The Doomed Bird of Providence "Will Ever Pray"

Front & Follow, 2011

And it’s all true I tell you…every word…

• Genuinely original, a revelation of sordid and degrading tales from the early history of the Australian colony, as Britain offloads it's brutal and dishonest and places the dishonest and brutal to oversee their incarceration on the other side of the world. If I said doom laden folk opera with squeezebox laden songs of torture death and mutilation you might think "The Decemberists". Well, only sort of. All these stories are true, and don't have a jaunty chorus to leaven the despair.

• Sung by Mark Kluzek over a multi-layered accompaniment whose sophistication allows it to appear casually haphazard, "Will Ever Pray" evokes a macabre world which is one part Dickensian underworld and one part a sun drenched Gothic horror. A very real visceral revulsion is produced by songs such as "The Wild Beast of Goat Island" which tells the tale of a convict who is flogged and then chained to an exposed rock, his bloodied and flayed back becoming a feeding ground for maggots with the maddening revelation that he is waiting "for maggots to turn into flies" which will allow the grisly daily ritual to repeat again and again.

  The set piece reworking of "The Massacre of the Whole of the Passengers and Part of the Crew of the Sea Horse", from a 19th century broadsheet, as a five part tune and song suite is the album's most sweepingly theatrical piece, depicting a journey ostensibly from England to Australia, but actually to be waylaid into some outer reach of hell by the mutiny of the crew.

  This is depicted in lingering detail as the passengers are first drugged and then, in best slasher movie style are needlessly hacked apart by the knives of the mutineers. The deceptively calm opening tune becomes an insane sea shanty that tells this tale with vivid close-ups on the torture and final murder of the captain, as the Sea Horse turns from a fine ship into a floating charnel house. Make no mistake - "Will Ever Pray" is no easy listen, Kluzek uses a guttural grating singing voice, the music his band mates produce is intense and occasionally makes no pretence of knowledge of tune and scrapes along like a blunt razor over leathery skin and like the mutinous crew of the Sea Horse it takes no prisoners.

  It is, for all these reasons, astonishingly good. You might call it arty or theatrical if you like, but damn me, you should hear it.