Playmates

Jack Ladder’s fourth album evades the Nick Cave comparisons while poaching from a previous generation’s middle-of-the-road stars, writes ANTHONY CAREW.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] The back-cover picture on Playmates – the fourth LP for Sydney songwriter Jack Ladder, backed again by his band, The Dreamlanders – looks like the cast photo of an ’80s sitcom, in which the hapless straight-man hero is ‘helped out’ by a cast of colourful, crazy characters; from Donny Benét’s wannabe lothario to Laurenz Pike’s sardonic pessimist to everyone’s favourite wacky next-door-neighbour, mulleted sharpie Kirin J Callinan. The Dreamlanders may’ve scattered following 2011’s Hurtsville, but now they’re back together, all under the one roof, hijinks due to ensue.

Regrouping the old gang isn’t unprecedented: Benét’s Weekend at Donny’s LP also recently roped in Ladder and Callinan amongst its variety-show roll-call of Very Special Guest vocalists (side note: the Ladder-sung ‘Sex Tourist’ and Callinan-barked ‘Three Brothers’ are two of the standouts jams of Australian music in 2014). But the escalating celebrity of the members of Ladder’s backing band means that a Dreamlanders reunion now has a tinge of supergroup, with the frontman due to be overshadowed by a wrecking crew filled with outlandish showmen.

The ’80s-ness of the sitcom-esque promo shot is key (it’s hot pink!) because that signifies what Ladder (we have to mention this somewhere, still: real name Tim Rogers!) is up to with Playmates, whose ye-olde-risqué title speaks of a distant era’s faded glamour and coked-out sleaze. Due to Ladder’s deep voice, he’s routinely seen through the prism of the classic booze-and-cigarettes songsmith – constantly compared to Nick Cave or Mark Lanegan – with the praise for Hurtsville routinely filled with images of the hard-bitten barfly scribbling Gothic Australiana on his bar napkin.

Trying on a more white-suit-and-wine-cooler sound frees Ladder from the burden of being the gritty, rock ’n’ roll truth-teller; it allows him to grow into a figure full of doubt, softness, silliness, sincerity. There’s moments where the title’s ‘adultness’ lingers – “Dear Doc, can you cut this thing off?” Ladder sings on ‘Reputation Amputation’, this ‘thing’ likely the same one being held in ‘In Her Hands’ – but Ladder hasn’t taken a full aging-creep turn à la Geoffrey O’Connor (another name in the Benét rolodex). The album, instead, is full of exhaled sighs, less world-weary than love-lorned weak.

“‘Playmates’ will likely be misidentified as Ladder’s synth-pop album.”

Playmates will likely be misidentified as Ladder’s synth-pop album, but in truth it features few synthesisers. Producer Kim Moyes, of The Presets, employs them as tasteful (or bad-tasteful, depending) adornments rather than compositional bedrocks. Benét and Pike may play so tight as to resemble programming, but they’re a human rhythm section, on bass and drums; and Callinan’s guitar, run through a bank of effects pedals, adds washes of pastel colour – the three of them using rock ’n’ roll’s regular tools to make something that evokes nightclub neon luridly colouring clouds of drifting dry ice.

Moyes and band aren’t merely outfitting the singer in new sonic wardrobe, but helping Ladder journey into a sound secretly intimate, retreating into innocent memories of the AOR heroes of his youth. If we forget the fact that ‘Reputation Amputation’ sounds like Marilyn Manson, Playmates entirely evokes the artful stadium waft of the ’80s: ‘Our Ascension’ echoing that moment when Japan turned from New Wave fops to moody art-rockers; ‘Model Worlds’ channeling Icehouse at their chart-topping peak; ‘Let Me Love You’ summoning the drawling soft-rock seductions of Chris Isaak; ‘To Keep & To Be Kept’, featuring international-blog-friendly guest vocals from Sharon Van Etten, a duet steeped in hit-’80s-soundtrack power-ballads.

Poaching from the middle-of-the-road markers of a generation prior isn’t always the most inspired musical move, but it’s undeniable, listening to Playmates, how much it suits Ladder. Moyes’ neon-lit production illuminates his music in a far more flattering fashion than any of the singer’s prior Gothic-rock chiaroscuros: providing contrast to his wounded baritone, felicitation for his fondness for storytelling, and, finally, escape from the career-long spectre of Cave.

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‘Playmates’ is out now on CD and digital through Self Portrait/Inertia, with US release set for February through Fat Possum.