“Big Jet Plane”
from the album Down the Way
2010
iTunes
Australian brother and sister team Angus & Julia Stone, hailing from sunny Sydney, recently released a delightful 4-track EP that, in just under 15 minutes in length, affects the heart and ears considerably with its fundamentally beautiful and mournful tone. It’s the ultimate testament to this EP that, in spite of its short duration, the work represented here shows a stunning, reflective immediacy, and a powerful tone that loses none of its potency on repeated spins. Their 2007 debut album A Book Like This was sadly met with little critical championing, although they have managed to increase plaudits through their intense, stripped-back live shows, and a selection of charming EP’s (this is their seventh so far). Down the Way, their next album — released in March of this year — is an utterly engaging and magnetic affair, and the four tracks that are included on the EP are of the same distinctive quality and character.
The first track, “Big Jet Plane,” also features on Down the Way and starts with an intro slightly echoing the sombre first track on Damien Rice’s dark and poignant “9 Crimes” from his second album 9, released in 2006. Over a chugging, yet understated beat and a minimalist cyclical guitar riff, Julia’s sky-widening, weightless drawl emanates gradually, eeking out a sonorous expression of sylph-like fragility, at once graceful and hypnotising. It’s infused with an earnest and measured meter that bears delicious fruit in the form of a timid reflection on meeting someone special, and all of a sudden disappearing with them in reckless elopement:
“She said ‘hello mister, pleased to meet ya / I wanna hold her, I wanna kiss her / She smelled of daisies, smelled of daisies / She drive me crazy, drive me crazy. / Gonna take her for a ride on a big jet plane / Gonna take her for a ride on a big jet plane / Hey hey, hey hey.”
There’s a bubbling undercurrent of sexually-charged malarkey teemed with a poetic innocence that works wonderfully well here, and the sinuous strings really stand out on this track, giving it an effortlessly sassy edge.
Track 2, “Living on a Rainbow,” is another showcase for their precious, fragile lyrics, with Julia’s vocal an appealing mix of a Björk-y Dido (if you can imagine such a thing) uttering a Sia-esque lament: “who will lead us when our faith is all but gone?” With a Ryan Adamsian guitar part seemingly borrowed from Love is Hell Part 1, layered under a delicious coupling of shuffling percussion and a creeping, rattling throb of a bassline, it’s a mesmeric little number that churns unnervingly in the brain. Ending with a haunting child choir borrowed from The Village of the Damned repeatedly intoning the word “rainbows,” it’s a strange, otherworldly end to the song that knocks the listener slightly off-kilter, although it’s out-of-leftfield darkness doesn’t make it any less compelling.
Next up is the Angus-sung “My Malakai,” with his vocals taking on a crooning Dylan style amongst the malleable milieu of the mellow Fleetwood Mac-y musicianship. A lilting guitar arpeggio reminiscent of “Dear Prudence” from 1968’s The Beatles (White Album) (and also, bizarrely enough, the Stereophonics 1997 Top 20 single “Traffic” as well) galvanises the song’s cheery but terse tone, contrasting to the melancholy track that succeeds it. The fourth and final treat on the EP, an eerie cover of the Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta duet “You’re the One That I Want” from the Grease movie soundtrack, is done as if by a weirdly dispossessed amalgamation of Alison Krauss and Dolly Parton. Aping Tegan and Sara’s delightful stadium-shunning acoustic cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” it’s now a million miles away from its original cheesy roots and given a unique mystique by this makeover, with plumes of clandestine smoke emanating from its emotionally-charred embers. It feels so right. A mellifluous live version from earlier this year at the Café de la Danse can be seen here:
It’s a fantastic end to a downright fantastic EP, and it’s all the more enchanting because it sounds so weathered with sincere human emotion, genuinely rounded, lovingly true. Angus & Julia Stone’s Big Jet Plane EP is a work full of so much concentrated vigour and depth that, peppered with a fraction of Jack ‘n’ Meg’s delicate intimacy, intones valuable lessons about longing and pain and lost love that — I very much hope — will be shunted into the wider public consciousness someday very soon. Astounding.