Gareth Liddiard - Strange Tourist (2010)
(Shock)
Gareth Liddiard is a novelist who just doesn't know it yet; a writer for whom landscapes, both internal and external, provide the grit and soul for a kind of visceral storytelling that absolutely no one else is matching at the moment.
In his work with the band the Drones, Liddiard has made album after album of rugged, demanding, powerful rock'n'roll, which has already won one Australian Music Prize and could easily have won three. Their songs leave an indelible impression on you physically, particularly live, where razor-like incursions and deep, rumbling propulsion can be flipped into stark and tender chasms and lonely peaks of anguish or clarity.
Just as importantly, those songs leave ineradicable emotional and intellectual imprints. Liddiard's characters and their world are invoked with such eye for nuance and detail – from the rundown suburbs on the city fringes to the brutal bush of colonial Tasmania; from a man who "though downwind of him trails a fog of alcohol/he fails to do his best to be indifferent all the same" to a mother much too needy and too jealous of a girlfriend "all eyelashes and bones" – that you feel covered in the tangy sweat of fear or frozen in the same miasma of indecision and enervation as his protagonists.



With his first solo album, Liddiard puts aside the physical presence of the Drones, forgoing that capacity for movement as well as variation in favour of none-more-bare presentations of voice and guitar. These are in effect spoken-word pieces with minimalist backing or, given their lyricism and focus, books on tape "read" by a man whose nasally, insistent voice is never going to be mistaken for that of a choir boy.
Gareth Liddiard is something different. Something very special.