World’s End Press

The long-time-coming debut album from Melbourne quartet World’s End Press appropriates the history and mechanics of dance music for something unique and utterly flooring, writes EDWARD SHARP-PAUL.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Self-released singles, a self-recorded album (scrapped, re-recorded for an indie label and downsized to an EP), a major label signing, more singles and, now, World’s End Press release their long, long-awaited debut. Since Liberation signed them in early 2012, the band have knocked out a Dan Whitford-produced single, snuck in a whole lotta festival appearances and flown to Wales to work with DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy. A lot is expected of these guys, and anyone that’s ever caught their live show would know why. Money has been spent, and the sense is that a lot is riding on their self-titled album.

Luckily they’ve produced a gem, an album that brings the party as well as the substance.

Well established as a singles band, the most welcoming aspect of World’s End Press is its sheer album-ness. World’s End Press do two things very well: expansive, four-to-the-floor rave-ups and saccharine pop anthems. And hooks. Make that three things. On World’s End Press, they are careful to not only maintain the balance between the two/three, but to offer the listener plenty of respite from all that energy – songs wind up, wind down, bleed into each other and give way to meditative interludes that aren’t the flat spots you’d assume them to be. A dance-oriented act is generally pushing its luck when it toys with an album’s momentum like this, but you sense that the band are fully aware the album stands up as an immersive listening experience.

“It rests heavily on camp British synth-pop, acid house and the breezy, post-Cut Copy wave.”

The World’s End Press aesthetic borrows ideas from every major post-disco iteration of dance music, but it rests most heavily on camp British synth-pop, acid house and the breezy, post-Cut Copy wave of which they could be considered a part. It’s one thing to be influenced by the past – everyone is – but it’s another thing to swallow one’s influences and burp them up as something new and distinctly yours. Analogue synth twinkles, acid-house piano stabs, blippy sequencer lines, foggy washes of delay and classic 808 sounds – the provenance of all these sounds are well known, but they are used sparingly and imaginatively. Among the array of textures employed, these sounds function as recurring themes. They remind you that this is a unified piece, but they don’t recur so often as to come across as shtick.

Such deft touches are characteristic, and the overall sense is that the band’s creative core of singer-guitarist John Parkinson and keyboardist Rhys Richards have been planning their coming-out party for quite a while now. There is always a splash of colour at just the right time, a key stab or a snaking guitar melody, an imperceptible lift. Weighing in at around seven minutes, wide-open jams like ‘Someone’s Daddy’ and ‘Deadbeat Sweetheart’ have the potential to drift out of focus, but they are dazed, lucid and compelling. Both World’s End Press and Goldsworthy know too much about the history and the mechanics of dance music to be making bung tracks, and so it proves.

“The spooky bit is that it just keeps happening, song after song.”

The architectural splendour of these tracks means that Parkinson’s vocals and far-from-facile lyrics could almost be considered a luxury, but … goddamn, what a luxury. Beyond its strength and flexibility, Parkinson has the ability to bend his voice to the appropriate shape, finding the correct persona for each song – his two favourites are a camp, nasal, flattened Neil Tennant thing, and a grandiose, over-enunciated Bowie impersonation, though there are plenty of others. This ability to toy with tone and phrasing is pretty much essential to sustaining interest over the jams with predominantly static chord structures.

That the gutter-scraping bass of ‘Deadbeat Sweetheart’ could evolve into something so uplifting seems a minor miracle, but then Parkinson’s dead-eyed falsetto tips things over, and … well, you had to be there, I guess. The spooky bit is that it just keeps happening, song after song. I’d love to find some negative aspects, for the sake of balance, but I’ve got nothing. I’m floored.

World’s End Press deserve to be huge. Have they done enough? They’ve probably done too much, actually.

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‘World’s End Press’ is out now through Liberation. The band play Meredith in December and launch the album with the below dates.

Thurs, Nov 14 – GoodGod, Sydney, NSW
Sat, Nov 23 – Valley Fiesta, Brisbane, QLD
Fri, Dec 6 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
Sat, Dec 7 – Plus One @ Rhino Room, Adelaide, SA