When Alps, aka Chris Hearn, arrived home from a lengthy world tour last year, his first Sydney show was an intimate backyard concert in Enmore. His equipment was suffering and worn, but the sub-20 attended audience was typically transfixed. As is often the case in Sydney though, there was fierce neighbourhood intervention: a shrill inner-city resident was aghast at the audacity of kids playing their ancient, barely amplified organs in a (bloody) inner-city backyard in broad daylight, and so Hearn was forced to ceasefire. The federal election coverage was on, after all.

He played a few tracks from his 2006 Shriek Sounds LP Alps of New South Wales, and honestly, in a live environment these songs felt strangely bereft. It might be that the intentions codified within the home-recorded, DIY aesthetic (an immediacy of expression, an inherent honestly in four-track humility) often veil lacklustre material with an agreeable obscurity, or an ideology a certain minority can identify with. For Alps, the method of execution is a major identifying quality – to tag these emanations to a face and an array of half-shitted Porta sound organs has a dulling effect.

Not so much the case with this new record though. Alps of New South Wales often felt utterly miserable – some of the lyrics were so explicitly resigned that there was an element of masochism involved in listening to them. Alps of the World is still infused with those oddly incongruous major-key melodies that are gradually subsumed by ominous organ-drone murk, but it’s a whole lot weirder, more psychedelic, more dynamic. There’s the sense that while Hearn travelled the world he inherited new colours to pour into his songs.

There are earnestly strummed guitars on ‘of The USA’, during which Hearn sings “the start of a day is the end of another on all days but today”. Previously this line could be nothing but desperate, but in the context of Alps of the World – with all its colours and cryptic mood swings – it could be an expression of desire.

The most telling moment on the record is ‘of the UK’, where Hearn addresses the liberation and loneliness of travelling solo. It’s a minimal tune for voice and accordion, and Hearn’s vocals sound just as resigned as always, but it works – there’s an environment in the words, a panorama in the music, something to dwell or ruminate over.

While previously Alps couldn’t help but make you miserable, now it makes you wonder with wide-eyes and occasionally a smile. It’s a stopgap record before his next, apparently more ‘fleshed out’ outing, but let’s hope Alps keep travelling in this direction.

by Shaun Prescott