Ten years from now, when someone asks what the Marrickville Sound actually was, point them here. Patrick Haid spent a decade and a half fronting Key Out, a band that was a firm favourite of ours in this antipodean corner of Backseat Mafia, all restless energy and melodic ache. He could have left it there. Instead, he’s returned with Saskia Clapton (The Great Emu War Casualties) and the indefatigable Nick Kennedy — a rhythm section so battle-hardened between them (Big Heavy Stuff, Imperial Broads, Knieval, take your pick) that Sydney’s independent scene would seize up without them — and made a record that sounds less like a comeback than an arrival.
Marlophone‘s debut, ‘Remembered Adventures in Widescale’, out today via Mandatory Music, Love As Fiction Records and Defend Vinyl Records, is exactly the kind of record that keeps us banging on about the Marrickville Sound: a phenomenon we’ve tracked for a couple of years now, where seasoned musicians are quietly making the best work of their careers, unencumbered by the anxieties of a debut and unwilling to simply repeat themselves. Creativity does not have a use-by date, and this album is the proof.
We’ve been following this record’s trail of breadcrumbs since May, when ‘I’m On Your Side’ arrived as a fuzzy, shimmering statement of intent, all yearning melody wrapped in muscular guitar. ‘If We End Up On The Run’ followed in June with a thunderous, romantic sweep, and by July ‘Nintendo Era Hero’ had confirmed the pattern: bittersweet melancholia riding barbed-wire guitar lines, Haid’s vocals surfing somewhere out near the horizon while Clapton laces the whole thing with harmonies. Heard as a trilogy of singles, they were glorious. Heard now, folded into a ten-track album produced by Wayne Connolly, they reveal themselves as chapters in something considerably more ambitious.
What Connolly has captured — and his CV, from Underground Lovers to You Am I, tells you he knows exactly what he’s doing — is a band unafraid of scale. Opener ‘Nintendo Era Hero’ announces the record’s nostalgic-yet-forward-looking sensibility in a rush of feedback, and from there Remembered Adventures in Widescale keeps finding new corners of that idea. ‘Pencils Drawn at Dawn’ turns family memory and happy accidents into something tender rather than twee. ‘Beating Heart Waltz’ and ‘Strings and Old Machines’ slow the pulse for dreamlike reflection, songs that trust silence as much as noise. And closer ‘I Could Hear It In Your Smile’ is a genuine widescreen finale, post-punk textures swelling into choral grandeur — the sound of a band that knows exactly how to leave a room.
At the album’s centre sits ‘I Promise It All To You’, a duet with Sarah Blasko that is, without hyperbole, one of the finest things any of these musicians has put their name to. It begins as an impressionistic, almost hushed ballad before bending strings and soaring violin drag it up into something enormous — much of it captured live, with Blasko’s vocal added afterwards in a lounge-room session that, going by Haid’s account of turning up with a box of Miss Sina doughnuts and a portable rig, sounds like it was as unpretentious as the song is not. Blasko has said she expected to be little more than a backing voice and ended up a featured artist instead; you can hear exactly why on the recording. It’s the kind of collaboration that could have been a stunt on a lesser record. Here it’s simply the emotional peak of an album built entirely around peaks. Blasko says:
I love Pat & I haven’t heard his music for a long time & so when I heard this new music & he asked me to sing, I sang!
Reflecting on the collaboration, Marlophone’s Patrick Haid says:
It’s a thrill to have one of the best voices in the country on our record, and to be singing a duet with Sarah Blasko. Most of this track was captured in a live take, but Sarah’s vocals were added afterwards. Armed with a box of Miss Sina doughnuts and a portable recording rig, I set up in a lounge room in Sydney, and she effortlessly propelled the song to another level.
There’s a temptation, writing about a band stacked with veterans of Key Out, The Great Emu War Casualties and half the gig posters in inner-west Sydney, to frame ‘Remembered Adventures in Widescale’ as a nostalgia exercise — old hands doing what old hands do. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is a record about possibility, about the adventures hiding inside ordinary days, and it’s made by musicians who sound genuinely excited by what they’ve found, not by what they’ve already done. Wednesday, DIIV, Yo La Tengo, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Elliott Smith — you can hear the DNA of all of them in here, filtered through three players who’ve spent long enough in this scene to know exactly which of their influences to keep and which to leave behind.
‘Remembered Adventures in Widescale’ is out today and available through the link above and via all the usal download/streaming sites.
Marlophone play the album launch at Sydney’s Golden Barley Hotel on Friday 21 August with The Electorate, before heading to the Central Coast’s Link & Pin on 19 September alongside Wayne Connolly and Blackheath. Get along if you can. ‘Remembered Adventures in Widescale’ is out now, and it’s one of the records of the year.
Remembered Adventures in Widescale is out now via Mandatory Music, Love As Fiction Records (AU) and Defend Vinyl Records (UK/EU)
