Welcome back to the wide, weird world of Nicholas Allbrook. The ‘Walrus’ EP is the crooked POND front-man’s first offering since his delightfully titled 2014 debut LP ‘Ganough, Wallis and Fatuna’. Once again, we feel like we’ve woken up sleazy; wretched after a big night out, drawing the curtains only to find we’ve somehow woken up in a dystopian apocalyptic future rather than the bleak suburban existence we thought we were living. Allbrook once again sees himself as a shaman of the coming End Days, and he cackles and writhes with hedonistic glee.
‘Walrus’ is noticeably different from Allbrook’s debut; indeed, if ‘Ganough, Wallis and Fatuna’ was him driving a steady 90 in the left lane, then ‘Walrus’ sees him skew across three lanes of speeding traffic without indicating, steering with his knees as he fumbles around in the back for a stray McNugget. The grand pop moments are still there, buried among the psychedelic haze- but they are obscured, buried in a labyrinth created partly of Allbrook’s sun-cooked mind and partly in an almost masochistic desire to stuff as much of it into a five song cut as possible.
Sometimes, this leads to unexpected and entirely whimsical results: witness as lead single Blanket 3072 breaks out of a sleazy, mellow sort of psych wobble into a soaring intergalactic ballad, Bowie-esque in its grandeur and imagination. The rest of the EP, however, does not give up its treasures quite so easily: Noyfeck seems to be building into a glitchy, obscene chorus before it pulls back suddenly with a headphone shattering screech, changing direction entirely, the turtle pulling its head back inside a shell of dangerous sounding electronic doodling. Chelsea, meanwhile, shifts about like a small child that needs to go to the bathroom, throwing ideas and sounds at each other and seeing which ones stick. When Nicholas Allbrook goes down the rabbit hole, he can be truly frightening.
The EP is bookended by two of its best cuts: opener Goode (when we were awake) and closing track Salvo or Stop the Goats (a thinly veiled blah blah). Goode hints at things to come with a minute and a half of tinny drums and fast-spoken female Japanese and squiggles of sound, before easing into a laid back pop beat. Allbrook’s vocals are at their accessible best, and even when he’s singing about viscera and Latin, he sounds like he knows exactly what he’s talking about. The psychedelic fuzz is familiar but interesting, and even settles into an easy, distorted rock riff. Salvo tills a quite fertile ground for current Australian alternative artists, dissatisfaction at the state of the nation, and though not quite perhaps as direct as the Smith Street Band’s political fuck you to Tony Abbott, ‘Stop the Goats’ is nevertheless a wry dig at a controversial policy.
It all adds up to an EP that certainly requires more than one listen. On a couple of songs, particularly Goode (when we were awake) and Blanket 3072, there are moments of pure pop ecstasy; there is always a rich undertow of psychedelic sensibility and the experimental production adds meat to the EP. I’d give it so many stars, but I think Nick Allbrook already has them all in his galaxy. 7/10
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