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 (Chalkmark/Inertia)
UK folkie distills Australia’s twee scene into a single album
Here’s the story behind Passenger’s third album, Flight Of The Crow: UK-based frontman Mike Rosenberg sheds his band to hit the road, busks his way around Australia, coming into contact with the Triple J-approved luminaries of Australian singer-songwriterdom (Josh Pyke, Lior, Kate Miller-Heidke, Simon R. Berckelman of Philadelphia Grand Jury and, erm, Katie Noonan), and records an album with his new pals in a single day. If you find this story charming, you’re pretty much the target audience for this album (I’ll bet you subscribe to Frankie and own a large collection of teapots, too); if you don’t, you’re the same kind of choleric cynical bugger as me, and we should hang out and spit bile at crap music over rye Manhattans. Back to the album, though. It’s pretty standard indie singer-songwriter fare, leaning towards the stickier, more romantic side of the blend of wistfulness and melancholy that Australian folk audiences seem to lap up, and laced with particularly earnest, sometimes cringeworthy lyrics: “Broken records don’t play new tunes / ‘Cept for once in a blue moon / And I’ve looked, but the moon is still white,” Rosenberg croons on the opener, Month Of Sundays. It’s not all so embarrassing, though: Diamonds demonstrates both musical and lyrical verve and wit, and Golden Thread gets the balance right by adding a heavy dash of melancholia. If the guest list has you salivating, Flight Of The Crow will be right up your alley; if not, Rosenberg’s heavy-handedness won’t convert you to the twee folk cause any time soon.
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CHAD PARKHILL
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