Ross McLennan
By Sophie in Ross McLennan | 1 comment
MP3: Teenage Wish (from Sympathy for the New World)
MP3: He Seems To Think We’re His Family (from Mistletonia)
Upcoming Ross McLennan shows:
Sunday August 24, 6.30pm
Writer’s Retreat with Ross McLennan + Lisa Miller + Ned Collette
The Retreat Hotel, 280 Sydney Road, Brunswick.
An intimate show in the “songwriters in the round” format.
Tickets $15 at the door. No supports so come early to get a table.
Tuesday October 21, 9pm
Melbourne Internatonal Arts Festival: Beck’s Bar @ Meat Market
The Ross McLennan Sympathy Orchestra spectacular!
Tickets $27 from Ticketmaster.
“There is genius among us” - MUSIC AUSTRALIA GUIDE
“Ross McLennan excels with this stream of musical consciousness, forging a new strain of languid psychedelia from off-kilter strings and spidery guitars, all spilling harmonic colours outside the lines” - THE AGE A2
“Sheer unadulterated godhead genius. A melancholy psych/folk masterpiece.” - RHYTHMS MAGAZINE
“Like Beck, Brian Wilson or Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, McLennan’s musical vision is unimpeded by predictability or tradition… As time passes, McLennan asks more of his listeners but all parties can take that as the highest compliment.” - THE AGE EG **** four stars
“If you want an Australian album that will still be causing you glee and aural wonderment in 2050, hunt down this gem” - HERALD SUN **** four stars
“McLennan’s voice is like a lone man walking through the night with a lamp, so it doesn’t tread heavily but it does find a way to inveigle you along. This is an album in the mould of Scott Walker but with its pop heart as valuable as its head.“ - SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
“A sweeping vision… one of the finest local albums this year” - DRUM MEDIA
“Sounding alternately like The Beach Boys, Lambchop, or fellow weirdo songsmiths Richard Davies or Cass McCombs, SYMPATHY is an album that’s mellow and meandering, yet dark and thoughtful” - TWO THOUSAND
“Whispered vocals and noir-ish psychedelia, like a collaboration between Lambchop and the Flaming Lips” - WHO WEEKLY
“A fresh and fascinating grandiose pop gem” - TIME OFF **** four stars
“With Sympathy For The New World McLennan announces himself once and for all as one of the few truly original pop songwriters in the country, and trust me, you’ll be hard pressed to hear a better album all year.” - BEAT
“A bit of a masterpiece, frankly” - MESS + NOISE
Mistletone is proud to release Sympathy for the New World, the new album from Melbourne’s home recording pop pundit, Ross McLennan.
This stunning new record charts Ross’s dizzying artistic progress following his post-Snout solo debut Hits From The Brittle Building, and will delight his many fans as well as turning a new generation of listeners on to his twisted pop precocity.
Written and recorded entirely in his home studio in the quietude of an inner-north Melbourne suburb, Sympathy for the New World is an accomplished production. A dozen finely crafted songs open up labyrinthine worlds of meaning, association and possibilities with every listen. Ross’s quizzical and playful lyrical and melodic smarts place him firmly in the league of other such idiosyncratic musical brains as Todd Rundgren, Kurt Wagner (Lambchop), or Stephen Malkmus - another artist who has arguably done more weighty and intriguing work after breaking up his band and retreating to his home studio.
The sophisticated production values and rich orchestration add dark soul textures and grandiose alt-rock flourishes to Ross’s sometimes witty, sometimes melancholic songs. Amongst the special guest appearances, Rebecca Barnard contributes ghostly vocals on the majestic closer, Welcome To World’s Fair, and a rousing choir of illustrious dozens from the Melbourne music community can be heard on the symphonic Sceptre Glove.
Sneakily spectacular, introspectively epic and inevitably classic, Sympathy For The New World is a must-hear.
From The Age: Subterranean songwriting blues
Read the full article here
Beyond the din of popular music, the chimes of artistic freedom can be heard. Michael Dwyer meets some of those putting meaning to melody.
No matter which way you read it, Bob Dylan’s honorary Pulitzer Prize of April just didn’t scan. To those long hip to his revolution, it was a lame apology for a sustained and deliberate insult from the American literary establishment.
Besides, what do songwriters have to do with that world any more? It’s 40-odd years since Allen Ginsberg drew fleeting academic attention to Eleanor Rigby and Subterranean Homesick Blues. Popular song has long since resumed its lowly status in the public imagination, a village idiot to the educated society of art and literature.
