In Tender Is the Night, American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald explored the sociological flaws and twisted egos that lay beneath the superficially beautiful cultural era Fitzgerald termed ‘the Jazz Age’. Centred on protagonist Dick Diver’s social, professional, personal and alcoholic proclivities, Fitzgerald’s novel finds the Jazz Age in a state of indulgent excess and on the cusp of permanent decline: to offer a recent historical context, it’s the coke and ‘ludes saturated Los Angeles 1974 to San Francisco’s acid-spiked 1966.
Melbourne band Dick Diver are as glistening and glamorous as the singed piece of toast the band describes in elegantly banal detail in Alice, the second track from the band’s second full-length album Calendar Days or the futility of channel surfing in the charmingly disaffected Gap Life.
And therein exists Dick Diver’s brilliant charm. Like Ray Davies, whose creative genius was to create songs that transposed a sociological experience into its natural musical form, Calendar Days is less a linear aggregation of songs than a socio-musical conceptual experience. The genius of Dick Diver – and, accusations of hyperbole aside, it is genius – is to capture the banal reality of life in a suburban share house, and turn it into a seamless set of pop songs that take you to a place we all know, and sometimes love.
Contrary to the all-too-typical sharehouse dynamic, Calendar Days is characterised by common and united purpose, with ne’er a stick yellow note on the milk, nor an unpaid telephone bill to be found. On Blue And That there’s a lazy tale of wasted leisure times; the organ, keyboard and saxophone add a glimmer of excitement to an otherwise languid afternoon just doing stuff. Close your eyes, and Calendar Days takes you into a kitchen lined with fading brown lino and cupboards lined with lurid orange contact where the days are dragging and the fun’s only just beginning.
Water Damage is brutally honest in its exposition of the shit that clutters up our daily life; Steph Hughes’ vocals hang in the background like a postcard of a place we’d all rather be visiting. The sparse Two Year Lease is a metaphor for the transient pleasures of youth; no-one has ever worn a lime green shirt of the Moffs-quality pop beauty of Lime Green Shirt. Bondi 98 is every bit as invigorating and aesthetically pleasing as the NSW Tourist Bureau would have us believe that fading beach paradise still is, while Languages Of Love reconstructs romantic attachment as a series of chance linguistic encounters and a crystal clear pop sensibility.
Fitzgerald’s protagonist only ever wanted to be a great psychiatrist. By the end of the novel, Diver’s life and career was on a downward trajectory, his youthful promise eroded by alcohol, adultery and a litany of personality flaws. Dick Diver, on the other hand, is on the way up, and their best days are still in front of them.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Alice
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: THE KINKS, THE GO-BETWEENS, and sitting around in the backyard with a beer and a half-consumed bag of Drum.
In A Word: Laconic
