Tom Cooney
Presque Vu

These days, folky singer-songwriters seem to be a dime a dozen. There’s no shortage of wannabe troubadours out there, hearts full of tragic tales they’re desperate to share with us over a few lazy strums of a (preferably battered) acoustic guitar.

So when an album like Presque Vu arrives with a bio that references Fionn Regan and M. Ward, expectations can be expected to take a dive. “Here we go,” you might think. “Just another collection of polite folk tunes, right?” Wrong.

Tom Cooney is … well, he’s different. Better. Much, much better. For starters, his voice is something else. Without sounding bored (and therefore boring), Cooney delivers his vocals with a laidback ease; even as he’s pushing his larynx to its limits on the record’s haunting closer ‘Silence’, he wholly avoids sounding overwrought or insincere. Though he’s a Brisbane native, Cooney’s voice shows little trace of an Australian accent, a fact that cultural crusaders might want to rail against. But given the nature of these songs, that Cooney sounds more Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam than Paul Kelly is definitely to Presque Vu’s credit.

Presque Vu was crafted using much the same ingredients as favoured by Cooney’s contemporaries – gently strummed and nimbly picked acoustic guitars, along with occasional touches of percussion, violin and female backing vocals – but he dodges alt.folk cliche by way of the album’s delicate, understated arrangements. A faint sense of rural menace is brought to tracks like ‘Mountains in the Sky’ and album highlight ‘Beneath the Wheel’ by way of dusty electric guitar (courtesy of kindred spirit Whitley), while there’s an almost invasive intimacy to ‘Cycles #2’ and the aforementioned ‘Silence’.

Vitally, Cooney hasn’t mistaken pleasantness for inoffensive blandness. There’s no reason you couldn’t play this record next time your mum comes over to visit (well, except for when he says a rude word in ‘Beneath the Wheel’), but that doesn’t mean Presque Vu is colourless AM-friendly folk, either. There’s a rawness to Presque Vu that aligns Cooney rather closely with Australian songwriters like Ned Collette and Tony Dupe (who, incidentally, is all over this record), and he deserves to be recognised, treasured and, of course, enjoyed as such.

by Adam D Mills