That perception is based, of course, on the overwhelming audibility of the lowest common denominator. Where is the legacy Bruce Springsteen identified when he inducted Dylan into the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame 20 years ago? “Bob freed the mind,” he said, “the way Elvis freed the body.”
Gone to ground, is the short answer. The genie Dylan let loose can never be rebottled but, from an industry viewpoint, it’s obvious that the body remains the more attractive dancing partner. Art is ballast for music tragics while cheaply synthesised froth rises ever more thickly to the top of the charts.
…
If there is a silver lining to the global freefall in CD sales, it’s the palpable ascendancy of this kind of thinking in a new generation of independent musicians. Cheap home-recording facilities, the new MySpace democracy and fading prospects for mass-market penetration are redrawing aspirations at a grassroots level.
a solitary soul surveys the paucity of potential suitors
pushes past her fellow commuters
looks around and sits down
next to the guy with the brown tie
and the laptop computer
the heavily coutured strain under the weight of their creations
their postures wear the gravity of their special situations
and the doors groan open for the latecomers
come one, come all comers
take a seat, welcome
you are all frontrunners
The trip winds on, morphing into a metaphor for social hierarchy and aspiration, until haves and have-nots reach their mutual destination in the fire of a terrorist’s bomb. Only in the indescribable shock of the explosion does the song spiral out of literal narrative into what McLennan calls “magical thinking”.
the 8.15 rounds the corner past the everyday people
suddenly swirling up around the synagogues, minarets and steeples
a traditional lament that travels by world’s fair
encoded in its resonant machinery
cats’ whiskers and leg hairs laid flat like the scenery
and it tolls as it tears flesh and sprung fit panels
it tolls as you scan the shortwave channels
it’s kept burning in trapped flame
a crucifix filament
its pealing hand is dealing to the guilty and the innocent
and people forget that people are born
people forget
Again, meaning and emotion soar beyond the realm of poetry. Lugubrious horns play the desolate traffic, sliding strings infer the slow outward pull of camera perspective. Rebecca Barnard’s husky chorus vocal is the broken mother’s plea while the narrator’s tone mirrors the short journey from boredom to confusion, disbelief and devastation.
Speaking about his influences, McLennan mentions novelist/philosophers Kurt Vonnegut and Albert Camus before John Lennon and Ray Davies, but “Dylan’s always there,” he says. “I remember reading . . . about the madness he went through when he was writing Chimes of Freedom. I feel a sympathy for that type of mind.”
It’s that type of mind, rather than anything you can notate, record and take to the bank, that defines Dylan’s legacy among his golden-age peers and countless subterranean acolytes. Maybe it’s neither pop nor poetry they’re writing but something with no practical use for a shelf label at all. It was only ever popular by default, after all, when the auteurs of the ’60s briefly took control of the vehicle and leapt the rails of teenage heartbreak and euphoria to cruise the labyrinth of imagination.
The often-asked question of whatever happened to the great songwriting visionaries is easily answered. They were simply sidelined by an industry with no time for mind games and a greed for instant gratification. Who can even wonder why pop idols are now fine-tuned on TV by expert panels and SMS voters? Commerce demands vast committees that overrule all but the most obvious keynotes of heartbreak and euphoria in songs we already know by heart. These are the tunes that play best in the mall.
“We’re not making wallpaper for people,” says Ross McLennan. “When people go shopping they want wallpaper. That sounds misanthropic; I don’t mean to be. Maybe it’s just rare these days to find intelligent people wanting to pursue pop music as their favourite thing.”
One suspects it will take more than one Pulitzer Prize to change that, but at least the chimes of freedom are still tolling out there for those with a mind to listen.
From Rhythms magazine:
Inpress live review (Sand Pebbles launch):
Arriving onstage in trademark fashion, alone with his acoustic guitar, local pop visionary Ross McLennan politely introduced himself to the audience before kicking off another one of his lessons into the deconstruction of contemporary music. Accompanied tonight by his brilliant, stripped down four piece backing band, it would be difficult to argue against the observation that McLennan is currently in career-defining form. Tracks from both his superb albums, Hits From The Brittle Building and this year’s sublime Sympathy For The New World, were performed with precision and swagger.
