Sydney supergroup The Aerial Maps have just released their new album, ‘Our Sunburnt Dream’ and it is clearly business as usual for these purveyors of shimmering and eloquent antipodean sunshine. Produced by the legendary Jim Moginie (Midnight Oil) in conjunction with ARIA Award-winning engineer Ted Howard (Ian Moss, Kasey Chambers, Yothu Yindi et al), the album is the 4th from the Sydney band and folows the glorious ‘Intimate Hinterland’ released back in 2021 (see my review here).
The album is a collection of sonic gems delivered in singer Adam Gibson’s laconic, raw style, carried on a bed of sparkling sharp instrumentation that seems to capture the vast opens skies of Australia. A thread of visceral melancholia winds its way through the eloquent prose, fringed by haunting backing vocals that are at times ghostly and ethereal. Gibson is the uncrowned poet laureate of Australia with his poignant reflections of the minutiae of everyday life, and when his archetypal Australian-inflected drawl is contrasted with the dulcet tones of Alannah Russack.
Gibson explains about the new album:
We wanted to evoke a feeling that you can’t quite put your finger on, like a memory, like an idea you once had or a vague sense of a person you lost along the way of life’s journey.
There is a reflection of Australia that is painted so vividly it almost hurts. As Gibson says:
Things are changing in this landscape.We felt it was important to document how we cope with such change but also at same time celebrate our resilience and power to push onwards in the face of such changes. So this album seeks to present songs that are deeply personal but also contains stories that have a more fictional aspect, with the end result being a cornucopia of ideas and situations.
At times, Gibson exhorts and declares like a preacher, at other times his words are distant and observant, filled with acute personal words – lines like I had a haircut like Tim Finn in the anthemic opener ‘I Always Sought The Sky (Tucabia)’, always touched by a self-deprecatory sense of humour..
There is a delightful day-glo sparkle in ‘Any Summer Day’, fueled by a fairground organ trill and guitars that ring out with a tremble. And it’s is all laced with a hint of wistful innocence that for many recalls the unique delights of languid, roasting Sydney summers spent on Clovelly Beach and eating potato scallops. You can almost see the bleached out vistas, smell the sunscreen and hear the seagulls.
Apt really for the arrival of the antipodean winter (and always colder in the southern outpost of Hobart where the Backseat Downunder HQ is housed), this is a blinding piece of sonic sunshine that hops, skips and pirouettes into the ears with a sense of carefree abandon.
Adam Gibson, with his hand on the tiller, says of the track:
Perhaps upending perceptions of the Aerial Maps as a band that only deals in elongated spoken-word based tales of life, love, and the land, this is a pop song that evokes the joy of summer days by the beach, but with the smell of bushfire smoke in the air hinting at wider concerns. All the band members are lovers of guitar pop and on this song we just let that love fly free.
His delivery is, as always, in the Australian vernacular, raw and expressive, with a filigree of gold added by Alannah Russack’s velvet vocals.
‘Eucalyptus Road’ is like a swagman version of John Cooper Clarke engaged in a delicate waltz with Kirsty MacColl by the Billabong.
Gibson says of the song:
This is a song where the idea of environmental factors impacting our lives is writ large. A couple seek shelter from the madness of the world and work hard to find safe haven from fire and flood, doing so by crafting a home from a little shack up on mythical “Eucalyptus Road”. During the process of finding this they suddenly realise that they also need to have fun, to live a little, with the question asked: “When was the last time we went out dancing?” The song is a call to arms to remember what makes us human and that the connections to those we love are the most important things.
Indeed, the sense of yearning and desire seem to permeate every note, Gibson’s vocals rough and raw as the lyrics paint a intimate and detailed world that is lifted like a hang glider in an updraft into the stratosphere by the chorus. There is always some intimate connection this band seems to have with the Australian terrain like a sonic version of an Arthur Streeton landscape: an outback wilderness captured in Gibson’s words and the band’s sweeping orchestral delivery.
A raw romanticism graces each track, at times almost innocent and naive (like the brief ‘Make Mine Love’) and at other times vivid and universal (‘For Just This Moment’). A sense of surrealism enters at times – ‘The Time of Spiders’ having an almost ominous vibe over dappling pianos and backing vocals as it captures snapshots of an ordinary life but injects it with poetic observations. There is a Tindersticks-style graceful beauty to the storytelling.
‘Miss Rebecca and the Nambucca River’ starts with a spoken word introduction, revealing a sense of weariness at the weight of memory that pervades our lives. ‘Sweet Motel Night’, featuring Russack’s vocals is magnificent and eye-watering beautiful – moving and epic that moves like an approaching thunderstorm, filling the air with electricity.
A more muscular spine appears in songs like ‘Against The Westen Sun’, ‘The Mullimbinby Night’ and ‘Head Up North Forever’ (with its day-glo pop) where a raw wildness enters the guitars and vocals, emitting walls of fuzzy sound and introducing a little sonic chaos.
Gibson captures moments in life in a vivid sonic photograph – poignant, searing, indelible – and The Aerial Maps deliver these vignettes across a bed of sparkling, crystalline instrumentation that almost crumbles with its delicacy like spider webs. This album is a national treasure, bleeding an antipodean wash in every note.
‘Our Sunburnt Dream’ is out now and available to download and stream through the link above and all the usual sites.
The Aerial Maps are:
Adam Gibson –vocals, saxophone
Alannah Russack – guitar, vocals, piano, synth
Jasper Fenton – drums, guitar
Mark “Na Na” Hyland – bass, vocals, Fender Rhodes electric piano
Peter Fenton – guitar, vocals, piano
With special guest Jim Moginie – guitar, piano, Fender Rhodes electric piano
Produced by Jim Moginie and Ted Howard
Engineered by Ted Howard and Jim Moginie
Mastered by William Bowden
Recorded at Oceanic Studios, Sydney
Feature Photograph: Safari Lee
