Z-ZERO is 90 seconds of blown-out synth pop punk.
The bifurcated melody lets for once the bridge also be the chorus, and it is no small wonder that this works out fine. Yet again, Australia has shown us the way.
It’s all very good. There’s enough style that it lapses back into substance at some point in the general mire, the rhythm guitar bounding back and forth across the soundscape throughout.
“Give me a chance to be a stranger / give me a chance to be forgotten”
The drums land in the mix somewhere at the base of the skull, in the limbic system or lizard brain. I’m not sure I heard them the first 10 times I listened to the song, but you feel them.
And anyway with Chancer the guitar hooks are the centerpiece, adorned in fuzz and jangle.
There are at least three vocal tracks spread across the headphone range in various states of singsong and staggered slightly in delay and octave. They all unite in a fine megazord in the mix, sword accessorized.
There is so much good music coming out of Australia these last few years. UV Race, Aloha Units, Sarah Mary Chadwick, The Rangoons, and so on. Maybe these are all the same person, I refuse to investigate.
Junk Shop is timeless.
Through its ingenious combination of traditional elements into a new and exciting form it reminds me of a page from John Szarkowski, reviewing Lee Friedlanders photograph “New Orleans. 1968.”
“Photography has generally been defended on the ground that it is useful, in the sense that the McCormick reaper and quinine have been useful. Excellent and persuasive arguments have been developed in this spirit; these are well known and need not be repeated here. It should be added however that some of the very best photography is useful only as juggling, theology, or pure mathematics is useful – that is to say, useless, except as nourishment for the human spirit.”
“When Lee Friedlander made the photograph reproduced here he was playing a kind of game. The game is of undetermined social utility and might on the surface seem almost frivolous. The rules of the game are so tentative that they are automatically (though subtly) amended each time the game is successfully played. The chief arbiter of the game is Tradition, which records in a haphazard fashion the results of all previous games, in order to make sure that no play that won before will be allowed to win again. The point of the game is to know, love, and serve sight, and the basic strategic problem is to find a new kind of clarity within the prickly thickets of unordered sensation. When one match is successfully completed, the player can move on to a new prickly thicket.“
“The larger, dark figure reflected in the shop window is (obviously) the photographer. Friedlander has made many such fugitive and elliptical self-portraits, partly no doubt because of the easy accessibility of the subject, and partly because of his fascination with transparency and reflection in relationship to the picture plane, and partly because such pictures remind him later of where he has been and what it felt like to be there. The small figure in the bright square of the photographer’s heart is also the photographer, reflected in a mirror in the rear of the store. The man standing by the Mustang (like the donor in the altarpiece) is merely a bystander, wondering what the photographer might be looking at.”
“It would of course be possible to draw a diagram, with lines and arrows and shaded planes, to explain crudely what the picture itself explains precisely. But what conceivable purpose would this barbarism serve?”
“And Anne, and Elliott, and Sylvia / Do the work and then it kills ya / right, mama?”
Hard to pick one track off this excellent album to celebrate, so more will likely follow later. But damn. Full of grace and dread, end to end. A great work I am deeply envious of. And, whether I am worthy or not, I feel a deep kinship with it.
Plainly & Painfully 
