From Australia’s most westernward shores comes wunderkind visionary Luke Steele and his band the Sleepy Jackson with one of the year’s most startlingly beautiful debuts. Lovers has a magical immediacy in its assuredly-crafted songwriting and flawless production by Jonathan Burnside (Nirvana, Melvins, Faith No More); it also has a revelatory quality in its semi-mystic layers of meaning and allegory.
Fans of Grandaddy, Sparklehorse, Mercury Rev and early Australian pop psychedelics such as the Church or the Triffids will be smitten. The trippy pop melodies feature George Harrison-styled slide guitar, melancholy daydream lyrics, backward guitar loops, giddy electro blips, and an underlying country sensibility, especially on the pedal steel-laced “Old Dirt Farmer”.
On “Morning Rain”, the fragility of a child’s prayer (sung by Burnside’s daughter) and church-hall piano accompaniment waver along a fine line between haunting and creepy; that feeling returns with the children’s choir accompaniment to “Don’t You Know”.
There is something childlike to the purity of Steele’s imaginative vision, a sense of wonder and also of isolation. His idiosyncratic intelligence never caters to stylistic convention. At age 23, Steele may well be teetering over into genius. It’s a dizzying act to watch.