Rabbits Wedding - In Truth About Road
Music has a fine wife in lyrics. They can partner evenly, but often we focus on the carrier of the name. Good music is enhanced by great lyrical content and form, that leads by sensitivity and purpose.
Then there are songwriters who redefine the boundary. That enable us to see the ordinary with a new perspective that encourages the recalibration of expectations.
Rabbits Wedding are understated - and also in that strange way that you won't find too much written about them anywhere these days. That ambiguous and beautiful legacy of pre-internet identity: when what you can uncover about the obscure and worthy is a truly rare and remarkable find.
Even rarer, I would guess, is coming across the albums these days. You will find a little of their work on YouTube. But their output was more limited than may have been expected. Or maybe it could be. The unusual is often unsustainable. Even in the fecund musical environment of Sydney in the mid to late 1980s, with so many venues, and the healthy promotion of bourgeoning musical genres, some forms of innovation were underrated, or not understood as they should have been.
In Truth About Road is Rabbits Wedding's first EP. It opens with "Next the River", which perfectly encapsulates their particularity, marked by Rawlinson's first rim shots on the whole and half beats in the first four bars: between beats after the fourth, then after the third and on the fourth, then after the third again, on the first, and after the third and on the fourth again; which is repeated until the the vocals begin. Rabbits Wedding are distinguished, but what delineates them is, at first, difficult to place. We recognise the familiarity of the four four beat; the drumming becomes regular; but something is still out of pattern. This is perhaps one of the differences that either shakes, or wins their audience. You aren't given time to work it through, though. It's like that uncharacteristic hum in the motor in busy traffic, when you have to focus on the road. Watling's lyrics will take all your attention. It's not until later, when you get home and under the hood, when you let it idle and listen closely, taking it a part at a time do you find it: Watling accents the first and third beats in the vocals, and the drummer is hitting the second and fourth. Like all Rabbits Wedding songs, it's often the lyrics that we are drawn to. They are oblique concepts and snippets of the everyday that do not give anything away, but - like that familiar common-time beat - seem somehow out of context. Even the album name, In Truth About Road, we understand, but we are pushed to interpretation. And here is the beauty of reconsideration. Rabbits Wedding also give you only some of the song's lyrics on the inner sleeve, which support decryption and clarity.
Their classic "Rideout" is more regular in tempo, with unison between Rawlinson and Watling. This fast paced track, that featured as a single, is perhaps more easily accessible than the lead track. That it is placed second on the album seems to confirm Rabbits Wedding's integrity. They don't follow the formula for putting the biggest hook first place on the album. They open with their idiosyncratic feature - suggesting testament to their musical probity. But the Rabbits Wedding markers are still evident in "Rideout". This doesn't speed in easy gratuity across the lowlands. While the instrumentals fang forward, Juliet Ward's (Lighthouse Keepers, Widdershins) anomalous vocals lend a bias that tilt the plain.
"Anderson" shifts across schizophrenic imagery and astutely selected lyrics. Rawlinson's brilliant marching tempo rallies in perfect meter against the drunken configuration of Anderson's guise. The militaristic imperative of this percussive driver impels you to travel with the protagonist, as it rises to its crescendo. The exaggeration of state is contrasted by Watling's lyrics that simultaneously take us through Anderson's blur, but keep you tethered to an objective reality.
Side two opens with "Nuns in a Vicarage" and those beautiful drums rolling through the fade up. This time Rabbits Wedding play with tempo, shifting it down slightly for a few bars before the lyrics come in. Watling plays with tempo, too: emphasising on and off beats in irregular patterns throughout the song around that jangly guitar.
"Four Kisses", like many Rabbits Wedding songs, defy the regular pop song structure. Without chorus-stanza-chorus structure, we have the opportunity to listen to the uncommon themes in the lyrics several times throughout the song. Despite the three repetitions, the subject of "Four Kisses" comes to us like Sappho's fragments. The beauty is what is revealed and what we cannot conceive between "the dusk of [e]ach one leaved chapter" and the complementary imagery suggested in Watling's carefully selected verse, that hangs on irony, "I can see no lyric [i]n that at all".
"Penny Eats Things" is such a likeable Rabbits Wedding song, although the subject remains illusive. There could be an anthropomorphised guess, but Penny is so likeable and Rabbits Wedding songs are so insightfully peculiar that the shifting perceptions of who she could be allow the reasoning in the lyrics to be multifarious. This again defines the strange allure and seminal character of Rabbits Wedding.
Unlike so much contemporary music, Rabbits Wedding is not about the gratuitous or the mundane. But it captures both what we know so well and throws streams of light on unexpected beauty. In its particular way it looks sideways to draw our attention to a different truth about the road we are on.
When writing this review, I looked to find where Rabbits Wedding were now. They still cite their hometown as Perth, and still have their dry, wry sense of humour. Their Facebook band page states: Due to precedented lack of public demand, there will be NO band reunion. Although I loathe superannuation funding reunions, I did regret the loss. But then I searched deeper and found they have retained their integrity, and aged into a fine, wise incarnation. We have not lost them at all. Everything they were they are again, but evident of that accomplishment that comes with time, contentedness and staying true to what you believed in. What they were, they always will be. They are now Dusken Lights, still with Rawlinson on drums, and siren vocals of the beautiful Francesca Bussey (Cannanes).
