Emma Swift, Blake Scott, the Avalanches and others: the best Australian albums of 2020
Emma Swift – Blonde on the Tracks
Every now and then an album breaks through the usual channels to make fools of what is left of the local music industry. Emma Swift’s album of Bob Dylan covers, Blonde on the Tracks, was one of them. While the album was a hit on US and UK Americana charts, Australian radio programmers couldn’t work out what format to slot it in. Was this country music or indie? Listeners didn’t care: Blonde on the Tracks stormed into the top 10 of the Australian mainstream charts on its first week of release.
The crowning glory is Swift’s version of I Contain Multitudes, from Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways. “It’s a love song, and a prayer,” she said of the song. “And it’s about his life, but it’s also about what art and music and literature can mean to humanity. And to me that’s an extraordinary thing to meditate on, particularly when our social interactions are so limited.” All of the above could be said of Blonde on the Tracks itself. – Andrew Stafford
The Avalanches – We Will Always Love You
We Will Always Love You is a miraculous-sounding record, infatuated with the universe and the infinite nature of energy, light and – especially – sounds that echo in the void for eons. Sample-based music is inherently tactile; artists like the Avalanches pick up and tool around with old vinyl that’s traded hands before. And on this record, they’ve leaned into that tactility and the sensoriality of music, turning images into sound and back again (Star Song.IMG, when run through a spectograph, produces an image of troubled Hollywood starlet Barbara Payton); and feeding the bleeps of the Arecibo Message – a 1974 broadcast from a radio telescope – into a midi controller, to create twinkly alien song.
Tracks on the album bleed into one another, with threads from early on picked up again later, all in a great reminder that music lives forever in space and time, and we’re all in it together. – Brodie Lancaster
Gordi – Our Two Skins
2020 was meant to be the year doctor-slash-songwriter Gordi (AKA Sophie Payten) ditched her hospital scrubs and went global with a sophomore album of lush folktronica. But soon after she jetted off, another global phenomenon sent her packing back home to Australia. Gordi found herself launching Our Two Skins to an empty Sydney Opera House via a livestreamed concert. The album – recorded with Bon Iver collaborators Zach Hanson and Chris Messina on her family farm in Canowindra in the central west of New South Wales – documents Gordi coming to terms with her sexuality against the backdrop of the 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite (Radiator, Hate the World, Limits), and the death of her beloved grandmother (Sandwiches).
On show are Gordi’s trademark hooks and harmonies, but so is a new assurance as a storyteller as she peels back layers of identity and social conditioning. Days after Our Two Skins came out, Melbourne’s second coronavirus lockdown came into force, and Gordi put down her guitar to don full PPE on the frontlines of hospital wards. Let’s hope 2021 is the year she can finally ditch her day job. – Janine Israel
Vanessa Perica Orchestra – Love Is a Temporary Madness
The big sound and the swing got me at first. Well, after I got past asking, “Who makes a big band jazz album these days when you can barely get paid enough to pay two musicians and a rhythm box?”
There’s energy and power and those tunes are strong: Dance of the Zinfandels and Scar for Charlie have killer melodic hooks, and the drums are stunning. But after the rush, the quieter moments when the orchestra might be down to three or four – like the piano and trumpet exchanges in Saint Lazare and the title track – are just as mesmerising. – Bernard Zuel
Blake Scott – Niscitam
This artfully paranoid solo album from Blake Scott is populated by hardboiled antiheroes, with the former Peep Tempel frontman slipping mercurially in and out of characters and his own moods. The one constant is the solid grooves from the rhythm section, Jacey Ashton and Nick Finch, allowing Scott to skulk and scuff his feet, shifting between spoken word and singing.
The opener, Bone Heavy, ramps up the pressure as surely as thumb screws. Other tracks indulge a literary attention to detail, including Bullfloat Zen (“In the cab of the old Daihatsu, Bruno is cooking chilies with his lighter”) and the filthy funk number Fever (“I let the brushfire fill my lungs”). In Kalashnikov, Scott devolves into a sinister, slurring timbre to inhabit an ugly aggressor, before breaking character: “One a week, as we speak, women killed by men in this country / Anyway, how good’s the UFC?” The resolute Love dispels all that claustrophobia. We might assume that Scott is exercising a duty of care. – Jenny Valentish
Snowy Band – Audio Commentary
Audio Commentary, the divine, fragmentary debut by Melbourne’s Snowy Band, is folk music stripped back to its barest elements. With the exception of the motorik Never Change and the sparse anthem Rest of Your Life, these songs mostly comprise the near-whispered vocals of frontman Liam “Snowy” Halliwell and looping melodies from his delicately picked nylon-string acoustic guitar. Occasionally, another element will appear as if from nowhere – a ghostly saxophone line, a cymbal crash, soft vocal harmonies from Halliwell’s band – and the effect is combustive. It’s delicate, 70sstyle indie folk rendered as binary code; endless waves of zeroes shattered by occasional, unexpected ones.
