God Have Mercy

In a world obsessed with ironically appropriating the past, how do you go about making fresh, sincere and authentic music? Something that makes you forget about everything other than the sounds and words reaching your ears?

How? I don’t know. But Paddy Mann has done it with the new Grand Salvo album, “Death”. This exquisite “storybook” is without a doubt the Australian album of the year. In fact, it’s the best album I’ve heard in many years, period. It is not easy to make an album like this – and not just because the songs and arrangements are complex. The biggest feat that Mann has pulled off here (in a project that took over three years to finish) is to make music that is fully an expression of the poetry that he has written. The fragmented, achronological story of a Rat, a Rabbit, a Bear, a Bird and a Man, their trials, tribulations, love for one another, and eventual deaths, leaps out of the speakers and you feel like these characters are running, flying, hunting, and dying all around you. It’s been a while since a song has made me cry – I think the last one might have been “XO” by Elliot Smith – but that’s what the track “Bird” from this album did to me the other day as I was listening to it for the umpteenth time.

The key to this album’s success could be called “naivety” if Mann’s hand wasn’t so steady, so sure and determined. I think it might be better to call it “innocence” – but not one that comes out of ignorance. There is a weary, wary, loving, youthful innocence here. It’s not Indie, it’s not Hippy, it’s not ironic, it’s not self-indulgent, it’s not referencing anyone. it’s just fucking amazing.

Cat Power played one song from You Are Free and one from The Greatest, so they were they only two I knew in her epic two-hour-plus set (except for New York New York) during which she sang uniformly amazingly and held me utterly enthralled. Chan Marshall is a singular performer and artist and her band was fucking great. I didn’t even feel disappointed that she didn’t play my favourite songs…and that’s saying something.

Some years ago, I was waiting for Radiohead to release a new album. But by the day before yesterday, I’d got so sick of waiting that as I downloaded In Rainbows I found myself strangely unexcited. That excitement did not increase that much as I listened to the first few tracks while navigating my car from my house in Santa Cruz to the 17 freeway. However, at a certain point through the album and the drive a shocking realisation arose: “Holy shit, this is actually fucking good!”

If, like me, you thought that Hail to the Thief was one of Radiohead’s weakest records (it had many great “bits”, but few great songs*) and felt Thom Yorke’s solo record pass you by in a vaguely kind-of-cool sort of way, you may understand my suprise. To me it was beginning to look like this previously most supremely consistent of bands had finally passed their apex and begun on the long downward curve of their parabola.

While In Rainbows might not reach the heights of OK Computer or Amnesiac, it does surpass Hail to the Thief. What we want from Radiohead are songs that have had a lot of attention put into their construction, songs that thrill and surprise you with the little well-wrought bits in them that fit perfectly into the whole; songs like “Pyramid Song”, “Everything in its Right Place”, “Paranoid Android”. We want those little Radiohead rushes: like the moment when the distorted bass comes in on “Exit Music”, or the part in “I Might Be Wrong” when you think the song is over and that a new song has begun, and then all of a sudden you realise that the guitar riff that’s playing is still part of the song, and then everything comes back in so beautifully with Thom Yorke’s vocals, and then the song finishes – fuck yeah, that’s what we want from Radiohead! Not this limp “are you hungry? are you sick?” bullshit.

The good thing is that even though this new album is very “jammy”, and has many songs with repetitive grooves, it also has that attention to detail and overall song structure that characterises Radiohead’s best stuff. What’s more, and unlike HTT, the lyrics are beautifully written and at times moving. This album will need many more listens until I can decide fully what I think of it and where it sits in the band’s canon – it certainly took many listens for me to really connect with Amnesiac – but right now I am happy, and comforted, to at least know that I now own another Radiohead album that I enjoy listening to the whole way through.

* For example, “little babies’ eyes, eyes, eyes” etc is a great bit, but is that a song? The one that goes “we will eat you alive” or whatever is a great song though.