Dan Kelly is quickly becoming our generation's Steve Miller. Our own Space Cowboy/Gangster Of Love is back with his second album, Drowning In The Fountain Of Youth, bubbling with the kind of intelligently agile, irreverently mischievous, psychedelic blue-eyed soul that the Steve Miller Band, Todd Rundgren and 10CC took to the charts in the '70s. Ah, the glorious '70s! When strange, beautiful pop songs shimmered over AM radio. When four-part harmonies and lavishly imaginative production swept us off on three-to-five minute tropical holidays.
Those days are back my friends. Just listen to the swelling harmonies of I Will Release Myself (Unto You) (and try not to weep a tear of nostalgic delight) if you don't believe it possible. If Dan Kelly And The Alpha Males' startlingly brilliant debut Dan Kelly And The Alpha Males Sing The Tabloid Blues presented a charismatic distillation of the greatest elements of modern indie rock, Drowning In The Fountain Of Youth takes a step back to make a giant pirouette forward.
Behold those angelic harmonies!
Those enthralling melodies!
That extravagant (self) production!
Those extraordinary lyrics!
How did Dan and his Alpha Males arrive at this new future classic direction? They've experienced much since the release of their impossibly auspicious debut two years ago. Beloved bassist Gareth Liddiard finally departed to concentrate on his own world-conquering outfit The Drones. He was replaced by bass player Lewis Boyes whilst guitarist Aaron Cupples and keyboardist Dan 'The Black Shadow' Luscombe were also initiated as full-time members alongside drummer Christian Strybosch.
Whilst busily touring the country's finest venues and festivals (where he and his handsome Males attracted rows of doe-eyed female admirers to the foot of the stage), Dan put on a brave public face. But he could be found in dark corners after all the girls had left, wringing his hands in nervous terror. Maybe he'd written his only good album. How could he possibly better The Tabloid Blues?
But the combined spirit of the Alpha Males gathering around Dan proved to be irrepressible. Somehow that spirit manifested itself in a tropical guise. Falsettos, four-part harmonies, ukuleles and Theremins became standard operating apparatus, and the first born of this new fertility emerged in the form of the most mellifluously expressed but savage indictment of our current political clime yet Drunk On Election Night. The song had thousands of us joining arms and crooning 'Ooh cocksucker, ooh motherfucker' in blissful vituperation. Dan realised that he had tapped into the pulse of the youth of our nation, just the inspiration he needed.
'Why scream and shout, when you can massage your indignation into people?' posited Dan. And The Males cheered because, indeed, they were as sick as the rest of us of all those screamy-shouty bands. So they put on their Hawaiian shirts, gathered in a luau of writing/recording bacchanalia and founded their own political party on palm-trees-in-theafternoon-breeze cadences and dropping-out-is-the-only-solution sing-alongs.
We're talking escape. Would it be so terrible to abandon our responsibilities and desperate ambition? What's wrong with momentarily disregarding the indelibility of a miserable marriage with a night of dancing? Dan proposes in Baby Sitters Of The World Unite! What's wrong with having no greater ambition than to be a toy boy/kept man? he furthers in I Will Release Myself (Unto You). Nowhere is the idea of being aimlessly adrift, lethargically resigned and tropically beached more eloquently articulated than in the simile of The Lonely Coconut: 'Like a lonely coconut I roll around your town'.
But escape, it seems, is only a temporary solution. When Dan sells up and sails off to 'play the coconuts in a Polynesian band' in Safeway Holiday (Get Wise), he finds a 'stinking Safeway carpark laid out on the sand'. When the dancing couple in Baby Sitters... return home, they must again face the question 'have I wasted my life with a fool for a lover?'.
Danger signs begin to appear everywhere. As Dan surmises in Mail Order Bride, 'The cost of doing nothing is to slowly die'. He hits the heart of the matter in Drunk On Election Night: 'The bad stuff's coming when the good do nothing, it's true, so what am I gonna do?'
