Review by Samuel J.Fell
Dog Trumpet – Live Forever (Independent)
Dog Trumpet seem to exist in their own land, on their own terms. A land soundtracked by ‘60s pop and ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll, the band’s terms being music at its own pace and for its own good, rather than anything else. It’s uniquely Australian and yet casts long bows, this music of theirs, and it always has done, over a period of more than thirty years. Dog Trumpet have existed for all this time on their own terms and perhaps you didn’t realise this, and if so, then perhaps it’s time you did.
Live Forever is the band’s ninth offering, a lithe and sometimes surprising cut that over the course of a dozen pithy tracks presents as the perfect picture of a band such as this one. In among it all, there’s some real juxtaposition in that songs of a differing stylistic nature co-exist quite seamlessly (‘Marianne’, with its dreamy Beatles v Stones-esque poppy hum, which then rolls into ‘Ding Dong Butterfly,’ a song with a little more grit, a bit of guitar-led psychedelia). And so I wonder if this is a conscious move, or if the band’s principle writers, brothers Chris and Peter O’Doherty (the former AKA Reg Mombassa, and both founding members of seminal Australian band Mental As Anything), just happen to write like this as a matter of course, the songs dictating their own terms.
Mombassa talks of their mutual love of ‘60s pop in particular, but also, “We like country music and folk music and all that kind of goes into the mix, and jazz,” he muses in regards to how these songs built and came alive. “All of those influences go into the mix, we don’t sort of pre-arrange it… songwriting does happen sort of weirdly, slightly, half automatically and half magically.”
There is a touch of magic to Live Forever, if only because it seems to ever-so-nicely capture a time and place; yes, some songs could have been born during the heady 1960s, but even so, in the hands of the O’Doherty brothers along with bassist Bernie Hayes and drummer Declan O’Doherty, the songs that adorn Live Forever seem so relevant to now. Of course, the writing reflects this in the main, lines like “Sometimes I am afraid / Of everything in the world / And sometimes I am ashamed / To be a human it’s a shame”, from the title track which certainly paint a picture of life as it stands today, how it is to be human in this foul year of our lord.
And yet, at its core, Live Forever is a happy record, one that bounces along at a pace dictated by the songs (on their terms, of course) – the carefree jangle of ‘Space and Time’; the driving rhythm of ‘Eileen’; the shimmer and shine of the title track. Of the latter, Mombassa says it’s a song which came together over a number of years. “[That] was a strange one, [the title track], I’d had it for a while and thought it was too long and disjointed, [I thought] it had like a prog-rock aspect to it, it’s got that riff at the beginning that doesn’t repeat anywhere else and all the different parts,” he smiles. “But once we started jamming on it, because we recorded a demo of it several years ago and forgot all about it, but we reworked it… that’s the part where you’ve gotta mess with it to make it make sense.”
On the album as a whole, he says, “We didn’t have any specific MO, we don’t usually have a concept or a theme to an album that we decide on beforehand, the songs just come out as they do… and there were a couple of extra songs that we didn’t use. But yeah, we’re very happy with it, we think it’s possibly our best record, but that’ll be up to the punters to judge, I guess.”
The one cover on the album is ‘Waltz of the Wind’, by a New Zealand band called The Windy City Strugglers out of Wellington circa 1968, which Dog Trumpet give a retrospective treatment, almost a lament, the song finishing, “The only thing that stays the same / Is the waltz of the wind.”
What else has stayed the same is in the calm and measured way in which Dog Trumpet go about conducting their musical business – Live Forever, with its solid melding of ‘60s, ‘70s, blues and proggy-psych and throw-backs and look-forwards, is a beautifully crafted piece of work, and as Mombassa said, this is the band’s best work yet, and he might just be right.