Slow Bark

In bringing an opera-singing background to an experimental aesthetic, Oliver Mann is taking a road seldom trodden by male vocalists and songwriters, writes ANTHONY CAREW.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The baritone in rock ’n’ roll brings a lot of baggage. Think of all those Waitsian tics, that Lanegan lore, those Cave clichés: world-weary, hard-bitten, Bible-quoting barflies whose voices are all cigarettes and whiskey, smack and gravel, the depth of their voices verily oozing machismo. The most distinctive element of Oliver Mann’s music is his bass-baritone voice, but his singing speaks not of those familiar dive-bar, rockist tropes. Instead it summons something that’ll be far more uncomfortable for indie listeners: the world of opera.

It may be okay for synth-Goth wailers like Zola Jesus and Katie Stelmanis (Austra) to ’fess to years of operatic training, but switch gender and it’s a different tale. There’s no obvious examples of male choristers to cite when talking of Mann’s long history with the Victorian Opera, and how much you can hear it in every note he sings. This isn’t to say Mann’s voice is bereft of ‘secular’ comparisons: at its most murmured and soft, it has the drawl and fall of Tindersticks’ Stuart A Staples; the way it rolls off its deep register into nothingness, like syrup dripping into a low-frequency abyss. Yet, when Mann lets loose with the full heft of his vibrato, pitch, and projection, his operatic warble straddles a musical divide that, even in an era of rampant crosspollination, is rarely bridged.

Mann’s third longplayer, Slow Bark, suggested that divide in the initial run of 7”s from which it sprung. They were called, with some sly sarcasm, the ‘Rock n’ Roll Series’; even if their Spartan acoustic arrangements came steeped in folksong, their twin meditations on a singular motif made them seem like modernist compositions, and, at times, they even had the classic 45 feel of the pop song on one side and the dub on the flip. The various studios it was recorded in speak of Mann’s split artistic pursuits: ranging from working with Stereolab’s Andy Ramsay in London, to recording four songs at the studios of 3MBS, a Melburnian classical music station.

“Five good reasons he should ‘come back’, [knocked] off like bottles of beer from a wall.”

Slow Bark collects the four 7”s, adds two wafty, synthy, ambient remixes from Lower Spectrum and Super Melody and finishes with the freshly recorded ‘No Good Reason’. It’s, as collected work, far more solemn and restrained than 2005’s Oliver Mann Sings... or 2008’s The Possum Wakes at Night. Strangely, it feels more singular than either, with a formal quality to its carefully arranged mood of restraint.

‘No Good Reason’ is set to a solemn acoustic guitar line and a droning haze of melodica, a piece of slow, atmospheric minimalism that happily borders on barely-there. (Maybe this is the obligatory time when we mention, parenthetically, that Mann is the brother of Paddy Mann of Grand Salvo, who should be Australia’s most beloved songwriter, and I’m often puzzled why he’s not.) Even though it trends towards the desolate, the lyrics resemble a childhood counting song; Mann beginning with five good reasons he should “come back” before knocking those reasons off like bottles of beer from a wall. Who knows where he’s coming back to, be it literal or figurative, but befitting an album assembled over years, the songs often feel like snapshots, moments of transit caught still amidst the passage of time.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]Oliver Mann - No Good Reason by Fuse Group Australia

‘Puff Puff pt. I’ is a farewell to a stint spent living in Shinjuku; ‘Tin Power pt. II (Then and Now)’ an instrumental riff where the theme is written in the title; ‘Deepest Temple pt. II’ a duet with Emma Waters (of E-Wah Lady, Gospel Dance, etc.) where, over woodwinds, she sings, “All the worst things happened in the past/and melt away in burning hearts.” Mann uses lyrics touched in the ephemera of the environment – flame and snowflakes, smoke and clouds – as imagery evocative of theme. There’s a reason why, in many European languages, the words for ‘time’ and ‘weather’ are interchangeable.

All this timeliness comes to a crest on ‘A Country Wedding pt. I’, whose narrative sends its narrator (and, assumedly, songwriter) returning to a boyhood home (“Left when I was 15/and I’m 32 today”) and discovering all those years that have passed; it feels both poignant and painful, and eventually add up to an unavoidable reminder of his mortality. “To be back where as a boy I played,” Mann sings, “when weevils and worms/break down what is left of me.” Home, as always, is a slippery concept, but from which you came and to which you’ll return is always the same: nothingness.

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‘Slow Bark’ is out now through LO/Fuse.