Artist Reviews, Perry Keyes, Uncategorized
Perry Keyes – Review – SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Sunnyholt ★★★★
FOLK ROCK
This album deserves far more space than afforded here, for not only is it is a quality record of storytelling, it is a major and very Australian album. Having covered life in the working-class inner suburbs, in the pubs where old footballers might hold up one end of the bar and the houses where a scrabbling mother ponders how to pull together the next meal, Perry Keyes follows the story west. Out near Mount Druitt and St Marys where the government moved some of the poorest in the late 1960s for a fresh round of social engineering. There’s less Springsteen than on his earlier albums and less despair shot through with bursts of exultant defiance. There is more austerity; the title track is a dark tale told drolly so that you can almost get through it before realising what a kick in the balls it is. The detail is killer, whether mixing GI cordial with gin and soda or playing housie with the Greeks and the Maltese. The songs are killer too. They’ll stay with you a long time.