★★★★☆
“Why don’t you barrack for the Crows?”
It was an indignant rebuke masquerading as a question of football allegiance, delivered in the late 1990s by an old Adelaide friend whom I’d not seen since leaving high school a decade earlier, and provoked by my declaration that I didn’t support the first AFL team to come from my city of birth. “I don’t like their style of play – their jumper sucks, plus, blind parochialism really shits me,” was my defiant response. At that point it was, not surprisingly, a very strained conversation.
But had it taken place now, I would’ve said I did like The Adelaide Crows – the Melbourne-based band, not the footy team. In the opening track on their EP, ‘Little Heart’, Twerps meet The Pogues, while ‘New Start’strolls laconically around the streets to the groove of The Go-Betweens, trying to shed the skin of suffocating routine in the search for cerebral inspiration. Fittingly, the EP ends with ‘The End’, a marriage of harmony, melody and suburban fatalism that arrests your depressive slide and transforms it into excitement for whatever lies around life’s blind corners.
It’s nothing at all like The Doors’ Oedipal rant, but it does remind you that when any door closes, another opens. And for the Adelaide Crows, all those doors reveal great songs.
Strained ConversationsbyThe Adelaide Crows is released independently and is available now.
