Augie March: Moo, You Bloody Choir

By: Scott Caffrey

Allow me a moment to repine. Why must it take two years for North America to hear the music of Australia’s Augie March? The band has existed for over a decade and is being slighted a major population of music-loving Americans who just need the opportunity to hear this poetic Melbourne brother to Wilco. And with all due respect, an appearance on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson is hardly what I’d call a push. It’s hard enough to get over in the States. Once the news of a follow-up to the sleeping-giant Strange Bird was leaked in 2005, it was another two years before Moo, You Bloody Choir (Red Ink) landed on our shores (Bird also took two years to reach us).

Moo is full of big, majestic songs. All penned by main March Kevin Richards, who spearheads a group that should be considered in the most important circles of today’s music. The band – Edmondo Ammendola (bass), Adam Donovan (guitars, keys), Kiernan Box (keyboards, string and horn arrangements) and David Williams (drums, percussion) – is a sort-of Every Band, not unlike their namesake Saul Bellow character. Moo can be so twistedly profound that you almost can’t know the full life of these songs until you’ve heard them explode with the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra.

Moo is about universality. The imagery is oblique enough to stir the listener’s natural thought processes. The places are real but the lyrics are too abstract to provide any literal meaning. The characters and scenarios are played out in cities all over the world. So like any good record, the listener gets what he or she wants out of it, guided only by the beautiful notes being played. All the poignancy in the world cannot replace a stroke of genius such as that.

Opener “One Crowded Hour” gently rolls from a finger-picked waltz into a joyously epic melodrama, and it’s just the head of a slowly moving snake whose fangs spring briefly during the lite-country rock of “The Cold Acre.” It saves its venom-strike for “Mother Greer,” one of the album’s first rocking bits and the moment where Moo really takes off. After swinging like Gershwin through “The Honey Month,” the Supergrass punk-thump of “Just Passing Through” provides the downturn back into the same energy that pushed along the record’s first half. Rounded into form by the Dylan-y “Bottle Baby” and some more fine country-rock with the “Baron of Sentiment,” Moo becomes a fully realized musical project.

In the world of High Art and self-importance, one thinks about the chicken-and-the-egg scenario. Are they trying to be pretentious and scholarly or are they really like that? Do the naysayers just raise thumb to nose as a mental defense? Either way, there is attention to detail in these aspects for Augie March, and the answer only ever fairly bears itself out through the actual music laid down in Moo, You Bloody Choir.

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