Live at the Sydney Opera House
review by Audrey Pfister
photos by Prudence Upton
fBI
Acclaimed Naarm duo HTRK recently made their ethereal debut at the Sydney Opera House for Vivid LIVE. Kicking yourself for missing it? Audrey Pfister transports you to the Drama Theatre that fateful May evening.
It starts with ‘Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings’. Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang of HTRK are standing on stage in the Sydney Opera House, spotlights lit behind them while Standish clicks into one microphone and sings into the other. Around the stage are pale blue roses, petals and a purple ribbon, like the kind my friend Gi wears as a magical charm, but this one is draped over Jonnine’s microphone. Her lyrics narrate a dream in which another person appears, this manifestation interrupts the narrator’s sleep (again), and then it “sets the mood for the morning light.”
It’s Friday afternoon in Martin Place. I meet my friends at the CTA Business Club for a beer, walking through the strange vacant foyer and downstairs into the red carpeted and velvet boothed bar room. It might have been this that set my mood to see HTRK’s Vivid performance as very Lynchian. I’m thinking of Lynch’s Blue Velvet nightclub scene where the character Dorothy sings the titular song upon a stage, melodramatically performative, lit in hazy blue light, and wearing a lace dress with a small rhinestone detail. Blue Velvet is all about the omnious and seductive underbelly of suburban life. HTRK’s live performance carries the same kind of spectre. It’s haunting, it’s both clandestine and melodramatic.
HTRK feels like both sunlight and bee stings to me. It feels like sunlight – warm, dappled, lustrous and life giving. And bee stings – a swelling, a prickling. I read an interview with the duo published last year, Jonnine says it herself; “personally, I was really interested in songs that kill you…”, referring to the direction she’s taken with songwriting, “…that was one thing that I was personally interested in, which you get a lot from some country and folk songs.” Immediately I agree, thinking of Townes Van Zandt, one of the few country and folk musicians I listen to. As a teenager I listened to Zandt’s ‘Heartworn Highways’ and would say the exact same thing, this music killed me. I can see why HTRK has drifted towards country; short and sweet songs that are both romantic and melancholy.
HTRK’s Vivid performance comes off the back of their 2021 Rhinestones album release – the tracks feel unadorned and sketch-like; vocals, guitar, clicking, uncomplicated synth and drum loops. In the week leading up to their performance I avoid listening to them because their music is gut-wrenching enough on a good day. After a few years of listening and dancing to club music and Soundcloud mash-ups I was afraid to go back to music that made me feel like a contemplative, melancholic teenager again.
It makes sense that this album came out of the last two years of lockdowns, a time where (like being a teenager) our worlds are so much smaller as (many of us) we’re confined predominately to our bedrooms, a particular loneliness, and maybe with some more time to pick up a new hobby. In Yang’s case this was a time where he picked up the acoustic guitar again. The quiet lockdown environment encouraged a different approach to music, as Yang says “we weren’t clubbing and that seemed like a world away.”
I think about a line from one of James Baldwin’s short stories that narrates; “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations.” But listening is undoubtedly a social relation, and Baldwin knows that too – he realised that writing that taught him about other people’s pain and heartbreak “connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” And the same could be said of listening.
Later, HTRK plays the opening track from Rhinestones titled ‘Kiss Kiss and Rhinestones’ while the stage lights turn golden and shine at a giant disco ball. The song starts and something feels empty like I would hear if a pin dropped. A hi-hat loops, Nigel plays acoustic guitar, and Jonnine’s vocals subtly reverberate: “I can make you glitter / I can make you feel glitter than this.” But empty is maybe the wrong word, it’s empty like a shadow. It’s hefty. It’s ghostly. Standish sings “I’m covered in kisses / From head to toe oh oh.” It’s teenage, gothic country lyricism.
A rhinestone is an imitation diamond used for ornamentation. Rhinestones, the album, reveals the peculiar poetics of country and folk and, in particular, its yearnings. I think of how a lot of country, western, and folk seem to have developed from a kind of cruel-optimistic longing for the promises of the ‘good life’, upward mobility, and security. HTRK repeatedly takes us through. You could say HTRK’s music manifests as a kind of anthology of our psychic life – taking us through desires, emotions, fears, fantasies, dreams, and projections.
