My Review:
Hey Calamity - Desperation
Finding youth with the passing of the years, in adulthood, is a wonderful, sublime, rare act. To be able to create excitement, to enter new practical and emotional zones, to find yourself doing what you normally start doing when you are a teenager is truly sensational.
Releasing a debut album when many artists' careers end right around that time communicates hope, it is never too late to debut.
Dave Thomas demonstrates this with his project Hey Calamity: twelve acts of presence, an appearance with the release of a work that, in addition to testifying to what I have just stated, shows great qualities in the writing. A remarkable sensitivity gushes forth in these tracks that the South Australian artist has performed in total and complete freedom.
A set of beams of light containing within them an exceptional delicacy through lyrics that reveal maturity and a high propensity for reflection.
Dave has a light voice, a cotton ball that enters the dimension of music which contemplates and welcomes it to succeed in giving us the impression of notes born for it.
Everything moves motivated by guitars and a bass of exquisite workmanship to form a listening experience that smells of empathy, although robust episodes are also present.
It all remains, however, an embrace that fortifies us and makes us lucky.
Stepping out into the jungle of the record market at an adult age can be a risk: Dave wins this bet thanks to his enthusiasm and his desire to knead what he cares to express, for a debut in which there are songs capable of captivating from the first listening. The only comment the scribe dares to make is that too many songs were released before the record, but this does not detract from the validity of compositions that seduce by quality and value. There would also be a great compliment to be written: the ability of the Australian musician, which is very rare these days, not to fall into the cliché of the musical genre, but to be able to range by really demonstrating great skill and musical culture.
The provenance from earlier decades, rather than from songs, can be heard in certain ways in which instruments are played in small parts, showing a great deal of distinctiveness that immediately wins you over.
Obviously there are Shoegaze and Dreampop presences that make the tracks magical and powerful, giving beams of bright emotions, reflections and an inner room to rest one's consciousness in the stage of maturity.
As a grown-up and capable man, Thomas knows balance and wisdom, he is measured but full of ardor: one can hear his passion, he does not risk his life with this album but makes it available like a cake to eat together, in full generosity.
Songs that are full of outbursts, of poetry that are capable of being sonic and eccentric, surprising, with joyful traits that simplify chewing: Dave knows the scepter, he commands our emotions in the pericardium of a heart increasingly in need of beauty. He does it wisely: he knows how to be multi-purpose, playing the instruments that allow him imagination and elasticity, maintaining his own visual and sonic course, with the innate propensity to make sound a diviner. Actually we find wonder, surprises, a sense of continuity that blesses and comforts.
With the pop attitude that marvels in certain episodes, along with a willingness to know how to slow down the rhythms giving the tracks mystery and expanding atoms of welcome. To call it a shoegaze album is incorrect precisely because of the variables contained and proposed, but it is certainly able to navigate those boundaries even if you hear the will to be a free beater living with curiosity, a scientist in a laboratory who wants to discover new formulas, succeeding. Everything supported by that enthusiasm which infects it, which pours in our listening, helping to make our skin a fertile lane of delicious fruit.
A valid debut that makes the scribe affirm that the best is yet to come and it is a conviction that must instill satisfaction and courage in the Australian author, because starting from such a record is a good and very valid thing...
Alex Dematteis
Musicshockworld
Salford
26 October 2022
