Young Man, Old Man

The debut by Canberra four-piece Hoodlum Shouts is an artfully crafted epic, writes MAX EASTON.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Rugby League, post-colonialism, distance and falsified patriotism are all touched on in Hoodlum Shouts’ Young Man, Old Man; a record indebted to the dark history, tortured personalities and unique geography of Australia. It’s a complicated album, spending as much time in insular depressions as it does in anthemic pub-rock, with Sam Leyshon’s Garret-via-Biafra warble sitting over rollicking arrangements from the pages of Diesel & Dust-era Midnight Oil.

The oft-mentioned homage to conscious ’80s pub rock is only a surface quality though, more feeling given to the languid observations of The Drones than the direct criticisms of The Oils. It’s a record that taps into our imagined Australia – humid taverns, Nullarbor drives and rusty tin sheds sitting on stretches of red sand – the land we tend to imagine rather than the gentrified global cities that are the reality. In that sense, Young Man, Old Man is escapism; visiting injustice, pain, hate and misery through its shady characters, personalised historical accounts and thriving dynamics. It’s as strangely discomforting as it is infectious.

Bookended by the barren instrumental prelude of ‘La Nina’ and the desperate pleas that round out ‘The Last of Them,’ Young Man, Old Man is an artfully crafted epic. Take the album’s three stand-outs: the stumbling fist-in-the-air anthem of ‘Pushing Squares’; the tortured biography of ‘Young Man’; and the eight-minute suburban blockbuster, ‘For a Family’. Each takes on oversized themes that never reach beyond what the band is capable of.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Guns Germs Steel by HoodlumShouts

‘Pushing Squares’ is a blissfully unimportant aside; thrusting through half-statements of forgotten memories and bouts of lost control, all with a grinning, drunken swagger that is barely re-addressed for the rest of the album. If ‘Pushing Squares’ is a night on its way up, then ‘For a Family’ is its deflated finish. It begins by lumbering through two perspectives on the same broken down household. The first: “A home, a yard for a family, overgrown and choking all boundaries, no need for no fence.” The second: “Outside a stranger stands alone, he can’t imagine this to be a home.” It may seem labored on paper, but it’s this drawn-out entry that creates such a twisting tale of intrigue.

"A dark landscape painted with emotional devastation, confused dichotomies and generational guilt."

However, it’s the mid-record placement of ‘Young Man’ that most firmly reaches out to grab you by the shoulder. After the preceding 20 minutes of thrashing grunts and spat critiques, ‘Young Man’ shifts to something arrestingly sparse. Leyshon’s once buoyant warble becomes a sinking, clearly-spoken narration. The song tells the story of homosexual footballer Ian Roberts, opening in a way that’s almost tantalizingly inane before the first chorus: “This game’s been good to me,” Leyshon intones.

The lost plea of, “I called for the last, I listened for a while”, leads into the shocking discovery that was to inform much of Roberts’ early life. The couplet, “I kind of knew before the call/He was taken for the last/I found him in a drain, nobody saw a thing”, revealing the body of a prostitute and personal friend found dead in Sydney’s back streets. Soon after, you find the track is indeed a two-parter. Its counterpart, ‘Old Man’, is a thrashing emotional catharsis marking the tragic mid-point to an album with even more feeling left to give.

Young Man, Old Man is an Australian epic; a dark landscape painted with emotional devastation, confused dichotomies and generational guilt. There have been few records since The Drones’ Havilah that have been both this identifiably Australian and literarily awarding. It’s a continually rewarding listen describing an Australia that sits only in our imaginations, crafted with a stunning sense of restraint and despair.

Listen to ‘Young Man, Old Man’:

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‘Young Man, Old Man’ is out now through Poison City/HelloSquare.