Tinpan Orange - The Bottom of the Lake
Tinpan Orange
The Bottom of the Lake
Vitamin Records
It’s Sunday. Mid-morning. You’re a little dusty, and it’s already warmish outside. You open up the front and back door to let some air in before you grab the paper and a coffee. An ideal complement to this kind of lazy-Sunday morn is the new offering from Tinpan Orange, The Bottom of the Lake.
You’ll find it sitting somewhere in between Clare Bowditch and perhaps Lisa Mitchell.
To be frank, this album was my first Tinpan Orange experience. The first listen to songstress Emily Lubitz’s voice evoked shades of Bowditch, in it purity and sweetness. So it was no surprise to read that the two, in fact, wrote their first song together when Emily was only nine years old.
But it’s not just the voice that soothes on this, their second release. More so, it’s the balanced combination of instrumentation, with carefully placed violin, mandolin, and ukulele filling out the acoustic-laden Tinpan sound. It’s clearly one of those albums that is rich without being over-produced – no doubt aided by getting Harry Angus on board as producer and instrumentalist.
The result is textbook ‘synergy’ – the interaction and cooperation of each of these elements produces an effect greater than the sum of their parts. At times, you barely notice the violin filling the background, or the addition of the whistles; they don’t just contribute their individual sounds, but add to the creation of what I clearly hear as the Tinpan Orange sound.
And, the more I listen to The Bottom of the Lake, their third LP, the more this sound in growing on me.
This has the romance of opener Romeo Don’t Come, and Lovely, but it never gets too sickly sweet. Things get a little melancholy with the title track, The Bottom of the Lake and closer Saudades, but it never gets too down and depressing. There’s longing, there’s homesickness, and a couple of tracks - Round and Round and Fitzroy Street - that are written and performed by guitarist Jesse Lubitz.
In fact, there’s really nothing too offensive in this album, nothing too distracting. You know what you’re going to get, which is at times mostly nice. It also means there’s no one highlight, nothing really blowing your hair back – just well-written tracks, the cruisey Tinpan instrumentation, and that melting Lubitz voice – consistently keeping the album heading in the same direction.
So if you’ve got a spare lazy Sunday, ease into it with a bit of Tinpan Orange’s The Bottom of the Lake. That should set you up very nicely.
