Photo Credit: Kyle Caulfield
REVIEW BY DYLAN WILLIAMSON.
My wife walked down the aisle to Jellyfish.
Slowly Slowly have been a part of my life for longer than some of my friends. They’re a key way that I can communicate with my partner through music as she slowly grows out of her emo phase and I grow into mine. Our record collections are entirely different and only a few albums sit in the “us” category. Slowly Slowly take up a large proportion of that esteemed position, in no small part because we physically own their entire discography with the exception of their 7” split with Luca Brasi. We’re also fans of vocalist Ben Stewart’s pop side project, Congrats. In fact when he supported Trophy Eyes, we were – and remain – convinced that as a one-man-band he put on the better live show. It was not at all out of character for us to snap up a copy of the new Race Car Blues Extended Edition as soon as it went on sale, certain that Slowly Slowly could do no wrong.
The decision to press a Race Car Blues Extended Edition rather than a standalone copy of Race Car Blues Chapter 2 is at odds with the messaging around this album. The press releases would have you believe that this is not really a B-sides record. There are 12 fully realised (almost – we’ll get to that) tracks with no interludes, including the harmony-laden First Love featuring Yours Truly vocalist Mikaila Delgado. There’s certainly enough production value to lift this release to full feature album status. On the topic of Slowly Slowly’s dense release schedule, this is a good time to mention that Ben Stewart has an intimidating and chronically overachieving work ethic. In the last twelve months he’s released two albums and the split 7” through Slowly Slowly, written and released the single Melbourne for Triple J, and put out 3 songs through Congrats – plus played most of an east coast tour. The closing track of Race Car Blues Chapter 2, Anywhere, and the Congrats song Berserk both cover Ben’s commitment to achieving musical success without distraction. He’s not lying.
Chapter 2 is not a quantity over quality affair. There are no filler tracks. Every song sounds distinct and, aesthetically, covers different ground. I imagine listening to some of these songs and wondering how they didn’t make it on to Race Car Blues will become a common experience. Comets & Zombies, for example, would aesthetically feel right at home on the big brother album, and raise less eyebrows than experimental departures like Suicidal Envagelist or Superpowers – but put together on the one release, the flavour of Chapter 2 is entirely different. It’s much heavier. Slowly Slowly is not exactly known for their hardcore and metal influences but they do run in those circles and it shows in the songwriting. There are vocals that sound suspiciously like fry screams in The Best Bits and Learning Curve, and some of the guitar tones and drumlines would be terribly out of place on earlier albums that stray closer to indie rock.
This release isn’t just heavier musically, it’s heavier lyrically. It is obvious why none of these songs made it onto Race Car Blues after a careful listen. Chapter 2 covers deeply uncomfortable themes with an unforgiving clarity. Album opener Comets & Zombies is a first person account of love in the throes of drug addiction. It finds company in songs like Restless Legs, inviting the listener to empathise with two parents used to running from love, and Set The Table, an acoustic track dressed in Victorian imagery discussing an attempted suicide after a marriage destroyed by miscarriage. There is really nowhere to hide in Chapter 2. It’s a stark contrast with Race Car Blues and its stable of party rock songs like Jellyfish and the two Creature of Habit songs. Listening to Chapter 2 feels like being at a party where you don’t know anybody, having been left alone by the friends who brought you here, and finding everybody you try to talk to terribly rude and shallow. There are even two songs that contain vicious rhetoric towards social media users to the point it begins to smell of elitism.
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There are some sections that demonstrate why this is definitely not, absolutely not, please don’t call it a B-sides album (this is sarcasm – there are some rough edges).. There’s some refinement needed on some songs that should have been picked up in a more rigorous writing and editing process. Two songs covering the same theme in the same way, especially as specifically as The Best Bits and The Internet do, comes across as mean and amateurish. Some sloppy lyrics could use some attention, such as one of the pre-chorus lines on The Internet: “I wouldn’t pick the Internet with you / over a noose”. I get a vibe on what he means, but I’m left wondering what specifically the narrator thinks the subject’s relationship with the internet is in this scenario, and the lesson I’m supposed to take away. Small Talk could do with some work linking the hook “I’m polite to all the boys and girls / but every one of you is small talk” with the hospital imagery and experience of reconnecting with an old flame. I also picked up audible noise on the vocals on the slow, wholesome meditation on family and death, House On Fire. Unsurprisingly, the whole release lacks much of a musical or lyrical linking theme. This isn’t a requirement, and certainly not for a B-sides album, but it’s conspicuously missing for a not-a-B-sides-album and after the smooth sequencing of Race Car Blues. If this was going to be put out as a standalone release I think these wrinkles would have been ironed out through recording and production.
