![Big Smoke album Time is Golden.](/web/20161217195343im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/3/w/w/f/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gszzb9.png/1481178722786.jpg)
Big Smoke
TIME IS GOLDEN
(Barely Dressed/Remote Control)
★★★★
"When the last of the autumn leaves have quit their hanging on, they fall upon that cold road I'll soon be travelling on," Adrian Slattery sings on Kiss Me Once, the standout cut from Big Smoke's debut album. The Melbourne country-rockers recorded Time Is Golden after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and Kiss Me Once is heavy with imagery – falling leaves, setting suns, looming darkness, time slipping away – of imminent mortality. It's a stirring ballad, all hammered piano and hollering backing vocals, whose romantic regrets cut deep: Slattery knowing he'd take them to the grave. He died, just 30, in May, leaving behind a bittersweet LP. For all its emotional heaviness, there's musical joyousness: Honey I hitting Heartland rock's eternal highway, Something Good all gurgling Hammond organ and drunken abandon, Lean on the Fire full of spit and swagger. The band, well-drilled and whip-smart after years of gigs, puts their instrumental interplay on display, finding profundity when – on the melancholy title-track and the sax-drizzled eight-minute epic When You Dance – they employ it in pursuit of transcendence. Anthony Carew
John Cale
FRAGMENTS OF A RAINY SEASON
(Domino)
★★★½
There's defiance in John Cale's voice when he sings "do not go gentle into that good night," the curve of his lingering Welsh lilt tempering his stentorian baritone. It's also advice the classic prodigy, Velvet Underground maverick and idiosyncratic solo artist has long heeded. Reissued with an extended track listing, this is not only a companion piece to Cale's famously combative 1979 live album Sabotage/Live, it serves as clearinghouse for the productive first 25 years of his solo career. Performing alone, with accompaniment derived from gorgeously formed piano chords or textured acoustic guitar, Cale showcases the distinct corners of his compositions. Whether putting the poetry of Dylan Thomas to music on Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed and On a Wedding Anniversary, or reaching back to the title track of his finest studio set, 1973's Paris 1919, the multi-instrumentalist has a clarion tone and dramatic depth – there's none of the sloppy sentimentality that weighs down too many live albums. His take on Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, the first and possibly definitive interpretation, is included, but Cale's own songs hold up in comparison, particularly on the heartbreaking (I Keep a) Close Watch. Craig Mathieson
Lower Plenty
SISTER SISTER
(Bedroom Suck)
★★★
Lower Plenty's Nullarbor was the feel-bad hit of 2012, a beautifully gloomy break-up song. In the wake of a real break-up however, many miserablists regret that their entire music collection is sad songs. Perhaps the never-ending awfulness of 2016 is why Sister Sister seems slightly more hopeful. This fourth album from the Melbourne group (with members of Total Control, the UV Race, Deaf Wish, the Focus and Dick Diver) is still lo-fi downer folk, with space and and sorrow akin to early Will Oldham, yet with a little Vaselines lilt, and hints of Velvet Underground. And like the Velvet Underground, there's a couple of tracks you may want to skip. However, dolewave is like a beloved threadbare op shop T-shirt, so effortlessly cool, and comfy, and oddly comforting. A few spins and you'll likely be anticipating the hooks and humming along to Bondi's Dead and Run Run Run, maybe even crying cathartically to Cursed by Numbers with its Springsteen-like self-pity. Though the lyrics of All the Young Men speak of heading to war, the film clip is sprinkled with fairy lights and bottles of champagne – beacons of hope amid the fog. Wilfred Brandt
Luke Temple
A HAND THROUGH THE CELLAR DOOR
(Secretly Canadian/Inertia)
★★★★
There's shades of latter-day Mark Kozelek and his conversational, cathartic Sun Kil Moon cuts on Luke Temple's fifth solo LP. After 2013's Good Mood Fool was full of oddball grooviness, here the Here We Go Magic frontman delivers a set of oft-gentle acoustic songs built around their lyrics. The album's standouts are all feats of long-form storytelling. The eight-minute epic The Case of Louis Warren is about a former high-school bully turned gentle soul after a fiery car accident, the locomotive The Complicated Men of the 1940s is a study of the impenetrable masculinity of the aging Greatest Generation, and the agitated, building Maryanne Was Quiet is a character-study of an aunt whose life is long, twisting, tragic. The album is a series of songs as spun-yarns, Temple recounting tales rich in history, hard-nouns, trauma, time passing. But where Kozelek's trips into this kind of lyricism are indivisible from his ego, on A Hand Through the Cellar Door Temple seems to be, pointedly, looking outside himself, to events bigger than his feelings. Anthony Carew
Wayne Hancock
SLINGIN' RHYTHM
(Bloodshot Records)
★★★★
On his 11th studio album, Wayne "The Train" Hancock has proven he's the master of juke-joint swing. The Texas-based musician, who's been active since the late '70s but didn't release his debut album until 1995, delivers a set that embodies the foot-stompin' American south; a melding of western swing, hillbilly and country with elements of jazz, to create a sound that, while a throw-back, comes across as fresh today as it would have been in the '40s when the King of Western swing, Bob Wills, was stepping out with the Texas Playboys. Backed by a crack band, Hancock is at the height of his powers here – the humid, slow Dog Day Blues, the rollicking title track, the jazz-inflected instrumental Over Easy, a fine reimagining of Merle Travis' Divorce Me C.O.D. Hancock's laconic delivery creates a collection of songs that flows – it's not forced, it's not pre-meditated, it's not slick and sharp. Nope, it's a Friday night in a lean-to tonk somewhere in Texas, shuffling across the dance floor, cold Lone Star beer in hand – a cracking release from the master. Samuel J. Fell