The Goon Sax - Mirror II (2021)

Growing up in public is a tough gig, but Australian trio the Goon Sax don’t have a lot of choice. They were still at school when their 2016 debut album Up to Anything was released, with prosaic, witty songs about unrequited crushes, Saturday jobs and dates ruined by sweaty hands and bad haircuts. It would probably have been compared to the early, Jonathan Richman-indebted work of the Go-Betweens even if frontman Louis Forster’s dad hadn’t been the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster. Frankly, if you’re a trio from Brisbane with a female drummer, dealing in smart, twitchy-but-melodic guitar rock with lyrics majoring in affairs of the heart, you’re going to provoke comparison to the Go-Betweens – who were all of those things 40 years ago – regardless of whether your old fella was in them or not.

The Goon Sax were still in their teens when its less rough-hewn successor, We’re Not Talking, was released two years later and started attracting attention among indie circles in the US, which led to a deal with venerable US alt-rock label Matador, currently home to Perfume Genius, Interpol, Julien Baker and more.

Growing up in public is a tough gig, but Australian trio the Goon Sax don’t have a lot of choice. They were still at school when their 2016 debut album Up to Anything was released, with prosaic, witty songs about unrequited crushes, Saturday jobs and dates ruined by sweaty hands and bad haircuts. It would probably have been compared to the early, Jonathan Richman-indebted work of the Go-Betweens even if frontman Louis Forster’s dad hadn’t been the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster. Frankly, if you’re a trio from Brisbane with a female drummer, dealing in smart, twitchy-but-melodic guitar rock with lyrics majoring in affairs of the heart, you’re going to provoke comparison to the Go-Betweens – who were all of those things 40 years ago – regardless of whether your old fella was in them or not.

The Goon Sax were still in their teens when its less rough-hewn successor, We’re Not Talking, was released two years later and started attracting attention among indie circles in the US, which led to a deal with venerable US alt-rock label Matador, currently home to Perfume Genius, Interpol, Julien Baker and more.

With Mirror II, the label appears to have inherited a different band to the authors of We’re Not Talking. After a layoff in which their members variously moved to Berlin, took up free jazz drumming and dabbled in noise rock, the Goon Sax are now more expansive, ambitious and confident, their efforts aided by producer John Parish, best known as PJ Harvey’s primary musical foil. In the Stone and Psychic take a sound that started life as resolutely unvarnished and small scale – part of the appeal of the Goon Sax’s debut album was how listening to it felt like covertly reading someone’s teenage diary – and shift it on to a bigger stage without losing any of the idiosyncratic charm. There’s a muscular power-chord chug underpinning In the Stone, but it’s topped off with disjointed, needling lead guitar and weird spatters of ghostly electronics; Psychic’s sound is built out of an odd combination of drum machine, rumbling distorted guitar and bright, poppy synthesiser. Both songs are superbly written, their sweet melodies carrying lyrics that depict people arguing, frequently at cross purposes – “you said that we were psychic,” protests the latter, “like I’d find some comfort in that” – their drollness amplified by Forster’s doleful, conversational delivery.

Forster was initially the Goon Sax’s primary writer, and he’s still the provider of their most immediate songs – not just In the Stone and Psychic, but the spectacular chorus of The Chance, and Bathwater, which starts out rackety and nervous then suddenly picks up speed, breaking into an assured sprint. But a lot of Mirror II’s strength lies in the fact they now contain three distinct writing voices. Riley Jones deals in songs that bear the melodic influence of 60s girl groups alongside more left-field concerns. She’s apparently a fan of Throbbing Gristle and avant garde 70s Japanese psych-rock band Les Rallizes Dénudés, and you can tell: the chaotic mesh of guitar and synth on Tag keeps spiralling out of tune, at odds with her airy vocal, and the track concludes with a keyboard line that would sound poppy were it not in a completely different key to the other instruments.

TRACKLIST

1. The Goon Sax - In the Stone
2. The Goon Sax - Psychic
3. The Goon Sax - Tag
4. The Goon Sax - Temples
5. The Goon Sax - The Chance
6. The Goon Sax - Bathwater
7. The Goon Sax - Desire
8. The Goon Sax - Carpetry
9. The Goon Sax - Til Dawn
10. The Goon Sax - Caterpillars