There’s something about the human voice en masse that is magical. While soloists either need training or such a distinctive character as to make them unique in order to sound good, throw a roomful of people together to sing and the massed imperfections simply add to the resonance, the bigness of the sound. If you’ve ever been enthralled by, say, a Tongan choir you’ll understand exactly what I mean. The standout characteristic of the music of Paint Your Golden Face is this exact phenomenon. Including the core duo of Jonathon McCarthy and Jordan Marson, no fewer than 37 different voices are amassed on this album, many times sounding as if it could be a significant number of those at once. While certainly tuneful, this is no trained choir, and the effect is just as described above. Often singing surreal or disjointed, single, repeated phrases (“Caroline cuts hair for cider”, “I think this band is the one, and I think the front man will shoot himself into his face”, “She fell twenty-seven”), there is a primal beauty to their effect. As an aside, I was slightly disappointed to see the band at a recent Sydney showcase and find that the choir was confined to an i-Pod backing track – the visceral quality of all those embodied voices in one room would have been remarkable, logistics notwithstanding.
The other main feature of Paint Your Golden Face’s æsthetic is the primitive, repetitive and often sound-on-sound looped drumming of Marson. This is particularly effective when he deliberately shifts the hit slightly each time around the loop, as he does at the climaxes of ‘He Had The Most Beautiful Voice, He Could Sing The Birds Out Of The Trees’ and ‘Lions Love Lions’, creating a mass, phased flammed blur out of a single floor tom. There is a tendency to dryness, as can be imagined when an entire album is built around just voices and a limited number of drum tones. This is tempered by the use of harmonium on a few tracks such as ‘We Keep Cutting Each Other’s Throats’ and ‘Lions Love Lions’ and, most effectively, album closer ‘Kicking A Ball Into Powerlines’, creating ambient drones to contrast the aggression of other sections of the album. It just about succeeds. There’s always a difficult balance that artists attempt to maintain between creating a distinct, uniform sound and creating diversity to hold interest. I have to admit that I have struggled just a little to get through the entire album at times due to this tendency to the monochrome. But, having said that, I find that I’ve been continually drawn to putting the disc back on my player and listening to it (at least a handful of tracks) again. There is something going on here that is strangely compelling, no matter if it is sometimes difficult. To me, that’s a reasonable indication that the effort will be worth it and that Paint Your Golden Face is definitely deserving of ongoing scrutiny.
Adrian Elmer
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