Paradise Motel - Ghosts of Australia

What links an island off the south-eastern coast

of Australia to the scenery of the great American gothic, to its visions

that resurface periodically, flooding the collective consciousness? There, as

in the places most haunted by the spirits most lucid in deciphering what stirs

behind the scenes of American literature (and beyond) – from the Maine infested

with atavistic presences, which reason would like to confront, in a desperate

attempt at domestication, of Lovecraft, Poe and King to the superhuman silence

of the wooded expanses of Twin Peaks – Western man finds himself facing

a land whose past he cannot reconstruct, an untouched landscape of

immense, silent monoliths and untamable stretches of motionless desert. It is like

the dramatic, in a sense, realization that the planet – and, with it,

the universe – existed before man and will outlive him; that, perhaps,

ineffable, everlasting entities underlie the normal course of human events.

It may seem strange, but the music of Paradise Motel, a band from Hobart, Tasmania,

does indeed carry all these sensations, deeply rooted in the cultural sensibility

to which they belong. The Australian night, with its distant lights of unreachable galaxies

and will-o'-the-wisps, is the night of Man, a

time and place in which the purely material superstructures of existence

dissolve and everything becomes a tangle of ancestral, ineffable suggestions.

Whatever is dark, brooding and murky churning beneath the surface thus takes on, in the

band's finest moments, impalpable forms that dance over alluring abysses

of the soul, glowing with the blinding color of wonder. This is how

the landscape of the Unknown is painted, at once reassuring and terrifying,

where prayers echo to unknown gods and incomprehensible reminiscences.

It is, then, an oneirism that belongs to these Australians, not to be confused – not entirely,

at least – with that of the

Cocteau Twins, steeped in mythology and tinged with mysticism. Paradise Motel's songs are not delicate

neoclassical etchings, new age sighs, but

epiphanic flashes in an almost aggressive, looming darkness, propelled by

incessant guitar movements, in a bleak but evocative slow-core, never

repeated.

Carving light and shadow into a “still

life”

Bad light followed all the way

from “Bad Light”

Whose are those mud-stained wedding shoes on the

cover of Paradise Motel's debut (Still Life, 1997)? Perhaps they're

Laura Palmer's shoes, the shoes of the part of us that's at once most

innocent and most dark, morbidly drawn to love and, because of that, to

death. The vehicle for these themes and impressions, these

shivers that tickle primordial urges still peering out from the dark

recesses of the subconscious, is a song that would become something of a recurring nightmare

– it would turn up in various releases by the band – 

throughout Paradise Motel's career: “Bad Light”.

Here we get acquainted with Sussex's voice, a voice impossible to

pin on a flesh-and-blood being: impossible to picture a face,

to associate it with gestures; the only conceivable image is that of a voice emerging from some dark recess of the

mind, or from cracks opening onto other dimensions, places of baffling and

bewitching perdition, labyrinths of red drapes, dancing dwarves and impenetrable

darkness.

Through compositional choices (the obsessive, tiny acoustic riff that suddenly swells into booming

roars of horror) and arrangement choices (the dry, sepulchral drum beat, the

menacing creep of the bass), responsibility for which lay almost

entirely in the hands of guitarist Matt Aulich, the band complete a

masterpiece of new gothic. And yet, after the dizzying glimpses of "Bad

Light", it's the reassuring, graceful pop of "California", with its innocent and

unconditional emotional surrender ("Where are you now?" sings Sussex with

the anguish of a lovestruck girl), that imposes an almost bizarre dichotomy

on the band's expressive range.

Nothing unexpected, after all, is it – once again – that

the extremization of the all-American obsession with the fight between good and

evil, portrayed in an extreme, almost caricatural way (as if it were a zen

parable), in Twin Peaks and here revisited along the same lines. Here and

elsewhere: the alternation between light and shadow will become a true trademark

of the band, in its veiled, unsettling premonitions of death and in its

sudden, explosive bursts of life, which intertwine, as in the human

soul – and as in the finale of Lynch's famous series.

Part of this latter aspect is certainly to be attributed to the indelible charm of the

ballad à-la Julee Cruise

(David Lynch's unforgotten muse) of "Calling You" and to its annihilating incipit (the band's lyrics

are generally written by the other guitarist, Charles Bickford), whispered in

an immanent, superhuman darkness:

Do you remember?

A tiny speck of time

We both were searching

For something that was blind

The void that fills, in what follows, is a voluptuous crescendo, it is a dream

in which the contours of reality take shape, plucked like the strings of the

violin that accompanies Sussex (what a voice!) through its refrain, magnified by small guitar flourishes and powerful

gusts of strings. It's precisely our heroine's voice that allows minimalist ballads

like “John” to hold together, with fleeting piano chords chasing each other beneath

her lead.

Controlled emotions, but never repressed, run through Still Life, in the hinted-at yet looming riffs of

“Circles”, in the pitch and acid of the searing “Men Who Loved Her”,

possessed by vertiginous surges and a transfigured Merida Sussex, right up to

the sudden (and brilliant) final shift in register.

