MUSIC REVIEW | Vanishing Shapes' 'Tiny Planets'

Vanishing Shapes have been Newcastle’s art-folk mainstay since 2012 when conservatorium students banded together for a group assignment under the banner of a reference to the Crooked Fiddle Band.

The result was a self-described and deceptively infectious interpretation of Jewish Klezmer and Andean folk music. The blending of minority folk traditions and the technical adroitness of highly trained music students comes off as a pretty alienating initial pitch for The ‘Shapes - music of this compositional calibre is essentially magic to a reviewer with little-to-no theoretical knowledge who learned guitar by playing along to My Chemical Romance songs - but not so.

Actually, one of the most impressive things about them is their accessibility. That is, their being an almost entirely instrumental five-or-more-piece, none of whose instruments belong to the conventional ‘rock’ canon, that manages to regularly transfix crowds in DIY punk spaces.

Translating this to the Saturday night house show-sphere and making woodwind and classical strings accessibly fun is no small feat. At the very least, it’s one that requires a lot of talent.

The latest output from our small city’s own is the Tiny Planets EP. The sophomore effort resumes the oxymoronic brand of neo-traditional jams that 2015’s Urchin left us with - five tracks of seamless composition released completely independently to compact disc. Tiny Planets, like Urchin, is an intricate intersection of clarinet, flute, classical guitar, viola and double bass in a variety of driving rhythms well outside the 4/4 staple.

The scampering clarinet hook of the opening track makes me feel like I’m about to be drawn into something Peter and the Rabbitesque. Although it launches immediately thereafter into the classic lush folk sound, the EP does manage to rival it in narrative focus.

Tiny Planets is a concept piece, part-sci-fi-part-political-commentary. It details the fate of neighbouring planets as they’re colonised and exploited by a megalomanic dictator. The in-depth written narrative given on Bandcamp took an unexpected turn concluding with the revelation that it was created as an analogy for “the dark origin story of our modern Australia”. It was refreshing to be flung back to reality after being immersed in a fantasyscape.

Admittedly, it was hard not to contrast Tiny Planets to the gig I just got back from: all-P.O.C hardcore punk bands shouting about colonialism as a viscerally, daily lived experience rather than a creative abstraction. Not that diverse forms of political commentary should ever be discouraged. Our colonial past is all too often understated or ignored so critique is always necessary and encouraged. And then anyway, I suppose that’s part of the appeal: the whimsical and abstracted.

At the end of the day though, it is just wicked-tight music. But not the kind that can be fully appreciated through computer speakers. It was probably when a sweaty, tangled room full of people were entrancedly swaying along as the clarinettist flounced to the rhythm in a vest sans shirt like some kind of Pan-type figure that I really “got it”.

https://vanishingshapes.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/vanishapes/

https://www.instagram.com/vanishingshapes/

{Image courtesy of artist}