Pseudo-reggae nonsense from Australia’s finest
‘No one likes a smartarse but we all like stars.’ John Butler isn’t a star though, his lyrics reel like meaningless art, pseudo-beat ramblings interspersed with some nice guitar parts. Opener ‘Treat Yo Mama’ for example isn’t riveting until the words stop, then we’re left with a little wah-wah riff that really catches the ear. Communication through the strings rather than the verse.
The strained reggae that the sound is built on can certainly do with being removed, it doesn’t mix well with the folk aspect of this Australian band’s style, the vocals are delivered in a dishonest manner, an unrealistic pretence that distracts from what could be some quite good songs. The voice is a definite annoyance and the music often wanders into big silly solos, ‘Company Sin’ being a number one perpetrator.
It’s the kind of music you’d find a few stoners in a beach shack really getting into, nodding heads, shutting eyes and missing the point. The acoustic and slide-guitars are played by the lead multi-instrumentalist with gusto and invention and every now and then on the album a very promising intro starts like ‘What You Want’, a good track only hindered by the vocals which luckily disappear for some nice lengths of pure, glistening music.
What a song ‘Damned to hell’ is though, clocking in at only 1:49, this short piece is like a medieval ukulele dream, it’s an anomaly, soon replaced by more neo-reggae trash found in the form of ‘Hello’, but for that brief minute and a half the pretentious streaming farce of the rest of the album can almost be forgotten.
This band have enough critical acclaim to their name to be spared accolade here, but I just see that the title of another six-minute, hopeless opus found at number 8. ‘Bound to Ramble’ quite sums them up. A lot of doggerel, with the occasional nice tune and melody and the ultra-rare good song that occurs half way through this long-player, and the word ‘long’ isn’t used flippantly.
A good few tracks are over five minutes, one over ten and they’re not engrossing, they don’t come across as brilliant works of magnificence, massive in stature and fully deserving of your undivided concentration like, say The Mars Volta or Pink Floyd, no, they come across as pointless meandering rambling shambles with badly-conceived words sung in such a fake and annoying tone, tut.
In their homeland, the album’s gone multi-platinum and ‘Zebra’ has won an award for best song of 2004 beating Jet’s ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’, but astonishingly in reality, even Jet’s ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’ is better than ‘Zebra’ and that’s saying something.
Struggling to be ‘Sublime’ by melding all his words together with ‘bwa’ sounds when singing, John Butler manages here only to accomplish a lengthy album of lengthy songs with OK bits here and there. It may have sold a lot in Australia and it may sell a lot over here, but it doesn’t win my vote.