Mea culpa, but better late than never, and you don’t need a Doc-equipped DeLorean to travel to a time where this record is still vitally relevant, because you’re standing in it. We’ve paid The Drones their dues twice in a row for records still as essential as they were when they came out, so let me not allow the circle to go unbroken: I See Seaweed is the best album by The Drones yet, which makes it one of the best rock albums of this nascent decade, full stop, and go take a float down the river if you disagree. Arguing why you need to hear The Drones is almost a moot point by now, but this record perfects the smacks you around the noggin’ with more dread-filled hopelessness than an entire tent of doomed Arctic explorers, while somehow remaining more elliptical and brutal than anything else they’ve released, moving with a mixture of reckless uncertainty and whiplash dynamism that makes “Jezebel” feel like breakfast cereal.
(Basic assumptions going forward: [1] Gareth Liddiard is the greatest lyricist currently working in the idiom of guitar music (uncontestable), and [2] When Iggy Pop gave up on punk, it went to Australia to be periodically resurrected there for at least a while [sorta contestable])
The Drones made their reputation on calling bullshit for what it is, whether the folly is English redcoats chasing down newly Antipodean convicts for sport or I See Seaweed extends the problematic to global warming, the degradation of rural towns for mining purposes, the destruction of animals for space research, and the hegemony of conservative media shock jocks. As usual, they beat you with their truth in a way that’s peculiarly Australian, goldminer-cum-sledgehammer, but what’s new is how much better they are at investing their arrangements with a deftness of cruelty, as if there’s a sense of permanent incipience and tension, in that the hardest moment is always the one yet to come. They no longer need to blast you to get the point across, which is a strange mercy, and something largely due to Steve Hesketh’s keyboards being constantly present like a drowning seagull pinned beneath a mast beam. Listening to the Drones is now more Pale King than Money, and we’re richer for it.
Take “They’ll Kill You,” which details the failures that twenty-something Australian emigrants encounter when they try and escape reality by positing a greater one beyond that country’s borders. The cracking of illusion is painted in the way the chord progression yields and opens to a seasick lurch down the scale in the bridge, sliding like the point in an argument where things start getting thrown, and sinking towards the inevitable conclusion: “this birdhouse migrates too”. It’s downright devastating, and in doing so, it pins down a peculiarly Australian neurosis in a way that’s instantly accessible in a fashion that Sixteen Straws couldn’t have been. The message is clear. The country isn’t the problem.
Accessibility is a moronic characteristic to mention with a band as gut-shakingly vital as The Drones, but it bears an important point out: the more this band evolves, the more they are capable of bringing people inside the tent. Where once Liddiard scraped a comb across the Australian past, here he discusses our communal post-(and possibly pre-)atomic future in terms that leave no one cold, but everyone chilled. Although we’re all fucked, this is not the paean to hopelessness that previous records have been; what I See Seaweed excoriates of false moralism, willed ignorance, abdicated responsibility, and misplaced misanthropy. As The Quietus pointed out, Liddiard isn’t recommending the grab-a-gun-and-blow-your-mind-out fatalism of Havilah’s “Oh My” anymore; this is him throwing down the fucking gauntlet, because he is talking directly to you here. This is not historical recollection, this is not documentary, this is the nine o’clock news, looking you right in the fucking eyes and waiting for you to start doing something real.
To get to the heart of I See Seaweed is to grow incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of only serving yourself, of condescending to your weaker parts, to say we didn’t start the fire and curl up in front of Game of Thrones. To be more to the point, any forward-moving relevance that g/b/d/k/v music is going to have relies on music like this, stuff that uses the inherited, elemental force of sweaty anger to drive a stake through the arrogance that mere consumption and observation entails, the notion that old forms can be superseded through aiming towards invention alone, that considerations of mere aesthetic alone trump meaning and urgency, that having someone put their bloody hands around your throat is a passe gesture. Music that prescribes nothing but diagnoses, and leaves you to pick up the tools. What we need, what we will always need, is art that apprehends you with the threat of making you fucking afraid and aware of the fact that you are a problem. You are a problem, and I See Seaweeed has to ask: Whose side are you on? Just yours? Wrong answer.
