True Believers webmaster Stuart reviews Mark’s latest album, Mayday.

Author:  Stuart Fenech.

Date: 29 May 2015.

Original URL: N/A.

Article Text

“I could be your brother, I could be your son…”

Mayday demands your attention. Specifically, it is the humanity of Mayday that demands your attention.

There’s life passing by with our casual involvement. There’s the son discovering his father’s inevitable fallibility in Kosciusko. There’s seventeen years as a fly in fly out worker, reliant on the booze and smokes in an isolated cabin. It’s in the fragile emotional dependence of Carry Me Home. There’s even getting busted for booze on a train station.

Yet the human experience extends further. Irish Breakfast observes family chaos while casually sipping tea. There’s a legal fraternity with no bleeding hearts in Courtroom 32. We are drawn into the lives of asylum seekers in Two Dollar Punter and Asylum. Perhaps even to consider the questionable future of humanity in the rocking Oblivion.

Mayday invites you in by reflecting our own lives before expanding to our collective humanity. It explores lives and experiences beyond the simplicity of the evening news, without judgement, encouraging a broadening perspective. Earnest sentiments of frustration and hope delivered through thirteen tales of existence.

The delivery is via Mark Seymour with his band The Undertow, now onto their third album. Mark’s voice is earnest and demanding, as mesmorising as ever with the insight and confidence of experience. John Favaro’s bass and Peter Maslen’s drums provide a solid rhythm section while Cam McKenzie’s electric guitar is put to maximum effect at the front of the mix. The overall effect is a natural rock refined ‘live’ presentation that puts you in the centre of the action.

Fittingly, the final track Mayday leaves us with the hopeful vision of “red flags of mayday in the sun”. Left wing? Perhaps. Perhaps life has a left wing bias 🙂

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