If at times HTRK’s songs sound recursive that seems almost precisely the point – “You can give me what I want / You can give me what I need / And I need / I can give you what you want / I can give you what you need.” Repetition here becomes less about monotony or a sameness, and instead HTRK’s repetitions become more of a re-emphasis, and an exposition of plural meanings. Repetition blurs beginnings and endings. But HTRK ends their Vivid set with ‘HA’ from their 2009 album Marry Me Tonight, with the sounds of the late Sean Stewart and Rowland S. Howard legacies echoing through. Its moody bass riff, noisy guitar, skulking drums pattern ‘HA’ alongside Standish’s vocals that swivel between something sincere and something ironic. Standish finishes with the celestial – “If you stay / I’ll make you a star,” which is to say the infinite.
Rhinestones
review by Claire Biddles
The Wire
What a magical thing, for a beloved group to take an aesthetic heel turn and arrive at a place that feels like it has always been their home. Australian duo HTRK have spent almost two decades in molasses-slow darkness, at the age-old crossroads of danger and desire. Their sixth album Rhinestones deepens the relationship between Nigel Yang’s guitar and Jonnine Standish’s vocals, shifting it to a wholly suited environment of ethereal Americana.
The duo’s conviction in this new style is apparent from the opening track “Kiss Kiss And Rhinestones”, a velvet-dark country ballad with an ancient sounding melody and an alluring central promise (“If you take my hand/I can make you glitter”). The song retains the intricate production that unites all HTRK’s releases, this time lending itself to capturing the intimacy of folk performance, with almost a field recordist’s sensibility audible in its sense of space. This might be taken as ironic, or a corny approximation of authenticity, if it weren’t for Standish’s additional harmonies – a seductive supernatural addition to this superficially as-live recording. “Valentina” follows a similar blueprint, wrapping a mythical encounter with a treacherous creature (“Her petals fall on my bed/A familiar thorn in my hand”) in swelling layers of reverb.
Seduction and acquiescence are constant concerns. Standish’s lyrics are studded with deeply suggestive words and phrases – lipstick, petals, hush-hush secrets, serpents’ spells – pulled from the songbook of country folk and murder ballads, delivered with an almost onomatopoeic physicality. This is matched by Yang’s deeply felt, conversational guitar work, and the album’s economically deployed electronics.
Rhinestones is drenched in stylistic melancholy, but its deepest and most affecting sadnesses reveal themselves subtly. “Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings” is ostensibly woozy and almost carefree. Beginning with offhand laughter, it’s a lament to a lover who only comes by in the solitude of night – a fitting match for its Mazzy Star-like twilight, until Standish makes a suggestion (“If you wanted to/Hang out with me during the day”) revealing a desire for deeper connection, or public acknowledgement. A finger snaps in the distance as the song fades out, unanswered. The next track “Siren Song” sees her repeat another plea (“Let’s just do somethin’ for fun”) almost as though in a trance, absent of self-assurance. The only lucid sound is that same finger snapping – killing any hopeful intention cold, like a controlling, coercive lover. Yang’s deep, barren two-note guitar melody appropriately conjures the sound of the lapping ocean, shrouded in noirish mystery.
Appropriately for an album indebted to “eerie and gothic country music”, Rhinestones has a strong sense of narrative and heightened drama. Standish’s mix of earnest expression and glamorous character work makes her a convincing central femme fatale. In “Fast Friend”, this charismatic collision is the perfect vehicle for a story of connection-as-addiction (“So many meltdowns/Just makes you seem interesting/ What a friendship shrine/Worship double time”). The ultra-slow pace and laconic guitar work are more evocative of the comedown than the thrilling rush of newness. Tellingly, the “Let’s just do somethin’ for fun” refrain returns here, suggesting a flashback to a relationship’s doomed beginnings. Named for the artist couple who famously “eat at the same place every night”, “Gilbert And George” also treads the line of friendship and co-dependence (“I’ll only trust you/I’ll put my trust in you”) but remains resolutely enigmatic.
