Wounded Bird

On his debut solo album, Rob Snarski of Chad’s Tree and The Blackeyed Susans evokes a bygone era, writes AARON CURRAN. But the songs are all the better for the darkness they contain.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Some singing stays with you, indelibly marking moments in time that signpost when and where you heard or, more importantly, felt those voices first. You’ll have your own examples and I’ve got mine: a coastal car ride alone with Karen Dalton’s ‘Something On Your Mind’; sunlight slowly moving across faded kitchen linoleum to Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad.

The first time Rob Snarski’s voice made me cry, he was standing in the spotlight with his eyes closed, singing David McComb’s ‘This One Eats Souls’ to the spare accompaniment of Chris Abrahams’s piano. While there’s always been much to enjoy in Snarski’s long musical career, from the brittle pop of Chad’s Tree to the dark indie cabaret of The Blackeyed Susans, till now I’ve found his work most moving when, like on ‘This One Eats Souls’, the instrumentation is stripped back and he uses his warm, honeyed tenor to explore the shadowed territories of the mind and heart.

That naked combination of sweetness and pain was particularly affecting on the underrated album Snarski made with current Drone/ex-Susan, Dan Luscombe, in 2004, There is Nothing Here That Belongs to You. Now Luscombe returns with Snarski a decade on to co-write and produce Wounded Bird, alongside Shane O’Mara and a steadfast cast of musicians including JP Shilo, Clare Moore, Bruce Haymes and Phil Kakulas. But this time Luscombe has offered the billing to Snarski alone, a generous gesture that will hopefully assist in Rob becoming better known amongst those who’ve not yet had a chance to hear him sing.

“There’s an innocence that harks back to a simpler era embodied by The Everlys, Ricky Nelson and Roy Orbison.”

It’s fitting that Wounded Bird features a faithful rendition of The Everly Brothers’ evergreen ‘So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)’, because there’s an innocence to Snarski’s music that harks back to a simpler, bygone era of pop embodied by acts like The Everlys, Ricky Nelson and Roy Orbison. But even the innocent can feel desire, and Wounded Bird reminds the listener there’s no desire without the potential for betrayal or loss.

Album opener ‘Tender Like a Bruise’ embodies this dichotomy – is Snarski singing about a lover or an addiction that turns his “eyes to pins”? In the muted melodrama of ‘Henry Small’, does the title character retreat into alcoholism to mask the pain of love lost, or was it the drink that sent his lover away in the first place? You can imagine ‘Johnny Only’ being sung by a ’60s girl group like The Chiffons or The Shangri-Las, until you realise the lyrics are about a gay man hiding his sexuality from family and friends. It’s not the only song here with a complex approach to gender and point of view: ‘Christmas Card From a Drunken Sailor’ could be a festive companion story to Brokeback Mountain, but is written with enough mystery to leave it open to interpretation.

The arrangements are tasteful, always in service to the material, like Clare Moore’s redolent vibraphone on ‘Christmas Card…’, or the plucked strings that give way to distorted guitar and martial drums in the folk-like ‘Black Caress’. The best is saved for last with ‘Train Driver’, a “lost song” written by ex-Coral Snake Gordy Blair. With its shimmering orchestration and minor-chord majesty, it could be a lost outtake from Scott 4.

When you hear the stories in these songs, it’s easy to picture them taking place in an earlier era, viewed in yellowing Kodachrome. Perhaps that’s what makes some of the more anachronistic lyrics here forgivable, like the “teenagers on the dole, sitting along the pier drinking their ice cold beer” in ‘Temperature’s Rising’, which is a little too far from the realities of Australia’s young unemployed to pass unnoticed. So yes, there’s wistful nostalgia on Wounded Bird, but a close listen reveals a bitter distance to these memories, an unfulfilled yearning. There may be “bluebirds singing on the windowsill” in the touching ‘One Last Song’, but the bird is wounded, the song is as much lament as tuneful refrain and the effect of Snarski’s murky pop on the listener is brooding pensiveness.

These songs are poignant yet disquieting, like the strange bird that sings in the final frames of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and they are all the better for the darkness they contain.

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‘Wounded Bird’ is out now independently on CD and digital. Launch tour dates below.

Sun, Aug 16 – Astor Lounge, Mt Lawley, WA
Mon, Aug 17 – Mojo’s Bar, Fremantle, WA
Sun, Aug 23 – The Flying Saucer Club, Elsternwick, VIC
Mon, Aug 24 – The Wheatsheaf Hotel, Thebarton, SA
Sat, Aug 29 – The Junk Bar, Ashgrove, QLD