Tinpan Orange - The Bottom of the Lake

23 August 2009 by Max Easton

With two albums under their belt and aspirations to break the Australian music scene for good, Tinpan Orange have released their third; The Bottom of the Lake. The assurance is that the future is bright for the Victorian trio.

Every now and then an extremely unique voice rises through the cracks, grabs a hold of your ear drums and wrenches you into its sonic quality. The voice that croons over Tinpan Orange’s latest effort ‘The Bottom of the Lake,’ however, is not one of those. That may sound a bit harsh, in fact, it totally is, it just sounded like a good way to start a review. So let’s start again. In 2009, the radio airwaves are coated in a viscous mess of voices that are the new and improved female folk-singer. From the names that came first like Feist and Cat Power through to Laura Marling and Lisa Mitchell, there is no shortage of the uber-cute, smile-inducing brand of pop-folk swimming from tower to tower and bleeding out our radios. It’s an extremely unfortunate time to try and enter the industry if you just happen to be one of these people, and that’s the situation Tinpan Orange are in at the moment. With a guitar, mandolin, violin and a ukulele sitting behind a gorgeous voice asserting the words: ‘la lalalalala’, Tinpan Orange are a formidable outfit. It’s just a shame about the timing.

Tinpan Orange are headed by the sibling songwriting duo of Emily and Jesse Lubitz with the unrelated Alex Burkoy rounding off the core of the band and Cat Empire’s Harry Angus filling in the rest. The album they’ve artfully rounded out is incredibly infectious, with the soft, sensuous voice of Emily Lubitz sliding across some very well-rounded instrumentation. Her voice is lovely to listen to, similarities so ever-present that it could be called the gene-splice of Claire Bowditch, Angie Hart and Renee Geyer, which is the highest of compliments considering the quality of that trio. It’s a voice that’s pretty difficult not to like, unless you’ve been keeping tabs with the aforementioned cacophony of honey-voiced guitarists.

Probably the best indication of what to expect is the album’s long list of cutesy titles; ‘La La La,’ mingles with ‘Chinese Whispers,’ ‘Round n Round’ and ‘Lovely,’ so you sure as hell don’t want to be a cynic. It’s an album choc-full of sweet, poppy undertones melding with cute, poppy overtones. There’s not a moment where you shouldn’t be on some kind of anti-depressant, and it’s a very soothing album.

Now here comes the hypocrisy. Remember that bit where we covered how similar Tinpan Orange were with respect to the array of female voices plaguing radio airwaves and how that’s a pretty huge detriment to the album? Yeah. Well...there’s a track early on with a male voice which will have you leaning hesitantly towards the skip button on your CD player. ‘Round n Round’ is a sleazy, flamenco styled ditty voiced by the brotherly side of the Lubitz family which creates a feeling of desperate yearning; a desperate yearning to return to Claire Bowditch’s sonic clone. Thankfully, Jesse’s second attempt ‘Fitzroy St’ is a step up and a welcome break from the overwhelming flowers and hugs sensation of the rest of the album.

‘The Bottom of the Lake’ is a very well-rounded third attempt from this little-known trio from Melbourne that is most definitely worth a listen. There’s no doubt that it will find its way onto our airwaves and hopefully hang around for long enough to get heard amongst the rabble of similar artists that Triple J are flogging these days. It’s an album that I find myself coming back to on occasion, as it has some really nice moments, but it’s also something that can be a total struggle to get through if you’re not the right mood. If you’ve got a smile that can’t be turned into a raised eyebrow and a series of jokes, then this album is for you; but if you even have the tiniest, most miniscule degree of a cynical tweak, then maybe your facetious mumblings are best served elsewhere.

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