River'Esque

I think this album's greatest sin is that it doesn't know when to stop.

I was introduced to this Geelong based band through one of my coworkers recommending the track For a Short Time to me and a few coworkers and I decided to listen to the full album. The project reminds me of that Jimmy Barnes and Paul Kelly kind of Aussie country music, and it usually doesn't feel like it's trying to be mean-spirited. The state of country music nowadays made me really wary of what might happen and there isn't anything on here that's completely out of pocket.

For the positives, I really think the vocalist has a really good amount of charisma. He really sounds like you're sitting down and having a nice yarn with him. He has songs about wanting to pay rent with someone else which is kind of funny, the ghosts of an old gold rush town playing cricket together, a cup of coffee in the morning. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of the album is held back by the fact he doesn't have the best lyrical chops and doesn't quite know when the end of his songs should be. As a result you have the song The Ghosts of Walhalla essentially having 4 choruses for no reason by the time it finishes, or Five Shows a Day which sprawls for way too long. It also means that some tracks just don't hit the emotional peak they could, like the track For a Short Time which my co-worker mentioned, which is about how just a short time can really mean to someone.

Finally there are a few weirdly mean-spirited moments on here that just hit wrong. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous felt underbaked and I could never quite tell what he was actually taking aim at. It sounded like the ability to be ignorant of the world but IDK there just didn't feel like anything meaty that he went into. Lights of Devonport though was an especially bizzare, angry song about some guys in a pub in Devonport, Tasmania that just feels really insecure, with him imagining them cheering "Good bye and good riddance" behind his back and then just namecalling them... and it goes on for so long, I think it's the longest song on this thing. It kind of soured my opinion on the last leg of the album as a result.