You can find In Truth About Road on Waterfront Records. Catalogue number DAMP 47. Released 1987.
Then there are songwriters who redefine the boundary. That enable us to see the ordinary with a new perspective that encourages the recalibration of expectations.
Rabbits Wedding are understated - and also in that strange way that you won't find too much written about them anywhere these days. That ambiguous and beautiful legacy of pre-internet identity: when what you can uncover about the obscure and worthy is a truly rare and remarkable find.
Even rarer, I would guess, is coming across the albums these days. You will find a little of their work on YouTube. But their output was more limited than may have been expected. Or maybe it could be. The unusual is often unsustainable. Even in the fecund musical environment of Sydney in the mid to late 1980s, with so many venues, and the healthy promotion of bourgeoning musical genres, some forms of innovation were underrated, or not understood as they should have been.
In Truth About Road is Rabbits Wedding's first EP. It opens with "Next the River", which perfectly encapsulates their particularity, marked by Rawlinson's first rim shots on the whole and half beats in the first four bars: between beats after the fourth, then after the third and on the fourth, then after the third again, on the first, and after the third and on the fourth again; which is repeated until the the vocals begin. Rabbits Wedding are distinguished, but what delineates them is, at first, difficult to place. We recognise the familiarity of the four four beat; the drumming becomes regular; but something is still out of pattern. This is perhaps one of the differences that either shakes, or wins their audience. You aren't given time to work it through, though. It's like that uncharacteristic hum in the motor in busy traffic, when you have to focus on the road. Watling's lyrics will take all your attention. It's not until later, when you get home and under the hood, when you let it idle and listen closely, taking it a part at a time do you find it: Watling accents the first and third beats in the vocals, and the drummer is hitting the second and fourth. Like all Rabbits Wedding songs, it's often the lyrics that we are drawn to. They are oblique concepts and snippets of the everyday that do not give anything away, but - like that familiar common-time beat - seem somehow out of context. Even the album name, In Truth About Road, we understand, but we are pushed to interpretation. And here is the beauty of reconsideration. Rabbits Wedding also give you only some of the song's lyrics on the inner sleeve, which support decryption and clarity.
Their classic "Rideout" is more regular in tempo, with unison between Rawlinson and Watling. This fast paced track, that featured as a single, is perhaps more easily accessible than the lead track. That it is placed second on the album seems to confirm Rabbits Wedding's integrity. They don't follow the formula for putting the biggest hook first place on the album. They open with their idiosyncratic feature - suggesting testament to their musical probity. But the Rabbits Wedding markers are still evident in "Rideout". This doesn't speed in easy gratuity across the lowlands. While the instrumentals fang forward, Juliet Ward's (Lighthouse Keepers, Widdershins) anomalous vocals lend a bias that tilt the plain.
"Anderson" shifts across schizophrenic imagery and astutely selected lyrics. Rawlinson's brilliant marching tempo rallies in perfect meter against the drunken configuration of Anderson's guise. The militaristic imperative of this percussive driver impels you to travel with the protagonist, as it rises to its crescendo. The exaggeration of state is contrasted by Watling's lyrics that simultaneously take us through Anderson's blur, but keep you tethered to an objective reality.
Side two opens with "Nuns in a Vicarage" and those beautiful drums rolling through the fade up. This time Rabbits Wedding play with tempo, shifting it down slightly for a few bars before the lyrics come in. Watling plays with tempo, too: emphasising on and off beats in irregular patterns throughout the song around that jangly guitar.
"Four Kisses", like many Rabbits Wedding songs, defy the regular pop song structure. Without chorus-stanza-chorus structure, we have the opportunity to listen to the uncommon themes in the lyrics several times throughout the song. Despite the three repetitions, the subject of "Four Kisses" comes to us like Sappho's fragments. The beauty is what is revealed and what we cannot conceive between "the dusk of [e]ach one leaved chapter" and the complementary imagery suggested in Watling's carefully selected verse, that hangs on irony, "I can see no lyric [i]n that at all".
"Penny Eats Things" is such a likeable Rabbits Wedding song, although the subject remains illusive. There could be an anthropomorphised guess, but Penny is so likeable and Rabbits Wedding songs are so insightfully peculiar that the shifting perceptions of who she could be allow the reasoning in the lyrics to be multifarious. This again defines the strange allure and seminal character of Rabbits Wedding.
Unlike so much contemporary music, Rabbits Wedding is not about the gratuitous or the mundane. But it captures both what we know so well and throws streams of light on unexpected beauty. In its particular way it looks sideways to draw our attention to a different truth about the road we are on.
When writing this review, I looked to find where Rabbits Wedding were now. They still cite their hometown as Perth, and still have their dry, wry sense of humour. Their Facebook band page states: Due to precedented lack of public demand, there will be NO band reunion. Although I loathe superannuation funding reunions, I did regret the loss. But then I searched deeper and found they have retained their integrity, and aged into a fine, wise incarnation. We have not lost them at all. Everything they were they are again, but evident of that accomplishment that comes with time, contentedness and staying true to what you believed in. What they were, they always will be. They are now Dusken Lights, still with Rawlinson on drums, and siren vocals of the beautiful Francesca Bussey (Cannanes).
You can find In Truth About Road on Waterfront Records. Catalogue number DAMP 47. Released 1987.
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