Augie March Watch Me Disappear (TM) by: Thomas Mendelovits Thu:02-Oct-08 Label: Sony BMG Year: 2008 WB rating 62 out of 100

‘One Crowded Hour’ was a killer tune, no doubt, but its charms had a silver lining that allowed it to be radio station Triple J’s number one song of 2007. Elitism? Most definitely, but we snob types fell in love with Augie March for their arty tendencies. And, after the deluge, it seemed even the band was wary of the honour; for example, often playing ‘One Crowded Hour’ first live to “get it out of the way”. But perhaps there was no going back for the band after the popular success of such a song brought them more fans and bigger venues. If this is the case, Watch Me Disappear is surely the result. With an overriding folk-rock sound, the Melbourne band’s fourth full-length is an album geared to large-scale situations. As such, Watch Me Disappear is Augie March’s biggest departure from their envelope-pushing beginnings, which – occurring with their debut Sunset Studies almost a decade ago – have now been taken to their logical conclusion.

To an extent, Augie March’s lofty pretensions have always had an air of grouchiness about them. Songwriter and singer Glenn Richards has been quoted as saying his band would never be seen shaking their arses on stage, and indeed, early songs that did slightly rock had a cheekiness and verve that belied their upbeat nature. This quality is tangibly lacking on Watch Me Disappear, an album so straight up it is often bland. It has been six years since the rollicking hillbilly of Strange Bird’s ‘This Train Will Be Taking No Passengers’ – subversive in being just that little bit too fast to really move to – but on Watch Me Disappear, the band have regressed. The barroom country of ‘City of Rescue’, with a ridiculous sing along chorus (“I’m gonna run”) and a ‘Highway 61’-like whistle, is the only such moment of fun. Elsewhere, any form of pizzazz is sorely missing. Opener ‘Watch Me Disappear’ could be a cut from Oasis’ forthcoming Dig Out Your Soul, albeit without the arrogant swagger (which may carry such stuff off depending on your perspective), while ‘Farmer’s Son’ is so insipid it could be an off-cut from My Morning Jacket’s Evil Urges (as an aside, US producer Joe Chicarelli recorded both records). It’s a theoretical long shot, but if the Augies ever stooped to think of themselves as the literate cousins to a band like Powderfinger, such a mentality seems to have played itself out in the populist tendencies of Watch Me Disappear.

There are parts of Watch Me Disappear that see Richards continuing in fine form as frontman and lyricist. The vocal phrasing of ‘Becoming Bryn’, all shaky and delirious, is one of the standout moments of the album and ‘Mugged by the Mob’ and ‘Lupus’ also manage somewhat in putting his considerable way with words to the fore. However, where previously Richards had assumed pride of place, here mostly, we hear the sound of his band – and one created in the studio, no less. By the end of the song, ‘Mugged by the Mob’ finds Richards struggling to maintain focus over trumpets, while on ‘Lupus’ it sounds as though he can’t quite scan the words to the quick tempo. Throughout the record, generic overproduction (needless Hammonds and horns pepper many songs) and rushed, somewhat monotonous, tempos sully what is essentially Augie March’s finest asset. Even on the ballad-like numbers, the band fail to reconcile their new sound with Richards’ vocal. ‘The Devil With Me’ may have pretty strings but it is no match for the splendour that inhered within the astoundingly matched arrangements of ‘There Is No Such Place’ or ‘The Drowning Dream’.

For a band that takes itself as seriously as Augie March do, first single ‘Pennywhistle’ is a funny choice. With a melodic rhythm almost directly paralleling that of ‘One Crowded Hour’ and the gimmicky little pipe of a pennywhistle, it’s as though the band either wanted something to match the lead single of Moo, You Bloody Choir or, alternately, that they wanted to play a sort of hyper-folk, deconstructivist trick on the listening public: something so unmistakably Augie March that it would make a big impression. I never thought that ‘One Crowded Hour’ would define them, but on Watch Me Disappear all too often it’s as though that is the only path they could have chosen.