Talk about a lot to get your head around. For their second release, Melbourne band Mum
Smokes have decided to go with a double album: two separate discs recorded at entirely
different times, comprised of 31 tracks in total, all written by the four different songwriters
who make up the band. There’s ambient drone jams, there’s ragged indie rock, there’s
fragile pop, and that’s just one of the discs. It should, by rights, be a complete and utter
mess – it should be an overindulgent dog’s breakfast. It definitely takes more than a couple of listens for it to even start to make sense. But when it clicks and when it becomes just a little bit familiar, for some reason, it all works. Rather beautifully, too.

As could be expected, it’s the poppier material that tends to make an impression first.
Lead single Left For Dead from ‘House Music’ is all jagged rhythms, manic backing vocals
and pop nostalgia – an immediate standout, as is the softly sung pop gem that precedes
it, Jazz Tiger. But there’s the other side of the two albums as well – ‘House Music’ opens with the busted up noise and feedback of Catherine, and later revisits the soundscapes in a
more ambient format in the guise of Meltdown Creation, two minutes of atmospheric ebb
and fl ow that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Brian Eno’s late Seventies albums.
‘Easy’, on the other hand, begins with the dreamy Wrap Up before drifting into the
more driven Non Commercial Lifestyle Activities. Later in the disc, 1949 starts with the kind of ragged guitar that could fit within Eno’s earlier Seventies output. It’s intentionally not as virtuosic as Robert Fripp’s skewed take on pop, but it shows a lot of the same kinds of sensibilities – turning the genre upside down and injecting it with noise.

On the whole, ‘Easy’ stands as a more linear work than ‘House Music’. There’s less in
the way of soundscapes and sonic deviations, though it’s no less interesting in terms of
its writing. You could argue that the collection should have been released as separate
albums, but the sheer volume and variety spread across the two discs really is a huge part
of its draw, and the sequencing moves from track to track with enough delicacy that the
variety is rarely jarring. It’s a unique, often obtuse but ultimately brilliant collection of music
that shouldn’t be missed.

Alistair Wallis

Mum Smokes have been very quiet since 2007 with their last live appearance being at the Dirty Three-curated All Tomorrow’s Parties in the UK. But with a double album loaded with pop gems and instrumental curiosities it appears to be time for these Melbourne abstract popsters to come in from the cold.
 
Originally a three piece formed in 2003, the band is now made up of four songwriters already well known to Melbourne punters: The Ancients’ Jonathan Michell, Karl Scullin of KES Band fame, Julian Patterson from Minimum Chips and Zond’s Justin Fuller.
 
Easy/House Music is the band’s first offering since 2005’s much-lauded Railroads, Chasms, and Fantasies and, though packaged together, the two albums are very much stand-alone works. The 31 songs swing from quiet acoustic reflections, rippling instrumentals and white noise sunsets, to lo-fi pop and the occasional rockier number, and chart the evolution of the group from 2006 right through to late 2008.
 
It’s a difficult collection to categorize, but despite the broad spectrum of styles at play, there is a unity here that highlights a patient and considered approach to the arrangements. The laconic melodies of the four vocalists duck and weave around each other, while the lyrics share stories of inner city share houses, fractured relationships and couch dreams.
 
'Gypsy Joker' sounds like The Pastels covering Burt Bacharach and 'House Music' could be an instrumental outtake from Starlight Walker-era Silver Jews. Album highlight, 'Left For Dead' combines Scullin’s elfin vocal stylings and eerie Manson family wails with a rhythm track that could have been stolen from Matador lo-fi pioneers, Fuck. 'Easy', on the other hand, recalls the blissed-out fantasies of Galaxie 500.
 
This is no doubt one of this year’s best local releases: an album that gets closer and more affecting with each spin, rewarding the listener with hidden secrets every step of the way.

Karl Smith

POLYESTER BRUNSWICK ST FITZRO + FLINDERS LANE CITY STORES AND MISSING LINK IN BOURKE ST ARE CURRENTLY STOCKING MUM SMOKES' FIRST ALBUM.  JUST LIKE IT SAYS ABOVE. FOR $20

Mum Smokes
Easy/House Music

Mum Smokes make the magnificent out of the mundane on their new double LP 'Easy/House Music', writes SHAUN PRESCOTT. Cover art by MARK RODDA.

In a world full of excuses to be angry and demonstrative, it’s a feat to pull off one album like Mum Smokes have here – let alone two. Rather than make blatant coruscating statements, this music provides a meditation on the day-to-day, rarely resorting to confrontation or bombast. Domestic set pieces riddle both of these albums, and along with that tact comes the idle sunburst philosophising and 20-something minutiae that has dominated this form for most of its history.

It’s a subtle craft, moulding the mundane into something faintly exotic. Those who fail at it do so miserably, purveying a desperate sense of privileged self-entitlement, the type of naval-gazing that sets all but the participants’ teeth on edge. Far from that, Mum Smokes render the smallest, most petulant trials, such as cleaning your house for a visiting lover, or fending off schoolyard bullies, into heartrendingly touching pop songs that prefer to show rather than tell.

