Title: Nowhere, Now here Label: Laughing Outlaw Sounds Like: The best Australian album this year RIYL: Mark Eitzel, Wilco, Ryan Adams, Steve Earle. Scottish born. Dylan bred. High school dropout. And crafter of this year’s best release from an Australian artist. It’s that fucking good. Remember the feeling when you would come home from a record store and put on an album, sit back, and just let it change you? Can you recall the last time that happened, or is it lost in a blur of half-listened CDs tossed in a pile? Because Nowhere, Now Here, changes things. It makes the darkness even darker, “Ride Out Alone” whispering “I couldn’t give you what you wanted” and breaking hearts. Their snapping echoes on in “Paperback Book”, “I’m a drinkin’ man, it’s where I find my solace/ I’ve got your words in my bottle and I’m throwin’ them down” and Broadie’s voice, a Camel unfiltered harmonic rasp slides around experience looking for its home. And it helps make the loss something more than an unending struggle. Cold comfort, but to listen to someone else wreck their way through the words, “You’re still beautiful/ I bet he knows it well” is a note to self that whatever this is, we’re not alone. Broadie’s acoustic guitar is subtle, a guide for the vocal voyage, backed by fiddles and pedal steels, and occasionally Broadie himself on banjo and blues harp. It’s hard to believe that it’s Broadie’s first CD - there are moments here, like the end of “Moonshine Dancin” that sound like The Band. Admittedly Broadie must have balls of steel in his debt to the big Bob - calling one of your songs “If not for You” treads a little too close to asking for a comparison, but a cheeky recognition to his Zimmerman in the track beforehand lets us know that Broadie knows that we know. And so we can smile. Some people spend all their lives trying to make an album like this. Broadie’s made it his debut. Whatever he does next, he’ll know that on Nowhere, Now here he created something special, he gave meaning to others in their darkness, like a good Leonard Cohen song can do. Go. Now. Buy. Play. Listen. Feel. Repeat.
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Artist: Karl Broadie