Inpress (live review):
From Wireless Bollinger e-zine: Ross McLennan
| by Chris Thompson | |
| Tue:25-Mar-08 | |
 After a long hiatus following 2003’s spectacular Hits From the Brittle Building, former Snout frontman Ross McLennan is back with a new album and a new take on the world. Wireless Bollinger asked him about the New World, recording at home and the fall of John Howard… It’s been almost 4 years since Hits From the Brittle Building – that’s a pretty long break so aside from the obvious recording of the new album what have you been up to? The new album is called Sympathy for the New World. What is the significance of the title? What is the New World as you see it? That’s a hard one to answer. My poor little brain makes a lot of connections that have no place in the world of logic. The title sounds important. That’s good marketing, right? It’s a pun on Dvorjak’s ‘Symphony: From The New World’ and The Stones’ ‘Sympathy For The Devil’. It’s kind of about our dilemma as international citizens. Poor old humanity. Old world seeds, new world deeds. Traditionally, the New World means America, and “America” represents the best and worst aspects of modern planet earth. It’s an unwieldy beast… From the moment it starts, Brittle Building was unashamedly a pop record, but Sympathy seems to be less so. There’s a pop bent at times but it’s certainly got some stranger, sometimes even slightly menacing elements at times. Was this something you set out to achieve or did it just happen that way? Well, I don’t like doing the same twice - at least not consciously - so I contrived to make something quite different. After Hits From The Brittle Building, I’d been thinking a lot about the place of an older person in pop, too. I remember reading an article about how the album was a dead medium so I thought I should make a concept album to really seal my fate… When I was young I played in various types of outfits including an 80 piece concert band and occasionally we would play pieces of what they would call “serious music”. When I sat in amongst it all for the first time I was knocked for six. Then one day many years later I started scratching my chin with a faraway look in my eyes. Lyrically, the new album seems darker too, almost like you’re angrier or sadder about the world now than then… I think it’s the natural consequence of continuing to write as you get older. You start to notice the same stuff happening. Having children now has certainly complicated my thoughts. ‘Now, About Siev X’ (named after the Indonesian fishing boat that sank in 2001, killing more than 350 asylum seekers) is probably the album highlight after the first few listens. How do you start trying to convey an event or issue like that in a song - how do you try to deal with the weight of something like that? First off you are moved to outrage. Then you realise you can’t do people’s stories justice, so I tried not to write about the disaster itself. I wanted to talk about political life. Death of the soul. These people who could sacrifice people’s lives, lie about it and sleep soundly. It sort of ended up being three separate stories in the end - impersonal, personal, and confused. I debated at length about the title… I’m guessing this is a question you’ll get a fair bit of in interviews this time around but I’ll ask it anyway - one of the talking points from Brittle Building was the song ‘John Howard the Actor’. How did the election result make you feel and how do you think The election result made me feel happy and hopeful. I didn’t vote Labor but I think we have the best possible leader in Rudd. However, political culture itself needs to change and that’s partly down to the people on the street. Have you looked at them lately? They’re an odd looking bunch… As for Howard, I’ll always speak about him in negative terms to anyone who’ll listen. Once again, the album was recorded in your house. When you’re so intimate with the surroundings, how do you think this affects the recording process and the outcomes? Is it always a positive to be so comfortable and relaxed? It’s the best possible scenario given that I’m not in a band as such. The finished works evolve from the first germs of the song rather than exist as a separate entity. It means I can follow my nose a bit more. You’ve been playing a few shows about the place and have more planned - how has the new material been received? Really well. The bulk of the tracks are still unknown quantities for most punters. Once the record’s out there it will change peoples expectations I suppose, the arrangements being so layered and all. You played pretty much everything instrument-wise on your last album, a couple of guest spots and drum tracks aside - is that the case again this time round? Yep. Is that a control thing for you, or is it simply a case of you being able to do it all, so why not? I’m relentless in the pursuit of my final objective. I can’t think about organising other players unless I have to (though it is nice to get friends in to play and sing sometimes - it stops me getting so lonely). Is it then strange hearing your bandmates play your parts live? Do they bring new things to the material and are you ever surprised, pleasantly or otherwise, about where they take your songs? It’s more novel than strange. I’ve been enjoying playing shows with my friend Ian Kitney. He’s doing guitar while playing stomp box and tambourine with his feet. It’s funny considering how big sounding the album is but it really works. Your last album was received exceptionally well from a critical point of view - how does it feel knowing that you’ve released something that is almost universally regarded as brilliant and yet it doesn’t find a huge audience in the way that it probably deserves? It feels pretty good right about now. “Deserves” is not a word I like to use very often - it only makes a person unhappy. Even when they get what they “deserve”… There was a time when artists would put out an album a year (sometimes even two or three). Nowadays that’s rare, and many artists take several years between albums. Why do you think this is? And what effect do you think it has on the music? The marketplace has changed a lot. Pop acts appear and disappear with more frequency and that’s bound to affect the stats. And of course the album is dead. It’s the province of old folks with kids. I think it’s a good thing in some ways. Most people can’t make much money from music so they’re saying “stuff it” and just doing it in their own sweet time. I tend to listen to most things that pass my way. In the recent past it has been Smog, The Beatles, Bachelorette and the Sufjan Stevens Christmas CD. What’s next in both music and life? Enjoying playing live. Loving my family. Recording a double album. I wouldn’t mind doing some soundtrack work. Working at Sydney Road Community School. |
it will affect this country? What do you think Howard’s (not the actor) legacy will be?
