Review Summary: Maybe this is the thing that I never get through
I’ve come to terms with the fact that 2017’s
More Scared of You is likely the closest we’ll get to a fully developed concept, i.e. narrative, album from The Smith Street Band. Journaling well after the fact a tumultuous real-world relationship from somewhere in its beginning to end – the good, the bad, and the downright abusive – the album is sparse, albeit revealing in its chronicling of events, sprawling, even novelistic in its account. What results, I think, is one of the most effortlessly dynamic, emotionally affecting albums of the previous decade.
Don’t Waste Your Anger, on the other hand, the Smithies’ latest full-length release – their first since, alongside a change in line-up, a temporary unravelling of the band’s public image (a number of emotional abuse allegations made against frontman Wil Wagner, most of which involving the abovementioned, relatively public relationship; a resultant suicide attempt, and the since-reversed blacklisting of the band’s music from the local radio station that helped popularise them) – feels, or rather felt, on first listen, a bit like a disappointment. A disappointment in the sense that, despite a notable sonic shift (the album sounds little like its predecessors), the album feels lacking in something like a broader narrative. An overarching sense of journey, a justification of the album’s form that’s characterised the band’s music since, like, 2014:
More Scared of You in a narrative sense,
Throw Me in the River in a thematic one.
Don’t Waste Your Anger’s threads, unlike those albums’, feel or felt frayed. Loose and/or untied. At risk of unravelling altogether, grazing its bearer’s elbows in the process.
And this remains true, at least to some extent. But what
More Scared of You revealed in its aftermath is that real-world narratives attempting to deal with real-world events bear real-world consequences; and what
Don’t Waste Your Anger demonstrates (in a sense, redresses) is that a tell-all chronicling isn’t, and never has been, essential to what was and remains the band’s ultimate goal: to highlight the possibility and illustrate the necessity of surviving.
Which is what
Don’t Waste Your Anger does, all things considered: in a way that is, though a little messy and far from narratorial, ultimately more reflective of real life and its troubles than may first appear. The album is, of course, littered with typically Wagneresque mantras: from ‘God is Dead’’s cautiously optimistic, “Nobody cares about you or your pain / But that becomes freedom if you look at it that way”, to the titular closer’s typically trite, though necessary, “Life is hard but keep on living”. Worth noting, the former of these couldn’t be further from the truth: see Facebook group ‘PassionaPosting’, hundreds of strangers invested in Wil’s wellbeing; see fans at shows and on the internet and in Melbourne unis (pre-lockdown), sporting shirts denoting, in some roundabout sense, the one man’s pain. A nevertheless wholesome, even pragmatic approach to recovering from public blowback.
What results then, too, is music that becomes less about the artist in any absolute way, and more about the listener’s reaction to the music, their subsequent internalisation of it. Whether or not ‘I Still Dream About You’ is about an addiction to ciggies or not, then, is totally beside the point: “I” becomes “You” becomes “We”; “You” becomes “Ciggies” becomes “Ex-Lover” becomes “Who or What or Wherever the Fuck it is that You Miss”. (“AND WHEN I SAID ME, I MEANT ANYONE!!!”) Which is the reason, I imagine, the band’s music resonated with anyone in the first place. (See the recent music video for ‘The End of the World’, which features members of the aforementioned Facebook group in isolation, singing and playing along to the mid-album highlight.)
How beautifully relevant, then, the recent addition of the fantastic Jess Locke and the equally talented Lucy Wilson, whose vocals lend even the saddest, loneliest moments on the album a sort of communal heft. Likewise, the band’s relatively recent sonic additions – keyboard, synths, trumpets – manage to make lively what is perhaps the band’s least energetic effort to date. Nowhere is this more apparent than on ‘Dirty Water’, on which soft piano strikes blend and blur with distant guitars to create an atmosphere that is at once lethargic and hopeless, but also strangely gorgeous. Within this context, the song’s overly dramatic hook, “I’ve fallen out of love with people”, feels more freeing than it does painful (or so the intro goes).
On the flip side, of course, is the aforementioned ‘The End of the World’, which feels very much like the typically anthemic Smith Street Band fans have come to know and love. It is, I’m willing to argue, the album’s least interesting track; but what remains true of
Don’t Waste Your Anger is that even at its weakest and least cohesive, it feels ultimately justified. Justified in the sense that, though its far less obvious in its structure than its predecessors, at no point do the band sound like they’re phoning it in. Rather the opposite, everything Wagner and co does feels as though it comes from a place of necessity, even desperation, like the writing and releasing and performing of music is all a vital part of the struggle, survival itself, and not merely a product of it.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that 2017’s
More Scared of You is likely the closest we’ll get to a fully developed narrative album from The Smith Street Band. And I think, if
Don’t Waste Your Anger is the alternative to that, that that’s for the best. ‘It’s OK’, ‘Heaven Eleven’, and ‘Don’t Waste Your Anger’, the trio of closing tracks, hit harder than a telecaster on floorboards; and really, what are The Smith Street Band for if it not to make you want to dance, weep, and carry on?