On “Reverse Déjà Vu” – something of an outlier, like Mark Hollis producing Sade – the album’s drama is relocated to the stage of an almost empty 1980s nightclub. Alongside the familiar instrumentation, a drum machine pulses like an instructive metronome for the listener’s worn-out heart. As well as the allusions to its inherent Americana, the title of Rhinestones is an acknowledgement of how “cheap keepsakes can be more valuable than diamonds”. With this stripped-back suite, HTRK demonstrate such alchemy – achieving dramatic tension and emotive resonance from skeletal means.
Venus in Leo
review by Mark Mordue
Sydney Morning Herald
There is such a thing as dreaming with eyes wide open. I am walking the city on a rain-threatened afternoon, registering a quick drop in temperature and watching food wrappers scour the ground and spin up into the wind. If I could make my right hand move clean through my left when I try to lace my fingers, it would be the same as those bodies passing through one another on the street today.
On my iPhone, HTRK’s Venus in Leo is playing. The music makes me feel like I am swimming through sex and sadness, like I might find liberation in movement itself. It’s a sound that is naturally starry, night-evocative. Old parallels come to mind: Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, the Durutti Column. But HTRK (pronounced “Hate Rock”) feels more defined than my post-punk musical ghosts. Flavoured with the faintest hint of an angry, haughty heat: a dry-ice burn.
This is the Melbourne duo’s first recording in five years, dominated by Nigel Yang’s synthesised drum patterns, high-hats like a tin can being hit, echoing guitar that sets me in mind of the Cure on Seventeen Seconds. Hypnotic propulsions and slapped spaces, across which Jonnine Standish sings breathily – aloof, damaged, free.
I stand inside the foyer of a large building and stare out through a wall of glass at people in the spitting rain. Standish sounds like she is calling from the bottom of a well whose walls are the skyscrapers. Words like “sinking” and “falling” are repeatedly uttered in her lyrics like something pretty. I keep playing HTRK on my iPhone until my world turns aquatic, entering it more deeply, yet moving beyond it. It’s an inspiring gift, this sense of the heaviness of wings. I’m as ready as I will ever be when the sky breaks open.
Psychic 9-5 Club
review by Will Lynch
Resident Advisor
HTRK have been through a lot of changes in the past ten years, personally as well as musically. In 2006, back when their songs were full of reverb-drenched guitars, they left their home city of Melbourne for what turned out to be an unhappy stint in Berlin. From there they moved to London, where, in 2010, bassist Sean Stewart committed suicide. The band had been in the process of writing Work (work, work), an ominous, synth-heavy album that Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang finished as a duo. Since then, HTRK's remaining members have resettled in Australia, this time in Sydney. It was in this period of relative calm that they produced Psychic 9-5 Club, their first record done entirely as a duo, and their most mature piece of music yet.
In some ways Psychic 9-5 Club feels like a sequel to Work (work, work). The titles of both records reflect the band's unease about day jobs—"We both really like the idea of that energy that can exist between the hours of nine to five, which for a lot of people are wasted hours, or hours of just going through the motions," Standish recently told Dazed. Vanity and body image still loom large—before we had "Skinny," now we have "The Body You Deserve" and "Wet Dream." Most essentially, HTRK's sound is once again driven by a kind of erotic angst—the same thing that made Portishead so good.
But if the themes are familiar, the delivery is more refined. HTRK have a lighter touch here than they ever have before. The compositions are thoroughly minimalist, each one little more than a few understated loops and Standish's smoky moans. Dubbed out with reverb and delay, the skeletal beats have a hypnotic, mirage-like quality. The lyrics, meanwhile, are more subtle and pithy. There are the oblique phrases HTRK's always done well ("bones go day-glo"), as well as simple, disarmingly personal refrains. In "Chinatown Style," Standish coos something like "you know / I got / mood swings that I got no control of." But you know that isn't quite it—as with My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, some of the lyrics are only half-intelligible, and more powerful for it.
A deep languor defines Psychic 9-5 Club—the overall vibe is part séance, part post-coital cigarette. Even its broodiest moments have a kind of sexy elegance to them. There are glimmers of sweetness, too, like the warm chords of "Soul Sleep," or the instrumental "Feels Like Love," where we actually hear Standish laughing. This odd marriage of dread and tenderness has a way of getting under your skin. As cryptic as it is, Psychic 9-5 Club is very easy to love.