Grand Salvo
Death

According to the dictates of rock music dogma, there is nothing more unwelcome than a concept album. Despite some indisputably classic records attracting the tag (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Smile, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots), the whole genre seems to smack of seventies indulgence, often seeming to limit a record's scope with its demands of thematic coherence. So it is with mixed feelings that one comes to this new concept album from Melbournian Paddy Mann, which centres on characters introduced as “the bird, the bear, the rat, the rabbit and the man, all wide eyed”. Call it his 'The Secret Life of Animals'. It's certainly an ambitious affair, the first half laden with strings, but its 51 minutes sometimes seems bloated with spoken-word exposition on its characters and wispy 'Is this still going?' instrumental sections that make Mann's evocation of “a place so still you'd swear it was asleep” seem at times rather too literal.

Ultimately, though, Grand Salvo isn't so much an acquired taste, as a very refined one. Hippie haters will run away, crying. Many would be put off by the mawkishness of 'Without His Friends', where the bear thinks of “all his little friends and the warm burrows” or the admittedly very pretty 'Shaleem The Hunter' which sees said bear precariously perched on thin ice as the music clangs along with something like urgency. Despite its title, the concept album Death most sounds like is often Cat Steven's mega-fey Tea For The Tillerman. But this resolutely sedate, nature-loving song cycle is not so easy to write off. Tracks like 'Bear' see Mann recapture some of the dark loveliness that made his previous record The Temporal Wheel and his rare live outings such a delight. Better still is 'Closing' where Mann's plaintive vocals recall a somewhat more credible '70s songwriter, Robert Wyatt.

by Daniel Herborn