My Review: Graveyard Train - Hollow

Graveyard Train - Hollow

Scene: a child with his eyes glued to his ocean casts his gaze, and along with it his voice and time, to grease the dream of a dark delirium. What you hear is music that descends into the bowels to find a den of vipers in manifest attitude of burrs gathered in the seconds before an attack. Four, five, six strings and tar-filled skins, a myriad of instruments assembled to run that baby act through the six Melbourne musicians on the wrong side of town. 

The stories told are sabre-rattling demons with metallic, bloated grins, facing into the pain of a discomfort that welcomes miles of romance, where madness is perhaps God's smile... An album full of secrets, of torments, of manifest tension, of reverberating obsessions, with the blues caressing the slide guitar about to confirm the mingling of alt-rock, the most malignant country and the darkest side of an arsenal that knows forms, modes, toxicity and alcohol without the cap, and within the pike jump towards an inebriated belly.

Understanding what goes on in Melbourne's lunar, nocturnal desert is extremely complex: among the stragglers, the souls hanging from a needle, a bottle, or locked in desolate solitary meditation, it is the Australian band's unabashed binoculars that make the difference, rolling out the shame, the fear, and nailing them between dusty grooves and grated souls.

The writing scheme involves powerful guitars and vocals that are representative of the darker side of those strings that dig into the south-west side of the USA, filtering, dilating, in order to put a timbre that allows no insecurities: the eleven compositions come from the land of koalas, no doubt about it. It is useless, harmful, rather banal and stupid to quote Nick Cave: we are a long way from that marvellous, unhinged, adolescent madness of the singer who later found himself the epicentre of so many new souls.

No, these are not bards, wolves of the night, not even a parade of cruel behavioural cloudbursts. Graveyard Train (with this sonic ensemble finally determined to have a full-time drummer) are on the opposite side of any self-confessed certainty: describing them is like throwing a handful of raw sand on the ocean waves.

The coordinates are literary first and foremost, with distrust of the human being, ending up showing continuous paralysis. The instrumental part is a noxious combo, a grating of objects slapped together to produce foam and crystallise suffering, not as a plea for help but as a slab showing the behavioural cancer of a humanity now nailed to its books. And so, in this epidermic crystalline context of constant yelps, a fiduciary link to depression and overt vice is affirmed, a drink is invited to remind us how under the Melbourne sky there is a child who, hypnotised and bamboozled under the effect of endless nightmares, has no past, let alone a future. The choruses, so avowedly linked to the American rockabilly option of the 1950s, rattle out verses that avowedly come out of readings from books kept secretly in basements, denying them the chance to offer themselves to the awareness of a world uninterested in doing so. Adem Johansen is a hypothetical barbed wire, with the petals of sweetness that know how to appear in the few moments when the ballad suspends the sonic procession so prone to German psychedelia, for a truly impressive leap into space.

The slide guitar on those few occasions takes over, removing the black and inserting a melancholic but dreamy blue. In those songs, the band loses the concentric impact to nourish the soul's need for that child's soul...

The clarity of the sound serves to exalt the dark side of a city increasingly victimized by progress, always adept at marginalising the weak, and in all this the sense of unease seems a friend in a state of grace. A bundle of sound particles for a journey into the pleasure of a vice that takes away the dimension of understanding and awareness. Bleak, crude, itchy, unbearable stories needed an electric cable, rhythms without hesitation, a weight equal to that of oil-soaked lyrics. The pub ballad as well as the wild dance on the edge of a bad night meet in the place of these songs that often recall the films of cocaine-filled parties, for dreams with a recurring nightmare

Frighteningly credible, the sound carpet is shock therapy, in the swamps of a future that here turns to dust-filled records. Often the voice seems the consequence of the devil putting his fingers in the grip of a selfishness: unhinged, without oxygen, Adem's uvula offers no doubts because normality exists and does not live here!

A long fatuous fire crosses time, nails hope on the cross of eternity with these continuous fragmentations, in the tenebrous ups and downs of a work that allows the six to be hated well, almost with love: they do not lack the courage to tar lies, idiocies, to take sides against the market, sons of that Australian left that does not use the megaphone but songs like dung, to cover others' incapabilities.

They end it all with a dive into the firecracker that ends the world: where there is objectivity the only surrender consists of musical writing that will be remembered in the next bing bang...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

11th September 2023

https://graveyardtrain.bandcamp.com/album/hollow