Carnival of Soul

The timeless, sure-fire formula of soft folk rock, sweet harmonies and sensitive lyrics delivered with understated vocal honesty worked so well for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, James Taylor, Nick Drake, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, et al, and it works superbly for Husky on this, their fourth album. Stardust Blues is even a kind retro concept album, the 12 songs being linked. Lead singer-songwriter Husky Gawenda notes: “The album takes place over 24 hours in Melbourne, during which we and our friends explore the city, which becomes a kind of map of the heart.” The result is a coherent collection of songs: intimate, warm, with wonderful washes of sound, all performed with precision, emotional honesty and so many attractive hooks that it invites comparisons with the Beatles at their most inventive and gentle. Listen to Quicksand and marvel at how, in its balance between delicate lyrics and rising instrumentation, it has been touched by Paul McCartney and the ghost of John Lennon, while Kinetic seems to be filtered through the psychedelia of the later Beatles. The result is an intensely beautiful meditation on the cycle of a day, every song infused with a rare and fragile beauty. BRUCE ELDER

FLAMENCO
Paco Lara
THE ANDALUSIAN GUITAR (pacolaraflamenco.com)
★★★★

The clap of a pair of hands is all it takes for a flamenco guitar to switch from fieriness to supreme elegance. Paco Lara, a distinguished Spanish guitarist who has recently moved to Australia and who plays with impressive articulation, tends to favour the music’s elegance over its furnace. On this album (recorded in Sydney and Cadiz), he also favours flamenco fusion over staying strictly within the idiom’s tradition. Sereneta, with violinist Yuhki Mayne and accompaniment from bassist Steve Hunter and percussionist Evan Yako, exemplifies Lara’s soft-focus approach to the fusion side, so the music, beyond being exceptionally well played, is always pretty and eminently approachable – a quality compounded by the choice of repertoire. So Stanley Myers’ Cavatina (best known as the theme from The Deer Hunter) is used as the basis for a flamenco excursion, as is Sting’s Fragile, and while they are rendered stylishly and quite imaginatively, I prefer something through which the blood flows a little more thickly, such as Bulerias, with singer Marcelino Fernandez, or Lara’s fascinating arrangement of Rodrigo’s Aranjuez, with the melody torn open by Bernardo Parrilla’s violin. JOHN SHAND

ROCK
Hockey Dad
BRAIN CANDY (Farmer & the Owl)
★★★★

Rock music used to be pop music’s apex predator. But in our increasingly online world of Zoom meetings and streaming services, rock sometimes feels like an endangered species. In this world, Hockey Dad are a throwback: their schtick is that they’re two childhood friends from the Wollongong area who seem more interested in surfing than selfies. For such surfer kids, rock’s rush can often fit their lives better than the usual chilled electronic beats. On Brain Candy, Hockey Dad often distinctly echo Australian alternative rock of the 1990s (listeners of a certain age may compare their sound to Silverchair’s Daniel Johns singing with Jebediah as the backing band). However, Hockey Dad’s young fan-base probably don’t know or care about Jebediah. Instead, they’re responding to Zach Stephenson’s soaring vocals (best showcased on Itch), the evident pop song-craft (the catchy single In This State, for example) and the band’s youthful energy (Tell Me What You Want); something in those sounds reflects young lives, just as they did in the 1990s. Perhaps rock music is no longer the apex predator, but Hockey Dad show that it can still fill an evolutionary niche quite nicely. TIM BYRON