Floodlights are a four-piece from Melbourne, who released their debut EP, Backyard, back in May. That EP is being reissued on LP later this month on Spunk Records, bringing the remarkable little record to a whole new audience. Combining rough and ready indie rock with a decidedly Aussie country twang, Floodlights provide added depth and context with a keen sense of burning injustice and sincere sentiment.
The EP opens with a short monologue by musician and activist Bunna Lawrie, a Mirning Elder and Whale Dreamer of the Nullarbor coast, a large area of arid country in southern Australia. He talks about the land’s healing qualities, particularly in regards to the sounds of nature there. The Mirning have a word for this nature sound—Mirrdinjar. “Everything that makes a noise from nature,” Lawrie describes,”the sound of the birds, the sound of the whales, the sound of the dingoes barkin’—it’s all Mirrdinjar, and it’s all healing.”
This segues into lead single ‘Nullarbor’, which follows a journey Floodlights lead Louis Parsons took across this plain, packing in his day job and travelling from Melbourne to Kimberley in search of some epiphanic moment. “If I trek a little further, into the dust, into the bush,” Parsons sings, “I’m stuck, but it’s something I will feel in my guts and in my blood.” The triumphant final section draws upon the patience of the wide open spaces, the sense of palliative perspective, the Mirrdinjar that Bunna Lawrie talks about at the beginning.
Nowhere to be
And I got time to kill
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‘Small Town Pub’ is what Floodlights describe as “reflection on culture and conflicting ideas of national identity,” placing short shorts and Shane Warne next to the “ghosts of the gums” on stolen Aboriginal lands. The result is a country-shaded punk rock song, all squealing guitar and cantering percussion, that confronts difficult questions of national identity in a land of cultural genocide.
This historical awareness is a central pillar across Backyard, and separates Floodlights from many of the other Aussie punks and indie rockers. “Floodlights would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that this EP was recorded on,” the band state in their notes. “The Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to their elders, past present and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded.”
The closing title track is at once the EP’s brightest and most tender moment, what Floodlights call “a song about the network of support created by different people in your life.” It opens with grandfatherly wisdom, and carries that affirming momentum forward in a celebration of family and community in whatever shape it takes. “I am nothing without the wind behind my back,” Parsons sings, “but it’s the wind that blows that keeps me on my track.” Whether metaphorical or metaphysical, this idea of wind once more harks back to the healing force of Mirrdinjar, and ends an EP of complex emotions on a note of something like hope.
But where this wind comes from
Is not like a sea breeze
It flows constantly
From those close to me
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Backyard is out on Spunk Records on 21st February and it’s available from the Floodlights Bandcamp page.