The Age EG review (four stars):
The 2004 debut album from Melbourne musician Ross McLennan, Hits from the Brittle Building seemed a natural progression from the British influenced pop of his former band Snout, as he began to evolve from a not-so mere songwriter into a composer.
Instrumentation grew denser, arrangements more complex. McLennan’s new work, Sympathy For the New World swims even deeper into fantastic labyrinthine worlds of singing strings, ghostly brass and fluid, visceral sounds that take on an almost filmic quality, especially when paired with McLennan’s vivid, at times out-there lyrics. Like Beck, Brian Wilson or Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, McLennan’s musical vision is unimpeded by predictability or tradition.
Check out the spectacular, symphonic Sceptre Glove, buoyed by a huge all-star chorus, and the epic, melancholic Mealy Mouth, which takes you to the other extreme, reminding you of the power of a simple chord change on acoustic guitar, particularly as McLennan sings softly, tremulously, “you could die out here”.
As time passes, McLennan asks more of his listeners but all parties can take that as the highest compliment.
- Jo Roberts
The Age A2 review:
Herald Sun review:
You may not always understand what Ross McLennan says: I suspect he isn’t trying too hard to help you. He probably figures that you’ll get the gist even if you may look blank when he sings in Sceptre Glove, “little nations lay back and cry/date ape dresses like an upright guy” before declaring later in the song “you give your spirit to a heartless man/breast milk metered on the buyback plan”. What? Still, you do “get” the low-rise tension and, in the swelling voices of the choir, the tricky business of life.
That tricky business is the core here, though more often it is couched in shimmering prettiness with bolts of the just-off-kilter (such as the string and brass arrangement of Mealy Mouth) rather than Sceptre Glove’s dark atmosphere. McLennan’s voice is like a lone man walking through the night with a lamp, so it doesn’t tread heavily but it does find a way to inveigle you along. This is an album in the mould of Scott Walker but with its pop heart as valuable as its head.
by BERNARD ZUEL
Drum Media review:
If Ross McLennan’s post-Snout solo career has any problems, it’s certainly not a lack of ideas or the will to put them to music. It’s more likely to be his prosaic profile as a young father who lives in Coburg and teaches music to primary school kids- it’s just not exotic enough to make people sit up and take notice. Which is a shame, because this, the follow up to 2004’s Songs From The Brittle Building, is a bit of a masterpiece, frankly.
His ‘He Seems To Think We’re His Family’ was a highlight of the recent Mistletonia Christmas compilation album, but that, with it’s relatively straightforward structure, was a mere sketch compared to what he’s cooked up here on Sympathy.
Home recording is a luxury, of course, and one that is all too easy to abuse. So too is self production, especially for a solo artist. Combining these with a batch of songs and coming up with an album’s worth of solid goods takes a deft hand.
With the help of a few guests, McLennan crafts finely made but unconventional-sounding tunes that gently meander to the point. He puts everything into the mix - ‘Famous Lonely Deaths’ features kettle drum, violins, oboes (or French horns, maybe, there was so much going on I lost track for a second) and a layer of fuzz guitar for good measure. But it’s all perfectly balanced, and the lushness of the palette is matched by the sweep of some of the arrangements. ‘Pete Best’, for instance, ranges from scratchy guitar to full blown Bacharach.
