It is indeed a good Friday when one of our favourite bands, Victoria, releases a surprise holiday single that positively sparkles like jewels in the firmament with its gentle and fey delivery.
There’s quite a tale behind the jingle jangle guitars and yearning melodies. Like many a good antipodean band making great music in their later years, Victoria epitomise the Marrickville Sound – band members that have a history and reform to play and write songs, just as creative as ever in their later years. Max Doyle had a history in New Zealand, home to the eighties phenomena the Dunedin Sound epitomised by the brilliant Flying Nun Records. He was in the much lauded and Robert Forster approved band Songs, and the new track tips a hat to this past:
The title is a play on the word scrap: the scrapper who keeps coming back for more, despite the broken nose, the scrapbooker (which Max does for his 15K followers on his page @scrapdoyle) and, thirdly, the scrap on a junkpile.
The lyrics are imbued with a delicious melancholy:
When I look back, over my life
All the bits, wrong or right
I see it like a scrapbook
But I won’t take more photos tonight
Rough scrap, of where I’m never going back
That was another life
The way it all now blends together
I’ll be Scrap forever
Scrap, scrap, scrap forever
The track comes a with delightful scrap book of vignettes from the past:
Out through the inimitable Scenic Drive Records, ‘S.C.R.A.P’ is the second single from Victoria’s upcoming second album ‘Paris Flowers’. You can read our review of the first single ‘Silence Is Golden’ here.
You can download and stream the single via all the usual sites and through the link below.
Victoria, named after the Kinks song, consists of members of seminal bands Youth Group, The Vines, Smudge and Songs. Members are Cameron Emerson-Elliott (Youth Group), Alison Galloway (Smudge), Patrick Matthews (The Vines, Youth Group) and Max Doyle (Songs).