It’s there in the album titles really: Easy and House Music. Easy is the standout of the two, recorded between January 2006 and March 2007. It best showcases the distinct nuances that each member brings to the table, and Mum Smokes is at a clear advantage when it comes to adept songwriters: founder Jonathan Michell, also of The Ancients, stands alongside Karl Scullin of KES fame, Julian Patterson of Minimum Chips and JK Fuller of ZOND. It’s amazing - considering the apparently disjunct parameters involved - how precisely these songwriters fit together. They don’t so much blend in together – because who could blend into Scullin’s voice, for example – but each personal touch compliments whatever follows.

Take Scullin’s ‘These Fish’, for example: an upbeat jaunt complaining of (or perhaps dryly celebrating) the baffling distance between polar opposites. Michell takes the reign thereafter, delivering two of my favourite songs. ‘Cheese on Toast’ is a funereally-paced piano ballad, vividly evoking dusty corners and overgrown backyards in inner-city share houses. It contains a melancholy that threatens to flood into depressiveness with its pining for days of meagre food budgets and plenty of time spent grappling with ideas and ambition. Patterson elaborates on this theme with the following title track, a gorgeously warm low-key diary entry, drawn out by a precise bass line and lilting sonorous guitar touches. When Patterson admits that all he has is “waiting for you”, the ensemble marches inexorably onwards for minutes into an exhausted end. Indeed, in the world of Mum Smokes there’s always plenty of time, nothing is ever rushed, and Easy seems haunted by the falsity that anything will come in time - that comfort and a happy ending is something one is entitled to.

There is a wealth of material on Easy that resonates on this universal level, but there are moments of lyrical inscrutability that tie the theme together, that buoy the heavy blows with a suitably plangent respite. Take JK Fuller’s ‘1949’ for example, a wry and sardonic rocker replete with dryly distorted guitars, coloured with choral keyboard chimes. It’s jaded and aloof like Sonic Youth circa Goo. Elsewhere, Michell offers a figurative and malleable love song in the form of ‘Cathy’.

Easy is the type of album that could provide months of aural stimulus, so full it is with tiny hidden epiphanies, so it’s rather excessive that another fully-fleshed album should be packaged with it. House Music is much looser, more musically effusive and, in some cases, determinably upbeat. It’s as if sometime between these albums, Mum Smokes came to terms with whatever they were grappling with on Easy and decided to lay down a more spontaneous set of tunes. House Music is let down by a fairly perfunctory beginning: after a short droning instrumental, ‘Jazz Tiger’ veers into jam band territory filtered through a lethargic indie-rock backbeat. By the time Michell begins singing it already feels as if they’re stranded between ideas. A soaring keyboard coloured finale saves it from becoming tiring.

The album improves from there and peaks at ‘Gypsy Joker’, returning to the themes explored on Easy but delivered here as a wisened anecdote. ‘Health and Girls’ is the highlight, and perhaps most exemplary, exhibiting a side of Scullin’s persona that his own project has rarely – if ever – revealed. It’s an ominously drifting soundscape walled by airy keyboard drones and Scullin’s magically individual voice. Overall, House Music is the more experimental album: it does drift, weaving strange psychedelic textures through partially-formed pop songs. It’s head music peppered with pop respite. Basically, the inverse of Easy.

Both albums are remarkable though, and this is a very generous and outstanding offering from a band whose constituents already dominate over their peers elsewhere. At a time when indie rock seems to be burrowing deeper into the crevices of its own tiring, white, middle class psyche, Mum Smokes has retrieved some of the facets that made this avenue so appealing to begin with: a precarious middle ground between prettiness and confrontation, shyness and calm confidence.

It’s music for youths who are growing irreversibly older. It’s also an album that is unlikely to be bettered in 2009.

+

Easy/House Music is out now on Sensory Projects.

 

Life's vicissitudes, dream encounters, emotional confusion and feelings of melancholic joy are steadfast themes in pop music, but so rarely transposed with the uncanny, true-to-experience ring managed by much-loved local outfit, Mum Smokes. In the same way a good friend's company and conversation can coax personal realisation after realisation and set your mind to thinking extra lucidly about time's weird ways, so too can the unforced, dead-honest songs of this preternaturally gifted group. Never forcing a point or quick to trade meanings, Mum Smokes' approach is to marvel, not to master - working first as melodic salve, second as entertainment.

EASY / HOUSE MUSIC is the sprawling, double-album follow-up to 2005's hallowed RAILROADS, CHASMS and FANTASIES debut that fans dared wish for from this band. All four members share the writing distinctively, often track-by-track, meaning ensured variety and the futile-fun chance to play favourites - is it Jon the Gypsy Joker, Julian King of Time, Karl the Earth Sprite or Space Commander Justin? Up and downcast tunes run a gamut of styles, but always with rich, acoustic-leaning arrangements that bloom with repeated plays and lyrics that'll keep you awake; mad for sadness. An important Australian band to look forward to remembering fondly.

By Mark Gomes

'At The Gate'