When I went to “writing school”, they told us to put the most important information at the start of a piece, so if you read no further and take nothing else from this, just know that Calendar Days is an instant classic, a landmark, perhaps the defining Australian album of our generation.
I don’t really like making big proclamations like that (I’m sure Dick Diver wouldn’t either) but what they’ve done here deserves recognition. The music they’ve made is just so spot-on that I’m getting this weird sense of regional pride and I want to shout it from the rooftops and get as many people as possible to listen to this.
Calendar Days is smart, it’s funny, it’s sad, it’s beautiful but perhaps most importantly it’s ours, yours and mine. It’s a generation singing back to itself, a record tied in to that feeling of being a young smartarse romantic, dole-bludging your dreams away amongst the self-conscious aspiration of Australia’s east coast.
Dick Diver didn’t move to Europe, they don’t worship Delta blues or put on American accents when they sing. This is music that grew up on a diet of 80s and 90s Australian guitar bands, watching Rage on ABC, going through John Howard and Jeff Kennett and living to tell the tale.
It’s our stories being told on Calendar Days , a series of seemingly insignificant observations that come together into alternative national anthems. Checking the cooking times on the roast chickens at the Safeway deli to see which one is freshest. Getting high in the park, waving back to your mate through a smashed phone booth. Global politics as a distant blur (“ North Korea invades Greece ”). That share house where you used to smoke inside with your ex but now you can’t. Nothing on from channel 2 to channel 9. Venetian blinds.
The soundtrack to these mining boom minutiae makes a mockery of the concept of a “Melbourne sound”. Yeah, there’s jangly guitar pop—the barnstorming “Alice”, the sweet “Calendar Days” and the effortlessly gorgeous “Water Damage” are sequenced right after each other in the most laconic one-two-three punch you’ll ever cop on the chin.
Elsewhere, though, Calendar Days is a mixture of the adventurous and the tastefully restrained. Opener “Blue & You” opens with a Casio keyboard beat and ends with a saxophone blaring, and the harmonica, slide and innocent Steph Hughes vocal on “Gap Life” take it wonderfully close to Tamworth territory. “The Two-Year Lease” is a one-take tearjerker duet over spacey living room strums, and the penultimate “Amber” is the slow-burning epic, a six-minute release earned over the course of the album.
Then there’s “Boys” and “Languages of Love”, sparse sketches delivered with a deadpan wink by Australian of the Year candidate and (usually) bassist Al Monfort. The former is an end-of-the-night, too-drunk-to-hold-your-head-up jaunt, and the latter closes the album with a street eavesdropper’s take on love and (what else but) multiculturalism. They’re brief, obscure and intimate, the kind of tunes that make you lean in close to your speakers to hear every last vital word.
A week or so ago Dick Diver launched Calendar Days with an in-store at Polyester (in the heart of Melbourne’s CBD, absolutely perfect). They barely had enough room to hold their guitars but they played, passed beers around, goofed on Nick Cave. They didn’t even have any records to sell because they’d been held up at customs, but they had a laugh about it because that’s the exact kind of band they are, the kind of band we need more of. If you were at Golden Plains they’ve probably already saved your life, and I really think you should hear this album because it could do it again. I’m very excited to be living right here right now.
WORDS BY Matt Nielson
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