The Drones Albums (5)
What The Critics Say
If the Drones have grown a touch more polished and focused with time, it's not at the expense of creating compelling music -- if anything, Havilah even more clearly places the band as one of Australia's best rock bands ever, something that goes beyond the clear twang in the voice of Gareth Liddiard right from the start of "Nail It Down," the album's dramatic start. With guitars moving from the understatedly tuneful to sweepingly angry without losing the pace, it suggests Havilah will be nearly all brawl, but instead it takes a generally calmer turn, Liddiard's voice front and center even as the band artfully and alternately arranges itself around the singing and then bursts forth on the breaks. Even that doesn't always happen, though, with "Penumbra" essentially being the Drones unplugged, the calm guitars touched with a distant wail at the song's end sounding like a lost soul. Songs like "The Drifting Housewife," its delicacy marked by bells and building strings even as the lyrics meditate on identity and social expectations, and the tense "Careful as You Go" show that even as the Drones sound less overtly frenetic they still exude a sense of unsettled threat, suggesting the build to a final fierce resolution rather than necessarily reaching it. If nothing else, some of the opening lyrics to "Oh My" show that the band's contrarian spirit is far from dead: "People are a waste of food....they're only happy when they're burying their friends." ~ Ned Raggett, All Music Guide
'Gala Mill'
Release Date 10/9/2006
Tracks 9
Label All Tomorrows Parties
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Australia's Drones set the American underground on fire with 2005's Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By. It is a wily combination of Aussie garage rock, country, psychedelia, and pathological sonic experimentation presented raw and immediate with the poetically strange and storytelling lyrics of frontman Gareth Liddiard. The songs, played with a spiky crackling energy and recklessness, pushed critics to the brink of superlatives in order to describe them. Released in 2006, Gala Mill is named for the rural place in southeast Tasmania where the album was recorded. The Drones are no less on the fringe this time out, and the album's sound is, if possible, even more immediate than its two predecessors. One can hear dogs barking, musicians coughing, and birds singing in and between cuts. And Liddiard is even wordier this time out -- to positive effect. "Jezebel," the slow, roiling eight-minute opener, is coiled to bust loose at any moment and addresses topics as unrelated as the death of journalist Daniel Pearl in the Middle East, nuclear testing in the Australian homeland, and a school massacre that is infamous in Aussie history. Liddiard refers to world events, history, mythology. Politics, sex, desire, tragedy, and other indecipherable topics are presented side by side as a way of weaving a new series of myths and texts that erupt from the belly of rock & roll. While there may be no direct influence at all, former Aussie rockers Crime & the City Solution fronted by Simon Bonney did the same on their cult gem The Bride Ship in the late '80s. "Dog Eared," with a gorgeous violin played by Michelle Lewitt, feels like Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer" crossed with Nick Cave's Boatman's Call album. The kind of love revealed in this tune is so vulnerable that it becomes abusive. The slow, plodding lyric lines adorned by switchblade guitars and unraveling instrumental passages are infectious and purely Australian -- they feel closer to the strange experimentation the Band did on Stage Fright, but are culturally outside the North American experience and feel closer to Australia's wild country music read through garage rock and post-punk. Gala Mill gets even slower for the next two cuts, the whispering shambles of "I'm Here Now," about drug addiction -- observing it, not participating in it -- and the truly hunted "Words from the Executioner to Alexander Pearce," about a convict in the 19th century who escaped the Sarah Island Penal Settlement not once but twice, only to be caught the third time after having murdered and eaten six men. This is a gallows pole conversation that is chilling in its close observations of an executioner who seems to care. Spooky? Hell yes. Spiny rock & roll returns in "I Don't Ever Want to Change," with its mutant Chuck Berry leads and open-chorded riffs. Liddiard sprays his anthemic wash of words into the mike and the band responds with a fury. The rest moves form slow to slower to skeletal to barely restrained anarchy in cuts like "Work for Me," "I Looked Down the Line and I Wondered," and the amazingly diverse but no less freakish "Are You Leaving for the Country." The set closes with "Sixteen Straws," referring to groups of Catholic convicts who wanted to die