The surrealist film clip for ‘Come On Back This Way’, the first single on Playmates – the highly-anticipated new album by Jack Ladder & The Dreamlanders – features the following images: a man (Ladder) who looks like Johnny Depp in Cry Baby crooning into a vintage microphone, a mysterious woman singing and dancing on a small podium wearing a long sleeve sparkly red dress and blue tights, and a man with a hook for a hand playing a pedal-steel guitar.
This Lynchian-inspired mise en scène is the backdrop for an achingly beautiful and eerie song about the one that got away, all driven by 80s new-wave sensibilities, melancholy synthesizers and Ladder’s beguiling baritone.
It’s surely the best Australian single of 2014.
The equally sensational second track ‘Her Hands’ picks up the tempo, delivering an avant-garde smooth-groover, reminiscent of New Order at their best.
While Ladder’s previous releases: Not Worth Waiting For (2005), Love is Gone (2008) and HURTSVILLE (2011) are solid albums in their own right, he scales to new heights on Playmates. The talented pedigree of collaborators assembled to bring this work to life makes it truly something special.
Artistic collaborations are like a bag of mixed lollies. When you dip your hand into the mix, you don’t quite know if it’s going to work out – will you get the best treat ever, or a sticky mess?
With Ladder’s fourth album you get the best chocolate you’ve ever tasted, hand-crafted by ancient monks at a secret location, wrapped in origami and placed in a basket lined with the finest silk, and carried by kittens shedding diamond tears of joy, while travelling to you on the back of the last unicorn on earth.
Playmates was produced by Kim Moyes (The Presets, Kirin J Callinan, Beni), mixed by David Wrench (FKA Twigs, Bat For Lashes) and mastered by Grammy nominee Mandy Parnell (The xx, The Knife). These musical engineers are an absolute dream team, known for complementing artistic creativity with a subtle approach, and, in turn, being responsible for more unusual and groundbreaking music.
The “mysterious woman” singing back up vocals and dancing in the clip for ‘Come On Back This Way’ is US singer/songwriter Sharon Van Etten, who fell in love with Ladder’s third album during an Australian tour. Van Etten also sings on another track, ‘To Keep & To Be Kept’, a sweet ode to overcoming fears of intimacy, which would work perfectly as the closing song to an offbeat romantic movie.
And then we have The Dreamlanders: Kirin J. Callinan, Donny Benét and Laurence Pike (PVT), all unique and subversive musicians of their own accord, who Ladder was lucky enough to assemble together again for a new album.
Ladder himself is constantly (and boringly) compared to Australia’s most famous gothic du jour Nick Cave. Both share a familiar vocal range and darkly confessional poetic lyricism, but that’s it. Perhaps the industrial metal inspired track ‘Reputation Amputation’ where Ladder croons, “I need a reputation amputation. Dear Doc, can you cut this thing off”, is a bit of a fuck you to this tiresome trope?
The final but silent collaborator on the record is the Blue Mountains, the national park 50km North West of Sydney where Ladder lives amongst its surrounds, and where Playmates was recorded. It’s as if the famous blue haze itself has seeped into the balladry on the album. The listener enters the world of the Dreamlanders; the haze clears, fears are exposed and consoled, and there’s suddenly a clear path through what once seemed like an impenetrable mountain.
Playmates is an absolute gem, the result of a musical collaboration of the highest caliber. It’s tongue-in-cheek, heartbreakingly serious, snarling, restrained, rhythmic and hypnotic. And it’s an instant classic.
Playmates is released on 7 November on Self Portrait / Inertia.
