Beyond the Pale

Gather around the campfire… Bush Gothic have 12 tracks’ worth of tales to tell. Of convicts and cattle wranglers, miners and bushrangers, country towns with empty streets. Of Jim Jones, an incarcerated Brit whose mission to bust out and join the fight against the British military is detailed liltingly, melodically, by singer, bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Jenny M Thomas (whose knack of singing and playing fiddle at the same time is antipodean legend) with sumptuous backing by bassist Dan Witton and Chris Lewis (drums, banjo).

Bush Gothic are acclaimed for their darkly inventive reworkings of Australian folk songs. ‘Pub With No Beer’, a ditty made famous by country singer Slim Dusty, is rendered tense, drum-heavy, riven with pathos by the bowing of the Lonely String Quartet; ‘Road to Gundagai’, an Aussie primary school staple, comes laden with menace and foreboding. There are references to beloved Aussie poets Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson and Judith Wright, and in ‘The Ballad of 1891’, a slow-burning tune set to music by Witton’s grandmother, to the shearers’ strike that led to the formation of the Australian Labour Party. This is Australia as a far-off penal colony; a rough-hewn place where beauty, when it comes (check ‘Past Carin’, an album highlight), feels all the more fierce.