but couldn't commit suicide for fear of eternal damnation. They would draw straws and the short and long would be the killer and killed, with the entire group assuming responsibility for the killing of the person murdered. From the sound of it, Parchman Farm sounds like a resort in comparison. Over nine and a half minutes in length, it as an acoustic ballad with the vocal accompanied only by acoustic guitar and harmonica. It's as bone-curdling a story as one is likely to hear. Perfect for Halloween, it's also perfect for a Wim Wenders movie. Apparently the narrative is historically documented, but Liddiard's portrayal puts him truly in the first person, and the narrative is cinematic. This is not the Drones recording one would have expected after the rollicking and punchy Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By, but it's the album they wanted to make, and it deepens both the myth and mystery of who -- and what -- the Drones really are. Brilliant. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
'Spaceland Presents: The Drones in Spaceland November 15th, 2006'
Release Date 1/1/2006
Tracks 10
Label Graceland
See Album Tracklist and Review
'Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By'
Release Date 4/18/2005
Tracks 9
Label Infidelity
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Melbourne, Australia's Drones had a lot to live up to after their debut, Here Come the Lies. That recording, equally split between covers and originals, is now regarded as a an Aussie garage band classic in the same way that recordings by Scientists, Lime Spiders, the Saints, Beasts of Bourbon, Died Pretty (Free Dirt), and even Radio Birdman have been heralded. Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By is by contrast a furthering of that vision and a slight turn into darker territory, with all self-penned material. The guitars still blaze, distorted and wild, Gareth Liddiard's voice is still more howl and growl than croon, and the needle of the recording machine is in the red more often than not. Thank goodness. One listen to "Baby²" is enough to confirm this in spades. Stomp, swagger, and pummel, with smoking hooks and a healthy disregard for rock's current conventions offer proof that this is an album that could only have come from down under. But there's something else, too, as the album's opener, "Shark Fin Blues," attests -- the songs themselves have taken on a more narrative and darker bent lyrically. Indeed, were it not for the overloaded six-strings burning through the heart of the mix, one could swear that Simon Bonney wrote these forlorn, doomed-man-at-sea lyrics for the Crime & the City Solution's Bride Ship disc: "Standing on the deck watching my shadow stretch/The sun pours down upon the deck/The water's licking around my ankles now/There ain't no sunshine way way down...." On the slower tunes, like "The Best You Can Believe In," the pace snakes and crawls one moment and the choruses explode in scree and fierce wailing feedback, although tempered by hooky backing vocals that counter Liddiard's tortured hollering. "Locust" is a fine if demented rock & roll drinking song that plays itself out like a country ballad done by the Bad Seeds gone off the rails, gathering steam and tension until it turns back on itself and caves in altogether. This is a kind of darkly humorous horror music about harmless drinking turned into virulent alcoholism and addiction. The sprawl and crank is back on "You Don't Really Care," where the band sounds like the Cramps, the Gun Club, and Scientists all combining members. It simply spits and screams its whiskey-bent and hell-bound lyrics into the void of blackness, and rages and swaggers all the way. "Sitting on the Edge of the Bed Cryin'" is as spooky a ballad as has been written recently, until the tension becomes so great that it explodes in blues skronk and swill, yet never loses sight of its hunted slide guitar hook. This is a kind of blues-country from hell, as if Dock Boggs had fronted a rock band. Here humor and pathos, nihilism and the hope for redemption fight to the death inside Liddiard's voice as his mates -- Mike Noga (drums), Fiona Kitschin (bass), and Rui Pereira (guitar) -- carry him back and forth from the sheer pit of darkness up to an Earth that's been scorched, so he can laugh and wail with grief in fits and starts. On "This Time," the track that closes the set, an organ conspires with the quartet in a spirit of dread and sorrow, but Liddiard lets it all speak for itself and sums up the album in turn: "There's a feeling on the road tonight/Something out there waits with eyes/There's a feeling on the road tonight...this time...." Oh yeah, it's ugly, frantic, and reeling and careening with untamed savagery, yet comes running at the wall with an overwhelming ravaged tenderness in the heart of the shambolic, raging maelstrom. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
