From Gang of Youths to Jen Cloher: 2017's top Australian albums

Gang of Youths
Go Farther in Lightness

It’s to their credit that Gang of Youths were able to turn the myth of the difficult second album into an advantage. On the towering Go Farther in Lightness, Dave Le’aupepe documents his struggle with moving on from thinking about death all the damn time, and that mood’s perverse attendant pleasures and creative animus.

There is a reason so many of the songs on GFIL, like its title, are phrased as life-affirming imperatives, interspersed with the kinds of thoughts that recur in hopeless moods: What Can I Do if the Fire Goes Out?, Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane, Fear and Trembling, Say Yes to Life, Persevere. It’s highest-common-denominator indie rock that trusts the listener with big ideas and big words, elliptical string arrangements and complex textures, and an earnestness that’s genuinely confronting at times. It is the sound of repeatedly finding yourself in dark valleys, terrified of the future, and then hauling yourself up the mountain ahead anyway, an affirming twist on the emotional grind of life that recasts Sisyphus’s lot as heroic rather than pointless in its repetition.

There were subtler, earthier, gentler and more experimental albums released this year, but the beauty of GFIL is that it casts its emotional net wide and high, fully intending to capture as many people as possible. Gang of Youths’ roots in the rich and potent musical culture of Sydney’s suburban superchurch belt is no secret, but the only entity the band wants you to have faith in is yourself and, in that respect, this album is a cathedral. It sounds as though GOY have left it all on the field, but they are capable of more still, and are completely unafraid of their own power.

– Caitlin Welsh

Amy Shark
Night Thinker EP

It’s been a whirlwind year for Amy Shark, 30-year-old Gold Coast singer-songwriter. Adore, only her third single, was voted No 2 on Triple J’s 2016 Hottest 100. Night Thinker, her major-label debut EP, was released in April, and a US tour, late-night TV spots and two Aria awards followed. But Shark is no overnight success: her music betrays a lifetime of soul-searching.

With their grand pop hooks and production, it’s easy to overlook how odd Night Thinker’s songs are. Adore is unusually confronting – a radio hit in which Shark threatens to punch out a rival for her lover’s attention. These aren’t simple love stories – they’re songs about how love and longing drive us mad. “What was I like before you? / Well I can’t answer that,” she sings in Blood Brothers. No one is ever complete, she seems to be saying. We’re always searching for ourselves in others, finding no easy answers, only more emotions.

Before Adore’s release, Amy Shark endured years of rejection from labels. Five years ago she might have been too big for indie, too cutting for pop. But in 2017, she felt just right.

– Richard S He

Kardajala Kirridarra
Kardajala Kirridarra

What do you do when you’re making an album somewhere so remote that recording has to abort every time there’s thunder and lightning? You get wet and collect samples.

The Melbourne-based electronic producer Beatrice Lewis captured the organic effects of Marlinja – a tiny town halfway between Alice Springs and Darwin, where the tropics meet the desert. It’s the perfect backdrop to Eleanor Dixon’s lyrics, sung mainly in the Mudburra language, about women and creation and love for country.

When layered in rounds, these soothing vocal lines form a structure strong enough to support the weight of the listener’s worries.

– Jenny Valentish

Jen Cloher
Jen Cloher

Jen Cloher’s self-titled fourth album is a trainspotter’s dream, name-checking Australian greats that have gone before her, from the Saints, the Go-Betweens and the Triffids through to the Drones and an entire song dedicated to the Dirty Three. More immediately, many other songs reference the long shadow cast by the success of Cloher’s partner, Courtney Barnett.

With this album, Cloher not only steps out of that shadow but has produced a record that stands up to anything made by those greats: in a piece for Meanjin this month, the writer Chris Johnston shrewdly compares Regional Echo to Cold Chisel’s Flame Trees in its evocation of memory, loss and thwarted ambition. Cloher’s lyrics are worthy of the Triffids’ late David McComb in their local detail, and the music is every bit as good, covering terrain as wide as the vivid landscape portrait of Australia she paints. An instant classic.

– Andrew Stafford

Orion
Orion

The first time I heard Orion was via a YouTube video of their song Sexy Alien, recorded in a dark purple room in 2014. The quality of the video is terrible but it sounded magnetic – unlike any other music coming out of Sydney at the time. Melancholy but never dour, with a stronger melodic sensibility than any other guitar band now working in Australia, Orion are often compared to all manner of 1980s punk and new wave obscurities, but the most helpful reference point is early U2. That’s a thoroughly unfashionable observation but Orion’s best songs are as trembling and powerful as that Irish group’s 1983 single New Year’s Day and, unlike a lot of self-defeating rock groups working in the margins, Orion don’t sound shy: they sing and play as if something’s at stake.

