Record Reviews
Good Times
By Josh Jennings
Eagle and the Worm’s debut album ‘Good Times’ is an impressive feat of inspiration and organisation, writes JOSH JENNINGS.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] For debut album Good Times, Eagle and the Worm mastermind Jarrad Brown fuelled everybody’s good spirits through touches like fetching sandwiches and beer, and ensuring the band never collectively rehearsed the songs prior to recording. One member of the band was so Zen about the prospect of the sessions they texted Brown to tell him. “I haven’t fucking listened to your songs,” they explained on their way to Melbourne’s Bakehouse Studios. It was a joke alright. Just one of those ones that happen to be true.
The snug confines of Bakehouse became a bit of a drop-in centre and the cast of musicians rotated from one song to another (four different drummers and a couple of bassists play on the album), perpetuating the idea that Good Times would be an egalitarian access point for good clean informal fun.
The “party-band” tag Eagle and the Worm have cultivated throughout the genesis of Good Times belongs to the lineup for three reasons: the studio recording sessions themselves; the explicit statement the title makes about the album’s over-arching theme; and because Brown’s aspiration is for everybody that comes into contact with the album (from the label people to the band members to its audience) to have a blast.
The album begins with psych-pop ballad ‘Summer Song’, a low-tempo tune with a few easy chord changes, enlivened with a sonic high-wall of strings and synths, dazed guitars, warm-toned bass melodies, a polygamous marriage of toasty vocal harmony and Brown’s doe-eyed-at-Inspiration-Point vocals: “The summer is here to stay/Know this feeling won’t go away/Know that nothing is gonna change/Know this summer is here to stay.”
Dan Kelly evokes comparable student-like sentiment in ‘Summer Wino’ gimmicky chorus lyrics like, “Red wine summer time drinking by the train line.” Both songs are a blissful celebration of going nowhere while the shit-stream of the world passes by.
Good Times’ easy-chair reverie-making dries up quickly, however. Single ‘Futureman’ follows first, rapidly escalating into high-geared revelry. It’s a manic jam session, with an ensemble cast of lead musicians chaotically trading licks by way of rollicking honky-tonk piano, unhinging slide guitar, wired-out synths, gospel harmonies, the jovial whack of horns and Brown’s Gene Ween-pitched vocals.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Good Times by Eagle and the Worm
Feel-good track ‘All I Know’ is a frenetic pastiche of kitsch Latin-soul that reaches fever pitch by the time the chorus unfurls its spicy hooks. Despite the much-referenced kinship the album is perceived to have with classic 70s bands, the title track harks back to ’90s icons, achieving the jaunty rhythmic signature of Blur’s ‘Coffee and TV’, the spazzed-out lead guitar wailing of Steve Malkmus doing his best edgework in Pavement and the bombast of a big spritely Supergrass chorus bound for pay dirt.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Eagle and the Worm - All i Know by Eagle and the Worm Music
The tendency of Good Times to vacillate between genres enhances its dynamism. About halfway, the album eases up and segues into a lysergic twilight zone of paranoiac experimentation, most laudable in ‘Too Young’, which might as well have been written in Brian Wilson’s sandpit. Brown’s fractured vocals are adrift in a cocoon of reverb, plonking ethereal layers of keyboards and the dusky blue whisper of Four Freshman horns. Then onto the ridiculously hooky power-pop jangle of ‘Estranged’. All gargantuan and obvious – replete with wigging-out synths, actual sirens and the frantic blow of jazz horns – it’s bookended by ‘Already Stands, a velvety, atmospheric, starry-eyed indie lullaby.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Eagle and the Worm - Too Young by Eagle and the Worm Music
The only song on the album that is below the highly ambitious benchmark otherwise set is ‘Come Home Love’, a very straight and unremarkably boy/girl-concerned anthem. It might as well be about period pain for all the indifference its passive, plodding, pining neediness evokes. It’s no more lawful or earnest or MOR than contemporary Kings of Leon or Coldplay of any era (it’s probably even serviceable straight-edge indie-pop balladry), but it’s the closest thing to an incongruous moment - a flat spot - on an otherwise exhilarating album.
For Brown, as the self-assigned “creative director” and songwriter, it’s no mean feat of organisation he’s undertaken to bring the album to life. The ongoing soulful energy of the band performing on the record and the intrepidness of the song arrangements are part of what was an involved process.
“For Brown, as the self-assigned “creative director” and songwriter, it’s no mean feat of organisation he’s undertaken to bring the album to life.”
Aside from the studio sessions, Good Times was principally conceived in Brown’s bedroom, where the nights were late and frequent and exhaustive, much to the ire of his housemates. Brown achieved ambient detail by adding a slew of tracks over some pretty rudimentary chord progressions and then cutting, copying, pasting and culling the layers. He nutted out which parts would be prominent, secondary and obscure, and then tried to fathom cohesion and order.
Producer Steven Schram (Little Red, Cat Empire) was instrumental in this process. He reconvened with Brown after the Bakehouse sessions, and said some of the songs were unrecognisable by the time he returned with them purely because of the onslaught of overdubs. Schram had the task of chiselling away the extraneous to locate the parameters of the diamond and putting the polish on it.
Living in Melbourne didn’t exactly simplify the process, either. As a city with a big music scene, Brown had ample access to many musicians. That combined with the free recording time that comes with DIY bedroom studio software, and the absence of expectation that anonymous bands enjoy in their formative stages, meant the disintegration of the boundaries that encumbered indie acts of the pre-digital era. That freedom could be a blessing or a curse, depending on who it’s bestowed upon. In the instance of Eagle and the Worm and their debut album Good Times, it was the former.
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