Inquiet We Trust
One of the long-running myths of the Australian music scene is that it remains structured around live performance. That is, if you play well live, you’ll find an audience and a record deal. It ties into some sort of egalitarian myth—that if you can get a gig (anyone can) and impress your audience, then wealth and creative freedom quickly ensue in this land of Hills Hoists and Holdens. This is largely bollocks, poppycock and drivel. Australia seems little different from other Western countries in terms of ‘access’ to the mainstream market, so the idea that this here land offers musicians opportunities which are unavailable (or, at least, harder to get) elsewhere is fanciful.
Perhaps it once did offer that. Maybe when Midnight Oil, the Hoodoo Gurus and Hunters and Collectors were playing pubs, it was less fanciful and more readily realised. Maybe. But Nick Cave and his smack’d skinny crew had to bugger off elsewhere to become successful. So who do we believe? (Not Nick Cave, obviously, because he don’t live here anymore. But he does presently sport a Merv Hughes moustache, which is pretty Oz. And he wrote a kind of picturesque rustic Australian Gothic/Romantic/Western tale, so he remembers the place in some nostalgic, outback=Australia way.)
All of which says precisely nought about Inquiet (pron: in-qwee-ut). Except it does, (or will…) because Inquiet are one of the few local acts who seem interested in doing something difficult (if not impossible) to reproduce on stage. This is a self-made difficulty given that the “band” is but one man named Sam. As a nominally indie act, with Inquiet we’re not dealing with Qua’s electronic laptop manipulations, but a whole other kind of musical manipulation. For Sam/Inquiet often likes to chop up, double up and mash up the subtle and soft sounds he makes. Short of some sort of Bob Log III meets lap-pop arrangement of drums, guitar and electronics, this seems quite improbable to be reproduced the same way live.
Inquiet’s sound is kind of like Architecture in Helsinki, but with a stronger sense of restraint—and less a sense of having thrown a music shop and kindergarten in a blender. Much more like Mount Eerie, actually, but with less sense of being alone in a cabin inside the Arctic Circle; more like being alone in your sharehouse bedroom for a week with a drumkit, an acoustic guitar, some shaker things, a keyboard, a microphone and a laptop. (It’s a double room.)
- Inquiet
- Island
- from Summer 04-05
If Summer 04-05 is not always successful, it’s at least doing something different. It’s getting out of this shitty paradigm that says if you can’t play it live, don’t record it. It’s getting away from this sense of the same bands providing inspiration for every new local outfit.
“Island” is the disc opener, picked for Melbs mostly for its length and being the most self-contained song on the EP. It was hard to pick a track for standalone listen here. One of Inquiet’s strengths is the cohesion the disc displays even as it splinters off into six brief fragments of songs. There aren’t choruses, there aren’t verses—there are just songs. That’s not revolutionary in the world of music, but in the world of indie music in this town, it somehow feels like a shot across the bows. If it is, it may well be the softest bullet ever shot.