If it sounds like I’m dancing around whether this is actually a good album or not, it’s because I am. The truth is that I really like it, and I enjoy the experience of listening to it a lot, but I can see a lot of people bouncing off it hard. Thanks to my heavy music habit I’m used to sitting through songs that can make the listener uncomfortable. Set The Table is a good case study on most of my feelings about the record: Ben Stewart is a master at putting the listener in positions they don’t want to be in. Set The Table starts off as a melancholy breakup song before veering into adult and dark themes. There are few topics that the horror genre and edgy metal bands refuse to cover, but miscarriage is such a deeply painful and personal tragedy that it remains largely passed over in favour of more digestible material including domestic violence and genocide. For me, Ben Stewart’s decision to include it here demonstrates confidence, putting him alongside only a handful of writers who dare to cover such a terrible topic. He’s rescued from an unforgivably transparent ego only because the song isn’t strictly about the loss of the baby, but about the attempted suicide and subsequent mindset shift of the character. In certain circles, of which I suspect Ben is a member, there is also a growing feeling that the taboo around miscarriage is a relic of the gender roles that social forces are so quickly undoing. You’d tell your boss you needed time off if a parent died – would you tell them if you had a miscarriage? Ben’s decision to cover this theme on Chapter 2 could be read as an attempt to allow the silent pain of so many hopeful parents to become a little less silent. After all that, the song ends with what I think will become one of my favourite lines of all time: “If I can dig a hole to die in / I’ll build a life to live in too.” This is a complicated song that needs finesse, talent and self-awareness and to pull off. Slowly Slowly have all of these.
Generalising my thoughts on Set The Table to the whole album, I think that Chapter 2 requires the same ingredients to succeed. The lacking factor overall is finesse. The first handful of songs completely recalibrate the listener’s expectations, preparing them for a heavier and more dynamic record covering more confronting themes. The album delivers on this, but it does so awkwardly and in an unintuitive sequence. The brief reprieve is the poppiest song on the record, The Level, which doesn’t arrive until track 9 – but even this isn’t a reprieve in context. By itself, it’s a fun, poppy rock song, but in context it’s like a good day among the bad; showering for the first time in a month, but knowing you won’t have the energy to brush your teeth too. The run to the end of the record is unsatisfying. The penultimate track Small Talk is difficult to decipher and difficult to connect with, despite the strength of the hook, and at the end we’re left with Anywhere, which is sort of a song about being a musician. I dislike tracks like this as most people will find it hard to feel energised by a song describing the singer’s commitment to art despite the difficulty, especially when it’s not abstracted enough to apply to something like becoming a parent or going to university. After enduring the emotionally exhausting themes of Comets & Zombies, Low, House on Fire, Restless Legs, First Love, and Set the Table, the album draws to a conclusion without offering any sense of hope or closure.
Each song on Chapter 2 is flawed and interesting in its own way. The flaws betray the humanity of the band and the stress of the lockdowns they would have endured through the production process. The record reaches out to touch heavier influences and applies them in a way that feels organic and enjoyable. The uncomfortable stories shared with us here were originally never meant to be shared. The band decided that they didn’t belong on the album they wanted to make, and so hearing them now is like reading someone’s diary. The stories that Slowly Slowly want to tell are sometimes about dinosaurs, or aliens, or love, but sometimes they’re about the worst experiences an adult can endure. Hearing those stories on Chapter 2 feels deeply intimate. When they don’t nail it, it shows their vulnerability rather than any lack of talent. While the album itself isn’t the best version it could have been, I think the listening experience is – because of the relationship it builds between us and the artist. And that’s what art is. If all of the ingredients on this record are present on the next one, Slowly Slowly everything they need for a career defining release.
I give Race Car Blues Chapter 2 by Slowly Slowly three and a half stars.
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