Mark and Lard were trumpeting ABSENTEE as far back as 2003 following the release of their single ‘The Getaway’. They’ve now moved up a gear with the release of ‘Donkey Stock’, a 6-track mini album. The title is supposedly a band summary of their sound or as front man Dan Michaelson explains it: “placid and slightly dopey on the one hand, but old and wise, and with a bit of a nasty kick”.
Certainly the majority of tracks on ‘Donkey Stock’ take a lugubrious route. Recalling Tindersticks, Nick Cave, Johnny Cash, Velvet Underground, Pulp and even Serge Gainsbourg, ABSENTEE come across as a dissolute cabaret act, long ago corrupted by rock ‘n’ roll, ruined by a succession of crap partners and left viewing life through a glass that stays permanently half empty. Only the vague promise of a desperate grope and a fumble with one of the shiftless clientele in the dark alley around the back of the nightclub reminds them that they have a collective pulse.
Michaelson’s sharp lyrics are dry and barbed, recounting stories of disaffected lovers and the awful realisation that as bad as the relationship is this might be as good as it gets. On the country-tinged melancholy blues of ‘Rainy Days Swimming’ he complains: “I hear you whine I hear you talk you say it’s cold in here / I gave you wine I cooked you pork just out of my kind my dear.” Even the promise of sex on ‘In The Toilets, Again” (the comma is so important) is fraught and problematic: “People coughing all around and it doesn’t help to know we’re having sex without coming / There’s no mess no babies it’s just a chicken without stuffing / Is this a test?”
On the Gainsburg inflected ‘My Dead Wife’- an ode to a departed girlfriend - her pictures are left on the wall and her knickers on the floor leading to the memory of “your wrinkled peach exposed amongst your underclothes”. The gallows humour of Michaelson’s words is given musical form with the song’s closing section: a cover of Grease’s ‘You’re The One That I Want’. By the time the drunken stumbling ‘Heather’s Golden Shoulder’ appears the resignation is complete: “So I got fat, and I got ugly, hair everywhere”.
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Even when ABSENTEE crank up the guitars and the pace on the glorious ‘Something To Bang’ (like a Lou Reed song covered by early Roxy Music fronted by Stephen Merritt) the “nasty kick” is still present: “I’m tired of being a man always farming your land / And I’m working up a sweat and you’re bringing out the worst in me”.
Best of all is ‘On The Hallway’, a song where the simple idea of thinking things through to a conscious decision is set to a beautiful tune, the band building the track’s melodic motif up to the critical point where the penny drops and the choice is made to “head back again….I want to stay”. In the context of the album such a small personal victory deserves the understated celebration of its musical backdrop.
Michaelson’s lyrics remind me of J.P Donleavy’s self-destructive and debauched yet romantic anti-hero Sebastian Dangerfield: equally unflinching in his detailed critique of the shortcomings of self and others yet doomed to live through life with the rose-tinted hope of making a connection with another human being who will help him make sense of himself and of the wider world that often seems cruel and unforgiving.
Probably a pretentious way of saying I like this very much.
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