T-shirt Tommy Hafey still reckons footy is a simple game. Not that you’d recognise it from the AFL’s attempts to re-engineer the laws of the game to create a free-flowing, risk-free, sanitised commercial product that’ll appeal to everyone from Broadmeadows to Bondi to Budapest. The once simple instruction manual has mutated into a Tolstoy novel of impenetrable complexity: once upon a coach’s instructions would suffice for direction; now, a tribe of lawyers and a cabal of management consultants advise on every move, on and off the field.
Mobile Cemetery, the latest release from local instrumental duo Footy, is an exercise in elegant simplicity. It’s not easily categorised: Realisation, the opening track, is the haunting side of jazz, walking casually into the spaces of the night like a walk-on character in a Jean-Luc Goddard film. Racist Lawn Ornaments – surely, the best name for a song in recent memory – is a piano-filled psychedelic storm waiting to break, but never does. You’re on edge, and anything could happen, but you’re left somewhere between the Brothers Grimm and Dostoyevsky.
Endless Selection of Channels is a metaphor for the retarded contentment of the western world; it’s dark, atmospheric and promises everything that it can’t provide, just like that stupid electronic box filled with moronic entertainment that we’re convinced can help us to escape the frustrations of daily life. Sea Home is tranquil, the piano skipping across the soundscape like a bird exploring the wonders of the natural world. What’s going on with Workin’? There’s some disconcerting dialogue in the background, and then the folk spirit of ’65 shines through the darkness, but only just. And then there’s the title track: again, it’s sparse – there’s so little fat here even fascist Michelle Bridges would be impressed – until the dulcet tones of ‘70s pop kick in, and you realise shit’s not as bad as you thought it might be.
It takes a lot to create perfect simplicity, and Footy has done it. Sit back, and ponder what this all means. You’ll be all the better for it.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Endless Selection of Channels
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: SIMPLICITY
In A Word: Elegant
