Jumpin’ In The Night #6: Don’t Look Back

On debut album ‘Listen Closelier’, Geelong’s Frowning Clouds nailed a necessarily retro sound. ANDREW STAFFORD wonders why they did it, and where they go from here.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] At first I thought it was the Shadows of Knight heralding my arrival as I climbed the stairs to my favourite record store. No, hang on. Was it some early Stones side I’d missed? Shit … Was it the Music Machine? Three songs in, I started to wonder if it was Carburetor Dung, the Count Five’s infamous, mythological second album, celebrated by Lester Bangs.

“Who the hell is this?” I eventually blurted.

If I started out this column in a quixotic Mighty Boosh-like search for the new sound, then The Frowning Clouds definitely wasn’t the place to start. Thousands of bands over the years have looked to the sound of the ’60s for inspiration, and ’60s garage in particular, but nobody has ever done so with this level of fetishistic devotion.

I took the record home. And it was a record – a vinyl copy of the band’s first album Listen Closelier, released last year. (I know – slow on the uptake, as usual.) But I’d been waiting for this pressing. I’d already heard about the Frowning Clouds’ amazingly authentic take on ’60s R&B, but a mere CD seemed to defeat the purpose.

Truly though, it’s hard to believe that a bunch of kids from Geelong barely out of their teens could make an album like this. To be fair, they probably couldn’t have without Eddy Current’s Mikey Young and Off The Hip’s Mickster: masterminds with both the contacts to track down the vintage equipment required and the knowhow to record it in the most faithful way possible.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Weeks later, though, and I still don’t know what to make of it. It’s brilliant, but confounding, and even just a bit disturbing. “They say that dwelling on the past is something that I shouldn’t do,” slurs Zak Olsen on ‘She’s Mine’. Clearly, no such advice was ever about to stop him.

To say this band was born out of time, to quote an old New Christs number, would be an understatement. Check the back cover. On the left, the numbered song titles and production details. On the right, a short but enthusiastic set of liner notes from their record company mavens, under a black-and-white photo of a bunch of young mop-tops perched in a tree like five oversized black birds. All just the way it used to be. The only glitch is a pair of label stickers inside with the proper track sequence, incorrectly printed on the originals.

The song themes are basic. All of them are about girls (pron. “gurls”) and all of them are written in the first person, with titles like ‘I’m Enchanted’, ‘I’m Sad’, ‘I’ve Got You’, ‘I Saw You’ and ‘I’ve Got a Bone for You’. They are either laments about girls who have done the singer wrong, or love songs to girls who haven’t done him wrong yet. I cannot help but be impressed by his early breadth of life experience.

But let’s not get bogged down in details. The point of this record is the concept and the production, not the songs, regardless of how good or bad they are. The Frowning Clouds would have fitted seamlessly into any of the tracks collected on the original Nuggets compilation: apart from greater clarity in the bass sound, you wouldn’t have had a clue about the band’s true origins.

On one hand, to recreate a sound and style from a long-gone era with such a high degree of accuracy would be an amazing technical achievement regardless of who accomplished it, let alone five teenagers at the arse end of the world. The question I can’t help asking myself, though, is why on earth they would want to. To be fair, I’m sure the album would have been fun to make, and that’s reason enough in itself.

But this is beyond merely retro, and you can’t help wondering what would inspire such a backwards-looking take on rock music. Do the Frowning Clouds have groovy parents? (I’m not sure whether pissing off/shocking your parents is a sine qua non of rock’n’roll in quite the way it used to be.) What audience are the Frowning Clouds trying to reach – is it ageing hipsters, or is it Generation Zed they’re trying to turn on to the sound of 1966?

“This is beyond merely retro, and you can’t help wondering what would inspire such a backwards-looking take on rock music.”

Perhaps above all, do the Frowning Clouds hold a fervent belief that what went down in the rock’s so-called golden era was genuinely better? (They wouldn’t be the first: the Flamin’ Groovies, from whom I pinched a title for this column, were adamant that rock’n’roll had lost its way, and sought to reclaim its lost virtues. But the second, Beatles-fixated version of the Groovies were doing that in the mid ’70s, not the second decade of the 21st century!)

At times, Listen Closelier almost has the feel of a class project. I don’t doubt the group’s sincere love for either the genre or era, but it is as if they asked themselves just how far they could take it. On ‘Snake Charmer’ – a cool Bo Diddley stomp, replete with cackling jungle sounds – the answer comes back: as far as you want to go.

Well, they get an A, but it left me wondering if the Frowning Clouds have left themselves with anywhere to go. Listen Closelier is artistically perfect on its own terms, but it also defines its makers so rigidly that I found myself thinking the only logical thing for them to do would be to just stop. I’m not sure they’ll ever make a better record – and probably not a worse one, either – but either way, the initial impact can only be diluted.

I hope they prove me wrong, though. The band is apparently recording again, this time in Sydney, with neither Mikey Young or Mickster involved. I’m definitely not hoping the results see some cosmic leap forward wherein the band begin recreating the sounds of the mid-’70s. But I do hope they can come up with something that goes beyond their obvious inspirations, and tells us a little more about themselves.

+

Andrew Stafford is a Brisbane-based writer and the author of 'Pig City'. He’s currently working on his second book for University of Queensland Press.

JUMPIN’ IN THE NIGHT #5: Some sobering thoughts on Spencer P Jones.

JUMPIN’ IN THE NIGHT #4: Notes from underwater.

JUMPIN’ IN THE NIGHT #3: Dancing to the beat of the living dead.

JUMPIN’ IN THE NIGHT #2: How not to be a feisty rock critic.

JUMPIN’ IN THE NIGHT #1: A rock’n’roll epiphany.