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INDIE POP/ROCK
Here Comes Everybody
Spacey Jane
AWAL
★★★★
The highest-ranking Australian song on Triple J’s Hottest 100 poll for 2020 – and landing just one spot shy of the top – Spacey Jane’s Booster Seat was a perfectly relatable (and replayable) slice of poignancy for the pandemic’s first year. In it, singer/guitarist Caleb Harper described the quicksand grip of anxiety, even as the Fremantle quartet applied bright-eyed guitar-pop to those downbeat sentiments. That’s generally how the band operates, both on its 2020 debut Sunlight and on this well-crafted follow-up. The music is catchy and accessible, and Harper’s plaintive singing sounds fairly resilient, never edging into exaggerated emotion. But listen to the lyrics, and there’s a recurring theme of feeling lost. That makes Here Comes Everybody another inventory of loose ends that’s cleaner and more classic-sounding than Sunlight, with its contrast between perky melodies and wobbly emotions going back to The Go-Betweens.
Against the chiming jangle of Clean My Car, Harper blames romantic distress for a lack of interest in his daily routine, but his listlessness probably extends far beyond that. Both propulsive opener Sitting Up and the slower, dreamier Not What You Paid For reference self-medicating with alcohol, with the latter memorably admitting personal defeat: “You caught me at a bad time / But to be honest there hasn’t been a good one for a while.” If songs like that one and Haircut – which calls the titular act “a shitty attempt at a change-up” – sound like pure downers in theory, they’re rounded out by the band’s warm melodic sensibilities and shimmering forward motion. Bassist Peppa Lane, guitarist Ashton Hardman-Le Cornu and drummer Kieran Lama share a wavelength and add valuable shades of depth to Harper’s understated laments, as on Lunchtime, which rides an itchy momentum through to a bracing chorus. Taking its name from the working title for Wilco’s 2001 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Here Comes Everybody is much more subtle and controlled than that famously experimental outing. Yet Harper’s lyrics capture a similar sense of searching and grasping at evasive resolution in three- and four-minute bursts. His problems won’t disappear overnight, but putting them to paper is worthwhile nonetheless, as much for him as for the rest of us.
Doug Wallen