The Weight And The Sea: Australian slowcore

‘Slowcore’ is one of those fairly silly genre names that people laugh at me for using. The thing is, as with all silly genre names, the term wouldn’t have passed into what for my purposes I’ll call common use if it wasn’t so damned useful. And, as I always point out when protesting my innocence, I didn’t make it up.

Despite the ‘core’ in slowcore being something of a misnomer – not having anything to do with hardcore punk, as one might infer – it’s a pretty amusing and efficient way of describing a certain subset of indie rock artists that play particularly, consistently, relentlessly slow music. Going with this patch of musical territory are arrangements that are by necessity subtle, sparse affairs. Chords and notes are left hanging in space. You can hear the restraint in the drumming. And there’s occasionally a country and western influence (often so slight as to be barely discernible).

What I want to explore here is a history (not necessarily chronological) of some of the slowcore music to be produced in Australia. Even though, as far as music criticism goes, the Australian landscape in song is a slightly tired area of discussion, I do believe that Australian landscapes, both physical and cultural, lend themselves to slowcore’s forms of expression. At a basic metaphorical level you can see how a musical genre where relatively fewer notes are strung out across large, mostly deserted stretches of time can be compared with a country where relatively fewer people and settlements are strung out across large, deserted stretches of land.

In fact slowcore’s adeptness in describing or harmonising with Australian psychogeography has led to a certain amount of its influence passing into popular Australian alternative rock. And more importantly, when I hear this kind of music, I can mostly tell, on some irritatingly ineffable level, which bands are Australian and which are not. Here’s a selection of Australian songs that loosely fit within the slowcore category, which I will proceed to ramble about.

Bluetile Lounge – The Weight (and the sea)

In my strange internal system of musical comparisons, Perth’s Bluetile Lounge are to tempo as My Disco are to melody – that is, relentlessly minimalist.

The Weight (and the sea) is a serene nine and a half minute tapestry of guitars, bass, drums, lap-steel, piano and vocals. The two guitars seamlessly form one beautifully textured chiming instrument. The lap-steel crying behind the rest of the band is like a whale’s lament. The singer somehow has you on edge for every major key resolution of the melody, and the oh-so subtle climaxes of sound overtake you so slowly that your brain melts into them helplessly. And from the first four delicately spaced cymbal hits that introduce the song to the last carefully-strummed guitar chord, The Weight (and the sea) never shifts from its glacial pace. The pause at the end, presumably performed to the same scale as the song itself, is twenty seconds long.

In fact the album from which this song is taken, lowercase, is brutally, heartbreakingly, impossibly slow all the way through. It sounds boring on paper, but there is such an unexpected amount of tension stored in the space between beats, like the powerful forces in the spaces between subatomic particles, that the music is never completely lethargic or apathetic no matter how slow it is. It’s a balancing act akin to trying to stay on a bicycle after all its momentum has run out.

I lack the bandwidth to upload the mp3 and I couldn’t find it on YouTube, so here’s a different song, ltd from BTL’s second album, Half Cut.

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Dirty Three – 1000 Miles

It’s the Dirty Three – what can I say? Warren’s violin hums and breathes. Guitar chords are enunciated string by string. Beautifully shambolic wire-brush drumming prods the whole thing along at a walking pace like an optimistic hitch-hiker just leaving town. And everywhere in the music there is space, lovely articulated musical space. Get Horse Stories, it’s wonderful.

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Art Of Fighting – Heart Translations

Heart Translations is the final song on AOF’s Second Storey album. The album’s artwork shows austere houses built with spindly, impossibly high stilts set onto isolated islands in a wild sea. There are no boats. The houses are irrevocably cut off from each other.

The front door of the house in the foreground opens onto nothing.

Themes of isolation and regret recur throughout the album – it was written after Browne and Frew had ended their relationship. OnHeart Translations, Browne’s voice climbs slowly higher and higher as he confesses that he can’t let go and recalls a pivotal conversation that he failed to understand. Finally Browne can’t stand to think about it any more and the cymbals and snare rolls and keyboards fall away to sparse guitar and he begs:

“So I say: ‘heart… translate’. Because I don’t understand a thing that you said. Maybe we’ll sit on as it’s fading away –  just the memories will come, different seasons and days. And as long as it takes, oh the heart it translates. It can never be wrong, it can only be late.”

Art Of Fighting’s sound is lush and rich, and melancholy almost to the point of self-pity (but not quite). They aren’t afraid to use quasi-ambient synth washes that could come across as cheesy in the hands of lesser bands. Ollie Browne’s delicate falsetto swoops and croons and comes cloaked in reverb. His vocal lines often follow Peggy Frew’s quietly limber basslines (Frew remains one of my favourite indie rock bassists). The way that Browne’s voice and Frew’s bass twine around each other is almost like a duet at times.

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Arrows – Pour Me Into A Taxi

Brisbane emo band Arrows are an interesting proposition, in that they’re more divisive than the other bands I’ve covered here. It’s to do with the fact that they still make make slow, intricate emo (in the mid-90s sense of the word) heavily influenced by the work of American Football, Mineral, early Death Cab For Cutie, etc. It’s consistently self-pitying and sometimes even cringe-inducing. Apparently it was fine to do this in the 90s but it seems strange and suicidally unfashionable to do it fifteen years later.

Parenthetically, I’ve wondered lately why this is. Is there a sense that indie culture has moved on and ‘grown up’ since the 90s by becoming less sincere and more playful, more aware of its privilege, coy, superficial? I mean this isn’t bad-year-nine-poetry material and both then and now the people writing this stuff were men in their 20s. I think that in the space of ten or so years, indie has developed a fear of just how white, male and upper-middle-class it is (not entirely unjustified). And so straight dudes in guitar bands moaning about their first-world problems doesn’t go down so well with critics any more.

All this said, I am a white, male, middle class dude with first-world problems and I do  enjoy indulging in Modern Art & Politics, the album from which Pour Me Into A Taxi is taken. That said, I don’t think I could listen to it from start to finish in one sitting. Arrows’ strength lies perhaps in the deftness with which their arrangements inject the real gravitas of slowcore (and yeah, post-rock) into songs about drunken hook-ups and failing relationships.

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