The Breakdown
The Electorate are finally back with a follow-up to their magnificent 2020 album ‘You Don’t Have Time To Stay Lost’ (see my review here).
‘By Design’, out tomorrow, puts on full display what has been missed during the intervening five years since their last album. Masterful songwriting with intelligent lyrics and a pop sensibility combine to deliver a tour de force. Like The National, The Electorate deal with the terrors and beauties of middle aged life: a certain world weariness and fatigue expressed with a poignancy and passion over crystalline instrumentation, an arched eyebrow and a wry grin.
Singer/Guitarist Josh Morris says of the album:
The approach to recording ‘By Design’ was to do more with less, to strip the record back to the core elements of the band. We wanted to ensure the bare bones of what we did were recorded so well that it could breathe on its own.
Eliot Fish expands on the album title, musing on the idea that everything in our lives may be predetermined:
Call it determinism or fatalism, choose your poison… No matter what decisions you make, or whatever may befall you, it’s already been written. In that way, I think these songs were destined to arrive fully formed with but a mere nudge from us musicians.
With the songwriting, Morris says:
Eliot and I have always written songs as individuals that we then bring into the band, which then really shapes and hones them. That’s the case with this record, but what’s really different this time around is that we really harnessed our rehearsal jams and wrote together in a way we’ve never been able to do really well before. Those jams grew into something bigger and better than anything we could have written individually.
‘The End’ is at the beginning – an epic start with its scything, jangling guitars that splash and tumble over the pounding drums and throbbing bass, with glorious harmonies in the chorus. Josh Morris’s vocals are sardonic and passionate and a heady psychedelic instrumental interlude creates a diversion. The repeated line that ends the song is powerful that is how it goes my friend everything has got an end.
The statuesque ‘Peace, Love & Kindness’ is a plea to humanity after to a terrible, terrible year in 2024, inspired by the criminally embarrassing No vote in the constitutional referendum last year to give the First Nations people in Australia a constitutional voice, as well as world conflicts that will go unnamed. Morris says:
The first line of this song should have been ‘I wanted to cry on referendum night’, because that was exactly how I felt. A profound loss and disappointment in a nation I thought was kinder than it has proven to be. Roll that frustration into the horrors of Gaza, Ukraine, and the other wars raging that we simply get used to, and I remembered how easy it was to crawl under the comforting blanket of cynicism.”
The lyrics are raw and emotive:
I want to just live in hope
Ignore the ignorant joke
Decency isn’t woke
Why is that so hard to do
To find a common value?
Equality’s nothing new
The music, as always, is crips and crystalline – crunchy, jangling guitars etching out scaling riffs with Morris’s deep sonorous vocals that launch into a cinematic rousing chorus with a delicious frisson of harmonies. I can’t help but think of Nick Lowe’s’s classic song (made famous by Elvis Costello & the Attractions), ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) With Peace, Love and Understanding’ and I’m sure there’s a deliberate nod to that track, without any irony but with added passion. Morris adds:
This song is my active attempt to reverse that cynicism and embrace hope as a naive act of defiance against the shit-show of ignorance and intolerance. To harness hope and turn it into small, common acts of decency, tolerance and kindness. Jam the static of those trying to divide us. Be kind. At the end of the day, this is just an indie pop song with no answers and one question – what is so wrong with peace love and kindness?
Ultimately, The Electorate prove they have an ability to write what is in effect a rallying cry in dark times – an openly political statement calling for tolerance and love that rails against the current Zeitgeist. And to do it wrapped in such a crunchy delicious pop song is all the more impressive. There is a fine coda to this track following the comprehensive rejection of right wing politics in the recent Australian election.
‘Sleeping On The Job’ throbs with its flanged guitar and slight reggae off-beat and archetypal bed of harmonies, a paean to the vicissitudes of life, the mundanity of everyday existence in the face of global challenges with a touch of humour.
‘The Great Divide’ is a personal look at emotional pain, rather than the political.
The pace is reflective with crystalline guitars that jangle with a clarity while the vocals are to the fore with ethereal harmonies. The track ebbs and flows but sparkles through every note, drenched in a certain satisfying melancholia with an antipodean flavour in the delivery and enunciation. As usual, The Electorate produce something that is majestic and anthemic. The chorus at the end is stirring and emotional before laying you gently down to rest. According to the band:
Lyrically, ‘The Great Divide’ is part confession and part map making. What happens when you stop being honest with yourself, and the people around you, and how do you find your way back from that.
The lyrics are raw and visceral:
We were lovers
We were mates
Dancing on tectonic plates
When they shifted and we fell
Straight past hell into
The great divide
between what I feel inside
and what I’ll say when you ask if I’m ok
Towards the end, with a nod to The Go-Betweens, there is a hint of resolution – I am going to bridge the great divide.
The opening Johnny Marr-esque guitars of ‘Unfamiliar’ give way to an ominous rumble of drums and bass while the vocals bleed and soar with an intensity. ‘No Turning Back’ is a bright track with catchy power pop melodies while ‘Ten Times Round’ has a little more barbed wire in the guitars.
‘Summer of Cicadas’ glides with a smoothness through its dappling, reflective guitars and delicate harmonies. The lyrics beautifully capture the essence of inner west of Sydney: an ignored glittering harbour, network of trains on different gauges and the shifting environment and inevitable sense of decay, corruption and loss. The song poignantly captures the entropy of the urban landscape with the cracks in the crown.
Guitar harmonics create a shimmering start to ‘Don’t Go Out’ before a shambolic tumble of guitars bluster their way in with the sardonic lyrics about ambivalence and lethargy in a punky steely delivery
Fish says of final track ‘Face of a Giant’:
This is about having an ethereal connection – an entwined synchronicity with someone that you can’t explain… either that or alien abduction. The song’s main riff, with my bass and Josh’s guitar pivoting on a simple octave came out of moment of weirdness in rehearsal and we almost wrote it entirely on the spot. It seemed to be beamed right to me and the words and melody fell out. Nick’s intensity with the drums sitting right in the pocket, shot it off into space
The song reverberates with an angular guitar line that nods to post-punk’s moody underbelly while being pushed forward by a rhythm section that compels movement, dragging the listener into its pulse. It’s all shimmer and shadow, a testament to the trio’s ability to shape tension and resolve into something that feels both immediate and timeless.
Produced by the band with the legendary Wayne Connolly and out through the magnificent Love As Fiction Records, this is another brick in the wall of prodigious music from this magnificent trio.
The band will be launching the album in July – details below and tickets here:
Saturday July 5th
Waywards, Newtown NSW
w/ Rubber Necker and Restless Leg
Of course The Electorate were almost single handedly responsible for the development of my theory of the Marrickville Sound – experienced musicians with an impeccable history forming to produce some the best indie music around. As the band says:
We started off life as the Templebears, split up, joined Big Heavy Stuff, The Apartments, Atticus, & others, before picking up, some 20 years later.
The Electorate is Nick Kennedy, Eliot Fish & Josh Morris. Creativity has no use-by date.
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