Rand & Holland, Pikelet, Ned Collette
The Hopetoun Hotel, Sydney

There was goodwill in the room this evening. An album launch is always a cause for cheer and congratulations, but tonight there was an added sense of delight, from both the audience and the headliners, as if each were looking at the other and remarking ‘Well now! Just how did we end up here?’

The generous feelings began early, with an unusually quiet and attentive Sydney audience for Ned Collette. He opened with a new song that was more like a screed, running with little sense of scansion through a daunting array of words – some, intriguingly, hinting at political turmoil and unease – like he was pouring out a bucket of water from a great height. It’s a credit to his unique talent that Collette is a compelling listen because – and not in spite of – his meandering approach. Interior monologues snake through guitar loops, and on ‘Blame’ he lets his half-spoken vocals, tinged with weariness, blossom into wordless drama.

Pikelet a.k.a. Evelyn Morris also knows her way around a Line Six pedal. She plucks and picks from a small array of instruments: drums, piano accordion, bells and glockenspiel, building up a dense and echoing texture from these and her own vocals, sampled live and looped back. If Collette is the bucket pourer then Pikelet is the sound from deep inside the well, and never more so than with ‘Sewerage Man’, where a lyrical reference to friendly goldfish acts like a charming flash of tinsel.

Rand & Holland climb aboard and guitarist Stu Olsen welcomes everyone to their party. Yet they begin with ‘Let Me Down Gently’, one of the sparsest tracks from their debut record, Tomorrow Will Be Like Today. It’s a prelude for what follows, for despite the folkish, finger-plucking textures of Caravans, and the fact that there are no less than three guitarists on stage, it’s those deep anchor, one-note basslines that dominate the sound. They’re a warm foundation, with Collette’s cluster of organ notes on ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The War’ eddying around them, while Brett Thompson’s vocals soak up the low burnish. “You’ve got the sun in your eyes,” he sings on the latter, and the line leaps out, fraught with promise and tension, with happiness and its shadow, “and things will never be the same again”.

by Emmy Hennings