It must be something in Perth’s (psychedelic rock) water.
The WA capital’s world-storming sister bands, Tame Impala and Pond, already share band members and a knack for charming both local and international audiences with their prolific output, now a couple of their ranks are fulfilling their promise made earlier in the year of unleashing their solo side-projects.
In an interview with Tone Deaf in January, Jay Watson – a key member of both Perth bands – revealed; “We’ve got so many records in our bands… Joe [Ryan], the dude with the afro in Pond, me and him have decided we’re going to drop our albums at the same time, same day, which should be fun.”
The good friends/bandmates/collaborators have today revealed the first taste of their respective full-length solo albums as GUM (Jay Watson) and Shiny Joe Ryan, both due for release in early 2014.
“We’re going to have an online poll,” Watson joked earlier this year, “me and Joe, ‘who’s album’s better and who’s more handsome’?”
It’s remarkable that Watson has found time to craft music in a year when Tame Impala have toured extensively, snaffled up multiple ARIA and WAM Awards, and been nominated for a Grammy, is anyone’s guess. But after first revealing the sound of his GUM alias in late 2012, the multi-instrumentalist has finished crafting his 10-track collection of “paranoid pop songs.”
Recorded in part with close friend Sam Ford and at Watson’s old home at Cottesloe Beach in Perth, Watson’s solo debut features songs that are “mostly about falling in love and all of the things that he thinks are going to kill him,” in the words of GUM’s management label Spinning Top.
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Keen-eared fans may have already heard ‘Delorean Highway’ – the title track from the GUM debut – last September. The track is inspired by a dream about Back To The Future and with its slow languid beats, fuzzy chords, and watery vocals drew close comparisons to Watson’s day job (if ain’t broke…).
Now arrives ‘Growin’ Up’, a second chewy taste of the GUM debut album, which gain features a spacey atmosphere in which guitars drift pleasurably across interstellar melodies. After the two-minute mark, a new hook buzzes to life and sends the track off into its euphoric middle eight that has all the ear-catching hallmarks of the best Tame Impala/Pond earworms.
Next off the rank is über-afroed Pond bassist, Joseph Ryan, who under his Shiny Joe Ryan alias offers a unique mixture of genre-be-damned music-making, flaunting the country-pop, eccentric-rock sounds that incubate inside the musical brain beating beneath that mass of hair.
The first taste of his debut album, The Cosmic Microwave Background, is the quasi-title track, which links a Beatles-branded piano and some tender, raw vocals with the kind of flipped-out, front-of-stage guitar work you’d expect of the Perth music perennials.
The Shiny Joe Ryan debut album was first recorded in solitude in a grotty Berlin apartment back in 2011, before enlisting the help of Pond frontman Nick Allbrook (to provide some drums), Steve Summerlin, bassist Ben McDonald, and Perth indie pop singer (and close friend) Felicity Groom, whose waifish vocals sift throughout ‘The Cosmic Microwave Background Pt 1’; all before Tame Impala linchpin Kevin Parker gave it a winning mixing job.
The Shiny Joe Ryan solo debut is described as “a heart-rending journey of interstellar innocence, staggering like a ketamine invalid and sailing like a rocket;” though a slightly different kind of audio-faring vessel than Pond’s Hobo Rocket.
Speaking of which, Pond’s Hobo Rocket tour launches tomorrow in the band’s home state before jetting its way across the country, before passing through the Falls Festival and landing at next year’s Boogie Festival. Not only that, but the band already have their follow-up album in the can, complete with a cheeky title: Man It Feels Like Space Again.
Meanwhile Nick Allbrook and Cameron Avery (who also plays in Tame Impala and The Growl – keeping up?) have got two more records up their sleeves set for release, including another under their Allbrook/Avery side-project and a third that was recorded with four-fifths of UK band The Horrors.
All while Kevin Parker has indicated he’s already at work on the follow-up to Tame Impala’s Grammy-nominated Lonerism, describing the new material as a “more minimal” in a great pizza simile; “Instead of a supreme pizza, where you just throw everything on, it’s kind of just gonna be like a margherita. I don’t want to over-fill it.”
So to re-cap, that’s new music from GUM, Shiny Joe Ryan, Avery/Allbrook, Pond, and Tame Impala. At that prolific rate, next year’s ‘Best of 2014 lists’ (especially NME’s) could be very skewed indeed.
