I’m walking home from the train station on some hot, dry, windy December day and the new album by Lehmann B. Smith (of Kes Band fame) is on the headphones. It’s one of those irrationally hot days – you move and you get sweaty, the cold bottle of water is warm in minutes. This is Australia to me: oppressive heat in the middle of concrete suburbs, mid-afternoon quiet as everyone hides from the rays, the Australia of perpetual water restrictions. Not the outback or the reddened desert that makes up the majority of the land, but smack bang in Melbourne’s western suburbs, any suburb. This whole fucking country is a desert, one big Russell Drysdale painting, no matter how hard we try to deny it with our English gardens and wilting green lawns.

Someone screams past in a red-ones-go-faster Lancer, air-con obviously blasting inside, and I’m out here like a sucker. But I’m glad I decided to walk, because it’s in this sweltering light that the truth of Smith’s music is revealed. I come to understand what The Big Dry really is: crackling, parched acoustic guitar, intermittent plucking and languid scrapes; belaboured vocals, as if they were recorded just after spending a day in 40-degree heat (maybe they were?); assorted creaking instruments stiff from sitting in the sun too long; and some strange sense of distance or oddity that can never fully be grasped (perhaps because the heat from the sun dulls your alertness?). Not that it’s in a stupor, mind, but The Big Dry is certainly slow; the kind of delicate, deliberate slowness one walks at to avoid getting too hot in the heat. The climate and the music melt together. Indeed, to say this album sounds “weathered” seems almost tautological. So it’s more than simply fitting, but one of those magical miniature epiphanies you sometimes experience as a listener, when the everyday just sparks with the song. As wind whistles about to join the music, it’s hard to tell which one is soundtracking the other.

If it isn’t clear already, Smith’s music is made from a lack of water. And like this “drought” that might never end, The Big Dry’s aptness is also its weakness, listening to it is like living through the uniform weirdness and languor of aridity. This album offers a singular and subtle evocation of an unrelentingly Australian experience, but I just hope his next climate opus is “The Big Monsoon”. Smith offers us respite towards the album’s end, quenching our thirst with sounds of rainfall and trickling water, but it’s hard to be optimistic when you see native animals literally dropping from the trees to die from the heat, nature turned against itself so unwillingly and forcefully that not even such sweet music might bring about the change.

by Lawson Fletcher