Once upon a time Michael Halloran played guitar in a young rock’n’roll band that enjoyed its ephemeral moment of national recognition. Like so many bands before, Halloran’s efforts at climbing the greasy pole of success were hampered by a few choice blows from the blunt stick of commercial indifference and the distracting influence of rock’n’roll ego.
Faced with the temptation to degenerate into the proverbial bitter old rocker, Halloran’s response was to regroup, regenerate and revitalise. Subsequent journeys led him to put together a colourful cast of local and international supporting characters – sinners, all of them, in the most flattering sense of the term.
Produced by former Beast of Bourbon Brian Hooper, and featuring contributions from Spencer Jones, John Nolan (Powder Monkeys) and Dee Pop (Gun Club), Me Soufler is Halloran’s first release on French swamp-garage label Beast Records. Largely comprised of tracks found on Halloran’s 2010 Australian release augmented with some more recent compositions, Songs for the Man, Me Soufle is a rich mixture of wry observation and social commentary, rendered with the unique Antipodean swamp rock wash European audiences continue to salivate over.
On Monastic Love Halloran is at his most intense and cathartic; on Point Of View Halloran tears a new orifice in the already ravaged battered body of rock’n’roll. But it’s in tracks such as I Wanna Be Loved and Approached By A Blind Man that Halloran is at his poetic best; the former is laden with pleas for emotional attachment, the latter lays bare the confronting reality of human indifference. Michael Halloran’s world isn’t one filled with roses and lollypops; then again, neither is real life.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Monastic Love
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Brian Henry Hooper and Spencer P Jones
In A Word: Poetic
