Tambalane - Tambalane

“Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Ben Gillies, drummer from Silverchair, decided over a bottle of wine, with friend and fellow musician Wesley Carr, that they should pen a few tunes and perhaps record them. A few months down the track, the “vino tunes”, as I like to call them, have surfaced on a self titled debut album, Tambalane, a name also inspired by the drink (the label on a bottle of wine, or as interpreted whilst under the influence).

The album itself, is all Mary Poppins quotes, chalk pavement drawings, dancing penguins and supercalifragalisticexpialidocious. It’s so sugar-coated, you feel the cavities appearing track by track, and run straight for the phone in order to book a dentists appointment as the album concludes. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the odd pink-iced donut and bag of licorice allsorts, but sugar doesn’t mix well with motivational lyrics in my stomach. The lyrics on the album, seemingly peeled straight from a motivational poster, those annoying sayings that are plastered over high school classroom walls, (with graphics such as people playing basketball, or dolphins emerging from the depths of the sea) and haunt you as you try focusing on differentiating an equation during a semester exam.

Cheesy analogies aside, the entire album doesn’t result in indigestion, in fact, a few of the songs leave you festively plump. Back To You begins with ‘70s inspired keyboards, pulsating drumbeat and hoarse yet refined vocals that even venture into Beatles style backups. However, the peak of absolute pop glory is reached on Little Miss Liar. Seeming almost parallel to Paul McCartney’s contribution to A Day In The Life, it features accented rhythm, themes of “waking up” and is the height of pop sensibility. Words cannot prescribe the blissfulness sustained on this track.

All Wounds Heal again reminisces with Beatles records. The acoustic opening sounds like the beginning of A Day In The Life, the drum opens not unlike the pattern featured in Sexy Sadie, and the “dream, dream” vocals are soaked in golden melody, helping compose a more than worthy song. The riff in Jungle also provides a point of notation when amalgamating the highlights of the album.

When the cliched lyrics of a majority of the songs, along with the overly sugared melodies are put aside, what you have left is a collection of decent enough songs. However, when considering the album as an album, a sense of mediocrity does prevail.