Album review: Oh Mercy- Privileged Woes
Album review:
Oh Mercy- Privileged Woes
As opening track “Lay Everything on Me” bursts through like sunshine on an early morning, you get the feeling the rest of the album will be a pretty sweet experience. Melbournites Oh Mercy are bringing their own brand of Indie Pop, previously experienced on In The Nude For Love EP (nice title, btw) on the follow up full-length studio album Privileged Woes.
The album is a crisp, blissful experience from start to finish. The songs are delicate, like the innocently penned “Get You Back”, complete with a harmonica and an airy riff, to the textured melodies and vulnerability of “By The Collar”. Being ex-students of the exclusive Victorian College of the Arts, the quartet has certainly done their homework. The result is a celebration of life and lost love, an experiment with pretty melodies, and a distinction separating their music from all the local, overproduced “indie” artists in Australia. They aren’t afraid to break away from local conventions.
The highlight of Privileged Woes comes from the dreamy melodies from “In Good Time”, where front-man Alexander Gow huskily laments a love gone bitter and a lost sense of direction. The soft riff of the guitar, with a gentle piano melody perfectly compliments the delicate lyrical story Gow gently breathes life into.
Avoiding the Australian Indie sound is important. It’s easy to get lost in the crowd of stolen, borrowed indie sounds, which seem to dominate local radio. Oh Mercy clearly define themselves with splendid sounds with hark back to the golden days of Brisbane’s own, and well-respected, The Go-Betweens. Oh Mercy clearly have the smarts to out-smart competition, with almost no care in the world. And with music like this, the quartet must be floating on air in the dreamscapes they’ve created. I’m just afraid that Oh Mercy will blow away with the sea of electro everyone seems to be thrashing out to these days.
- Hannah Robertson
