Record Reviews
The Loving Gaze
By Anthony Carew
Soft-rock shaman Ben Montero leads his eponymous band into audio daydreams and self-made myth on this ambitious debut, writes ANTHONY CAREW.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The inexplicable persistence of religion across the post-Enlightenment centuries is couched in the same Hollywood logic that promises us a Spider-Man reboot per decade: people love a genesis myth. Rock ’n’ roll, like any religion, boasts bountiful origin stories: vice-soaked tales in which the macho heroes of the stage earned their superpowers in garages, gutters, and dive bars.
Self-actualising meta-conceptualist that he is, Melburnian soft-rock shaman Ben Montero comes to the party prepared. In the ‘Artist’s Statement’ that accompanies the release of Montero’s first full-length, The Loving Gaze, he details a “complete mental/psychological meltdown” whilst in California, which lead to wandering (barefoot?) through Mexican deserts and along the El Camino del Norte, a pilgrim seeking penance for the unforgivable sin of having been in Treetops.
“A Viking warrior in pursuit of soft-rock Valhalla, where 10cc and Christopher Cross once piloted their yachts.”
Upon returning to Melbourne, Montero was no longer just another mop-topped sunshine-pop fop in a local scene in which every second dude seems to be named Ben, but now the Nordic-sounding Bjenny, a Viking warrior (in “brand new foreign uniform”) in pursuit of some soft-rock Valhalla, ‘Clear Sailing’ his longship towards those endless horizons where 10cc and Christopher Cross once piloted their yachts. There’s probably some Dave Grohl-esque, tried-and-true rock ’n’ roll folktale that Montero’s bassist-to-frontman switch could be compared to, but this wasn’t a lateral move, stepping over one spot on stage. Instead it was a reawakening, a way of liberating the songwriter from the prism of the rock band, the artist dreaming of turning himself into a “human power chord.”
In rebellion to Melbourne’s pub-rockist orthodoxy, Montero may have been playing the iconoclast, but the trail he set out on came pre-blazed; this path seeming, these days, as well-trodden as that to Santiago de Compostela. As much as it’s the smooooth operators of AM radio yore that serve as Montero’s patron saints, he’s really legging it after new-millennial spirit-guides Bobby Conn and Ariel Pink: willingly confusing notions of good and bad taste, and using the currency of decay to stage a conversation on pop-cultural time travel. Putting his own name in the band name, and then recruiting a shit-hot backing band to aid his vision quest.
“Pure cult-of-personality; a leader and his followers.”
And, so, aeons after all the psychological-meltdown/spiritual-rebirth stuff, and three years after first rolling tape, The Loving Gaze finally arrives with Montero meaning both Man and Band; the leader of this eponymous project and the six men who commune under its name. The presence of Chapter Music bossman Guy Blackman, Crayon Fields frontman and passive-aggressive solo performer Geoffrey O’Connor, and Animal-esque drummer Cameron Potts (of Sandro, Ninetynine, Baseball, Cuba is Japan, etc.) has even found Montero dubbed a ‘supergroup’. But – as students of rock mythology will attest – the notion is misplaced: Montero isn’t a collectivist proposition of shared celebrity, but pure cult-of-personality; a leader and his followers.
“Sing your loudest harmony/Visualise the sky with me,” Montero wails on ‘Taste the Carbonation (Monkey Outta Me)’, commanding his ranks with the language of the Dear Leader, be it of well-drilled combo or New Age-y be-in. The fact that the tune was written to “test the abilities and muscle of the band” makes it all the more apt.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]It’s fun to imagine Montero, a lyrical proponent of love and peace and magic and self-belief, as some behind-the-scenes Beefheart; the three-year genesis of The Loving Gaze not due to bouncing between studios and engineers (and beginning work as a musical based on the life of the late Wheel of Fortune starlet Adriana Xenides, from which ‘Adriana’ is on loan), but monomaniacally chasing elusive perfectionism.
He already scans close to Brian Wilson in this regard: ‘Clear Sailing’ catches waves and ‘Mumbai’ begins with “Life’s a beach,” only Montero himself is – like Wilson – scared of the water; summoning imagery of shore and ocean so as to tap into their totemic power. ‘Mumbai’ wasn’t written in India – more fertile foreign soil for artistic and/or self-reinvention by barefoot pilgrimage – but during his 40 days in the Calexico desert, the first song for his new project. He summons an imaginary fantasia (“They’ll be dancing already in Mumbai/with a pocket of confetti/and a whole lot of crazy new sounds”) where he’s free to scatter his creative seed.
These aren’t songs about Mumbai, but the Mumbai of the mind; not the sea, but the sea inside. Montero is an artist authoring audio daydreams, then bending reality to fit the self-made myth.
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