in fact have a powerful impact on our lives and on our world.
- Andy Paine.