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Album Reviews: Martin Frawley's Undone at 31, Cass McCombs' Tip Of The Sphere, and Lily & Madeleine's Canterbury Girls
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BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
The bard confirms that the right has a humour bypass, and replays the English Revolution on period instruments
Martin Frawley
Undone at 31
(Merge Records)
★★★★
ON HIS first solo record Australian singer-songwriter Martin Frawley breathes new life into that pop music staple, the break-up album.
Having formed the now defunct indie band The Twerps with his new girlfriend Jules McFarlane, the relationship — and Frawley, it seems — came undone when he was 31.
With its Dylanesque drawl, intensely personal lines and twee instrumentation, opener You Want Me? is so good it threatens to overshadow the rest of the broadly chronological song cycle. Other tracks examine problem boozing, “meeting the parents” and the inevitable crash of the relationship with McFarlane.
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