The rep on Whitley – aka singer-songwriter Lawrence Greenwood – is that he’s a Mornington Peninsula hardcore kid who got converted by the folk tradition, skipping out on the rehearsal room for the bedroom with an acoustic in hand before eventually undergoing a digital conversion and emerging with his 2007 debut The Submarine. That album, folk-pop buttressed by electronic tendrils, made a certain sense of his eclectic past: an agitated, percolating energy, flashes of narrative, a belief in resolution.

Go Forth, Find Mammoth, his second long player, is both a more comprehensive, crafted recording, written and produced by Greenwood himself with the likes of Jim Moginie (Midnight Oil) pitching in on overdubs and Scott Horscroft mixing, but one that’s altogether more complicated and, without overtly trying, unsettling. The steady dynamics and inclusive melodies often frame songs where the protagonists have either been worn to the bone by intimations of violence, or have emotional demands so strong that they can’t sanction a refusal.

References to killers and killing dot the lyrics: “I want to see all the killers drown,” Whitley sings on ‘I’, but ‘Killer’ has him pledging, “I would hunt you like a killer.” The concept of love, let alone the love song, doesn’t exist on this record. Emotional needs exist on a deeper, primal level; savagery lurks. “Something comes creeping, creeping in,” Whitley declares on the stern, soaring ‘Let it Sing’: “I killed my first love, blood on my hands.” He’s either the obsessive suitor or the wronged ex.

The record’s sound subtly reflects this. The instrumentation is dry, without warmth or wetness. Even when the songs rear up into life, as on ‘Poison in our Pocket’, there’s nothing lush or melodramatic about the intent – the structure is textbook, but the techniques are deceptive. The outcomes to these tracks are noted with offhand acceptance despite the implied distress, to the point where the repeated redemptive promise of ‘Bright White Lights’ – “I will make it through this” – feels like clutching at a familiar straw after a song that’s an orderly procession of calamitous trips through various environments (sinking in the ocean, falling though the air).

The album’s optimism, which lurks perceptibly throughout, comes from the realisation that these struggles are the norm, not the punishment of a marked, lesser individual. The rattling, percussive single ‘Head, First, Down’ finds acceptance in acknowledging that the “dark black fear” is something everyone will know: “So I fall … When you fall … And they’ll fall,” Whitley sings in turn, widening the scope after each verse of a song which has the buoyant, detached quality of Peter Gabriel’s ’80s songbook in the chorus.

Adding to the layers that unfold across the record are the echoes of another era counterpointed with the contemporary. The vintage tones that open the album, like a precursor to coded communication, are titled ‘1945’, which could be a random appropriation or a reference to the year World War II ended, suggesting that such a violent cataclysm only served to clear the decks for today’s troubles. ‘Poison in our Pocket’ follows on from it, and you could place the generation described (“we’re becoming silhouettes”) as being from either then or now.

That’s typical of the ambiguity Whitley is at ease with. The songs are often snatched moments, defined on emotional terms as opposed to physical detail or recognisable narratives; they could be happening as we witness them, or being reconsidered again and again by the now lone, embittered protagonist. Go Forth, Find Mammoth is accomplished, but it wants to keep you at a distance. It wants to be followed, but not fully understood.

That’s an odd, welcome state for alternative pop in 2009, an era alternately given to idyllic landscapes or the disassembling of meaning. Whitley is, I think, something of a tease. And perhaps ‘Killer’ suggests where he can take this, because it allows another voice – that of Hazel Brown – to intrude on the seductively bleak world of Go Forth, Find Mammoth.

At first she sings harmonies, barely there, but then Brown has her own verse – brisk, conversational – and she casually punctures the dome lowered around Whitley’s album. “It’s the same in your sleep as a firing squad,” she sings and that’s the sharpest line on the record, allowing in the oxygen of engagement. Whitley has come up with something distinctive and fascinating, edged with young genius pop smarts although thankfully not the associated Steele-ian excesses. Still, it will fare best as a stop along the way instead of the final destination. He has to let the right one in.

by Craig Mathieson