Quasimodo's Dream

The Reels’ second album ‘Quasimodo’s Dream’ is a major milestone in the band’s oeuvre, writes DOUG WALLEN.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Liberation’s march of Reels reissues kicks off not with the band’s self-titled 1979 debut but with 1981’s Quasimodo’s Dream, home to the cult-classic single of the same name. That’s reason enough for the decision: an industry panel polled by the Australasian Performing Right Association once voted it in the top 10 of the 100 greatest Australian songs. Beyond that, the song has shown more staying power than any other Reels original (their covers are another story) and feels ageless today. And this here is The Reels’ masterpiece, which alone makes it ground zero.

As covered in Icons form, The Reels shape-shifted their way from a genre-bending Dubbo, NSW act called Native Sons to Sydney’s The Brucelanders. By the time they became The Reels, a deal with Mercury Records had been forged and Mark Opitz (The Angels, Cold Chisel) was lined up to produce the first album. After embracing synths over guitars on Quasimodo’s Dream, the five-piece shrunk to a trio and turned increasingly to covers (a staple from the early days) on 1982’s Beautiful and 1988’s final LP Neighbours.

Frontman Dave Mason revisited the Reels catalogue on a 2007 solo album, and a reunited version of the band has done sporadic gigs since the following year. In true Reels fashion the songs are still ever changing in form, and so it’s fitting that this reissue doesn’t stick to the original sequence but follows an entirely new one devised by Mason. The title track now comes first, the elliptical ‘Kitchen Man’ appropriately comes last and a trio of related tracks are united as ‘Media Themes’. Changes aside, it’s amazing how well this album holds up. Remastered by Don Bartley, the songs sound spacious and modern despite their stylistic ties to New Wave. In fact, with its galactic vastness and starlight synths, ‘Quasimodo’s Dream’ could almost pass as a current chillwave find. All quiet urgency and vague purpose, it’s eerily uncluttered and ghosted with harmonies. Its depth of field seems downright infinite, and Mason’s cryptic ballad retains its resistance to explaining itself.

After that immersive four minutes, we’re thrust into the much more commercial single ‘Shout and Deliver’ in what feels like midstream. Like the best New Wave, it’s at once anthemic and elastic, subverting the pop model even while conforming to it. That’s a trademark trick of The Reels – smuggling anti-pop sentiments into total bubblegum – and it’s used adeptly in the following ‘After the News’, which mocks a reliance on the media while housing said commentary in jingle-like synth-pop fluff. One can’t help seeing The Reels as a precursor to Regurgitator at times like this.

Grafted to the original album against the band’s wishes after proving a radio breakout from the* Five Great Gift Ideas From The Reels* EP – and a disclaimer on the sleeve announced just that – the version of the Jim Reeves-popularised country tune ‘According to My Heart’ sounds more like The Beach Boys than anything else. Despite the reluctance to include it at the time, it foreshadowed a very successful future for the next incarnation of The Reels doing kitschy, romantic covers. Naming a major-label album track, ‘Depression’ is about as expected as naming one ‘Cancer’ (more on that later), and that song lodges Mason’s troubled examination of himself and the times in a musical form verging on cartoonish. It seems to predict The Models’ Mark Opitz-produced classic ‘Barbados’ a few years later: in that song, booze and suicide flood a holiday-set reggae frame. ‘Colorful Clothes’ [sic] then flirts some with ska, hammering home bassist Paul Abrahams’ description of early Reels as “Burt Bacharach meeting Kraftwerk, mixed in with a little bit of Specials”.

‘For All We Know’ is more rubber-rhythmed New Wave made insular and psychological. Two-thirds instrumental, the newfound medley ‘Media Themes’ fuses the faux-C&W clop of ‘Smokey Dawson Show’ (an ode to Australia’s first “singing cowboy”) with the incidental synth-pop of ‘Rupert Murdoch’ and the Far East–meets-Atari weirdness of ‘Ohira Tour’. Of course, weird is a relative term for The Reels, and the anti-mood piece ‘Cancer’ eschews proper lyrics for fevered layers and chants of the titular word. The band’s vision of their once hometown is just as bleak in ‘Dubbo Go Go’, reflecting on “a slab of mass suburbia” and “social dysentery”.

"The Reels did some very valuable work before and after 'Quasimodo’s Dream', but this is the landmark album that defines how we look at the others."

For all that outward venom and inward conflict – Mason was the son of one-time NSW Liberal Party leader John Mason, which lends an interesting backdrop to his lyrics – the closing ‘Kitchen Man’ is as spooky and vulnerable as the opening title track. “I can’t seem to find no answer,” pronounces Mason after admitting to fear and sadness, letting the closing line, “I get no answer”, become the album’s final statement in its new sequencing. Like ‘Quasimodo’s Dream’, the song seems to arise from Mason’s anxieties about just what it means to fit into the society of the time, especially as a man: “How can you propose to me that it’s equal?/It’s submission.”

There are no bonus tracks, though there is a tidy overview from The SMH’s Bernard Zuel in the liner notes. But we don’t need any extras or peeks behind the curtain of making this album: it’s enough just to have it widely available again. The Reels did some very valuable work before and after Quasimodo’s Dream, but this is the landmark album that defines how we look at the others. If you haven’t heard it, you’re missing out.

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‘Quasimodo’s Dream’ is out now through Liberation.