Plastic Palace Alice The Great Depression by: Thomas Mendelovitis Mon:21-Apr-08 Label: Inertia Year: 2008 WB rating 85 out of 100

It’s a fair bet that most who read this site, Australians and non-Australians alike, will be aware of Plastic Palace Alice. Not only were they one of WB’s 2007 ‘Bands to Watch’, they have been a constant presence on the live music scene, from a slot on The Cops’ national tour to a run at The Famous Spiegeltent for the Melbourne International Arts Festival. Add to this a bunch of radio and press attention, primarily through their first single ‘Empire Falls’ and you have the Melbourne embodiment of a buzz band. Anyone who has seen the sextet live will attest to their standing as a significant tour de force, muscular and intimate but basically extraordinarily musical and professionally assured. But now, with a full-length album to mull over in our more private moments, the true measure of Plastic Palace Alice’s worth must be evaluated. Thankfully, following their live displays of musicianship and nuanced arrangements, the album delivers. Unlike many, Plastic Palace Alice are a buzz band with none of the gimmicks – simply making their name through hard work and a firm conviction of intent.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the band is this conviction of intent, translating into Plastic Palace Alice’s distinct aesthetic criteria. Every song is a fully-formed slice of understanding, working on its own principle, finely-crafted and perfectly executed. The diversity of the 12 tracks is truly mind-boggling. General points of reference are the brusque burlesque of Tom Waits, Bowie’s idiosyncratic vocal stylings, and the orchestral theatricality of the Arcade Fire, The Band or Harvest-era Neil Young. Add to this a song blending analogue synths, swampy tremolo guitar and a post-punk backbeat (‘Karaoking/Antiphon’), a tender, almost English pastoral, string-laden ballad (‘1934’), Latin rumba-like touches (‘The Straight Song’), jazz-standard cabaret (‘Spotlights’) and you get some idea of the territory the band traverses. But throughout, they remain focussed; no arrangements veer off course and despite generic diversity The Great Depression remains a consistent record.

This consistency could be put down to a number of things. Often the overarching presence of a lead singer can do this, but the vocal duties are shared by songwriter/guitarist Rob McDowell and percussionist Emily Taylor. To my mind, this is the one area where Plastic Palace Alice falls short in their vision. Both are fine enough singers and have the ability to carry the abstract lyricism, but they blur their affectations and accents in places. As a result, McDowell comes across more as a master of melody, structure, and orchestration, rather than a singer-songwriter type channelling a world-view. Fortunately, the musical assuredness sticks and I think it is due to the understanding of musical history that McDowell, or perhaps the entire band, possesses.

In spite of the album’s remarkable achievements, something nags. The spacious, often epic arrangements and vast choice of instrumentation implicate something emotionally grand, but though immensely enjoyable, The Great Depression is not a visceral album. This is not to say it has a hollow core. On the contrary the pervading mood of the album is one perfectly suiting the age in which we live; full of foreboding, misguided or restrained hope and at times unbridled passion. But are we listening or ‘meta-listening’ to the album?

Does this niggle? A little, maybe. While the album is not at all retro, it is nostalgic; yearning for something from the past, something unnamed but always hinted at in all of its aspects from the lyrics to the arrangements and the production. At the height of Modernism, Theodor Adorno defined opposing types of musical appreciation, comprising the emotional and the ‘rhythmically obedient’ (or technical). These modes of appreciation are mutually exclusive, and the listener appreciates in one of the two modes. Bands like Plastic Palace Alice move toward transcending this dichotomy, and may be the first bands truly of the post-Modern age. In this world, a song titled ‘Karaoking/Antiphon’ featuring strange synthesisers, bleeding guitars and the lyrics “put aside your wholesome needs, wear fake aroma for karaoking” is not an ironic or self-consciously clever project, it’s just a song – and a pretty damn good one at that.