Toward the end of the record, the band leans into slightly over-the-top tones (“F

Heart”), in processions with a rhythm and expressiveness as bizarrely

frayed as that of “Stones”. “Violence and silence”: this

pairing, used by the band themselves in an interview to define their

own approach, would become their motto, summing up — if a

bit pretentiously, to be honest — their interest in hidden stories,

for the darkest aspects of a polished, dazzling Western society.

"Flight Paths" toward other worlds

Thanks to the success achieved at home, right from their first releases,

the local label (Mushroom/Infectious) makes a first attempt to break into the

English-speaking market, reissuing in England the debut EP, Left Over

Life To Kill, though turning it into an updated compilation by adding tracks from Still

Life and transforming it into a full-fledged LP.

Titled after the autobiography by Caitlin MacManara, widow of Dylan Thomas, the

record the band put out surprisingly surpasses Still Life, even though

it features largely the same songs, in terms of expressive consistency and

intensity.

The opening is the same: "Calling You". But, whereas on Still Life it

continued with "California" (a track completely dropped here), leaving a

sense of shaky ambiguity, here we're plunged right away into the tarred

tangle of "Dead Skin" and "Men Who Loved Her" ("The agony/Will set you

free”, and indeed she does), in a whirlpool with no visible end, between

brutalized guitars and sly sighs of death, sudden transfigurations.

The first departure from Still Life, however, is the string ballad “Watch

Illuminum”, an anguished song of a soul trapped by a quartet of

Beatles zombies – the contrasting effect between Sussex’s grieving narrative,

later echoed by a distant horn, and the relentless string choir is at times

spellbinding. These are techniques revisited in “Desperate Plans”, a rather

subdued love sigh that eases the tension before the unspeakable abyss of “Bad

Light”.

Traces of 90s pop also unmistakably surface in the lovely “German

Girl”, with its airy closing surge, which ends in an icy

embrace. But there’s time for one more great song before the closing credits,

once again entrusted to “Stones”: “Ashes”. Its small chord

shift drives the track with a piercing dynamism, fording from one

guitar theme to the next, amid sketches of emotional crescendos and the call

distant Merida Sussex that gives no hint of a possible ending. An

ending that turns out more natural than one might have expected, a tiny riff resting on a liberating emotional

truce.

The real “pop turn” comes, however, with Flight Paths (1999). Paradise Motel

bring their own ingredients back to the surface in a completely different guise, after

the wanderings through abandoned steel mills and desecrated cemeteries of Left Over

Life To Kill – as if they had passed to the other side of the great curtain.

A grand collection of songs, more than a proper album, Flight Paths

relies on a massive production, a more conventional and

widespread use of strings (overflowing, to be honest), a song construction that

pulls the band's sound away from the slow-core echoes of their early work and

brings them closer to a dream-tinged alternative pop,

in a final attempt to win over audiences across the oceans.

A decidedly different aesthetic, a dress that turns glittering yet

synthetic, but still great songs. “Daniel”, with its intense swells,

its triumphant build-up, swollen with feeling and fearless; “Heavy Weather”,

with its refrain “This can’t last

forever”, cloaked in the melancholy of summer hits and winking rather heavily

at the mainstream of the era, with its plastic-sounding beat (see also “The

Trees”) and its near-rapped interludes;

for the nostalgics, fragments of old passions live on in “Hollywood

Landmines”, with its easily recognizable refrain (“Knockin’ On Heaven’s

Door“).

It seems, in short, that with Flight Paths the band tried every trick in the book to

succeed, and indeed they put together a work that would have fit right in

the hit parades of the time, actually more

inspired than many a potential rival. The most famous track of theirs

will instead remain their cover of

“Drive”, the hugely famous song by Cars, included on the album (curiously, beneath

the ever-present blanket of violins, the synth solo is handed to an accordion).

Included in some editions of the album are the Reworkings entrusted to artists of

great renown. From a noise-laden “Lee’s Trees” (courtesy of Lee Ranaldo of the Sonic Youth),

we move on to a reverb-drenched rendition of “Drive”, handled by

Mogwai, through to the fine acoustic reworking of “Cities”, under the guidance of

Mark Eitzel, and the even more successful alt-folk version of “Four Degrees”, alongside Hefner's Darren Hayman.

Naturally dispensable, but evidence of a growing, indeed well-established

regard for our heroes within alternative music circles in the late

90.

It's around the release of Flight Paths that we can date their move to

London, which would serve as the base for their European tours, opening for the likes of

Sparklehorse, Mercury Rev and Grandaddy. Something happens, though: for a year the

band doesn't record any new material, and in early 2000 they'll break up. It's a

weighty question mark that hangs over Paradise Motel, unable to make a name for themselves

beyond their own doorstep, but not only that: unable to be "seen"

beyond the borders of their homeland, that land of boundless horizons they'll

find themselves reunited with, joyfully, only eight years later.

The return to Australia: new life and

the awakening of old ghosts

“Thinking

back to when we stopped playing together: we'd been living in London for

a few years and everything was going fine, but I found I'd run out of things to say

– I felt it was time to call it quits. Afterwards the band members

moved on to various other things, while I stayed in England for another eight years.

