In the spring of 2020, music might serve mainly as background for isolation and frustration. Far Enough, the second album from Australian trio Cable Ties, sounds almost like a punk-rock response to the moment, with a narrator who stares inside herself as often as she points a finger at, or raises a fist toward, the outside world.
Jenny McKechnie embodies the two-front war, sometimes half-murmuring like her fellow-feminist countrywoman Courtney Barnett, sometimes declaiming like a Melbournian Patti Smith, sometimes lunging toward rock-operatic screams a la Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker or even more a la X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene.
When comprehensible, McKechnie is unclouded by poetic ambition: “Tell Them Where to Go” is a direct tribute to all the girls who made necessary musical racket to refute the boys who said they couldn’t; “Self-Made Man” cranks up the Styrene side while taking the Kinks’ attitude toward the rich who don’t share the wealth; and “Hope” oscillates, for seven minutes, between self-laceration and self-encouragement.
Even when less comprehensible, McKechnie’s point becomes clear through her serrated guitar work and the locked-in rhythms of drummer Shauna Boyle and bassist Nick Brown. The thrumming drive on the album’s middle and midtempo track, “Lani,” is simple, not simplistic, and primitivist, not primitive, with an ever-encroaching darkness absorbed, perhaps, from the all-female English quartet Savages.
Cable Ties has also absorbed the postpunk refusal to play by classicist punk’s loud-fast rules, the length of “Hope” rivaled by “Lani” and “Anger’s Not Enough,” the latter another seven-minute number that swings between the shouting-blues bromides of the verses and the ringing, basement-show grandeur of everything else.
At the end of Far Enough, within the clipped riffs and strangely cheerful melodic bass notes of “Pillow,” McKechnie sings, “I’m often feeling doomed but don’t mistake that feeling for apathy.” She can stop, but she won’t stop, and that’s the energy of Cable Ties.
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