This article originally appeared on Mess + Noise.
Mere Women’s second album is all about one’s shifting relationship with his or her place of upbringing. It’s one of the most emotive and affecting Australian records in recent memory, writes JOSHUA MANNING.
As you roll into Bathurst, you are most likely struck by the aesthetic niceties of an historic rural centre, a pioneer town that forged the way for the colonisation of the centre of New South Wales. There are grand old churches, English-style cottages, terrace houses, and the lampposts that sit in the centre of the town centre’s intersections.
This is my town. This is where I grew up, a place I know inside-out. And for those that know Bathurst, it is far from a picture-perfect country town full of history and heritage. It is dichotomous in nature. For a youth that has dreams beyond the fishbowl, the aesthetic niceties do not make up for the stifling atmosphere of conservatism, the mono-cultural makeup of the population or the unchanging nature of the town’s landscape. It is a case of escape or stagnate.
Yet there is a nostalgia that draws you back, watershed moments in your life that forever connect you to a place you worked so hard to escape. Mere Women’s second album nails this dichotomy, perfectly captured in the vocals of Amy Wilson and the driving, industrially tinged post-punk that falls behind them. Coincidentally, the album was recorded in Orange, a mere hour’s drive from Bathurst in New South Wales' Central West, a town not dissimilar in nature to my own. It is also reported to have been recorded in a "red-wine-fuelled haze", the sort of escapism that, as a frustrated youth stuck in creative-unfriendly environs, I would tend to indulge in as a teenager.
Your Town is full of conflict – whether it is the battle between Wilson’s vocals and Flynn Mckinnirey’s subtly harsh and tinnily reverbed guitar lines or Wilson’s inability to reconcile her feelings, swaying between looking for comfort in what is familiar and damning the source of that familiarity, the unchanging nature of these environments. This is caught in the lyrics of the opening two tracks, 'Home' and 'Your Town', one pleading to go home where everything remains the same and the other bemoaning the lack of change.
Each element of Mere Women has contributed in equal measure to create something riddled with bleak imagery, teenage insecurity and an urgent need to escape. The lack of a bass guitar in the band’s setup creates an uneasy emptiness, and Tim Carr’s incredibly bright mix means that this emptiness hits you full in the face on each of Your Town's 10 tracks.
The simultaneously bleak and atmospheric instrumentation and Wilson’s emotional delivery and soul-baring lyrics, combined with Carr’s excellent work, make for one of the most emotive and affecting Australian records in recent memory. The vulnerability in Wilson’s vocal delivery is, at times, almost child-like, as well as laced with teenage-girl insecurity, desire, frustration and regret. At her most vulnerable she questions, "Will you still love me when I’m old and pale" at her most matter-of-fact simply stating, "You will eventually forget me". On closer 'Moon Creeper', she tells the story of a night-time pervert, the kind of story that reverberates around the gossip circles of these small rural centres.
Your Town feels to me to be an examination of the relationship between humans and the concept of home. Our formative years are spent rumbling around environments to which we are not necessarily suited and so many of the experiences that establish the patterns we follow – the insecurities we hold and the paths we pursue – are born in those environments. Mere Women have taken the concept of home and created a deeply relatable record that strikes at the heart of our upbringing, helping us to recall, whether wilfully or not, the emotional spectrum of our rites of passage.