Powderfinger’s Golden Handshake

With last year’s 'Golden Rule', have Powderfinger really signed off with their “most complete and satisfying album” to date? JP HAMMOND weighs in.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Absence is an uncanny creative motivation. Wilfully ransacking the last 50 years or so of alterna-indie-whatever with a simple purpose - to reconstruct the alt-epics of 90’s rock reborn – is a completely valid and reasonable reason to exist, to create and to recreate the disappeared in the world anew. So many bands emerge from this seemingly simple purpose.

It’s not shameful. One of the great democratic conceits of rock’n’roll is that, well, anyone can do it. If you’ve ever bashed drunkenly around a room – stupidly, emotionally, intensely – with the belief that this song, this lyric, this very beat matters to you, you’ve got the idea. Whether that moment is miming every disgusted syllable spat out in The Stooges’ ‘Gimme Danger’, or pinching Fat Bob’s pontificating pouts in ‘Fascination Street’, or even drawling the disdainful street-cool Thurston Moore seems born with, you know what I’m talking about. It’s all too easy to understand: this is why you’d start a band. To manufacture that feeling. But it’s strange to think that such an enlivening, affirming desire ultimately emerges from organising the world around something which has been and gone; that this dissonance is what you seek.

Absence weighs heavily upon Golden Rule, the seventh and final Powderfinger album. It emerges in a number of forms. The first is the most obvious: the absence of the band, disappearing before our eyes.

The second is the one mentioned above, that creative absence that compelled the band into existence in the first place. On their oft-ignored debut Parables for Wooden Ears, Powderfinger were equal parts Zeppelin, Sabbath and Soundgarden. Now, this is an absence itself; a motivation now seemingly submerged beneath stultifying layers of guitars and abject denial of that record’s very existence.

“It’s difficult to truly dislike a band like Powderfinger, a bunch of high-school friends who got lucky; made some good, consistent records; and have pushed hard for causes they believe in.”

The final form is the most complex one: the absence that Powderfinger themselves will ultimately leave, the creative void that might ultimately inspire another generation of girls and guys with guitars. If this seems like an arcane critical theory to apply to a dumb rock’n’roll roll record, consider the simple facts: Golden Rule isn’t even a good Powderfinger record. There hasn’t been even an arguably “good” Powderfinger record for quite some time. At what point is a band simply pissing all over whatever marginal cultural artefacts they’ll leave behind?

So it goes. Golden Rule opens with another of rock’s great conceits and pretensions – delusions of orchestral grandeur. In the almost comically bloated 42 seconds that constitute opener ‘El Camino de la Muerte’, Powderfinger singularly reference the era that gave birth to them and highlight the dire limitations that now constrain their own work.

These kind of pompous rock excursions have been out of fashion since Billy Corgan first became an insane, bald emo Ronald McDonald lookalike. His chug-rock double opus Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was the apex of alterna-rock’s bloat and ambition, and like Golden Rule, it opened with an instrumental. Corgan’s two minutes of prog-classical piano somehow conjured the very essence of his album: every histrionic American AM radio dream he had in the ’70s mixed with the complicated chicanery of metal and the strange baroque that comprised his vision.

Powderfinger, on the other hand, just hit us with 42 seconds of orchestrated Spanish-guitar bullshit. ‘El Camino’ is saturated with enough strings to make Tim Freedman (who allowed the Whitlam’s Love This City to be orchestrated to the point of making it barely listenable) blush profoundly. Devoid of purpose and devoid of inspiration, it’s difficult not to reflect that ‘El Camino De La Muerte’ is the name of a road in Bolivia. Its translation: “The Road of Death.”

The other main problem with Golden Rule is that Powderfinger have done this all before, and done it better. Let’s not deny them their achievements. They’re Australia’s biggest band for a reason. They’ve written some great, melancholic alternative rock songs. But Golden Rule tries to tick all the boxes for what should, notionally, count as “classic ‘Finger” and fails. It tries to do epic alterna-rock (‘All Of The Dreamers’, ‘A Fight About Money’). It has ballads (‘Sail The Wildest Stretch, Burn Your Name’). It has allegedly “knowing winks” to rock’s history to generate critical hyperbole.

