Richard Easton The Firing Range by: Steve Scully Tue:05-Feb-08 Label: Plastic Viking Helmet Year: 2008 WB rating 57 out of 100

Now five albums into his music career, Richard Easton is still sitting quietly on the outer. Like many musician/prospectors of Perth origin, he made the trek to Melbourne, presumably to immerse himself in Australia’s premier music scene. This pilgrimage took place nearly a decade ago now, and still Easton is frustratingly unfamiliar. Many young Perth bands have stirred up the masses in Melbourne’s pubs and bars over the last decade (most recently Institut Polaire, before them Snowman and The Hampdens), but Easton’s music doesn’t strike you as the ‘stirring’ type. His is more the sit-down, foot-tapping, head-nodding wallflower’s music.

Opening track ‘Better Plans’ is the album’s most strikingly original. Beneath the steady acoustic guitar and vocals sits a grunginess not often heard nowadays. In the mould of the glam-grunge Stone Temple Pilots, or Alice in Chains in acoustic mode, the chorus is a minor key dirge. The use of vocal harmonies to flesh out and distinguish the chorus melody is a constant on The Firing Range, but it’s never again as effective as it is on this first track.

Another of Easton’s standouts is the ode to isolation, ‘The Noise’. This song offers up the album’s most engaging lyrical subject matter: a Grandaddy-esque Luddite saga preaching disillusionment with the persistent white noise of the modern world. This solitary sensibility is well expressed through the insertion of cyclical radio banter. Easton’s voice is most convincing here, in the mould of Andrew Bird or even Sufjan Stevens insofar as he defies the urge to break out of his constant whispering. Relieving too is the lack of crescendo or noticeable dynamic shift: it’s a graceful song, in keeping with the emotions underpinning it.

The host of biggish names who were involved in the production of this record belies its understated nature. The Firing Range is more in the mould of pop-acoustic acts such as (*cough*) Pete Murray (*cough*), and you could not have guessed that Phil Romeril (Small Knives), Marcus Barczak (The Smallgoods) and Karl Smith (the underrated Sodastream) had much of a hand at all considering their combined alt-indie know-how.

As such The Firing Range could very well be a case of Easton taking the wrong path in his songwriting. Rather than taking risks with his song structures or melodic bases, more often than not he shows a decided lack of gall, taking the logical route through each song. With inoffensive and undemanding progressions throughout, The Firing Range is perhaps not all it could have been: the glimpses of ingenuity are overwhelmed by the album’s less-inspired, more traditional tracks, such as the simplistic “ba da ba” chorus of ‘Failing Light’.

Layered, textured pop pieces with flittering guitar licks and soaring, harmonized chorus melodies are not where Easton should land himself. He’s at his most effective when you hear an honest crack in his voice (‘There She Goes’ for example), or a grainy and gutsy shift in key. Mark Monnone of The Lucksmiths described Richard Easton’s brand of music as “more heart than art”. Indeed, if Easton wants to be wholly convincing, this heart has to be presented in as raw a form as possible, without the hum of a harmonica or double-tracked vocals. There’s more heart in a profound failure than a safe bet: Easton’s work seems a little too much of a compromise to fall completely on either side of the ‘heart’ and ‘art’ abyss.