When I went back to Australia…Everything started speaking to me again, I started hearing

the songs, the music, all over again. It all happened quite naturally, really: all it took was

calling up a couple of the members and talking through our ideas.

Charles Bickford,

“Yourgigs.com.au”

Perhaps that's the whole meaning behind the band's reunion,

which comes eight years after the split. Eight years in which

Bickford goes through Andersonian misadventures,

working as a designer and, more successfully, as a regular guest on a quiz

show. Under the influence of renewed Australian inspirations, the band

tackle a concept album devoted to

a great story, one of those that enter the popular imagination, that

divide public opinion, that mark an event: the death of Azaria Chamberlain.

Azaria Chamberlain was an eight-year-old girl who disappeared on 17 August 1980

during a camping trip at the foot of Ayers Rock, the famous Australian

monolith – her body was never found. The first televised case of

violent crime in Australia, it deeply struck public opinion, indeed,

when the parents' account – according to which Azaria had been carried off

by a dingo – was dismissed and the mother was sentenced to life in prison.

With a noir elegance that is not “studied” – see Elysian Fields –

but spontaneous, Paradise Motel build their reconstruction of the story of

their Laura Palmer (once again the Bickfordian obsession with the disappearances of these female figures returns, which

reappear as elusive, beautiful ghosts) across a sequence of

songs that drift through dimensional planes, enriching themselves with detail until they

unfold into hushed instrumental progressions. Guitars that seem to fold in on

themselves give way to the vibrant fervor of strings, a reassuring funeral

choir. The opening track, “The Witnesses”, a soft lullaby that gradually gains

space and resonance, like a dream growing less blurred as time passes,

is exemplary in capturing all this: one mystery is unveiled only to

reveal another.

It doesn't end there, because Australian Ghost Story is certainly not a work

that's convoluted or claustrophobic: it often manages to take flight with the lyrical afflatus of a

band that may be experienced, but is in no way willing to trade its

artistic drive for mannered posturing. As in the aching prayer of

“A Bend In The Terror”, where Merida Sussex plays the mother

entrusting her blessing for her daughter to the wind, from the cold walls of her

own cell. A miracle that carries on in “Goodwin And The

Jumpsuit”, aided by a string arrangement that never sounds restrained,

but by a folk veracity that lends a certain vividness to the dreamy wandering of the

Sussex (“Familiar Stranger”).

Australian Ghost Story sways disorientingly between dream and

consciousness, as in the aching nursery rhyme of the beautiful “Brown Snake”:

it's a record that undoubtedly carries the sly charm of intelligence

(“My Sister In '94”). We arrive, fully won over and

satisfied, at the conclusion, lit up with shamanic flames, of “Prelude

To A Saga”; in its sweet closing evocation, the band seems to be addressing not

only the record's protagonist, Azaria, but itself:

What I can recall of the outside world –

the taste of the bore,

that I my father dug

in exchange for a god .

Now he’s settled in,

and this dreaming must end.

My world’s in here.

It's not only the ghost of

Azaria Chamberlain haunting Bickford. The latter had contacted his

old bandmates with something other than Australian Ghost Story in mind, but another

album, which the band would record during 2008, though it was never released. In

December of that same year, in fact, drummer Damien Hill died. The

Paradise Motel project took the hit – of the album, titled I

Still Hear Your Voice At Night (better known by its acronym Ishy

Van), nothing more was ever heard.

Perhaps it's the fresh stimulus gathered from presenting their new album in

their hometown haunts that sparks the urge to officially unveil also

this work, released in January 2011.

Something feels rusty, though, in the songs on Ishy Van. It's natural that the

band loses the enveloping intensity of Left Over Life To Kill, or that it no longer

tries to grab listeners with the predatory hits of Flight Paths: the

problem that palpably emerges from this record is figuring out what's left. Problems

of identities that are reflected, then, in a transitional album, which reveals

a more “mature” style, but also one without rough edges, without any standout emotional peaks.

Perhaps their album closest to the restrained pop of Tindersticks, with that

full-bodied bass, always front and centre, the sparse guitar inlays, the

dry emphasis of the drums and distant gusts of violin (as in the lovely “The

Legend Of A Sailor”).

And yet, it doesn't seem like a game of false doors, Ishy Van, and from the depths of

the darkness of the early days it seems to catch its own reflection in a puddle, wallowing in the

mannerism of tracks like “Bear Never Left Home” and “The Moonlight And The Scrub”. Songs

that are pleasant, measured, polished even, but that never show a spark

able to reach out and grasp anything beyond a fleeting emotion, a

brief grimace of the face. Predictable, in short, more often than not.

A fine fresco in two dimensions, in which, however, Paradise Motel break in the

new engine of their more stripped-down sound, throwing in a few

experiments, like the male counter-vocal to Sussex's voice, which at times

seems to flatten out, as in “The Exiles”.

Sure, an off-the-cuff release, perhaps born of the excitement of being together

again, playing music, crossing Australia from end to end,

meeting smiling, friendly faces, the ones who still remember them.

But it's comforting to know that, after Ishy Van, Australian Ghost Story was released…