Album Review: Lost In The Woods - Down With The Sun

It seems like there was a time when albums were a definitive experience unto themselves. It was before I was born, in the sixties and seventies, when you couldn't find the latest Dylan record by clicking a few links. You went out to the record store (or, more likely, David Jones), came back with a miniature work of art - and make no mistake, those big Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison LP album covers were art, designed for and accessible to those kids in the quiet suburbs of the world, who wanted to be enveloped by somewhere completely different and beautiful - and sat in your bed, listening to the album on chunky headphones and reading every lyric and liner note, staring at the album cover, trying to untangle the secrets of this other world you're hearing.

Am I over-romanticising the past? Probably just a little. I only mention those imagined record-listening experiences, because Down With The Sun, by Sydney singer-songwriter Brian Yatman (under the name Lost In The Woods), should be listened to like that. It's not an album... it's an album.

For one thing, the painting on the cover, by Greg Rich, is a perfect evocation of the music on the record. A young kid wearing moose antlers is biting his nails - no, wait, playing a harmonica - in a clearing in the woods, as plumes of pink cloud and black smoke drift into the sky. A canoe rests against the water's edge, offering a way out of the soon-to-be-dark woods, and away from whatever they may contain. (The kid's wearing moose antlers... did he kill a moose? Does he even want to get out of the woods? Is he trying to get lost in them? Does he care that they're on fire? Or did he start the fire?).

Maybe you can see the Pink Floyd link. Think of Wish You Were - the entire album, not just the song - and that flaming man shaking hands on a gargantuan Hollywood lot. Once you've seen the cover - or, better yet, lay in bed staring at it - the music becomes completely, inextricably linked to that Storm Thorgerson design.

The painting gives you one world - in which kids wear moose antlers and possibly start forest fires - and the songs give you others; worlds where there are 'picadors at the rodeo jiving the sounds of the stereo,' where young girls set fire to Yellowstone National Park and 'smoke fills the dream of the grizzly bear,' where the 'world seems so wide... and we won't be denied.' There's the hope and urgency of early Springsteen: 'Let's ride the dizzy heights, don't worry if the light keeps changing.' There's another green world, a hollow earth, lightning bones, 'eucalptyus, smell of rain.' It's a literary album, where songs read like pages ripped from faded 19th century novels.

But what does it sound like? Often, like it should have been released on Sub Pop. The melodies burn and crackle like Holopaw or The Shins (listen to the chorus on The Hollow Earth Is Calling), the organic ambience like The Album Leaf or On Land-era Eno. In the slow, heavy acoustic guitar, there are hints of Gary Jules. In the quiet evocation of Sydney's inner west - the album must surely mark the first reference to MacDonaldtown station in the history of music - you can hear the two Tims - Rogers and Freedman - at their lyrical best. And, somehow, you can hear the birds calling and the Eucalyptus winds blowing out in the National Park near Heathcote and Engadine.

All the elements are there for a late spring afternoon spent in bed, wearing chunky headphones, experiencing an album. Down With The Sun, like those old records, offers up another world. And it's a beautiful one.

(Originally published at FasterLouder).

(Buy the album here. It's actually awesome).