Megadead is the new album from Melbourne-based musician Benjamin Shaw. Released jointly by our pals Audio Antihero and Tokyo-based label Kirigirisu Records, Megadead is Shaw’s seventh album, and continues to see him create his own singular brand of weirdo grump pop. Audio Antihero describe it as “a miserable album of disarmingly accessible songs filled with fuzz, brittle melodies, looping guitars, ‘80s synth, self-sabotage, self-doubt, violent fantasy and uncertain swagger,” which seems like a pertinent record for our time.
The album begins with ‘megadead.party’, a twitchy ambient track that’s all blips and whirs, supporting a vocal sample from some vintage information film centred on a party, a thread that runs throughout Megadead. Emerging from some long-dead decade, the voices are perked with a kind of chronic joviality, the human condition as it appears in informercials, sounding at once horrifically alienating and tremendously false.
‘All Body Start Feeling Down’ feels wonderfully evocative, its wheezing keys like a laboured heartbeat, answering machine samples adding that strange lonely sensation of speaking into the electronic ether, of missed connections, of having your modulated voice broadcast to no-one in an empty room. Eventually a snippet of the earlier sample reappears, “having a wonderful time” repeated over and over so that the statement subverts itself, betraying a vast hollow space beneath its surface. Making their first appearance in the final third, Shaw’s vocals respond in turn, their weary and emotional sound suggesting such a realisation is not new. “It’s okay,” he repeats, referencing the proverbial party of the opening. “It’s okay to go home.”
The keys at the start of ‘Melanomates’ could almost be Sigur Ros at their most restrained and poignant, although wordless Architecture in Helsinki-style blah-ed vocals soon dispel that illusion. When Shaw starts to sing, the track reveals itself as something like a mix of slow-motion Why? and a more rickety DIY take on Justin Vernon’s electronically modified collage pop. “I’ve got a mouth full of thunder,” he sings, “a head full of rain, a desk by the fire escape and you on my brain.”
It’s a continuation of a theme that has threaded through much of Shaw’s work, something which he reflects on in the album blurb.
I reckon I peaked somewhere around 2012 (didn’t we all). Luckily for me, it was exactly around the time I also peaked in shame and anxiety about doing any kind of art at all. Especially music… so what’s changed? I’m still doing this shit as I hurtle through my 30s. Goodbye pension, goodbye family, goodbye career.
Lead single ‘Terrible Feelings!’ is something of a centre point for the album, both temporally and thematically. Its title alone sums up Megadead pretty neatly. As Shaw explains to Atwood Magazine in their premiere of the track, “‘Terrible Feelings!’ started off as just a title in my phone, and quickly became the inspiration for a whole album of terrible feelings.” The song sits on a bed of anxious electronics that sound like the laboured robotic movements of some grey and lonely future, Shaw’s jaded vocals adding an all too human element as he sings:
“Hey apocalypse,
it’s nice to know you still be trying
To lift me by the hips
And make believe like I be flying away,
you’re all terrible people, with terrible clothes,
go away”
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Though to focus on terrible feelings as a beginning and end of Megadead is to miss the point. Take ‘This is Stupid’, which sounds like having some crushing epiphany amongst the gaudy lights and chimes of an arcade, a glimpse at the stomach-sinking emptiness behind the shiny candy-coloured facade. The realisation isn’t awful despite the surroundings but because of them, just as parties can be sad for their very abundance of so-called fun. To flatten this into the trope of anti-social introvert misses the true admixture of forces at work—the guilt, the shame, the dreams impossible to achieve. The promises that could never be kept, the nostalgia for things that never existed.
‘Blue Teeth Thursdays’ follows, what would be a sombre and downbeat piano ballad in another dimension, but here fogged and textured with Shaw’s usual ambience, and even the seemingly positively titled ‘A Brand New Day’ holds the same sense of miserablism. Opening with the lonely whining buzz of a lone fly in an otherwise empty room, the track captures that suffocating stillness of hopelessness, where ordinary days become long stretches of time to be endured and served. “Got a heavy head of hollow, a belly full of grey,” Shaw sings, “a big bowl of sadness, it’s a brand new day,” the final line reinforced with electronically modulated voices that again suggest something phony at the heart of such truisms.
Finale ‘hole’ is perhaps the records most tender moment, building out of minimal piano and a sense of surrounding silence, almost reminiscent of one of Meursault’s piano-led songs. Although tender doesn’t mean redemptive, this isn’t exactly a rosy, optimistic sign-off. Shaw maintains his sense of low-key misanthropy until the very end.
“So I dig me a hole
And I fill it with thinking
But the wind takes my hat
And I blame it on people”
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But is Shaw really a misanthrope? For all the frustration and (self-)loathing in show, there’s also something else. Perhaps the defining characteristics of Shaw’s music is its ability to transcend its own themes. He may be singing about hating his job, about going nowhere fast, but in doing so colours these things with meaning. To create art is to communicate, and as such the songs represent the antithesis to their own concerns, the simulated happiness and artificial connection punctured through their ironic presence.
“There’s a mirror,” says the voice on PUSH IT DOWN, questioning the loner of the party on that very status. “Go on, look at yourself. See if you can discover what it is.” Only, what if the problem wasn’t to be found within? What if the problem was all around?
Megadead is out now on Audio Antihero and Kirigirisu Recordings.
