Maybe that desert Dave Steel’s music conjures is the Australian Outback. Really, it could be anywhere on Earth – a road outstretched endlessly in reckoning with the self. That is the very experience of “Wooden Music”. With a fiddle and a gritty, stripped-back voice, Steel envisions a gothic, neo-Western sort of Americana that I’ve come to realise Australians do really well. Thematically reminiscent of Paul Kelly’s “Foggy Highway” and Nick Cave’s later work, Dave Steel’s “Wooden Music” taps into something almost arcane in folk music. Yet amidst his equally introspective peers, Steel manages to cut much deeper on this album. It is a philosophical triumph.
The first two tracks, “Roads” and “Sea Wind”, establish the mood of “Wooden Music”, a haunting, transcendental soundscape. The oceanic feeling Romain Rolland once sought an explanation for is the very thing Steel carries in his mind; “I’ve had enough of this melancholia” he avows at the end of “Sea Wind”.
Deeply introspective, and at times utterly philosophical, the entire album balances the difficulty of escaping the past, while looking towards some brightness on the horizon, however distant. Almost all of the songs appear to take place on the road, and sometimes this is very literal; memories are retraced in “Like As Not” where Steel has “been around this way again”.
Elsewhere, “Wooden Music” evokes lyrics that warrant skipping back to listen once more, almost unbelievable in their succinctness. “Salvation for a moment is some music I don’t recognise”, Steel sings in “Upside”, and later in “Go In Peace”, he appears to mourn a loved one. “Send me up a signal fire so I can find you there”, he asks of his friend as they journey to the other side, on a road much like his own.
“Hard Time Killin’ Floor” and “The Dying Stockman” are so soulful and eerie, they can hardly be put into words. It is bewildering that someone can write about burying a body so deep that it can’t be eaten by dingoes and make it one of the most breathtaking songs on the album. And like the very nature of life and death itself, the music picks back up after silence and plays on at the album’s end, a reincarnation of song.
Beautifully haunting, “Wooden Music” puts an Americana soundtrack to the musings of the existentialists and psychoanalysts of the last century, whether or not they knew how to play a fiddle. If ever there was a collective unconscious, Dave Steel has tapped into it. Arm yourself with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, sit outdoors in nature if you can, and prepare yourself for a masterpiece.
James Cook “Is That All You Got” – not defeated yet
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