Throw Me in the River

Can a studio album rival a live show full of fans shouting every word? The Smith Street Band try their damnedest on this third LP, widening the sonic scope of their cathartic punk anthems, writes DOUG WALLEN.

When bands set out to capture the sound of their live show in the studio, it’s usually about the members sounding spontaneous yet tightly in sync with each other.

But for The Smith Street Band right now, it’s more about trying to match the room-filling emotional surge of their famous gigs. After all, how much fun is an album going to be after you’ve experienced firsthand a devoted mob shouting out every lyric like a passionate oath? Even the feeling of being crammed up against other sweaty punters has begun to feel inseparable from the Melbourne band’s cathartic melodic-punk anthems, so much so that seeing them live has until now rendered the recorded songs almost unnecessary.

So what’s a beloved live band to do? In this case, The Smith Street Band retreated to the Victorian town of Forrest, where they recorded for over a month with Bomb the Music Industry’s Jeff Rosenstock, after laying down the basic tracks at Sing Sing in Melbourne. They’ve come back with a hugely robust third album that hits those same emotional highs in other ways – not with mass sing-alongs but with blistering guitar solos, expansive crescendos and even strings and horns. This is the sound of 20-something confusion graduating from the pub to the festival and theatre circuit, with the potential of stadiums close behind.

“Intimate revelations, delivered as if you’re the only person listening.”

At the heart of it all, of course, is Wil Wagner, without whom there literally wouldn’t be a band: SSB began under the banner of Wil Wagner & The Smith Street Band, and there’s never been any question that his devastatingly personal lyrics and everyman anxieties are what people queue up for. But more than ever before, on Throw Me in the River the rest of the band work together to propel his tumbledown tales far into the stratosphere.

The opening ‘Something I Can Hold in My Hands’ lets us sit with Wagner’s distorted vocals and scene-setting lyrics for almost a minute before hitting the climax broadcast a mile away. Even as his lyrics pack in a wealth of detail and subtext – in the first 30 seconds alone he evokes Australia’s colonial past and urban present, including modern culture’s obsession with keeping kids inside instead of letting them roam – the band are gearing up for a pure volcanic release that belies the intricacy of those words. But that’s the band’s secret recipe: creating a vast, universal backdrop for Wagner’s intimate revelations, delivered as if you’re the only person listening.

“And every inch of me is always itching unless I’m on a stage,” he sings on that first song, hammering home a music-saved-me theme that’s absolutely true for him. Wagner’s earnest songs are all about finding redemption in life’s messy tangles, and the rest of the band match that with noisy yet hooky rock-outs. If their contributions threaten to be broader and more familiar than his first-person outbursts, that’s partly because they downplay their parts to make room for him. But all the same, they’re getting better and better at blasting out songs that would be plenty open to fist-pumping even if they were instrumental. Lead guitarist Lee Hartney has studied the playbook of Superchunk guitarist Jim Wilbur, pulling out tight and bright-eyed solos that are just insanely melodic. Drummer Chris Cowburn and bassist Fitzy Fitzgerald follow suit, pummelling into a collective tumult that knows when to drop away and when to explode.

That keen sense of timing keeps the songs here from blending too much into each other, although the quiet/loud contrasts can become too frequent themselves. And there are moments when the familiar trajectory from sensitivity to ire feels too much like a formula. But the band’s tidy dramatics make tunes like ‘Surrender’ and ‘Surrey Dive’ satisfying when musically they’re not exactly revolutionary. And there’s a structural playfulness that keeps things interesting: in ‘Get High, See No One’, the quartet go from acoustic warble to an in-the-pocket solo that screams Superchunk to a great third-act chorus in “To get nice/To get clean/To get normal.” Factor in Wagner’s relatable yearning and Chris Cowburn’s constant activity behind the kit, and it’s a flinty highlight.

“He’s singing his heart out, whatever you may think of it.”

To be honest, it’s a lot to take in. These dense songs buck and dive as Wagner’s spills his guts with a barfly’s eye for tousled everyday life. Sex and regret become quotable slogans that are all the more so for how familiar they are, both to us and to Wagner: “This is the exact thing that I always do,” he laments on the boozy ‘Calgary Girls’. Even when he does that trick of turning tour life into grist for more songs to tour, as on ‘East London Summer’, his journeys to England and New York City never threaten to dispel his personal discomfort zone. Anyone even passingly familiar with The Smith Street Band knows well Wagner’s habit of mapping his personal faults, but here he’s able to do that while the songs get ever bigger and more ascendant. On the title track, he goes from on-the-sleeve misery (“And I’ll paper over what I lack/I’ll fill in the pores and cracks”) set to acoustic guitar to a strings-boosted climax and a growling trail of distortion to finish. ‘It’s Alright, I Understand’ edges even closer to stadium-sized emo, with Wagner asking for directions he doesn’t need just to get some human interaction.

The rant-and-release thrust of his songs leads us to the closing ‘I Love Life’, which offers the popular desire “All I’ve ever wanted is to leave this world more beautiful” and hits a thrilling, almost prog-rock instrumental run before circling back to the title sentiment of the first song (“All I’ve ever needed was something I can hold in my hands”) and coming to an abrupt finish. Most of the potential cheesiness is kept at bay by the temerity of both the group backing vocals and Wagner’s bedraggled rasp: he’s singing his heart out, whatever you may think of it. If you’re looking for a thesis statement for this album – which Wagner has admitted deals with a particularly bad break-up – it could easily be the shouted instruction “Keep on/through the shitstorm” on ‘The Arrogance of the Drunk Pedestrian’, whose folkier tinges harken back to the earlier days of the band.

That’s what Wagner and the rest of The Smith Street Band have been doing all along: keeping on, no matter what. Not just traversing the shitstorm but documenting it and sharing every detail. That they’ve picked up so many people who want to go through it with them proves just what a raw nerve they’ve tapped. We’ve all been young and dumb, older and wiser, drunk and happy, hungover and alone, but few of us can articulate those stark highs and lows as well as Wagner – or breathe distinctive new life into such age-old clichés of wayward youth.

+

‘Throw Me in the River’ is out now on CD, vinyl and digital through Poison City (Australia/NZ), SideOneDummy (US/Canada), Banquet (UK) and Uncle M Music (Europe). Upcoming gigs below. Read our interview with Wagner from March.

Wed, Nov 19 – Brisbane Hotel, Hobart, TAS
Thurs, Nov 20 – The Gov, Adelaide, SA [all ages]
Fri, Nov 21 – The Hi-Fi, Brisbane, QLD
Sat, Nov 22 – Manning Bar, Sydney, NSW
Sun, Nov 23 – Zierholz @ UC, Canberra, ACT
Fri, Nov 28 – Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
Sat, Nov 29 – Rosemount Hotel, Perth, WA
Sat, Dec 6 – Reverence Hotel, Melbourne, VIC [w/The Bennies, Fear Like Us + Rockenspiele]