The titles are a joy in themselves - how could you not want to hear something called ‘Hail to the Exoskeletons’, or ‘Now, About SIEV-X’? At times it sounds like a product of the morose, kitchen sink drama school of British pop, but he keeps a distinctly Australian voice throughout. The lyrics are often pretty opaque - small snatches drift by and only really make thematic sense in the context of the songs themselves. But at the same time, they are often expressed in clever lines and sly word play - rhymes like “Potential Suitor/Morning Commuter” become par for the course, and this guy can make any lyric scan. This is ear candy on many levels.
by Trevor Block
Don’t let this go to your head Mistletone, but - you f!#%king rule.
This new record label isn’t even two years old, yet they’ve released some of the most exciting new music around (Ariel Pink, Panda Bear, Dan Deacon). Now add Ross McLennan to that list.
Recorded entirely in his North Melbourne home studio, SYMPATHY FOR THE NEW WORLD is the second post-Snout solo album from this one-man chamber rock auteur. Sounding alternately like The Beach Boys, Lambchop, or fellow weirdo songsmiths Richard Davies or Cass McCombs, SYMPATHY is an album that’s mellow and meandering, yet dark and thoughtful. With grandiose dips and swells, it’s the sort of long player that allows you to either chill out on its surface, or dive into its depths.
Keep this up Mistletone, and I’ll marry you…
By Wilfred Brandt
Who Weekly:
Five years after his fine solo debut, ex-Snout frontman McLennan releases a follow-up that’s both trippier and more dense. This time, strings and choirs augment his whispered vocals and noir-ish psychedelia, like a collaboration between Lambchop and the Flaming Lips.
BRETT COLLINGWOOD
Music Australia Guide:
Time Off review (four stars):
Praise for Ross McLennan’s solo debut Hits From The Brittle Building:
“Ross McLennan never lacked a pop sensibility in his days as the front man for the sadly departed Snout; rococo keyboard fills and swirls of harmony regularly adorned the trio’s Beatles-inflected rock. For his solo debut - the brittle building referred to in the title is a tiny room in his Melbourne home - McLennan has taken what he knows about pop and bent it into a richer, angrier shape. For a start, there are the arrangements and production sound - layers of guitars that sound like bells, keyboards burbling as if played underwater and off-kilter rhythms. And the quirky, sometimes flip approach employed in the Snout years has given way to a sharper, politically charged world view, one in which he extends his sympathies to John Howard the actor for having to share a name with the other one. Great, intelligent pop” - The Age
“Though his musical references stretch back through Lou Reed and Bowie to the Beatles, Melbourne boy McLennan also shares a love of dissecting the modern suburban life with his contemporary peers such as You Am I’s Tim Rogers and E from the Eels.” - Herald Sun
“It’s quite some achievement to successfully present classic elements and relatively traditional song forms with a progressive feel (looking back, moving forward). It’s what The Beatles did so well; no matter how psychedelic they got, there were always pure, rich sounds and strong melodies there to grab onto. So it is on Hits From The Brittle Building, Ross’s first post-Snout solo album; his vocal melodies stand proudly out front with plenty of charisma and the warming, reassuring tone of an organ or bass is never far away. That’s not to say that Ross has gone all straight-faced, vintage retro. Of course not! This is cutting edge man, er dude, er dawg. No, seriously, Ross has mastered the art of tastefully cool, hiphop influenced beats. In fact his seamless home-grown blending of modern drum sounds and imaginative noises with more timeless rock and folk elements has him coming across quite Beck-like, Odelay era. Should I point out some evidence? Oh, how about that utterly winning guitar line over the simmering psychedelia of Motorola? Or, hell, the very first bars of the album in which the drums are introduced with a turntable-like scratch over ghostly twisted barroom piano in Symphobia? Ross’s freedom and ability to weave such delightfully engaging production antics into each song, not as flippant gimmicks, but as essential herbs and spices, is powerful evidence for auteur-ism, for the very talented artists to be left vto their own devices, without the distracting and diluting influence of engineers, producers, label-folk, even bandmates. The songs’ aesthetics are engaging enough, but there’s also substance every 13 steps of the way in Hits From The Brittle Building. These aresongs you’ll not only dig singing, but dig pondering; Ross’s lyrics (and they’re all printed (hand-written) on the sleeve) are as nourishing as they are tasty. 2004 is looking like a landmark year for truly great local albums and Hits From The Brittle Building will be one of the greatest; a significant, world-class release.” - Inpress
“It is a major achievement for him as a songwriter and as a musician. Powerful stuff.” - Beat
“Some of the most refined and well-crafted pop music you’ll find anywhere.” - Time Off
“A stellar record” - Canberra Times
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kerry | Feb 28, 2008 | Reply
what beautiful records you do make - thank you