Black Dog is the new album from Australian singer-songwriter Oscar Lush, an artist who operates in the age-old folk tradition of guitar-based storytelling. The record looks to build on his previous releases, music we described previously as “evocative and well-written and detailed beyond measure […] like updated versions of classic heartbroken folk songs.” As Lush himself describes:
Black Dog is a record mostly about people. It’s about changing and whether we do or don’t recognise the way we’ve changed. There’s also a lot about accepting things we can’t change. A fair bit about death and loss, and some of the things we go looking for and never find.
‘Pheasant Country’ is a patient folk song that burns with quiet intensity, Glendon Blazely adding flourishes of trumpet to gild the otherwise stark landscape of acoustic guitar and Lush’s formidable baritone vocals. Lyrically it is the perfect introduction to the record, a string of strong images from a previous time, hunting dogs and flooded rivers and muddied carpets, stories that have inhabited a countryside house for as long as the people who live there.
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‘Another Life’ has a similar atmosphere, slow guitar and wistful harmonica twining around the vocals, although it has its gaze focused on a much more recent past. It’s a leaving song, one full of road-borne introspection that reflects on the fact that houses are not necessarily homes, and how we’re obliged to keep searching until that changes. “Will I miss the old life? Won’t say I will,” Lush admits, “I never planted roots deep enough for any darker dirt to spill.”
But Oscar Lush can operate at more than one pace, injecting an alt-country energy when the feeling takes him. Maybe the album’s best example, the drums and guitar at the opening of ‘Stubborn Fool’ sound bright and golden as a new morning, although lyrically it is born of frustration. It’s a song for summer sun and open highways, a rare moment on the record when Lush steps out of the gloomy rooms of introspection and confronts things directly. The shadow Lush confronts is never mentioned by name, but there are clues that point towards ecological themes. “Stubborn fool – stubborn fool! Dark sea’s rising, ain’t got long,” he sings in the penultimate verse, “you’d stand and watch your daughters drown before admitting you were wrong.”
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Not that anger or exasperation are default emotions on Black Dog. Wrapped up in an elegant country sway, ‘Kind Living’ sounds undeniably contented, bathed in honeyed evening light and suffused with that gladness and inner tranquillity that comes with finding a place where you seem to fit. In Lush’s case it’s escaping the city (where “we were living like prisoners up on the second floor”) to the freedom of the countryside, a place where “the grass ain’t greener but it’s wide and moves for miles.”
Living out here, I think it’s changed me.
I ain’t dreaming about dying all the time.
Listen for the creek flowing by my door,
and all through the night I hear the great bats soar
There are also songs about strange dreams (“had a game show dream,” goes ‘Game Show’, “Mumma won it all”), the value of art in contemporary society (‘Fast n Free’) and even trees (on the Richard Powers’s Overstory-esque ‘Port Jackson Cypress Pine’). Finale ‘Black Dogs’ ends with a stripped-back lament as dark and syrupy as a moonless night. It sounds like a moment of cutting clarity in the early hours, all the worry and hope and general noise of the usual waking hours tamped down into earnest reflection. The final message is one reminiscent of the late great Jason Molina, a soothing reiteration of the fact that the uncertainty you’re feeling is normal, that even though it’s not always visible, we’re all chasing these black dogs together.
Everybody drives through the dark blue night
with nowhere to go at all
Black Dog is out now and you can get it from the Oscar Lush Bandcamp page.
