Mental Notes January 2023: All the Rest Are Strangers

BRISBANE—I haven’t done a music review for 23 years, literally, so I sipped a few Coopers on the balcony and did this for a friend. Or possibly enemy, as no-one likes a reviewer.

Chris Hann’s new EP All the Rest Are Strangers, recorded “during the wet”, a namesake season in Darwin, and released yesterday, is a fresh and familiar love affair with an artist that set some high bars on the Western Australian music scene back when.

The opener Out for Blood is comfort food — that jangle! Storytelling kicks in as Hann’s bending of all the majors woozes you through a tale, his voice having matured to tap a bit of Brian Ferry – that period with Eno also in the keys, also featured – but tricking it up with a very power-chord-y outro, then pending a bit of doom, building the instrumentation, simply signalling a darkness. Whispers foreboding.

The comfort is in the playful riffs of all the tracks of this EP. There’s a generation, which seems to be baked on now, of Perth artists that can’t help to smash out riffs like there’s potentially about 3-5 songs in any track, “but we can’t choose and I’m going to make it bloody work”. And he does.

I Like It But I Don’t Know Why is a pop masterclass. Less than three minutes long it gets to the point and raises a smile. Not a singer’s song, but a sing-along. Malkmus wants his song back. But then it slams into the undeniable Perth twist. Thus, it seems like home. It has those pauses, those bridges, not at all out of place, taking us to that P-Town sound of which we all love.

The stuttering, ‘I’m doing this at home’ start of Agency Birds makes way for musicality of the coastal beatuty of both WA and no doubt the NT, switching gears several times to bring the listener to the scene. Reaching deep to concentrate on the vocals, it’s another storytelling delight. The riff flourishes will delight.

Strummy strum strum Summer’s Lease with its pedal steel-ish vibes and storytelling is a liltish, languid summer by the pool. Stripped back, with an initial Bluetile feel, its evocative “Revlon painted on” is so sunny. Again short, it’s definitely an EP near-closer, a taster.

The Drifters is almost like a signpost to what a full stage and band, and everything potentially tweaked to overdrive, could be if brought to the live format. The slightly off-key backing vocals just add that very Wooden Fische lilt we all loved so mch, like, 30 years ago?! The potential of grunt from his Anodyne 500. A homage to the great 90s anthems that still hold us in thraw in 2023, The Drifters is an opening song at a festival support. Hang on, isn’t that what the young kids of Hann’s home town used to do? Before they headlined?

Ridey and ROsesy, it’s a final flourish with a slow fade to what Hann under the moniker The Sandhills can bring to the world in his latest incarnation, on the balcony watching the rain pour from the roofs of Darwin, with fond memories of the pitter patter of the sparce rain of his hometown.

Recommended.