The Sleepy Jackson
Lovers (Astralwerks) It starts off as a dreamy little trip, this tale of Lovers wrought by Australian collective the Sleepy Jackson, but quickly becomes dramatically different from track to track. Luke Steele crafts poignant poetry for his songs, even when it’s painfully mundane as with, “I ate all my food which should have lasted two weeks” on “Miniskirt.” Surrounding himself with a hired crew of musicians to help build mystery around the central core of troubled love, loneliness, death, Steele’s usual suspects are those found lurking in the lyric sheets of indie pop. Lovers wants to be a monumentally moving piece of work, the kind of album that makes the tears trickle down your forlorn cheeks as you lie in bed in your darkened room. Steele feels your pain, but you’ll have to excuse his creative ADD. The problem with this occasionally brilliant collection (particularly “Good Dancers” and “Mourning Rain”) is that Steele simply cannot commit himself to a genre, which is a gimmick that has well and truly run its course. The album has no clear trajectory, boinging from British invasion-style pop (“Vampire Racecourse”) and a less-bombastic Midnight Oil shout out (“Rain Falls for Wind”) to country-fried sleepers (“Miniskirt”), with a very stupid spoken-word thing (“Fill Me With Apples”) thrown in for good (?) measure. The stylistic schizophrenia swirling around the kernel of good writing ultimately hamstrings this project, which is a shame given the richness of the songs’ content. (Thursday, March 18, 8pm @ Exodus)
This article appears in March 19 • 2004.