Tex Perkins and His Dark Horses
Review by Mark Mordue

Sydney Festival Bar, Saturday 20/01/01

Laid back and veiled. Maybe that's all this talk of 'alt country' and 'post rock' means. The obscure championing of Smog, Will Oldham, Papa M, Cat Power. all distinct artists in their own right, yet all sharing a sense of something else happening behind the sounds they approach, a feeling that insinuation and shadows and mood are far from done with in modern music.

Of course some of the acts who fall into these warped genres can be explicit and aggressive - usually post rockers like Mogwai and Yo La Tango rather than the alt country types who sound as if they are holed up on some drug fucked, go-slow verandah. But there's a bridge there, over troubled waters, between these worlds, I'm sure. Maybe someone like the Dirty Three could tell us more about that.

Whatever the nametags and marketing stereotypes, these artists mark a new retreat away from the commercial machine and so-called indie rock, the relentless retail of grunge/punk rebellion and the intensification of music into niche-marketed packages. They've gone into hiding - dived into atmospheres and mystery, looking for soul again.

The thought of a hi-tech, low-fi millennium blues pops into my head, a kinda 'roots of rootlessness' music: propagated through the convergence of a mushrooming internet underground, home studio technology and artists happy to blow off their own willful creativity.  An aural community taking shape around them: people who can accept things a little slower or stranger, who want to get to know music instead of receiving it dead ahead.

You might identify this feeling as exploratory, introspective, submerged: adjectives that express the emotional backlash of a new (and sometimes old) underground to what's going on up there on the surface of pop life.

Tex Perkins Dark Horses CD fits well into this quiet, secretive talk of music from the margins, a certain cowboy existentialism. I'm certainly not expecting a Sydney Festival Bar Crowd to respond to the low-paced songs live. Just picture the place: girls in tight skirts drinking blue cocktails; boys with  designers beers hunting for sex; the DJ flogging this season's love drug, Cuban music that no one really gives a fuck about.

So when a long, lean Perkins and his group opens up with the ballad 'She Speaks A Different Language' it's as if the whole bar has sloooooowed down. Fine as it is, a more stated, medievally aggressive song like 'Splendid Lie' tames the restless for a while.

The Dark Horses are super-talented: Charlie Owen on keyboards, guitar and some bright banjo picking that blazes away then dies; Joel Silbersher, a post-rock god in his own right, maybe an even bigger star than Perkins in the cottage industries of cyber space, playing a bass almost as tall as himself along with a splash or two of psychedelic guitar; Murray Paterson, red hair and firm acoustic work that details the songs with Spanish emotion; Jim  White on drums, with those percussive rolls and holding back touches of
not-hitting-just-yet drama; and finally Perkins himself on acoustic guitar as well.

Maybe it's the Neil Diamond in Perkins attitude that makes him hold onto the acoustic guitar and make the most of his swivel seat for the evening. But Perkins feels walled in by the instrument, a superfluous strummer in a band already overweighted with three other exceptionally capable lead/rhythm players. You just want to see him move more, twist those extravagant hands into a lyric and back out into space towards us.

As a band of multi instrumentalists, the musicians continue to unbalance each other just when you have what you want. To see Charlie Owen strap on an electric guitar is a moment of rapturous yet short-lived sonic excitement,  while Joel Silbersher's guitar work is so fine and shaded and trippy and gone again, I'm left unsated by both of them.

Strung together in a set, there's also a feeling that the mood is way too blue - and that Perkins really should listen to the best bits of Hot August Night, or at least a little more James Brown and Captain Beefheart than he has lately. And yet a moody number like 'Ice in the Sun' repeats and broaden so much of what has come before it in the set, taking you to another aching place. It's ecstasy, and it makes my complaints seem churlish, my gripes minor on a very fine night of music indeed.

With demands to "bring me champagne", Perkins camps it up, Frank Thring style, enjoying himself and amusing the crowd. I used to hate that about him in ages past - like he couldn't commit to an emotion without mocking it; but now it seems more like nervousness or shyness as he slides out from a song into the world again, unbalanced by his own confessions.

Tonight's set would suit a smoky, intimate pub, maybe even a theatre better. Not a weekend meat market dazzled by the glitter of the disco ball. But to Perkins and the Dark Horses' tribute, the audience here make an  impassioned demand for an encore. By which time the singer and band have hit a note of raw, forward movement - coming out into us rather than making us draw into them. It's a belated dynamic too often lacking on this moody, weary array of songs.

Maybe all that is missing are two or three tunes which bring a bit of light and speed to Perkins' palate. Or a few more of those extra instrumental touches, like Owen on banjo or Silbersher with his funky wah wah ripples from outer space. A few more bright bold notes to send us off into the night knocked out, rather than just pleased and half loaded.

©  Mark Mordue

Mark Mordue's Music Archive: Radiohead: Ghost in the Machine, Ben Harper: "The Gift".   Mark gets in the mood in Glebe, Sydney with the new Dirty Three CD, "Whatever You Love, You Are."

Tom Roe's Music Archives: Made in New York, "No More Prisons", Sonic Youth

Back to the top

Post your comments to the Arts Bulletin Board

About Us 9.11.01 Hardcopy Letters Writers Group Links + Staff Legal Statements