Australian Americana that embraces the ramshackle.
Kyle Jenkins is a significant player in the Australian americana scene, having previously played with Suicide Swans, and now with Mt. Morning as well having released four previous solo albums. His fifth, Palace, sees Jenkins assemble songs that have been written in Toowoomba, Queensland, Pleasanton and San Francisco in California, and Dungog in New South Wales. Diverse locations, each offering inspiration in their own ways, that have made for diverse sounding songs – but these have nonetheless come together on an album that has a strong consistency. Jenkins leans towards a sound that offers layers of roughness, whether it be just in the vocal on the otherwise polished rock of Meadowlands, or mining a seam of Felice Brothers like ramshackle and near collapse on a song like See It Through. The deathly slow Bartender Eyes sets disconnection against aching pedal steel and a sparse banjo line before in the last minute drums crash in and take the song in another direction as Jenkins takes up the refrain “when the noose gets tied” as all options collapse down into one last desperate action. Haunting is the word.
There’s a Jesse Malin crashes against Josh Ritter feel to the pacey Better Way To Lose, an encapsulation of the unbounded energy of youth to embrace mistake after mistake and keep moving on to the next one. It’s growth, of a kind even if the embracing of the negative. There’s a similar echo of Josh Ritter on Valley Below, even with a nod in the lyrics to The Golden Age of Radio. With a fast-paced lyrical delivery, and a hooky time change mid-song it’s got something of the modern hey-ho folk about it as well. Adding one more influence to the mix, Trocadero is a vivid sketch of life in Greenwich Village, which deliberately – and rather well – channels Dylan with bouncing guitar lines fighting for a space against pulsing keyboards and a bar-room piano which stabs its way through here and there.
The good news is that Kyle Jenkins is more than the sum of his influences – he’s set out to make an album that reflects on what many people would regard as the high pinnacles of the Americana range, but he’s no mountain lake, he’s a clash of tectonic plates pushing up to make their own high point – and for that, this is an album well worth hearing.
