Here We Go Down The Black Hole by Sydney outfit Shady Lane is twelve tracks and forty-three minutes of my new favourite music.
The sparkling debut doesn’t seem that shiny upon first glance. Superficially, the artwork colours are quite subdued and the album title is ominous in itself. Open up the barely there liner notes and you’ve got songs with titles like This Is Death, Death Came Awful Slow and Ouch My Head. Said songs are full of lyrics that question life, death, existence, reality and experience and there’s an extremely futile thread linking each track to the next.
But from the first tinkly strains of the opener One Full Day Of Learning Things, I was hooked, in a strangely hopeful way. Rather than being a depressing journey of existentialism, the way that Shady Lane begs the questions of why we’re here and what we’re doing, the answers seem to lie in the warm electro fuzz and melody contained within each track.
In case you’re wondering (because I know I was), Shady Lane was once known as Jordy Lane, not to be confused with Jordie Lane. Right. Jordy Lane, on vocals and guitars, is joined by Pete, Conrad and Sarah on drums, bass and keys respectively to produce this sweet and slow like dripping honey electro/pop.
The music of Shady Lane is shoe-gazey enough to make me lie on my bed with my feet up the wall, electro enough to make me start tapping them about, and poppy enough to make me commando roll myself onto my feet and turn the volume up a little louder. The standouts on the album for me are Galileo and This Is Death. Sweet in one ear and subdued out the other.
