It’s hard to think of many people in Melbourne who’ve been making it in music for more than a decade and are still regarded with the almost universal affection bestowed upon Evelyn Morris. More people are doing things, tastes are more fickle and fleeting, and the stayers disappear overseas or into obscurity without warning.
It’s also hard to say why Calluses is the best thing Morris has done without reaching for the hoary clichés invited by such a dynamic performer, someone who started off terrorising audiences on drums in 9/11-gag-loving Baseball and the confrontational anti-music of True Radical Miracle before reinventing herself as a one-woman dream pop dynamo.
But it’s the best thing she’s done, hands down. Pikelet’s latest release demonstrably benefits from the long 2010’s Stems LP as a tantalising hint of the glory to come, and it was certainly worth the long wait. Morris’s collaboration with three other luminaries from the extended Chapter scene, first brought to bear in Stems, has hit its stride in songs like Projections and Pressure Cooker, where more vibrant song structures and tones have been given a wider berth than her earlier solo stuff.
All of this makes it difficult to tell what’s the product of her own continual evolution as a musician and what’s the result of some incubation time – they’ve performed some of these tracks in the years since recalibrated equilibrium between her and the rest of the band. If there is one sense of Morris making a concrete intervention into her own work, it’s the sense that she keeps a leash on things in the style she’s adhered to as long as she’s been around – gentle without being sugary, bold but economical with her instruments, and a voice that’s neither menacing nor saccharine but clearly wouldn’t take any guff.
BY SEAN GLEESON
Best Track: Projections
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Strange Mercy ST VINCENT, Head Over Heels COCTEAU TWINS, Black Brown Green Grey White KES
In A Word: Sublime
