Multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey has proven himself, time after time, to be an adaptable musician in more or less any situation he finds himself in. From his early days switching from guitar to drums in The Birthday Party, to ensuring Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds and Rowland S. Howard’s These Immortal Souls stayed just the right side of chaos, to an idiosyncratic solo career as a producer and singer-songwriter, Harvey’s career has been characterised by a clear, unswerving artistic vision, a level-headedness and an uncanny knack of wringing intense emotion from whatever project he turns his attention to.
Given that context, composing music for soundtracks was almost certainly an inevitability for Harvey. Beginning in 1998 with the John Hillcoat-directed prison epic ‘Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead’ from within the confines of The Bad Seeds, Harvey spent the best part of thirty years developing distinctive music for film and TV that riffed off his nous for drama and yearning and his command and direction of groups of players.
‘Waves Of ANZAC’ and ‘The Journey’ represent Mick Harvey’s first soundtracks in over a decade, here presented as an album with additional cues from two other scores (‘The Last Time I Saw You’ and ‘Iron Spyder’). In the intervening period since helast delved into soundtrack work, Harvey has concluded his long-running exploration of the Serge Gainsbourg back catalogue, as well as delivering a collaboration with Christopher Richard Barker that provided an unswerving perspective of World War One from its trenches (‘The Fall And Rise Of Edgar Bourchier And The Horrors Of War’). ‘Waves Of ANZAC’ starts in the same temporal zone, being the accompaniment to Sam Neill’s documentary exploring the legacy of the combined Australian and New Zealand military force formed during the Great War.
With a sound palette dominated by the evocative strings of Bronwyn Henderson (violin), Lizzy Welsh (violin), Biddy Connor (viola) and Julitha Ryan (cello), ‘Waves of ANZAC’ strikes a necessarily mournful tone. Here you won’t find jingoistic, troop-rousing moments of euphoria but instead a constant tremor of tension framing and anticipating the brutal realities of a war that was intended to end all wars (but didn’t). Around that quartet of players weave classic Harvey flourishes – haunting acoustic guitar, subtle electronics and the dextrous sonic dynamism that has coloured his music.
The soundtrack includes the stark and haunting ‘Turkish Theme’ and the mesmerising piano arpeggios and ghostly atmospherics of ‘Archives’; the densely-packed dissonance and sound design of ‘The Aftermath’, including an interpolation of a Beethoven motif; the brooding, almost horror film-worthy organ and cello of ‘The Lovells’, and the gentle guitar and mesmerising pizzicato patterns of ‘In The Archives’, the closest this collection gets to something hopeful.
‘The Journey’ is a suite of four compositions written in support of the detainees of Australia’s programme targeted at asylum seekers. Recorded with The Letter String Quartet – Steph O’Hara (violin), Lizzy Welsh (violin), Biddy Connor (viola) and Zoë Barry (cello) – these four pieces each carry a stridency and urgency, shining a necessarily unflattering light on the horrors inflicted by Australia’s border strategy. While it is, by absolute necessity, a grim listen, in its concluding piece – ‘Hope’ – Harvey offers a more resolute, optimistic tone framed by angelic, elegiac and ultimately uplifting voices.
8/10
Words: Mat Smith
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