With You Right By My Side Baby, The Deal Just Can’t Go Down

The Maladies’ debut outing 'With You Right By My Side Baby, The Deal Just Can’t Go Down' is by turns brutal, confusing and brilliant, writes JP HAMMOND.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Here’s where the strings come in – the gut strings, that is. If liner notes are ever a good guide to the enclosed contents (the presence of medieval lute is probably a no go; if a vocalist is listed as “throat”, a sturdy constitution may be required) Sydney’s The Maladies don’t misrepresent themselves on their debut With You Right By My Side Baby, The Deal Just Can’t Go Down. Two players respectively get a guernsey on the “gut string guitar”, something I’m entirely loathe to Google, lest it prove to be anything less than an instrument comprised of the hide of an armadillo and desiccated human flesh. Which, of course, is exactly what it sounds like.

Not convinced yet? They’re ably supported on the record by a motley band of carousers blessed with the moniker “The Don Walker Appreciation Choir”. Three members also contribute “gang vocals”. They had me at hello, in case you were wondering.

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to report that a record with these contributions is as good as its liners suggest. The Maladies come across like the heavy, bastard brother of Johnny Winter, Johnny Cash and Johnny Thunders. There’s also a hefty dose of the Bad Seeds (pre-hirsute bromance era, thank you very much) in this bilious mix too.

Don’t be put off by the last reference point. If invocation of inspiration from Nick The Stripper in the last few years has been reduced to a synonym for “own/may have heard a Birthday Party record and dug the bass sound- nb, possibly high at the time”, the Maladies are closer to the Southern Gothic drugstore cowboy blues Cave somehow found in the years intervening Caulfield Grammar and Coventry.

Yes, the Maladies play blistering cow-punk hoedowns with the Don Walker Appreciation Choir providing enough vocal encouragement to send a shudder through the likes of Malcolm Turnbull, but there’s a notable difference. Far from the apparently bloodless, godless atheism of The Birthday Party believers, the Maladies are blessed with Daniele Marando, a vocalist who is looking for gods everywhere, but just can’t find them. He’s searching for meaning in a world gone wrong, instead he finds a girl who “hates Johnny Cash, can’t spell where she lives … and shops at Supre”. Poor bastard.

That lyric is a clue to the great secret weapon in the band: black humour. By turns comic and caustic, Marando charts a desolate, dissolute vision. It’s equal parts Australian-Dream-turned-rancid, country rock cliche and general embittered shittiness. It’s a perfectly agreeable mix, particularly if you’re lover of generally embittered shittiness like me.

“The Maladies come across like the heavy, bastard brother of Johnny Winter, Johnny Cash and Johnny Thunders.”

Marando snidely looks forward to “work(ing) all day” just for preparing “this wood and this wire” to sell it off (presumably at a Government-grant boosted inflated price) to “some sucker from The Shire”. He falls for women “like a boy falls down a well” and he ends up with a girl who’s like “LSD”, “a dirty Sandra Dee” and “cocaine for morning tea”. The downside? She ends up keeping him “all dressed up like a metrosexual”. He dismisses a friend who “reveals the real you at last” with the derisive curse that he “has ex-wives he likes more than you”. He ends the album calling in on his lawyer “with empty threats and paranoia”.

In producer Jamie Hutchings (Bluebottle Kiss), The Maladies have found the perfect foil for the band. He apes some Mule Variations-era Tom Waits production in the percussive sensibilities closing ‘This Wood and This Wire’ and opening ‘Song From a Hot Country’, and tastefully mixes in a mandolin emulating Greek bouzoki music on bleary-eyed closer ‘You and Your New Tattoo’. ‘I Feel So Fine’ churns violently in a spin cycle of booze, blood and lust, all the while aided by Hutchings’ sure hand keeping all the elements (furious harmonica, overdriven guitars and brass) in check. His production is simple, unadorned but resolutely tasteful.

Oh, and there’s a cover of Don Walker’s ‘Silos’ in the midst of all this. It’s accorded note-perfect reverential treatment; a cherubic choir and Marando’s sweetest, keening falsetto. If the record sounds by turns equally brutal, confusing and brilliant, it assuredly is. ‘I Feel So Fine’ might just be the most disgusting, bile-filled diatribe committed to tape in 2009 (if it’s not, ‘Take Me Down’, which is three tracks later, probably takes the prize). Propelled by the kind of flat, low-end, rhythmic grit the last Bad Seeds album seemed to be striving for and pointedly missed, it culminates in almost a minute-and-a-half of Marando repeating, “I feel so fine”, over a backing wall of feedback. The overall effect is to suggest the exact opposite of his assertion.

If there’s an issue with the album, it’s probably only pacing. The band never relent, bar the aforementioned ‘Silos’ cover and final track ‘You and Your New Tattoo’. Added to that is Marando’s limited range. His two speeds (desolation and febrile desperation) do wear a little thin on repeat listens. The opening 20-second falsetto of ‘I Feel So Fine’ and ‘Silos’ suggest there’s undoubtedly more flexibility he can offer.

They’re minor quibbles, however. If gut strings are what the Maladies are using, heart strings are what they end up pulling on With You By My Side Baby. Marando opens the record with the declaration that he’s “gonna put my brothers on the lease, when I paint my masterpiece”. It just might be time to give them a call.

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With You Right By My Side, Baby The Deal Just Can’t Go Down is out now independently.