Gwen

The debut album from Sydney’s Golden Blonde takes the four-piece rock-band format so far afield that it’s sometimes abandoned altogether, writes ANTHONY CAREW.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] It was roughly midway through the second verse of ‘Yellow’ that comparing a band to Radiohead became a disreputable business.

And even if Oxford’s serious-rock superstars soon turned their back on their own anthemic-power-ballads rep – the fact that Kid A arrived mere months after Coldplay debuted seems symbolic – the uneasy association persisted. How could you, in good conscience, compare someone to Radiohead when The Bends birthed an entire industry of landfill indie?

This is all just a really long apology for comparing Golden Blonde, a crew from Sydney with no ambitions to be the next U2, to Radiohead. And not just Radiohead but the whole Yorkian soundworld, with its insectile solo LPs, its we-got-stoned-and-listened-to-Fela supergroups, its collaborations with Flying Lotus and Burial and Four Tet.

“Their music is never about release, just tension.”

Golden Blonde hew towards the old-fashioned rock band – four dudes: guitarist/vocalist, keyboardist, bassist, drummer – but they’re no slaves to the format. Nor are they interested in its orthodoxy. Instead, Gwen, their debut LP, uses the band as loose form: bound by brotherhood and membership to maintain a coherent form, yet free to explore and experiment within. Though there’s enough eggheadery and instrumental stretches to summon post-rock, the signifier would be misplaced: Golden Blonde are barely about creating a mood, let alone sustaining one. Their music is never about release, just tension; built on a central, essential collision between rhythm and arrhythmia. An audible love of both hip-hop beatmaking and generative modern composition gives the band the impetus to explore both repetition and the unrepeatable, and intersections thereof.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] GOLDEN BLONDE - We Begin by GOLDEN BLONDE

‘You Lead Me’ is a four-minute lock-groove that barely budges, rhythmically. Yet as its rapid-fire rim shots trap listeners within the one endlessly repeating motif, the band phase through a variety of contrasting, at times discordant, sounds: shrill, agitated electric guitars; wordless vocal howls; melodious piano figures fired as samples with irregularity. It’s insistent and uptempo enough to dance to, but its sound suggests a dancefloor of Ian Curtises: there’s no swing, sway or sex, just sharp anxiety, restlessness, unease. ‘Joan’ could be, within the context of the LP, considered something like its ‘R&B ballad’ but, beyond a smoother delivery from vocalist Adam Guzowski, it’s just as fidgety and fiddly, with as many contrasting elements and compositional collisions as any of the LP’s other cuts.

Once again, the devil is in its details: the disorienting waves of layered piano are so washed-out as to be greyed sonic slush, but isolated they’re manic, unplayable; ambience as inspired by Conlon Nancarrow. ‘Gwen’, the album’s closing title track, is its greatest devotion to this juxtaposition: its component parts are essentially all rhythmic, but they all keep to their own rhythms; the thumps of futurist-tribalist drums, free-jazz cymbal splatter, electronic pulses and rolling drones independent parts that seem more harmonious or disharmonious by proximity, their tone shifting as they move into and out of time with the other parts.

“Golden Blonde’s relationship to the rock band seems tenuous.”

Yet, even if these songs amount to Golden Blonde’s essential identity, they’re not above operating far from that sound. ‘Fuji’ is a spartan piece of bent Fujitone ambience that recalls the more outré works of Nobukazu Takemura, or his long-forgotten associate Aki Tsuyuko. ‘Oak’ is more from the Tori Kudo school: wonky, barely-in-time, and faux-naïf, with clarinet played with a beginner’s squawks, piano with one finger, the whole loping with a shambly charm. ‘Teeth in Open’ is big on open space; a buzzing drone creating an ambient layer-zero on which sharp electric guitars tango tentatively and Guzowski’s voice sounds out tiny.

On these moments, Golden Blonde’s relationship to the rock band seems tenuous: not merely making an ‘exploded’ take on the familiar four-piece format, but happy to abandon it entirely. In this way, citing Radiohead maybe doesn’t take it far enough: this is a rock band for those who consider Gastr del Sol and These New Puritans rock bands, and rock bands worth emulating.

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‘Gwen’ is out now through Tenzenmen. Read a Track By Track on the album.