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MP3: Hindsight

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Cracked pop fuzzbox MARK BARRAGE makes a nervy sound tonic, equal parts pop music EQd to breaking point and midnight crucifix synth-kraut.

Three years in the making, Delays by Mark Barrage (release date October 2008) finds the dissonant electronic songster shift from the overtly lyrical, heartbreak-obsessed territory of his debut into realms of hard sound, dance timings, band-ish arrangements and bleary-eyed nighttime sensation. The haunting melodies and pop song format remain, but the production is more gassy and art damaged - with lyrics oftentimes obscured by batteries of electronic layers, or treated simply as concrete sound.

The album’s mix of direct-pop intent, darkened electronic palette and woozy, pepped-up rhythms belies interests in punk performance as well as headphone electronics. Short and immediate vocal tunes intersperse with heavy instrumental, mood-laden vignettes, giving the record an overall, private/public tension, and the weird, compelling sound of labored programming destined for the band-room. DIY-produced at home with synthesizer, tapes, sampler, drum set, guitars and basic timeline-edit audio software, Delays’ accelerated, natural pace breathes new life into electronics’ artifice; working backwards to an affectation of life like vampiric possession, or experience felt in hindsight.

Mark Barrage has played over one hundred shows in Melbourne since 2003, many times alongside local indie highlights Panel of Judges, Love of Diagrams, Spider Vomit, ii, Hi God People, The Emergency, Always, Pets with Pets and Mistletone recording artists Francis Plagne, Kes and Beaches, among many more. Recent international supports include Dan Deacon, YACHT, Telepathe (all USA), El Guincho (Spain) and The Renderers (NZ).

Straddling the twin influences of electronic music and underground rock, Delays is a Morphean album in the spirit of Australia’s Severed Heads, the classic Komische groups and hard-art overseas labels Human Ear Music and Sacred Bones.

“Skittery, blunt mix of DIY electronic/minimal synth solitude and a marked New Romantic sense of melody and melancholy… Melbourne’s Barrage working in a one-man mode in which a lot of his modern day counterparts (Glass Candy, Chromatics, Minimal Wave/Wierd Records acts, even Dan Deacon) are missing a bigger picture. Rapidly engaged in a pop core and an android shell… songs that will linger in your ears longer than you’d expect.” - DUSTED MAGAZINE