Search - Augie March :: Sunset Studies

Best Australian album ever made

Alex | Australia | 03/10/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Realised the other day that the review I wrote for this CD years ago was under the Japanese import version, and not this one. So I thought I'd move it where it belongs.



This album deserves way more than 5 stars, because it is indeed a cut above nearly all other music out there. This is, quite simply, one of the greatest cds I have ever heard, and the fact that it is a debut makes it even more astounding. Augie March have a sound about them unlike any other band. This music, and I mean this in the most positive of ways, sounds old. Like it is from another era - an era steeped in time and tradition, lost in the nostalgia of the mind. If a sepia photograph had a soundtrack, this would be it. The atmosphere the music creates to me gives off an aura of 30s/40s Australia. The music, and lyrics, are both so beautiful and haunting, and together create an immensely enjoyable experience. A lot of people laud the lyrics of Glenn Richards, and rightly so. Poetry in every sense of the word. Head to their website (augiemarch.com) and check the lyrics out, plus listen to their songs and even watch a few music videos.



Each and every track on this album is unique and beautiful in its own way. and if it is possible for a cd like this to have standout tracks, they are The Hole In Your Roof, There Is No Such Place, Men Who Follow The Spring Around, Here Comes The Night and Owen's Lament. But if you can get your hand on a copy, do so immediately. You won't regret it - this is music you can lose yourself in. Australia's best band and best-kept musical secret."

A rarity

rob | Australia | 06/19/2001

(5 out of 5 stars)

"All the Jeff Buckley/Radiohead comparisons are really horrible i think - all they do is trivialise the sound, and make Augie March sound like a bunch of copyists, which they're clearly not. I hear more of the Pogues, Tom Waits, Tom Verlaine and even Grant Lee Buffalo in the music than anything Radiohead ever did. There's no Jonny Greenwood in Augie March - nothing really comes to the front in the mixes. Guitars are quite restrained, and even the louder bits are not augmented by frantic atonal picking a la Mr Greenwood. Augie March do a great job sounding like a *band* - in the most democratic sense of the word.Glenn Richards has a fantastic voice, but I guess anyone who sings the odd bar in falsetto these days is copying Thom Yorke, Thom himself obviously being the first to ever sing in falsetto.For me, the lyrics are the true genius of the record - even when not set to music, they are some of the most affecting words I've ever read. 'The Good Gardener' is an excellent example with a delivery that really focussed the listeners attention to the words - "drowned and amoral/I pollinate the coral/reek of the deep where I've tended the waterweeds". And 'Owen's Lament' is possibly the saddest war song I've heard. Richards' lyrical style is obviously indebted to the writer of the novel the band named themselves after - Saul Bellow. If you've ever read one of Bellow's books, you'll know what I'm talking about. Very colourful characters and narrators, very personal themes set against a backdrop of a nameless location - 'angels of the bowling green', 'maroondah reservoir', and, spelling it out, 'there's no such place' - the songs seem to create almost a fantasy world that brings to mind a 1950's American small rural town (featured in films like Lawn Dogs and Virgin Suicides).As far as I'm concerned, I'm prepared to put this album alongside some of the best in my collection - 'Good Morning Spider' by Sparklehorse, Lambchop's 'Nixon' and Television's 'Marquee Moon'. It's THAT good. Please check it out."

Australia's best kept secret.

Lachlan Drummond | Sydney, Australia | 04/13/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Up until I heard this album, I was convinced of two things. One was that all australian music sucked and was completely unoriginal. (And I'm Australian). Since there's not so much money in the Australian music industry, major label money rarely gets thrown around on more original bands like Augie March.



Two, Australian bands were simply not capable of crafting something as sophisticated and as beautiful as OK Computer, Murmur, Moon Safari, Loveless, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, or any of the other modern classics we all know and love.



After hearing this album, I was proved wrong on both counts. This is simply a stunning, epic, haunting, quiet, peaceful, beautiful album that deserves to mentioned alongside any of the albums I just mentioned. And yet it's extremely different to all of them. If the likes of Radiohead and Doves are the masters of the wall of noise and dense arrangements, Augie March are the masters of quaint, calm, sparse arrangements - and yet they seem to evoke just as much emotion. It just goes to show that when creating music of haunting beauty, simplicity often works just as well as the bombastic, if not more so.



But the arrangements and sounds would be nothing without great songs. And this album has 15 classics. Glenn Richards' lyrics read like Wordsworth poetry, here are but a few examples.



"Blasted in appearance and a composite of fearful minutes frozen in a waking instant" (There is no such place)

"are you lit from the inside, is that why your teeth are bright?" (Tulip)

"You are the queen of the dustbowl, ex to the crier in a town of ashes" (Sunset Studies)

"Here sits a once good gardener/ pale as a shadow of a doubt/once a happy dweller of a garden good/ once a sleepy sinner/ once cast out" (The Good Gardener (on how he fell))

"What did the condemned say to the blessed when they met on the path? "Oh you take the low road and I'll take the high for a laugh." And if I'm nothing now it's because I've a gentle heart." (The Hole in your roof)



Seriously.



The fact that more people haven't heard this album is simply criminal. Do yourself a favour and buy it now, you won't regret it."