Agnes Kain Keep Walking Or I'll Kill You by: Steve Scully Tue:28-Aug-07 Label: Half A Cow Year: 2007 WB rating 49 out of 100

Agnes Kain are two people, Chanelle Afford and Stefan Simunic, and their debut full length recording Keep Walking Or I'll Kill You, despite the relatively short time between the release of their last EP, is an impressive product. Citing difficulties not dissimilar to Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha kafuffle – recording in a noisy, ill-located house – the band have nevertheless produced a full, clear-sounding record, far removed from their ‘indie’, ‘amateur’ claims.

However, as we’re guided through ‘a Sydney winter’ in the opening song on the album, ‘Puddles & Mud’ – discounting the perfunctory, instrumental first track, ‘You Will Be Loved, & Hated’ – some issues arise: clumsy lyrical phrasing and infuriating imagery of ‘quirky’, ‘alternative’ life, “So I slip on my yellow galoshes/head through puddles and mud/with the memory of a girl/and a watch that doesn’t run.” So is the lyricism superficial, gimmicky rubbish or does it actually have substance? The infusion of viola, hand-claps and glockenspiel also suggest that musically this band could go either way.

The songs are, for the most part, typical twee-pop snippets, barely sitting at three-minutes in length, containing quaint little turns-of-phrase and based almost entirely around simple parts with occasional flourishes of viola, glockenspiel and melodica. Beneath this mind numbingly gleeful exterior, however, there is some substance to be found.

Sitting at the core of Agnes Kain’s work is a sense of sadness, incongruous amidst their bubblegum sound. ‘To Me’, the first touch of real subtlety on the album, is at once a cohesive blend of piano, viola and jazzy vocals, and a potent love song voicing a simple sentiment of longing: “you belong with me.” This sadness and, perhaps, desperation is enhanced by the restrained musical approach, making this track the album’s standout, simple, honest, and inescapably lovely.

The depth of the piano-driven ‘All Time High’ is somewhat veiled behind the novelty of the melodica and glockenspiel. The song is, at its heart, of wider scope than its pop simplicity; “We are using buckets/but the water’s getting low,” Afford sings, following on from the winter imagery of ‘Puddles & Mud’ with distinctively contemporary-Australian Summer rhetoric. Enviro-pop is becoming a genre in itself, with bands like the UK’s Shady Bard sitting at the forefront, and ‘All Time High’, despite its disposability in musical terms, offers a simple and effective message to those suffering in the current climate: “You and I can stop this fire.”

‘Josephine’ is perhaps the most dangerously misleading track on Keep Walking Or I’ll Kill You. Don’t be blinded by its often far-too-cutesy lyrics: “Too young to understand/the lightning was/just telling the clouds/to please be quiet,” it’s absolutely impossible to condemn a song when it’s so heavily charged with despair: “Josephine why’d you have to leave/to a place beneath the dirt.”

For all this sadness and fragility Agnes Kain’s record is imbued with enough hackneyed chord progressions and contrived lyricism to make bitter even the sweetest of aftertastes. From ‘Keep Walking Or I’ll Kill You’, where the chorus repeatedly drones “Boys don’t cry,” to ‘Our New, Happy Life’, a song constantly on the verge of breaking into Devotchka’s indie-film-soundtrack favourite ‘How It Ends’, there are far too many unoriginal moments amidst the clutter of quirkiness. The only meeting point being ‘All Time High’ when, in parodical fashion, Afford repeats the line “you and I can stop this fire,” using the same logorrhoeic tirade of Billy Joel in ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire.’ This moment stands as both one of environmentalist didacticism and of consciously near-plagiaristic behaviour.

While there is undeniable skill and honesty underpinning this record, any depth is confined almost entirely to its lyrical side. And while we may sometimes find ourselves invigorated by the lyrical content, it is not wise to have lyrics as the sole reference to whether an album is a successful or not. Unfortunately for Agnes Kain the fleeting moments of musical inspiration, and the more substantial moments of lyrical inspiration, are outweighed considerably by the overwhelming feeling that the songs are listenable at best, completely disposable at worst, offering pleasures nothing more than momentary.