(El Nino El Nino/Inertia)

Brisbane singer-songwriter enlists friends and makes impressive debut

Tom Cooney is about to become your favourite adult contemporary folk-influenced musician. This may not mean much to the average metalhead, who may not have a favourite at all (except for Devin Townshend’s more melodic leanings), but for people who take their acoustic troubadours seriously, Presque Vu is certainly something worth giving a spin. It’s not just because of the hometown pride, although knowing this music was created just down the road is a nice sensation. But Cooney has an earthy charm to him, one that doesn’t root the music in a specific time, place or genre. Yes, at its most succinct, Presque Vu contains lots of fingerpicking and warbling about love, loss and larger concepts, but the extra fiddly bits (yes, I’m quite sure that’s the technical term for it) separate this album from the rest of the rabble. Jamie Trevaskis was on hand throughout to assist with the recording and various instrumentation (his haunting saw playing is subtle yet particularly effective), while members of McKisko, Subaudible Hum and The Boat People also dropped by to add extra layers of guitars, keys and vocal harmonies. But at the centre of it all is young Cooney, whose voice and lyrics display considerable depth on the cyclical Giulia or the sparse finale Silence, where his voice momentarily switches from gentle to distraught. Presque Vu is apparently a psychological concept, like déjà vu, translating into ‘almost seen’, but it will be hard not to take notice of Cooney after this album.

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MITCH ALEXANDER

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