Washington: Batflowers | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- You would be hard pressed to find someone who is more “all over it” than Brisbane’s Megan Washington. Given her trajectory across the last decade has gone through jazz, blues, roots and indie-pop, her fourth album Batflowers shouldn’t display any missteps or unsure direction; and it doesn’t. Along with that, Washington has pulled the whole album’s look together herself, right down to the art direction, photography, hand-assembled animation, even the A&R. Hearing that, do you feel as if you might be slightly underachieving, even in this time of isolation and sourdough starters?

Washington is -clearly- not an underachiever and Batflowers puts a solid stamp on the way an artist, assured of their own material, can collaborate with more than one producer to pull together an album that resembles a Seurat painting: up close you could see all the separate dots and the manner of the creation, but seen from the proper vantage point, it is a masterwork of complementary colours, lines, shade and light.

Shade and light are in abundance, for instance, the album flows from the fun, short, quirky and almost jerky musically Dark Parts to the lyrically reflective Paradise Lost and out again to the digital click track that provides the energy for “Switches”. The album has already opened with the guitar led, almost '80's happy-song title track (think The Dream Academy) and then moving on to Not A Machine, the '80s are changed to something much more modern indie style, the sort of thing that Sia might have been pleased to record.

At the album’s mid-point, Washington switches to a beautiful, late-night piano bar ballad Catherine Wheel, but this is no up-town bar, this is one of the almost always deserted places with the requisite, nearly out of tune, ancient, upright piano which is the only instrument heard apart from her aching vocal, echoing around a vacant room. That only serves to increase the lyrics' tender meaning. The fact that this is her actual demo recorded on an iPhone and dropped holus-bolus into the album is an example of Washington's “damn the style dictators, let’s experiment!” approach. The Give is a grand piece of power-anthem pop and then when you think that is where she might keep going, it’s back to some very '80's electronica with Silencio, all Icehouse and Real Life (for those who remember Australia’s electronic moody pop history).

The purity of Washington’s voice is put to full use on Lazarus Drug which is moody without feeling maudlin, and there is an ocean of trilling synth runs to hang that vocal on to boot. It then settles back to almost just piano and voice, a powerful piece of work. Another departure from what has come before is the intriguing Achilles Heart, with the beat provided by a syncopated drum sound, a blending of deep, rich sounding strings, an overlay of bell-like synths and Washington’s voice sounding equal parts processed and yet not. The twelve track journey ends in familiar territory for fans of her earlier work, a full on bluesy-jazz belter, Kiss Me Like We’re Gonna Die.

Clearly Megan Washington knows what she wants and how to get it with the producers John Congleton, Japanese Wallpaper and Dave Hammer each bringing to their tracks what makes their production with other artists a house speciality. Add that Coca-Cola like “7X” to the mix in the form of long time Washington co-writer and collaborator Sam Dixon, you have an album that if blandly described as a work of mixed styles, might sound like a disaster waiting to happen; can I say again, it’s not. As the lyric of the title track says, “You bring me good luck/You bring me Batflowers”, and as the saying goes, “the harder you work, the luckier you get”. Megan Washington’s six years of hard work is about to pay off in the arguably unluckiest year of the century.

- Blair Martin.
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