Sift The Noise

There’s a hand-crafted beauty to the debut album from Melbourne’s Skipping Girl Vinegar that renders warmth both within and outside the music. Before anything else, there’s the packaging: a gatefold cardboard casing with two booklets, one with the lyrics scribed in typewriter font over what looks like the pages of those old maths grid books kids in high school use. While the lyrics complement the music, the other pocket-sized booklet introduces the band through sepia tones and a forward which explains that the album was recorded over four years in a multitude of makeshift studios and bedrooms around the world. In the digital zeitgeist, it’s nice to see a band that still cares about the little, enriching joys of physical releases.

That same warmth is recognisable in Sift The Noise’s rollicking, celebratory ode to life, ‘One Chance’, which opens the record with a chorus of hand claps and voices singing joyously along to a bluegrass banjo and Hammond organ. Mark Lang’s intimate storytelling and smooth vocal delivery is the centerpiece of Skipping Girl Vinegar’s music. Dedicated to his grandparents, who passed away during the recording of Sift the Noise, the whole album has an uplifting, redemptive quality to it, despite being made “during the darkest of seasons”.

Lang’s overtly optimistic words suit the jovial nature of songs like ‘Wandered’ that document his nomadic existence, and the album’s arguable highlight, ‘Drove for Miles’. Its evocative, road-worn aesthetic conjures up images of a travelling party careening across a barren, interminable landscape with no fixed destination in sight.

Skipping Girl Vinegar isn’t a band that opts for subtlety. Lang wears his heart on his sleeve on numbers about overcoming emotional burdens (‘Fighting with Gravity’) and the death of his parents (the forlorn album closer ‘The Passing’). The rewards to be garnered from the album are immediate because of this, but how that bodes for the longevity of Sift The Noise remains to be seen (well, heard).

For all the faux-tortured artists mewling about some insignificant life event no one cares about, it’s refreshing to hear a band that can cipher through the worst of times and find something positive to sing about.

by Dom Alessio