Michael Beach is the kind of unsung hero that makes the underground what it is. For decades, the American-born, Melbourne-based songwriter’s tentacles have reached far and wide, bringing together musicians from all corners of the globe both from behind the soundboards and the studio glass.
It’s from behind the latter where Beach’s best work has come. By and large a Saintsian Kuepperite with added heartland inflections, however unlike the clarion calls to the working classes from the likes of the Boss and Nils Lofgren, over his four solo albums, Beach’s subjects have been far more polemic. And there’s no let-up on Big Black Plume – the songwriter’s fifth and career-defining release.
Like a tribute album to all the best music to come out of Australia since the turn of the century (there are also some guests from the other side of the Pacific, including Comets on Fire’s Utrillo Kushner), on Big Black Plume, Beach is the immeasurable host.
Beach’s fifth long-player sees him dialing in to the same existential crisis that Paul Foreman illuminated earlier this year under the Exsanguinated Roommate moniker. On the beautiful piano-led I’m Gonna Need Ya, Beach laments that “The world is big and bad”, and as Mick Turner’s emotive beddings of sound conjure up the kind of intensity that only he can muster, it shines as Big Black Plume’s brightest light.
It all begins with The Sea, as Beach echoes a Dylan-esque diatribe that sees the songwriter navigating through the miasma of pianos, Turner’s knotty guitars and Maddy Macfarlane’s saxophones. All told, it’s a melodic mélange of noise not a world away from Sonic Youth’s Rain on Tin.
Michael Beach - Big Black PlumePoison Dart follows and later with Sick Century, both come as advertised. Backed by Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin’s cavalier heroics, it’s the kind of surging noise that would lift the roof off any inner-city Melbourne pub, as the Tropical Fuck Storm duo drag Beach into the sordid realms of mutant rock where he adds his own embellishments; the result, a raging collision of heartland rock and Ragged Glory-era Neil Young.
While backed by an all-star cast, Beach is never overshadowed, masterfully weaving poetic magic through these songs. “Nobody knows any better than the foot of your bed” he sings on No One Knows Any Better, and it’s these clever snapshots that keep drawing you in. Amid languid synths, there is none better than the tender, open-hearted balladry of Next to You (“Bare it like a cross / Or drive it like hearse across any bridge left standing next to you“).
And there’s more of it with the excellent eponymous closer, as Beach almost weeps into the microphone, professing that “There are countless ways of disaster”. It’s the same sunken gloom that Cory Hanson explored on I Love People’s Bad Miracles; however, in Beach’s case, there’s an offer of hope (“The dreaming of the natural world will go on”).
It’s these juxtapositions that reveal themselves more and more on Big Black Plume, making it the winner that it is. The different ideas and unique voices from each of his guests, adding new colours to this unique patchwork that reaches every corner of Beach’s world. That “sound of the collective band playing” as he sings on Poison Dart, brimming with a civic vitality that is lovely, vivid and, above all, real.
Big Black Plume is out now via Goner Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.
