When I launched Sound Doctrine Show & Tell with a backyard session from Yon Yonson I had no idea that it would soon become my primary income stream. I’ve had corporate sponsorship offers, product placement opportunities, requests for celebrity cameos and hollywood studios wanting to get in on excitment, all because Andrew and Nathan smashed out last years best upbeat down track for Australia’s most popular music blog. A real rags to riches story, the sort of thing that you almost couldn’t make up. Almost.
I used all that first video hype to leverage a second Show & Tell offering, this time with Sydney’s finest. Yep, they said he’d never do it, but I convinced Tim Fitz Music himself to perform an acoustic rendition of his Triple J superhit Sour for an audience of three, four if you count the abandoned hospital we were in, which is silly – but we were in one. Soon due for demolition, we figured we’d quickly take the opportunity to immortalize the building with Tim Fitz’z ode to the greatest city on Australia’s East coast. In the absence of Tim’s multi-instrumental chicanery, the song feels a touch more sombre than its recorded counterpart and allowed a cleaner insight into the core of a Tim Fitz song.
Filmed by Matt Davis at Silent creative
Our Man In Berlin is a tricky name indeed. It’s an odd moniker to adopt if you’re, let’s say, five separate humans from any place that’s not Berlin. It’s also a really special sort of brain melt to think that the name of the people singing the song you’re about to listen to actually, in itself, implies ownership of… itself. They are the man in Berlin while they simultaneously have some sort of supervisory relationship with this Berliner. After a while it sort of starts to get to you if you think too deeply on it and leads to more dangerous questions like how much does the internet weigh and is that too much? What does the D.D in D.D Dumbo stand for? What even are birds?
Their third and newest single ‘Cirrhosis’ offers immediate life answers in the form of Total Life Forever era Foals guitar rhythms and a heavily affected vocal. “Just a little more time. Just a bit of control” runs the chorus. Golly, wouldn’t that be nice. A bleaker concept still in light of the track’s title, a late stage liver disease that’s most often the result of a life of heavy drinking or hep-C. Not a lot of good cause or effect in that bundle but there’s a light-footed fleetness about the track that isn’t mired down in the sludge of the disease. I suspect the outfit are using it as a placeholder for a less bodily form of degeneration. The careful strictures of the song’s more sonic aspects tell me that this probably isn’t a band that just jam a thing out and call it finished so I’d imagine the conceptual side would follow a similar process. Whatever the case, we’re here now with this new one and I’ll be damned if it isn’t a four minutes of beautifully articulated precision.
There’s such texture in the voice of Simon Okley so as to trick you into thinking that he was singing across a tall range when it’s actually quite a limited depth of pitch. His tone moves from rounder, back of the throat sounds to breathier quiet whispers and backing vocals thicken his thinner chorus notes. It’s captivating enough to retain your attention for the whole of the track despite having to compete with some similarly attractive elements. That guitar section, which is paired perfectly with a clean and clear bass line is just beautiful. When the chorus drops in that same guitar line starts hugging the vocal part like an estranged father recently reunited with a child, endorphins everywhere, tears streaming down both of their faces as they finally let go of all that hurt and all that distance and all that pain. So cathartic, way beautiful. Okley spent his formative “moonlighting” as a guitarist for Oh Mercy but now out on his lonesome he’ll be releasing his record Surrender on the 19th of August. He certainly knows his way around the old throat for someone who was a string noodler all that time. I’m hoping that the album houses more tracks like this one because this is a legitimate song, not simply a pretty voice and a nice groove. Ten more of these and we’re talking about a standout release.
There’s a freshly minted video out for the track too, if you like what you’re-a-hearing.
Firstly, thank you Yon Yonson for being artists with a vision, for taking us on a journey that we didn’t necessarily expect. I’m talking of course of the binary structure of this song. Listening to this song we can hear that there is a clearly delineated A and B section, the first being characterised by something that sounds suspiciously like a stripped back piano ballad, and the second as a more visceral, beat-based electronic passage which is (from a production point) stunning, and to which youths of today will certainly find it easy to ‘groove’ to at a ‘live gig’.
Secondly, I’d like to say I’m so damn sick of songs that are about nothing. This is why I’m so damn into ‘No Enemy’. The lyrics are temporal and pertinent to this time and place, painting a highly personal description of confusion in a seemingly hostile world. There’s substance here, a flavour that isn’t vanilla; one you can completely eat up or AT LEAST react against if you hate it. The reverb-infused sound of a lonely piano suits the autobiographical vibe of the song perfectly. It almost feels as if the B section is a regression into a safe place, like too much thinking can be destructive. Which it can, so let’s not over analyse things anymore. It’s certainly the most ballsy, interesting oddball tune I’ve heard in a while. Also any lyricist that uses ‘analgesic’ instead of ‘pain killers’ has my vote.
Noone knows why its spelt ‘Khlever’ rather than ‘Clever’ but i suspect its a tip of the hate to the great Genghis Khan and like Genghis, Ned Beckley will not be stopped as he inexorably advances on Europe continues to lead the way for young Australian producers. I particularly like that Beckley isn’t annexing land from the already populous wave racer nation but instead is confidently turning heads with a sound more his own. No music is ever entirely one’s own what with the internet and using samples and those machines that young people are using to make music that aren’t guitars but it’s certainly less run of the mill than a good batch of the electronic music currently on the “online web”. Plus, and just as importantly, its really rather good. So too is the video. My guess is that we’re looking at Icelandic landscapes and my word, they’re beautiful. This could be a stand-alone advertisement for tourism Iceland were it not also for the cult-children adding some narrative to the work. Wonderfully shot and unfolding with the same patience as the track itself, this video is a lovely counterpoint to the dark structure that is Khlever. Credit to everyone even remotely involved in this art.
