Review Summary: Because playing it safe just isn't rock & roll.
Where we find Powderfinger in 2009 relates back entirely to your perception of relevance in today’s music industry for established acts. If you’re about the facts and figures, then you could see the band as vital as ever – after all, their last tour alongside Silverchair reeled in millions across the country, and 2006’s
Dream Days at the Hotel Existence, in accordance with every Powderfinger record post-
Internationalist, sold strong units with a small handful of radio hits to go with it. Conversely, if you recognize artistic relevance in association with how much heart, soul and effort a band is putting into what they create, then one could easily argue that Powderfinger have struggled to remain relevant since the turn of the century.
Whatever your stance, you’d be hard pressed to argue against the notion that the band themselves have been questioning their own position in Australia’s music scene. Sure, they’ll continue to headline the major festivals no matter what they release – but are they doomed to excuse-to-tour new material that fans will invariably groan at before calling out for the old stuff?
Golden Rule, the band’s eighth album, seeks to alter their supposedly inevitable path into this musical state. What it ends up doing however, is simply put the band on a different road with the same destination.
With the omission of just a minority of tracks, nothing presented on
Golden Rule is anything new or exciting. This is the kind of music that asks for your attention, rather than demands it – it’s mostly likeable, but it also manages to be predominantly boring. Songs like stock-standard lead single “All of the Dreamers” and the meandering “A Fight About Money” shuffle into the fold with little fuss and proceed to do little more than disinterest and numb the listener, before eventually making their way out with no noticeable or defining “moments” that would regularly entice a listener to eventually return to the song.
Even Dream Days, which was generally received as Powderfinger’s weakest album, were home to some of the band’s greatest moments, such as the three-part harmony in the chorus of “Head Up in the Clouds” or the powerful acoustic number, “Black Tears (on a Red Rock)”. There is, sadly, not a single song here that stands up formidably when juxtaposed with the band’s back catalogue. That’s certainly not to say that this is an entirely desensitising listening experience, however. As veteran songwriters, the band certainly still know their way around formidable melodies (the Donovan-esque “Poison in Your Mind”) and snarling guitar licks from Ian Haug and Darren Middleton (“Jewel”, which sounds like a Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars homage).
Arguably the best moment here, however, is “Stand Yourself”. Amidst a dreamy blend of electric and acoustic guitars and a tightly-wound Jon Coghill four-on-the-floor beat, vocalist Bernard Fanning slams down a vicious farewell to a former sweetheart. “Everytime you tell yourself it’s alright/It just becomes a bigger lie”, he sings with confidence, before adding the final kicker: “I hope that you can stand yourself tonight”. If any track is going to give you hope that perhaps not all is lost on the band, there’s a good chance this will be it.
Away from these glimmering moments, the album’s “golden rule” is to bring its listeners up, only to be let down. Case in point: “Think It Over”. The reputation of the song precedes it, with over thirty thousand people at the Splendour in the Grass festival asked to learn and sing the chorus for it to be recorded. The ULTIMATE gang vocal moment…and you spend the entire song waiting for it to kick in. As a matter of fact, you’ll have to go back just to find it pushed so far down in the mix it may as well have been producer Nick DiDia and his favourite uncle shouting the chorus from the bottom of a well. Every good idea is looked at momentarily by the band and then thrown aside to make way for more adventures through the garden of mediocrity.
Golden Rule is an album with as much to say as Fanning’s solo album,
Tea & Sympathy - in Layman's, an exercise in nothing in particular. A mostly effortless flash in the pan, this album alternates between cruising dad-rock and the band doing the best imitation of themselves that they can muster. Powderfinger remain kings of all they survey in Australian music, but consider their crown wobblier than ever.
