Review by Caitlin Welsh:
For their third (and best) album, ‘Crystal Theatre’, Belles Will Ring have immersed themselves in a deeply claustrophobic world.
Belles Will Ring have had this album in them for a long time. After the “small but perfectly formed” mini-album Broader Than Broadway (2008), Crystal Theatre is a sprawling, moody animal. It’s deeply, inescapably cinematic, as drenched in B-movie Americana and murder-y vibes as it is in the ’60s psych-revivalism we know and love.
While Broader Than Broadway was recorded in frontman Liam Judson’s parents’ living room – the same makeshift studio where he recorded and produced Cloud Control’s Australian Music Prize-winning Bliss Release – Crystal Theatre was put together mostly during stints in borrowed houses in NSW’s central-west region, where the band let themselves and their tunes marinate in isolation. Like Cloud Control, BWR continue to be labeled a Blue Mountains band, despite having long been based in Sydney. Perhaps we find it easier to explain the rich, icy reverb and widescreen atmospherics of Judson’s production style if we can put it down to the mountain air and how people from outside the city are kind of weird and different anyway? (But then we rock hacks always love an origin-story angle, after reviewing the endless parade of latte-sipping, vintage-shirted hipsters from our own dull stomping grounds. Look at the way so many Sydney and Melbourne-based writers talk about The Middle East or Stonefield, hailing as they do from such far-flung and exotic locations as “Townsville” and “a farm”!)
But rather than trying to extricate themselves from that pigeonhole, BWR went ahead and burrowed into it, and it’s paid off spectacularly. There’s a claustrophobic feeling than can come of being alone in a wide open space, and BWR clearly let themselves go a little mad – after all, in country NSW, no one can hear you scream. Songwriters Judson and Aidan Roberts spin tales of men lost in the wilderness – either literally, wandering lonely and resigned to their fate in bleakly gorgeous landscapes; figuratively, as the protagonist in ‘The River; who deals with a sub-verbal madness; or both, like the spurned hunter of ‘I Hear Your Voice On The Wind’.
“I am somewhere by the river now/I lost everyone, I don’t know how,” Judson sighs on ‘The Green’, the small-hours epic that illustrates perfectly how the band use their druggy psych-rock excursions to parallel the madness of isolation. Haloed with Lauren Crew’s ethereal backing vocals, gentle island-strum reverb and seething guitar jams, it’s sad and eerie, but it’s Judson’s vocal performance that ties it all together, mixing a little Morrissey and a little monster into his breathy everyman croon. Similarly, on ‘I Hear Your Voice On The Wind’, he starts sweet and becomes terrifying; a rejected lover hunting the woman who deserted him with a single-mindedness than can only end badly. The track stops a little abruptly, leaving only a few close, ragged breaths next to the mic. The effect of these ever-changing moods is deliciously unsettling, like that classic Hollywood villain – the charming sociopath who can flick the switch from honey-sweet to homicidal at will.
It’s easy to pick out (imagined) cinematic references once you’re sucked into thinking about it: Crew’s lovely snippets of flute seems to echo the Picnic At Hanging Rock soundtrack (aka Scariest Panpipes Ever); the sing-song hook of ‘The River’ is sweet in isolation but takes on a Children of the Corn quality when injected into that lunatic tumble; while the bass groove of ‘Come to the Village’ struts like Pam Grier in a leather trench. The solitary handclaps on ‘I Hear Your Voice On the Wind’ are sharp and reverbed into next week, and crack like a whip, combining with the prairie-ballad rhythms and twangs. Along with the roadhouse swagger of ‘Street Lamp Stomp’ and the Wilco-esque Roberts joint ‘Like A Boxer’, it reveals a flair for Americana that continues to dispel the idea that BWR are ’60s revivalists to a fault.
There are many moments that still feel like “classic” BWR, though. ‘Come North With Me Baby, Wow’, while clunkily-titled, is downright jaunty with its inviting harmonies and rich brass accents, although it still feels like the protagonist is offering an escape route. Album closer ‘Pallisade Alley’ is like the shiny, happy lovechild of The Shins at their best and the Kinks at their most relaxed, and while it’s a genuine stunner – shiny, lushly layered and swimming in “sha-la-las” - taken as part of the album it almost feels like a misstep; its sweetness so at odds with the mood up to that point. That I accept a such a lovely song so begrudgingly only speaks to how successful Crystal Theatre is in creating that mood. It’s an evocative and complicated album, put together by a band who work together as naturally as four limbs on the same beast.
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