Domestic Bliss
If there were ever a band to accompany drowsy procrastination in the backyard of some rundown Northcote sharehouse, Mum Smokes are it. Like a loveable, heat affected litter of new born Dobermans, Kes and co. potter their wide-eyed way through most of their newish MySpace tracks—the core of their second album—gently bestowing urban whimsy on a burgeoning public of fellow tea drinkers (I say burgeoning, because the lads were recently handpicked to play at the big deal that is the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in the UK. They couldn’t make it to Berlin—Kes’ Granddad passed on—but they’ve clearly impressed the Cave-connected cool hunters that make it their business to keep tabs on Melbourne’s weirdo-pop community).
Drummer and sometime lyricist Julian Patterson has form when it comes to unhealthy obsessions with domestic minutia. His is a world of gardening, whiny front gates and messy bedrooms—small beats big, old and familiar trumps new and untested. Patterson’s other band Minimum Chips released an album last year titled Kitchen Tea Thank You—he knows that when the big bad world gets scary, unwashed dishes and laminex begin to look tempting.
Of course, there’s an intrinsic appeal to domestic stasis—who hasn’t fantasised about burrowing inside the immediate and familiar, surfacing only to tend to pot plants and conduct fleeting small talk with the postie?
- Mum Smokes
- Non-Commercial Life
But it’s not really the subject matter that appeals on “Non-Commercial Life”, the band’s predictably positive spin on independent living. Melbs has said it before, but it’s Kes’ (nee Karl Scullin’s) completely impossible-to-pin-down vocals. Hazy and freewheeling, but rarely following through on what must be a nagging compulsion to throw off the introspection and explode in sun-drenched histrionics. He’s perfectly content to wander daggily from unsteady melody to antsy, almost creepy, side-of-mouth cooing. Where contemporaries the Crayon Fields embrace an irresistible climax in their similarly-paced “Living So Well”, Mum Smokes eschew the bombast for something more uncertain, more introverted, more deliberately ambivalent.
Actually, Kes could be saying anything here—like a 7 year-old da da daing absent-mindedly while their parents fret about petrol prices and Ikea opening hours.
The half-assed whistling à la fin seals the deal. Deliberately out-of-it obscurantism’s never had a schmicker poster boy.