Review by Sam Fell.
Jimmy Dowling – Sounds Like A Saturday (Independent / MGM)
I bumped into Jimmy Dowling last week, outside the Tex Perkins gig in Byron on a warm Friday night. We stood on the pavement catching up, talking about our partners and kids and the antique ship’s lamps that he’s been collecting, made in the 1920s in Rotterdam. He tarts them up and gets them working and places them around his house, revels in their old-world reliability and strength.
He’s in a good place. Stands with hands in pockets and a wry smile on his face. Good spirits. Which he is most times I run into him, in various places around the Northern Rivers of NSW where we both live, have lived for a long time. It’s not surprising he’s in this good space either, given he’s just released a new record, his seventh perhaps, although it’s hard to keep track. He’ll disappear for ages and then I’ll get a text message and it’s him telling me he has a new album, and would I like a listen.
In this case, he shoots me the album link and reckons it’s worth a yarn. This is around the weekend that the tropical cyclone is due to make landfall, and so he ends his text with, ‘get ready for a flood.’ I tell him I’m keen for a listen and to review, if I don’t get washed away, to which he replies, ‘Water and gravity always win.’
None of us get washed away or flooded, a relief, and so we’re left with Dowling’s new album, Sounds Like A Saturday, which came about in typical Jimmy fashion – that is, he had some ideas, he rounded up some guys, they stepped into a studio and stepped out again a little while later with a record.
An ode to the ocean by which we live kicks it off, ‘Wilderness Of Water’, gentle and strong at the same time, the pedal steel of Garrett Costigan underpinning it all. “I’m in love with Neptune’s daughter,” Dowling intones at one point, and I can see what he sees, standing on the edge of it all.
“There’s not a lot of info on making [the album],” he texts, “cause it was banged out in a day.”
“Recorded between 10am and 4pm on a Saturday in Melbourne, Union Street Studio. Live.”
The light and shade, deep and introspective instrumental ‘Dawn’ comes next, followed by ‘Born A Dog’, a song by Kevin Quain, “Mah old mate from Canada,” Dowling explains. ‘Busted’, another instrumental, is full-ashtray-blues that begins tightly coiled but then unfurls amidst flurries of stoned guitar duels, Costigan’s steel adding a wilting country element to it all, and it fades to a broken finish like it was almost never there.
Costigan’s pedal steel plays a pivotal role in Sounds Like A Saturday, the mournful pull of its voice setting up songs like ‘Toasted Sandwich’ (an old Dowling number) and the aforementioned ‘Wilderness Of Water’ and ‘Dawn’. Elsewhere, Dowling has pulled in Steve Hadley on double bass; Costigan of course; Sam Sanders, piano and guitar; Roger Bergodaz on percussion, doubling as recording engineer and mixer; Reuben Legge with tenor sax; Dowling himself with vocals and acoustic archtop. Adam Dempsey mastered the album, and Dowling’s oldest boy, Quinn, took the cover shot.
The album’s title track is a slow motion tidal pull of a song, that leads into the acoustic guitar intro of ‘Windsock’, joined by the quiet thump of the double bass, perhaps the only song dedicated to an actual windsock, which “holds conversations with the wind”, once again the steel coming in at just the right moment like these artists have been playing together for all eternity.
“I gave them the chord changes,” Dowling explains, “and a brief idea regarding the feeling and situation of the subject of the song. Then off we’d go. Everything [rode] on their raw talent and ability to get inside the song as they’re playing it, listening to each other.”
Often, the songs that adorn Sounds Like A Saturday began in seed-like form before blooming forth, songs building as the players intertwine and the music becomes bigger and bigger, before winding down, almost like it’s been set free and while it was lived, it’s now on its own.
The album closes out with ‘Moonset’, the third instrumental on the album, and indeed, if one closes one’s eyes, rides on the wave of the shimmering guitar and steel, feels the heart-beat like double bass, one can feel the connection with what Dowling is writing on. “I’ve surfed a lot with the moonshine riders up at the point,” he writes to me. “Just need a cloudless night n a fullish moon.”
Sounds Like A Saturday then, fades to a finish and you can’t do much more than tuck your hands in your pockets and let free a wry smile, as you realise, and it comes as no surprise, that Jimmy Dowling has delivered once again, an album in his own words on his own observations that ring true to you as well as him, and indeed, it sounds like a Saturday.