Their self-titled LP is a short one, and the first two songs may disappoint anyone looking for something more subtle than a goth jam band. But once the fourth track kicks in (the aforementioned Sexy Alien), the band’s strengths emerge. Sexy Alien, Execution and Turbulence are such yearning and desirous songs, dreamlike and sentimental. I listened to this album hundreds of times this year (my two-year-old loves it, for some reason) and it still makes me feel something each time.

– Shaun Prescott

Lindsay Phillips
The Sleep Song

Melbourne’s Lindsay Phillips writes folk songs of stark potency that seem to slow time itself. Now living in a farmhouse in rural Sweden, the musician cares for his young son and summons songs from a steel string guitar, the wheezings of an heirloom accordion and a sorrowful baritone distinguished by an abundance of vibrato. Few effects are used and no collaboration sought: this is defiantly solo music.

Phillips’ lyrics remain unmoored to time, place or subjectivity. At his most confessional, on Casting Shadows, he offers this truism, weighty with regret: “It’s hard to be wise in turbulent times / It’s hard to be kind all the time.”

As on previous records, a medieval air stains his songs sepia. If, listening, we are transported anywhere, it’s to a Games of Thrones subplot that ruminates on real people instead of dragon mothers and king slayers.

Folk music need be no more, and should be no less, than this.

– Kate Hennessy (review from Music You Missed)

Gold Class
Drum

It was last year’s single, Kids on Fire, that got me hooked on the post-punk sounds of the Melbourne four-piece Gold Class. That song, pegged to their then-forthcoming second album, provided the kind of stirring, defiant embrace of existential restlessness that demanded repeat listens. When Drum was finally released in August, Kids on Fire wasn’t on it but the fact that this 10-track album stands on its own is a testament to the strength of the songs that did make it in.

Whether it’s improved production values or a shift in composition style, Drum has a deeper and more resonant sound than 2015’s It’s You, proving a much more solid musical canvas for the biting vocals from Adam Curley. Opening with the propulsive Twist in the Dark – inspired by The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson’s stunning and unconventional interrogation of identity and physicality – it powers through the upbeat Rose Blind and Get Yours, multilayered explorations of identity and physicality in their own right. Things slow down a bit with Trouble Fun, Mercurian and Place We Go, but you never lose the sense that Curley and co are spoiling for a fight.

Gold Class regularly inspire comparisons to Joy Division or Morrissey, but they seem driven by righteous anger rather than the bleak despair of the former, and have so far managed to avoid the sooky self-indulgence of the latter. It’s been five or so months since Drum came out; still not sick of it.

– Stephanie Convery

Custard
The Common Touch

Former Brisbane alterna-rock heroes Custard split in 1999 but returned a decade later, recording two albums. There’s since been something of a change of focus in their music, which can perhaps be summed up as “ageing is weird”. On stage they tend to concentrate on the pumping classics that made their career, but it’s a more reflective band in the studio these days.

The Common Touch is easily the most ballady album they’ve done, with Dave McCormack’s voice cracked and plaintive on Princes HWY and Halley’s Comet, although things ramp up with 2000 Women and the Go Betweens-y You Always Knew. I’m Not Well is a classic that stands alongside any of their old favourites, speaking to the generation of people that used to scream along with every lyric at gigs and now can only attend Custard shows once they’ve retrieved their faded Guided By Voices T-shirts and lined up babysitters.

It’s not a perfect record – removing the cod-reggae of Hands on Fire would improve the album and the culture generally – but the string-drenched Take it from Here is the perfect album closer, as McCormack breathes: “We can make this the last one / And let it go.” Here’s hoping he’s wrong.

– Andrew P Street

All Our Exes Live in Texas
When We Fall

All Our Exes Live in Texas comprises my fantasy friendship group of Elana Stone, Hannah Croft, Katie Wighton and Georgia Mooney, who share lead vocals and songwriting credits and play mandolin, ukulele, guitar and accordion between them. I’ve never run faster to a merch desk than I did after their album launch in Sydney this year; it seemed implausible to me that the vinyl wouldn’t sell out within minutes of the final bar.

Besides the A++ band name; besides the endlessly clever, funny, insightful lyrics about heartbreak, nostalgia and the trials and joys of being a woman (which on songs like Candle and Oh Lover of Mine will punch you right in the guts); and besides the exquisite four-part harmonies that will make you want to join a choir, it was just a pleasure being in the same room as four hilarious, smart, strong women who enjoyed each other’s company as much as we enjoyed theirs.

They’ve had a big few years, featuring on a Kesha’s anthem Praying, touring America with Midnight Oil, supporting the Backstreet Boys in Australia (bizarrely) and winning an Aria for best blues and roots album last month. And since I bought it in July, that record is the one I sing along to when I’m feeling cheerful on a Saturday morning, and drink a glass of wine with on a moody Sunday night.

– Steph Harmon