Australia’s Drones set the American underground on fire with 2005′s Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By. It is a wily combination of Aussie garage rock, country, psychedelia, and pathological sonic experimentation presented raw and immediate with the poetically strange and storytelling lyrics of frontman Gareth Liddiard. The songs, played with a spiky crackling energy and recklessness, pushed critics to the brink of superlatives in order to describe them. Released in 2006, Gala Mill is named for the rural place in southeast Tasmania where the album was recorded. The Drones are no less on the fringe this time out, and the album’s sound is, if possible, even more immediate than its two predecessors. One can hear dogs barking, musicians coughing, and birds singing in and between cuts. And Liddiard is even wordier this time out — to positive effect.
“Jezebel,” the slow, roiling eight-minute opener, is coiled to bust loose at any moment and addresses topics as unrelated as the death of journalist Daniel Pearl in the Middle East, nuclear testing in the Australian homeland, and a school massacre that is infamous in Aussie history. Liddiard refers to world events, history, mythology. Politics, sex, desire, tragedy, and other indecipherable topics are presented side by side as a way of weaving a new series of myths and texts that erupt from the belly of rock & roll. While there may be no direct influence at all, former Aussie rockers Crime & the City Solution fronted by Simon Bonney did the same on their cult gem The Bride Ship in the late ’80s. “Dog Eared,” with a gorgeous violin played by Michelle Lewitt, feels like Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer” crossed with Nick Cave’s Boatman’s Call album. The kind of love revealed in this tune is so vulnerable that it becomes abusive. The slow, plodding lyric lines adorned by switchblade guitars and unraveling instrumental passages are infectious and purely Australian — they feel closer to the strange experimentation the Band did on Stage Fright, but are culturally outside the North American experience and feel closer to Australia’s wild country music read through garage rock and post-punk.
Gala Mill gets even slower for the next two cuts, the whispering shambles of “I’m Here Now,” about drug addiction — observing it, not participating in it — and the truly hunted “Words from the Executioner to Alexander Pearce,” about a convict in the 19th century who escaped the Sarah Island Penal Settlement not once but twice, only to be caught the third time after having murdered and eaten six men. This is a gallows pole conversation that is chilling in its close observations of an executioner who seems to care. Spooky? Hell yes. Spiny rock & roll returns in “I Don’t Ever Want to Change,” with its mutant Chuck Berry leads and open-chorded riffs. Liddiard sprays his anthemic wash of words into the mike and the band responds with a fury. The rest moves form slow to slower to skeletal to barely restrained anarchy in cuts like “Work for Me,” “I Looked Down the Line and I Wondered,” and the amazingly diverse but no less freakish “Are You Leaving for the Country.”
The set closes with “Sixteen Straws,” referring to groups of Catholic convicts who wanted to die but couldn’t commit suicide for fear of eternal damnation. They would draw straws and the short and long would be the killer and killed, with the entire group assuming responsibility for the killing of the person murdered. From the sound of it, Parchman Farm sounds like a resort in comparison. Over nine and a half minutes in length, it as an acoustic ballad with the vocal accompanied only by acoustic guitar and harmonica. It’s as bone-curdling a story as one is likely to hear. Perfect for Halloween, it’s also perfect for a Wim Wenders movie. Apparently the narrative is historically documented, but Liddiard’s portrayal puts him truly in the first person, and the narrative is cinematic. This is not the Drones recording one would have expected after the rollicking and punchy Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By, but it’s the album they wanted to make, and it deepens both the myth and mystery of who — and what — the Drones really are. Brilliant. – Thom Jurek