by Nick DeRiso
Fallon Cush grows more confident with each passing song on their self-titled debut. Perhaps because singer Steve Smith put this together on the fly, enlivened by passion and not weighed down by heavy planning.
Smith, who wrote all of the songs, began by assembling a group of well-known Australian musicians including bassist Bill Gibson (perhaps best known for his stint with the Lemonheads), guitarist Matt Galvin, keyboardist Scott Aplin, and drummers Josh Schuberth and Bert Thomson. Fallon Cush was then recorded simply on an old-fashioned 16-track, and at break-neck speed, as the group put down 10 songs in just 7 days in Sydney. The album was later mastered at London’s Abbey Road, where a number of rock masterpieces were fashioned by the likes of the Beatles and Pink Floyd.
There is so much to love about Fallon Cush. And the results, nifty and polished though they may be, only hint at where this amalgam could go.
“Tiny Town,” perhaps Fallon Cush’s best cut, begins with a lightly insistent strum before soaring into a power-pop jangle. Smith echoes early John Lennon here, two parts nasal melancholy and one part sneering rock ’n’ roll street urchin. Smith cops to a longing look back, lamenting how he “used to feel, in that tiny town, when the lights when down,” but he hasn’t stopped thinking about getting out. No way: “Today,” Smith sings in a sun-drenched harmony, “can right my wrongs.”
An elegant romanticism is similarly blown apart by an unsaid misstep on “The Trouble with a Moonlit Night.” This swirling keyboard wash ascends behind a lonely piano, as the band bashes toward a Beatle-y epiphany of hippified reverie. The trouble, see, is “a light that leaves you nowhere to hide, while cats sit on the roof counting their lives,” Smith sings. “We sit on the porch in the soft glow, with a secret that we can’t share but we both know.”
As the group charges through these sessions, admittedly, it doesn’t always move far enough past its principal influences. For every “Over Me” (channels Bob Dylan, but adds a modern pop-craft in keeping with Crowded House), there’s a “Where You Been” (its stamping urgency is too close to Elvis Costello). Fallon Cush gets it almost exactly right on “Dog Day Afternoon,” which updates a Pete Townshend riff with an arching new-wave vocal. Then, there’s the loving nostalgia of “Kiss You Awake,” which they toughened up with a mod beat out of Denny Laine-era Moody Blues. But Smith and Co. can;t get arond the obvious Byrds influences on “Great Divide,” right down to the ringing guitars and layered, soaring vocals.
03 The Trouble With A Moonlit Night by Fallon Cush
In a way, the doggedly optimistic “Sleeping Giant” seems to cop to the name-checking, perhaps the inevitable result of a session marked by such immediacy. “Once you’ve seen it all, you’ve seen it all,” Smith shrugs, finally.
The album ends with a perfectly wrought moment of emotional dichotomy, however. A lullaby-like placidity envelops “I Won’t Dream Tonight,” belying the turbulent times its protagonists are enduring during a long evening of arguing. “I watch the words I thought were mine,” Smith sings in a damaged falsetto, “fall out from your lips and hit the ground.” He often reaches for genuine emotion on Fallon Cush, and here he finds it. Then the finale “Disintegrate” storms out, with an insistent guitar rhythm and one of Smith’s most committed vocals.
He sounds, here, like a street singer, both in the sense of singing to the back of the room, and also singing as if his life depended on it. Once the larger band joins in, the lyric begins to coalesce around a repeated chorus, before Smith returns to the verse with a controlled fury. All of a sudden, Fallon Cush has dropped the Beatles pretentions for one of Abbey Road’s other most famous tenants: Pink Floyd.
As gorgeous and occasionally mannered as Fallon Cush had been before, this is intriguingly experimental, and it points to greater heights yet still to be reached. As of now, Smith says, the group has no plans to tour. Maybe they should. Fallon Cush sounds like an exceptional group that is just getting started.
Fallon Cush’s self-titled LP is available for download through CD Baby.
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