There need be no fear of impotence on Dan's
behalf. With these 12 new songs, Dan Kelly And The Alpha Males have made one of the most constructive contributions to society so far this century. Proving that pop can be both cerebrally and melodiously gratifying (tropical and topical!), Drowning In The Fountain Of Youth will thoroughly rehabilitate your soul; well, at least enough for you to make it to the next Dan Kelly and The Alpha Males record, anyway.
Those days are back my friends. Just listen to the swelling harmonies of I Will Release Myself (Unto You) (and try not to weep a tear of nostalgic delight) if you don't believe it possible. If Dan Kelly And The Alpha Males' startlingly brilliant debut Dan Kelly And The Alpha Males Sing The Tabloid Blues presented a charismatic distillation of the greatest elements of modern indie rock, Drowning In The Fountain Of Youth takes a step back to make a giant pirouette forward.
Behold those angelic harmonies!
Those enthralling melodies!
That extravagant (self) production!
Those extraordinary lyrics!
How did Dan and his Alpha Males arrive at this new future classic direction? They've experienced much since the release of their impossibly auspicious debut two years ago. Beloved bassist Gareth Liddiard finally departed to concentrate on his own world-conquering outfit The Drones. He was replaced by bass player Lewis Boyes whilst guitarist Aaron Cupples and keyboardist Dan 'The Black Shadow' Luscombe were also initiated as full-time members alongside drummer Christian Strybosch.
Whilst busily touring the country's finest venues and festivals (where he and his handsome Males attracted rows of doe-eyed female admirers to the foot of the stage), Dan put on a brave public face. But he could be found in dark corners after all the girls had left, wringing his hands in nervous terror. Maybe he'd written his only good album. How could he possibly better The Tabloid Blues?
But the combined spirit of the Alpha Males gathering around Dan proved to be irrepressible. Somehow that spirit manifested itself in a tropical guise. Falsettos, four-part harmonies, ukuleles and Theremins became standard operating apparatus, and the first born of this new fertility emerged in the form of the most mellifluously expressed but savage indictment of our current political clime yet Drunk On Election Night. The song had thousands of us joining arms and crooning 'Ooh cocksucker, ooh motherfucker' in blissful vituperation. Dan realised that he had tapped into the pulse of the youth of our nation, just the inspiration he needed.
'Why scream and shout, when you can massage your indignation into people?' posited Dan. And The Males cheered because, indeed, they were as sick as the rest of us of all those screamy-shouty bands. So they put on their Hawaiian shirts, gathered in a luau of writing/recording bacchanalia and founded their own political party on palm-trees-in-theafternoon-breeze cadences and dropping-out-is-the-only-solution sing-alongs.
We're talking escape. Would it be so terrible to abandon our responsibilities and desperate ambition? What's wrong with momentarily disregarding the indelibility of a miserable marriage with a night of dancing? Dan proposes in Baby Sitters Of The World Unite! What's wrong with having no greater ambition than to be a toy boy/kept man? he furthers in I Will Release Myself (Unto You). Nowhere is the idea of being aimlessly adrift, lethargically resigned and tropically beached more eloquently articulated than in the simile of The Lonely Coconut: 'Like a lonely coconut I roll around your town'.
But escape, it seems, is only a temporary solution. When Dan sells up and sails off to 'play the coconuts in a Polynesian band' in Safeway Holiday (Get Wise), he finds a 'stinking Safeway carpark laid out on the sand'. When the dancing couple in Baby Sitters... return home, they must again face the question 'have I wasted my life with a fool for a lover?'.
Danger signs begin to appear everywhere. As Dan surmises in Mail Order Bride, 'The cost of doing nothing is to slowly die'. He hits the heart of the matter in Drunk On Election Night: 'The bad stuff's coming when the good do nothing, it's true, so what am I gonna do?'
There need be no fear of impotence on Dan's
behalf. With these 12 new songs, Dan Kelly And The Alpha Males have made one of the most constructive contributions to society so far this century. Proving that pop can be both cerebrally and melodiously gratifying (tropical and topical!), Drowning In The Fountain Of Youth will thoroughly rehabilitate your soul; well, at least enough for you to make it to the next Dan Kelly and The Alpha Males record, anyway.
