Confidently treading through a variety of stylistic settings, the second LP from Melbourne boy/girl duo Big Scary rocks, yearns, reflects and even jests here and there. Although guitars occasionally step forward, the root of the record’s emotionally involved song craft is the piano. Also, jagged rhythms and chopped up drumbeats, along with regular emphatic lyrical repetition, alludes to a hip hop influence.
Tom Iansek showcases the broad reach of his versatile high-seeking register. He doesn’t refrain from allowing cracks to show on plundering opener Hello, My Name Is, which furthers the song’s ambivalent establishment of what defines him. Luck Now’s composed melancholy tone makes the revelation “You say my love is just cold repetition re-done/See that I’m losing more heart every day” vibrate with questioning vulnerability rather than bitterness. One of the record’s few conventional rock songs, the eastern-inflected Belgian Blues, sounds indebted to Jeff Buckley’s Eternal Life – an impression fortified by the fact Iansek’s warbling falsetto sounds effortless.
The strongest songs appear on the album’s subtler and reflective second half. On Twin Rivers Iansek’s pleading “Gonna have to wake up, I don’t want to have to wake up again this morning” is supplemented by Jo Syme’s placid “The conversation’s so old, we can’t even muster a fight” thus elaborating on the narrator’s anxious aversion. Invest is an assured piece of sombre neo-soul, while the disarming (and deceivingly titled) Syme-led Why Hip-Hop Sucks In ’13 points in the direction of UK trip-hop acts Frou Frou and Morcheeba. The sprinkling piano and suggestive vocal wandering in concluding track, Final Thoughts With Tom And Jo, is the record’s most experimental moment and evokes images of a new day rising.
The songs on Not Art have an interlocution quality that allows listeners to not only become acquainted with the record’s search through ideas of identity and the locus of love, but to engage with the thematic curiosity on a personal level.
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
Best Track: Invest
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Sun CAT POWER, High Violet THE NATIONAL, Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk JEFF BUCKLEY
In A Word: Climbing
