The biggest compliment you can pay Dappled Cities is that they’ve stuck around. Sticking around in the music industry, especially in Australia, is not an easy thing. With its highs and lows, its fads, the whims of triple j, the low prospect of any enduring success or future security, it can be such a disheartening experience; can transform your youthful passion for music into something cynical and calculated. At times it can suck all the joy and imagination out of you. And yet through all that Dappled have survived and even thrived.
IIIII is clearly the sound of a group of musicians still very much in love with music. I’ve always admired Dappled for their commitment to each other and to their shared musical vision: to excite but to also challenge the listener. To not be apologetic about making music that is cerebral and verbose. Of trying something. Album opener ‘In Light Of No One’ starts off with a gentle strum that sound like The Go-Between’s ‘Streets Of Your Town’. Dave Rennick’s still boyish vocals (what is his secret?) kick in. But just when you think you’re in safe territory it quickly gets hijacked by woozy synths, menacing piano lines and distorted, delay drenched guitars. Dappled just can’t help but to mess with the formula.
Over a year ago when they were recording, Tim (Derricourt one of Dappled’s singer/songwriters) told me this album was their dad rock record and on one hand it is and on the other, of course it’s not. Sure there’s the flat drum sound, some classic rock licks, all of ‘Bad Feeling’ and the fact that most songs cruise along at a mellow walking pace. But it’s still very much a Dappled record: unpredictable (‘Everything Ever’), excitable (‘Coraline’) and pulling in all sorts of directions, like on ‘Driving Home at Night Alone’ where a mellow, wah heavy guitar solo intertwines with garish ’80s synth stabs and Gregorian-esque vocal chants sit alongside gleeful squeals. Or take ‘That Sound’, which starts with a slick, soft rock chord progression and suddenly morphs into a psychedelic rave up. It could easily be a Steely Dan song, if the ’70s jazz-rockers had gorged themselves on mushrooms instead cocaine.
When I first met Dappled in the early 2000s, they were part of an art school scene that used to hang out at the Teacher’s Club on Mary St in Surry Hills. Now Tim’s a real life teacher, Alex Moore is married with a kid, Ned Cooke’s (almost) a lawyer. And that kind of sums up IIII for me: Dappled might have grown up, but they’re still art school trippers. If this is dad rock then dad’s having acid flashbacks.
Five is out through Chugg Music / MGM on May 5, 2017.
