My Disco - ‘Paradise’
reviewed by Andrew Sinclair.
The last few years has seen the birth of a new generation of Australian indie bands that for the first time are creating trends and sounds instead of imitating them from our friends in the US and UK. These bands include Damn Arms, Love Of Diagrams, The Lost Valentinos, Young & Restless and My Disco. ‘Paradise’ is the second LP from Melbourne trio My Disco and substantially expands (or detracts?) on the ideas stated on their first LP ‘Cancer’.
The most noticeable feature of ‘Paradise’ is its static, repetitious nature in the bass (Ben Andrews) and drum parts (Rohan Rebeiro). Where ‘Cancer’ repeated short phrases over & over and changed these once or twice during the course of a song, Paradise maintains these sparse, mostly one or two note phrases for entire songs and the drum parts often mirror exactly the shape of the bass lines. The ideas are always repeated to their perfect length whether it be 1 ½ minutes (‘|’) or 9 minutes (‘An Even Sun’) and the album follows these repetitious song structures for all 10 songs. This creates a hypnotic effect for the listener. You feel like you know the phrase like the back of your hand yet the repetition causes your mind to hear new things within the music, the repetition itself is essential to the overall perception of the phrases.
Liam Andrew’s guitar floats beautifully above the music like a crashing plane. He creates giant walls of sound, distorted crackles and screeches through his guitar, which only builds upon the sense of tension in the bass and drums.
What is created is a daunting sense of isolation that depicts a sparse and desolate landscape. It is in this sense that I view ‘Paradise’ as a truly Australian work. The cover of the album has the three members of My Disco dressed in what looks like black tights and raincoats on the peak of a hill in the middle of the dry, red and harsh South Australian desert contrasted against a stark blue sky. This image reflects the music perfectly. The desert is infinitely wide, all bright but equally lifeless, sparse and haunting. Ben Andrews’ lyrics seem to mirror this sense of the sparse, lifeless Australia as well. He barely sings throughout the album and only utters a single sentence per song (sometimes he sings nothing at all) but the music does not demand anything extra. “One nation, an even sun” he sings on ‘An Even Sun’ while on ‘/’ he sings ‘the less I see, the closer I feel’. The former lyric creates a suggested subject of Australia while the latter mirrors the sense of tension and isolation within the music.
The themes suggested within the music are constant and the album works very well as a whole. My only criticism is that the band could’ve branched out and explored different instruments and sounds to support the music but it is a minor criticism as they are a rock band and the instrumentation works perfectly in the context of this album. ‘Paradise’ is one of the best albums of 2008 and may possibly be one of the greatest Australian rock albums ever.
9/10.
http://www.myspace.com/mdband