These last attempts are among the most infuriating ideas Powderfinger have committed to hard drive. ‘Poison In Your Mind’ is pretty close to McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’; while ‘Jewel’, a song that is far from that, manages to have a band member echo the “look out!” call from ‘Helter Skelter’ before pushing into a melody that sounds like the J Geils Band’s ‘Centrefold’ run through guitarist Darren Middleton’s “Bowie filter”. Not good. Straight after that the band head into ‘Think It Over’, which manages to sound like they’re trying very hard not to rip off ‘Hey Jude’. On their seventh album. At least End of Fashion had the ignorance of youth, and a paucity of any real talent, as their excuse.

Of course, there’s no immediate reason why wanting to write a song as good as ‘Hey Jude’ is a problem. In fact, Powderfinger have liberally poached ideas before and it’s done them no harm – from the sludgy grunge grind of their debut to the deliberate aping of the opening riff to ‘Suffragette City’ on ‘(Baby I’ve Got You) On My Mind’, the lead single off Vulture Street, itself a homage to The Stones and Bad Company. But there was a real passion and enthusiasm for the alchemy of being a band, the joy of thrashing out music, that is wholly lacking here. It pours cold water on singer Bernard Fanning’s claims that it’s the band’s “most complete and satisfying album” at a press conference announcing the band’s break-up last week.

It’s not. Fanning, always a keen and desperate vocalist, sings better on their earlier records, and with more dexterity and subtlety. Hunt down Double Allergic and listen to ‘JC’ again. Or Internationalist and ‘The Day You Come’. ‘A Fight About Money’ off Golden Rule is symptomatic of the problem. Here, he’s either morose or belligerent, the Jagger swagger he had started to wear so well has seemingly been stripped away.

"The other main problem with 'Golden Rule' is that Powderfinger have done this all before, and done it better."

The band, evidently lacking inspiration, sound calcified. John Coghill’s previously nimble drumming, ever reliable in its strenuous emphasis on solid showy rock fills, is alternately flat and boring (‘A Fight About Money’), or tastelessly ostentatious (‘Burn Your Name’). Guitarists Ian Haug and Darren Middleton have always traded lines, alternating between lean and hefty, but here the focus is pure sub-prime beef. Chunky riffs predominate, but it’s all joyless, mechanical function. Production too, is strangely off. The band, reunited with Vitalogy alumnus and regular producer Nick Didia (after decamping to LA for an unsuccessful venture with Rob Schnapf), have never sounded so overproduced.

Supporters will argue that Golden Rule is a reaction to Dream Days at the Hotel Existence (2007), the band’s previous record. A relative commercial failure, Dream Days was a middling record with a title taken from a concept in a middling Paul Auster novel. Golden Rule, they will say, is Powderfinger reconnecting with what is, organically, Powderfinger.

But it’s not. Fingerprints (2005), a best-of record charting the band’s first six recorded years, exposes the album’s mistakes. It features one of the band’s best tracks in ‘Bless My Soul’, which was recorded especially for that collection. The track is all Stones-ian sex and sun, anchored with a kicking bass line and Fanning’s most ecstatic vocal to date. Golden Rule pitches for this clamour but ends up falling short.

And yet it’s difficult to truly dislike a band like Powderfinger, a bunch of high-school friends who got lucky; made some good, consistent records; and have pushed hard for causes they believe in. It’s worth remembering that a quarter of the press statement announcing their disbanding was devoted to the Aboriginal education organisation, Yalari, who they are assisting with their final tour. But there are other, better records, worth listening to - Golden Rule simply doesn’t measure up.

“Who’s gonna follow you into the night?/Who’s gonna carry the weight of your loss?” sings Fanning on ‘Poison In Your Mind’. It’s a relevant question. Who could imagine any kid listening to this referential, reverential guff and considering starting a band?

For Powderfinger, 2009 was nothing more than the year of treading aimlessly. It seems all too easy to link the artist who wrote the song that gave the band their name (Neil Young) to the lyric that’s an obvious statement of this album’s failure: “It’s better to burn out than fade away.” However, the better reference is a step removed, from Steve Albini, the man who recorded the last Nirvana album before Kurt scrawled that same Neil Young quote on his suicide note. “Breaking up,” Albini said, “is an idea that has occurred to far too few groups”. This should be the "Golden Rule".

On their final album Powderfinger were simply drowning by numbers. If they had ever made it to album number eight, the only cultural artefact they’d have left behind would be the manual on how to disappear completely and never be found.

And so they go. Finally.