Depersonalisation

A lingering sense of malaise seems to saturate every pore of Nite Fields’ debut album, writes ANTHONY CAREW.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] “I go out in the night/Nothing happens, but nothing’s something,” mumbles Nite Fields frontman Danny Venzin, mopily, mid-‘Like a Drone’. “I stay home and conspire/Always plotting, plotting nothing.” They’re words etched with both existential ennui and slacker smirk, delivered in a voice even more indolent than the sentiment; Venzin’s baritone moan sounding out every line as if a succession of exasperated, exhausted sighs.

There’s nothing happening in plenty of places, but for Nite Fields, their own particular source of inertia-inducing boredom is Brisbane. If you’re the kind of listener who likes to equate sound to surrounding, there’s little to suggest the Sunshine State in Nite Fields’ wearied woe and Gothic pallor – unless you imagine such shadowy music as an elaborate coping mechanism or hear its essential lethargy as resulting from oppressive humidity.

Whilst Venzin’s joined by but an acoustic guitar for ‘Like a Drone,’ throughout the rest of Nite Fields’ debut LP he and co-guitarist Chris Campion summon swimming shoegaze bends and high, arching electric-guitar lines, trailing echo behind them as they buckle and tumble, at times (like singles ‘You I Never Knew’ and ‘Prescription’) coming close to the mythical jangle of indie eternal.

The gathering air of gloom —and the sound of Venzin’s voice— have led to a host of comparisons along the Joy Division/Cure/Echo axis, but that just makes them, in print, read like Interpol. And if Nite Fields have anything going for them, it’s that they’re not Interpol.

Instead, Depersonalisation always sounds claggier, hazier and lazier than your standard post-punk revivalists. That’s partly a product of recording in over 20 ad-hoc locations (“garages, bedrooms, borrowed studios, stairwells, and a restaurant dining room”) in three cities (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne), but just as much a choice of atmosphere. That atmosphere is essentially a sustained, sedated bummer. In tempo and temperament, they seem less post-punk, more slowcore: the laggard pace and fatigued grace carrying the shrug of Bedhead; the heavy shadows and heavy hands reminiscent of the barely-remembered The Factory Press.

“Their musical objective: to convey a lingering malaise in sound.”

Those comparisons work better, given they harken back to bands that never burned bright with traditional ambition; that looked within rather than onward, upward. Plotting their artful nothing, no one could confuse Nite Fields as careerists, but the quartet have their own aspirations. Beyond getting the fuck out of Brisbane (they’re currently on tour in Eastern Europe, and being signed to US-based Felte suggests further travel opportunities), there’s their musical objective: to convey a lingering malaise in sound, in every droney tone, thrummed string or muffled drumbeat.

Depersonalisation’s title suggests that its malaise will be for the digital age, in which the algorithms out to individualise internet experiences convey the sense that you are less a unique snowflake made of stardust, more a predictable if-then-else impulse easily reducible to code. With Nigel Lee-Yang brought in for mixing duties, Nite Fields clearly hear something spiritually resonant in HTRK’s dark digital dystopias and austere audio weltschmerz; the instrumental, wheezing-drum-machine plod of ‘Pay for Strangers’ furthering the sense of debt.

But little in Venzin’s lyrics lives up to either a HTRK comparison or the LP’s lofty name. The press release describes Depersonalisation as being about “the disassociation of reality and dissipation of love,” which means, really, the songs are about feeling sad and breaking up, in so many simple words. “Outside is where I want to be/Inside always tastes so sweet,” Venzin sings, with wearied woe, at ‘Prescription’s opening. “You want to put me down/You want to raise a frown.” The record’s littered with such singsong couplets, making you wish some of the press release’s polysyllabic words had actually made it onto the album, and some of that theoretical thematic brio had breathed more real life into the songs.

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‘Depersonalisation’ is out now on CD, vinyl and digital through Felte.