The Dining Rooms - Numero Deux
Brand new in these parts, and yet if feels oh so familiar.
I like to avoid descriptions such as Ex meets Why they had a bastard child named Zed. It’s tempting here, though. Names like Lakuna, Portishead, The Beta Band, and especially the greatest of the Australian pace-setters to my mind (The Necks, and Paul Kelly’s score to the film Lantana) muscled their way right up to the fore, on first listen.
And that’s just it: It’s the pacing, stupid.
The ideal pacing for those moments in our everyday lives: preparing a meal, making love, shaving, sifting through the mail, grinding away at a keyboard or with a shovel or on the back of that big John Deere or setting down the briefcase at the top of the stairs. I know this music has been or will be co-opted by the forces that call themselves automobile commercials for the upwardly mobile, wipers all alive and swinging. The music on this record bleedin’ resonates.
At the same time, from the music-making point of view, it’s so simple and so clear. I don’t hear a single track on Numero Deux that couldn’t be completed, start to finish, inside of an afternoon.
For us in the Soundroom, the combination there is its draw.
And hey, it prompted Ms M. to encourage me to–impromptu-like, as if on the dance floor–”pretend to be a woman pretending to be a man.”
Much fun was to be had.
