Is there a neurological condition that describes the association between a song and a year? Sometimes it’s inevitable – Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit will forever be 1991, The Who’s My Generation is 1965, The Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams is 1984 and The Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen is so obviously 1977 it barely merits comment.
But when I hear Closed Hands, Full of Friends, the opening track from Foy Vance’s album, Joy of Nothing, it’s 1979 all over again – which is strange, ‘cause Foy Vance wasn’t anywhere on anyone’s radar back then. The pounding pop-rock beat could be the soundtrack from the emergence of FM radio in Australia – or even the signal for the impending demise of AM radio – and the vocals are packed with that emphatic pop star angst that was all over Saturday afternoon pop shows back then. And that, strangely enough, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
On the title track, emotional pleading probably gets in the way of a half-decent song; At Least My Heart Was Open is so heavy it almost suffocates the melody. You and I channels James Taylor without the junk; Feel for Me is more 1985 than 1979, with all the saccharine-sweet sincerity that oozed out of the radio that year.
Janey is the pleading of a bloke struggling to make sense of love in a post-adolescent world, where the only weapons of defence are an acoustic guitar and a dog-eared copy of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Paper Prince does male singer-songwriter angst behind a thin blues veneer, It Was Good is almost too nice, which is a charge that could be equally made at the touching, tender and almost gospel-esque Guiding Light (featuring Ed Sheeran). Beauty can be a wonderful thing, but it can be too heavy to handle.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Closed Hands, Full of Friends
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, JAMES TAYLOR and JACKSON BROWNE.
In A Word: Emphatic
