(2020) Claire Deak & Tony Dupé - The Old Capital


Review:
Melbourne-based duo Claire Deak & Tony Dupé wield an entire music shop’s worth of acoustic instruments on their debut album, The Old Capital, creating a dizzyingly beautiful tapestry of sound. If you can blow, strike, pluck or bow it, it’s likely you’ll hear it deployed somewhere on The Old Capital. However, this is far from a pile-up of ideas or the kind of playful mess you might associate with musical collectives such as Elephant 6. Deak and Dupé are astonishingly skilled composers and arrangers, piecing together intricate, dusty instrumental tableaux that become more mesmerizing and moving the more time you invest in them. Focus in and marvel at the grain of each layer, or step back and admire the elegance of the whole. Subtle edits rend the billowing canvas of opener “From a Rooftop” into something approaching funky, harking back to Dupé’s previous incarnation as Saddleback. There’s so much going on from moment to moment that it would be foolish to try and break it down; like opening up the back of an old watch, it’s best to just admire how well it’s been crafted and how all the tiny moving parts work together. Thankfully, Deak and Dupé have the compositional nous to counterbalance such intricacy with widescreen, droning passages, such as “The Rain,” which would sound right at home on a Stars of the Lid record. On six-minute centrepiece “Before Dark,” an arsenal of instruments rallies around a drum machine pulse, as harp, piano and strings ebb and flow. The first half of “We Crossed the Lake” layers sustained tones both growling and glassy, before a mournful refrain clears the sonic space for flute and all manner of plucked and reedy tones to resound in turn. “For Bernadette” is an elegiac waltz, its music-box plucking shadowed by the rumble of thunder. And “Procession” brings the album to a fittingly reflective close, as woodwinds and strings offer just enough uplift to offset the song’s melancholic, percussive trudge. As its title suggests, The Old Capital has a time-worn grandeur, but listen closely and you’ll hear human stories teeming within its nooks and crannies. There’s so much wonderful stuff going on across these seven songs that it’s a delight to revisit.





Tracklist:
01 - From a Rooftop
02 - Overland
03 - The Rain
04 - Before Dark
05 - We Crossed the Lake
06 - For Bernadette
07 - Procession


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, ambient, chamber pop, classical
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits