Sydney-based Stubai (the singer-songwriter Matt T and a few friends) have been quietly releasing a sequence of terrific one-off songs throughout the last few months – each a standalone triumph – but there comes a time in every new band’s life when songs need to settle down, put down roots, find a home – not least when, united, they reveal so much more than they do in isolation. Here we have, then, Stubai’s first EP – Voyager – which collects up four of Matt’s beautiful songs and is an arresting, rich proposition, containing as it does a number of terrifically buzzy, emotive indie rock tunes which put me in mind of some really great bands, not least frantic noiseniks-turned-troubadours Idlewild, who combined knowledge of 70s punk / 80s hardcore with open hearted and characterful wordsmithery and the harmonious and earnest melodicism of R.E.M.
Stubai are really on to something. I love these songs.
Voyager is an introspective collection; four songs whose focus escalates gradually from the narrowest of lenses to the most widescreen, from the painfully local to the furthest reaches of the cosmos. The cracking and quiet ‘Do You Miss Me’, is a yearning and romantic meditation on the pain of separation and the aching uncertainty of unreciprocated love. “Do you miss me, miss me like I miss you?”, Matt asks. “Do you kiss me in your dreams when the day’s through?”. There is such melancholy sweetness in the singing; jangly guitars detonate in sympathy. An “ocean separates”, Matt confides. The vista widens. Sometimes separation and loss make us feel awfully small, as does the generosity of letting go. Air escapes from a balloon and the dimensions shift. “You’re far away and glad you’re free…. but I need to know, do you miss me?”. I hear the song’s need for reassurance, for validation across the physical, emotional chasm of that big churning sea.
‘Broken Teeth’ is extraordinary. Over taut, winding guitars that recall late Sonic Youth, the emotional intensity shifts inward, as Matt unfurls a sequence of disconnected phrases which add up to a troubled recital of longing, self-doubt and fear of rejection, a narrator stumbling forward in search of encouragement. “I want you to notice something / I want you to be in love with me”, he sings. The tension between wanting to be seen and loved and the fear of being overlooked or misunderstood. The need for “Dutch courage” when you’re caught in that constant, nagging battle between wanting to be noticed and that morbid conviction that the person you love might not even care. For three minutes it simmers with confusion… then is gone.
‘Another Way’ shifts the narrative focus from romantic longing to philosophical introspection. Built around a notably quieter acoustic guitar riff than we have heard elsewhere, the reflective bucolic vibe and uncommon vocal harmonies bring to mind Swindon’s own XTC and Texas’s Midlake – two bands with unimprovable melodic instincts. Indeed the opening lines might have come straight from Andy Partridge’s devastating atheist hymn ‘Dear God’ – not because they are concerned with religion but because they share a disdain for those who consider themselves fit to tell others what to do or think. “The way that’s easily explained is no eternal way”, the lyrics begin, and “Those who speak, they do not know / And those who know don’t say,”. It’s a song that concerns itself with all that is uncertain and impermanent; the mystery of existence… before concluding, with exquisite good sense, that what matters most is kindness. “Do what you will but harm none”, it used to say on the back of XTC records.
The EP’s focus is widest on the title track, ‘Voyager’, which truly ascends to the stars. Recalling the fizzy, fuzzy tuneful pop-punk of 90s darlings Ash, the song draws on the imagery of the Voyager space probes, sent into the distant unknown in 1977, each carrying a ‘golden record’ – a hopeful message for extra-terrestrial life. “In peace as friends we send a sign across the universe / To transcend a fate we only brought upon ourselves”. No-one up there has yet heard that message, even though those lonely rockets – precisely as old as I am – continue to send back data from far beyond our solar system, in the vast emptiness of interstellar space. Will they ever be noticed? “Maybe you’re so small you fall between the cracks”, Matt sings, displaying a keen sense of cosmic futility. And regret. What good are our technological innovations when we are quietly destroying our planet? “We had a home – we blew it all,”.
“Maybe you once cast a bottle from the heavens
But now we’re gone and we’re through –
Put our thoughts and dreams in complex machines before we blew it all
Some tried to create and learn while others just destroyed and burned
And we… we tried to survive our time”
As E.M Forster wrote, ‘only connect’. Without the cats cradle of communication that binds us to other people, we are floating free in a hostile world, as far from home as Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Stubai’s songs inhabit the fretful moments of doubt and disconnect when the phone rings without answer, when great seas separate us. When all we need is a little reassurance, to be told it’s going to be OK.
I’m incredibly excited to hear what Stubai do next. This EP crams a vast amount of matter – and ideas that matter – into just 13 minutes. What could they achieve in 45? I’m waiting with baited breath.
Written by Jonathan Shipley
