Brisbane band Davey Spicer and the Creatures of Habit deliver groovy organic music with edge with their debut album The Murders.
It’s an ominous sounding title, and one which is perhaps eerier than the album warrants. However, these tunes are a lot darker than your average roots music from Byron Bay. These musicians are no hippies.
The album starts with “Waste of Beautiful,” a groovy tune with biting lyrics. It’s followed up with “Sinner/Saint,” with is so hooky and summery that you almost forget about the sharp words behind it.
Things take a turn for the eerie with “Bad Dream.” It opens to the sound of a sharpening knife, an effective tool for creating that sense of foreboding. Again, the instrumentation is so jaunty that unless you’re listening to the lyrics you might miss the darkness. But it’s there, deliberately underpinning that lightness.
From here the album gets a bit darker and more rock focused until “Love is Insane” brings it back to a less brooding place. The song is playful, despite its harsh truth.
I listened to The Murders a few times on a few different days before it really stuck with me, but when I got it I really got it. This album is full of melodic hooks yet deliciously dark, a wonderful anecdote to so much of the sleepy music around.