These disarming arrangements are paired with equally unexpected lyrics: casual but meticulously constructed missives on true love, loss, and the passing of time. Halliwell’s various musical projects have always showcased a canny awareness of the strangeness and awkwardness of human interaction but here he’s more earnest and more economical, making even the simplest words feel revelatory. – Shaad d’Souza
Archie Roach – The Songs of Charcoal Lane
Three decades after Archie Roach laid down his astonishing debut record on tape, he sat at his kitchen table and revisited the songs for this anniversary release. Recording at home with a tight crew of two musicians and an engineer, Roach would do two or three runs of each tune, sipping tea between takes.
He slows the pace of each, his wellworn voice a much richer instrument 30 years on, able to wrestle a different level of intensity out of these heartrending songs. – Nathan Jolly
Colour Club Records – VA001
No album is more emblematic of the survival spirit of Melbourne’s music scene in 2020 than Colour Club Records’ VA001: a fundraising compilation from the underground Carlton nightclub Colour. Colour’s precious late licence, upstairs band room and downstairs dance floor facilitate the intermingling of live music fans and club kids (“jazz doofs” have happened), and the compilation is similarly structured: free-wheeling musicianship on one side, pristine electronic production on the other.
There are Proto Moro’s wonky, saltbush-jazz freakouts; chirping, emuhouse from Mildlife’s Kevin McDowell; and a trance rave-up with smoke machine synths. Put plainly, the compilation bangs – but its significance extends beyond exceptional dance music.
2020 made the club’s operators swap sub bass for pizza bases; sell bonkers branded bathrobes and slides; help Melbourne’s venues secure emergency funding; and even hand-deliver this compilation. Without our venues, artists and audiences will be stuck in Zoom purgatory. VA001 is a totem of one venue’s determination during a desperate year. – Nick Buckley
Tkay Maidza – Last Year Was Weird Vol. 2
In the earlier years of her career, Tkay Maidza melded high-energy pop, hip-hop and electronic music. Hers were the sort of songs made for Hottest 100s and festival stages but ones that their creator has begun to identify less and less with.
Then in 2018 Tkay started to shift her sound, dabbling in reggae and gospel. This year she ditched her major label for tghe forward-thinking UK imprint 4AD. Her new eight-track release, Last Year Was Weird Vol. 2 – the second in a planned trilogy – definitively ushers in a new era for the Adelaide-raised rapper.
The EP glides between gritty, notso-radio-friendly rap and breezy bits of funk, like the excellent Don’t Call Again. Every song transmits a casual assurance, making this feel like the work of an artist who is exactly where she wants to be. – Katie Cunningham
Washington – Batflowers
A decade after her dazzling debut, Megan Washington hit a career high point with Batflowers: a postnatal, post-giving-any-fucks response to suggestions that she now belongs in the adult/contemporary category.
From the Radiohead-esque time signatures of Dark Parts to the New Wave synth strut of Switches, Washo threw caution to the wind – and threw it all at the wall. Unsurprisingly, a lot of it stuck. Her trademark ballads got a rework, too; closer Kiss Me Like We’re Gonna Die is raw, and dripping with soul. Wildly imaginative and sonically ambitious, it’s the gift of an artist falling back in love with what she does. – Jonno Seidler
RVG – Feral
An interior year requires interior music, and RVG’s second album is an invitation into an intimate world. On Feral, the Melbourne post-punk/jangle pop band peers into lives both ordinary and strange, from the breakdown of a relationship (I Used to Love You) and mounting family tension (Alexandra) to a man tied to both faith and science (Christian Neurosurgeon). Perfect Day is especially apt for this year, offering a generous, hopeful perspective in a time of uncertainty: “I only want you to see the things that I think you deserve / You’ve got too much going on right now.”
Propelled by Romy Vager’s emotionally devastating vocals, this record further cements RVG as a local leader of the genre, delivering on both sound and spirit in spades. – Giselle Au-NhienNguyen
Alex the Astronaut – The Theory of Absolutely Nothing
Best known for Not Worth Hiding – the uplifting 2017 single that became an anthem for the marriage equality movement – Alexandra Lynn’s first full album is filled with stories told with the same honesty, poetry, humour and detail that should sit her in the canon of Australian singer-storytellers alongside Paul Kelly, Archie Roach and Courtney Barnett. Some of these songs are about other people – a teen girl dealing with an unwanted pregnancy (Lost); a woman talking her way through a physically abusive relationship (I Like to Dance) – and others seem more personal: the reflective Split the Sky, the furious I Didn’t Know, and album highlight Banksia, dedicated to a friend who died at 21 with a lighters-up chorus bound to have audiences “singing for you, from the front to the back / they’re all singing for you”.
Her lyrical strength is matched by her ability to capture a mood (Happy Song does exactly what it says on the tin), and Lynn’s charming but forthright personality shines throughout: this is, after all, the 25-year-old who spent much of this month in a public spat with Mark Latham, and closes her album with a recorded message: “I hope you’ve had a nice time listening. Thank you for staying this long.” – Steph Harmon