Heavy Flow

The debut album from Melbourne’s Absolute Boys is unique in the current antipodean pop landscape. It’s imperfect yet breathtaking, writes LUKE TELFORD.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Absolute Boys’ set at The Square in Sydney last year was a bit of a dud. Guitarist Dennis Santiago was using unfamiliar gear that turned his ebbing chord cycles into an unforgiving sheet of ice, stripped of all harmonic colour. This may have been why the vocals were out of tune; bassist and vocalist Will Farrier couldn’t hear himself for the high-frequency scrape of Santiago’s aluminum six-string. Distracted, his ropey, complex bass lines only just managed to cohere with Kino Versoza’s loosely buoyant drums. The whole mass constantly threatened to fall over itself into a distended, dubby tangle.

It was a mess. But it revealed something startling and quite exciting about a band that had always seemed elusively promising, always about to be great. Despite the substantial imperfections, the feel of the pieces persisted. We weren’t just watching a recital of the trio’s forthcoming debut – here was a band operating by its own consistent, hermetic logic, fully inhabiting ideas so perfectly simple and felt-out that no amount of incidental chaos could dim their brilliance or compulsive beauty.

With Heavy Flow, Absolute Boys have crafted an extraordinary half-hour of consistently stunning and inventive pop music that delivers on the promise of that set. It alludes to familiar things – the melted Krautrock of Full Circle, for instance, or Fela Kuti – but feels completely sui generis, both comfortable with its allusions and calmly rising above them.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Absolute Boys - Love Mode by bedroom suck records

“Hearing each element spill forth is akin to watching points of interference in a ripple tank”

At first, the strangest thing about the record is how inviting it sounds, especially given the quietly bristling poker face of the group’s early work. The songs are quite basic – formed with minimal, repetitive cycles, they allow the focus to fall on the form of the sound itself and the interplay between discrete parts. ‘Old Dub’ is unfathomably rich given the basic tools it was assembled with – its feather-light percussion almost skips along, spinning a rhythmic levity that evokes the movement of dust particles in the air. When it hits, the bass envelops you – it’s fulsome and warm, posing a two-note counter-rhythm that pushes and pulls at Versoza’s pattern as the tide might toy with a piece of flotsam. A playful, circular guitar melody laces the upper registers, cascading quietly over the proceedings like a burbling stream over worn stones, its detail fading in and out of focus to dizzying effect. It’s a concoction that could leave you breathless for minutes, and it’s drawn together in less than 30 seconds. Paired with two verses of humbly exultant vocal, it proves ‘Old Dub’ to be one of the briefest and most uncannily beautiful avant-pop album openers in recent memory.

‘Twin Spirits’ takes a similar tack, offsetting stuttered bass notes against ascending swirls of minor-key guitar that bloom into a potent, spacious melancholy. Hearing each element spill forth is akin to watching points of interference in a ripple tank – the patterns spool outwards like waves on a still lake, gently abstracting as you see them blend and shift.

Elsewhere, the trio favours a tightly wound update on guitar trio dub. ‘Executive Realness’ centres on a claustrophobic, rattling bass line, while icy guitar tidily waltzes through a single chord way up high, skirting the vocal. It all takes a moment to process, so dense and gauche is its construction, but the melody doesn’t leave your head for days once it’s stuck. Again, this mode is mirrored on ‘China Heights’, though it’s flipped to feel optimistic, like a coastal amble on a resplendent day, looking up into endless blue.

Heavy Flow isn’t perfect. Singles ‘Haze’ and ‘Love Mode’ are stunning as individual tracks but stand out sonically, breaking the spell a bit – they’re clearly mixed and mastered to cut through on commercial radio, while the rest of the album sounds uniformly mellow and inviting of supine inspection. The guitar and percussion work balance taste and efficacy throughout, but Farrier’s parts occasionally seem slightly beyond his technical scope, giving the impression that he’s trying to overplay to meet the needs of some songs. This isn’t a problem – like the aforementioned live set, everything hangs together well even when it’s falling apart – but does feel like a notable blemish on an otherwise flawlessly consistent collection.

Similarly, his vocal sometimes combines naivety and faux earnestness to marginally silly effect. On paper, the chorus lyric on ‘Endless Projections’ makes a certain sense, but the delivery borders on the kind of flaccid tone your average chart R&B breakup tune might trade in, with no clear ironic intent.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Absolute Boys - Endless Projections by bedroom suck records

Again, this is a minor gripe. The tune’s bass poses a stunning counterpoint to the tumbling verse melody, and the brooding splashes of spring reverb at the outset are exquisite, panned slowly across the stereo spectrum. Even the curious chorus vocal has its charms after a few listens, recalling the goofy Top 40 homages that acts like Collarbones pull off so endearingly. Like ‘Old Dub’, it does much with very little, and its mood lingers long after it’s finished.

Heavy Flow is an important album in the context of Australian pop music. It eschews both the pub rock and Krautrock trends among the band’s contemporaries, while tacitly acknowledging both. Like Angel Eyes’ Final Fare, it’s unique in the current antipodean pop landscape, and manages this without sacrificing the directness of a good, honest, cohesive pop album. Perhaps most impressively, it sounds like Absolute Boys are just being themselves on this record, which makes the extent of its grace, poise and lushness all the more breathtaking.

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‘Heavy Flow’ is out now through Bedroom Suck.