As far as recording locations go, NSW trio Mere Women could hardly have picked a more fitting environment to track their second album than a freezing, dimly-lit warehouse. The resultant Your Town is a record absolutely steeped in the gloomy atmospherics that those conditions suggest. Clocking in at a little over 30 minutes, Your Town is an urgent, claustrophobic blast of reverb-saturated post-punk. And yet beneath the band’s DIY punk exterior, there lies a definite pop sensibility. It only surfaces every now and then, but it’s there, lurking in the shadows.
Your Town opens with the jagged stop-start rhythms of Home. Singer/keyboardist Amy Wilson’s voice is desperate, impassioned. She sings, “I wanna go home/Light up the window so I can find my way.”The title track and lead single Our Street follow suit in the desperation stakes, charting a particularly Australian brand of suburban malaise.
The key ingredient of Mere Women’s edgy post-punk mix, though, is Flyn Mckinnirey’s guitar. From the snaking, toe-tapping riff of Our Street to the incendiary chords that fuel album highlight Golden, Mckinnirey’s reverb-heavy guitar elevates everything it touches.
The excellent Moon Creeper closes the album and provides the biggest hint yet of Mere Women’s crossover potential. With a number of the songs, though, it would have been nice to see the band tease out the melodic potential a little more; to see them take a riff or section and expand it to its limit, instead of adhering to the no-frills songwriting ethic that governs the majority of their songs. That minor gripe aside, Your Town is an otherwise very solid album from a band on the rise.
BY WAYNE MARSHALL
Best Track: Golden
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: SAVAGES, BATRIDER, LITTLE SCOUT
In A Word: Claustrophobic
