The End Of Everything

The vinyl reissue of the Keep On Dancin’s 2011 debut LP is likely to kickstart a long, slavish love affair with the Brisbane quartet, writes MATT SHEA.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] For all the vibrancy and colour inherent in the Brisbane music scene, all the angles and attitude and spirit, it’s hard to remember the last time a truly great album emerged from this city. There have been a slew of strong long players from local bands over the last couple of years – Ball Park Music, Velociraptor, The Grates, An Horse, and Kitchen’s Floor all come to mind – but never something that makes you sit up and truly take notice, something to inspire the sort of love where possession of an album seems to segue into the idea of possessing the band themselves.

Nothing, that is, except for The End of Everything. During the middle part of last year, word of this remarkable local record started drifting out in the local street press. The band responsible were Keep On Dancin’s, and the four-piece’s shtick was roundly short-handed as west coast rock meets shoegaze – although Bethany Consentino taking a smoking seat to Glasgow and hanging with The Jesus and Mary Chain would probably be a more exacting description.

Indeed, if Keep On Dancin’s deal in west coast rock, it’s the kind you’d find echoing out of the Altamont Speedway in 1969, tight and twisted and laced with a lascivious doom. It’s something that’s highlighted in the grooves of this vinyl reissue of the album, which comes replete with brilliantly awful cover art. Thrown on the turntable with just some candlelight for company, it’s the perfect way to listen to this deeply impressive album, playlists and plastic discs ill-suited for dealing with such an analogue labour of love.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Keep On Dancin's - Houston by Mess+Noise

The most immediately likeable aspect of The End of Everything is the beguiling frontwoman Jacinta Walker. Dealing out her vocals in a broad, even mezzo, Walker lays her lyrics upon you in great sheets of love and loss, desire and bitterness. A perfect example is the band’s cover of Ike Turner’s ‘Your Love is Mine’, the only non-original on the album. In some ways it perhaps strays too close to the 1998 Holly Golightly take on the same song, but here the backing vocals are kept to a minimum, meaning Walker can make the entire performance her own, and she highlights the exquisite obsession with which Turner laced his lyrics. It’s a great moment.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Keep On Dancin's - Your Love is Mine by Mess+Noise

The backbone of Keep On Dancin’s’ sound, though, is Yuri Johnson’s sublime guitar work. Against Walker’s gauzy vocal performances and Alex Dunlop’s metronomic drumming, Johnson noodles away in a reverb-laden soup of sound. It’s intense but exacting playing, and on the swaying ‘Houston’ helps the band recall the eternally sexy but now defunct Tacoma five-piece Mono In VCF. Elsewhere, the piercing electric tonalities that drive ‘Keep On Dancin’ make you want to experience this band in the live environment, Johnson’s guitar reverbed to a point where it stops sounding like a stringed instrument altogether.

The End of Everything is an album that treads carefully that fine line between referencing the past and outright aping it. There’s a stirring transatlanticism to its sound that conjures not only a nostalgia, but also a sense that you’ve discovered something entirely new.

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‘The End of Everything’ is available now through Mere Noise Records via Bandcamp.