How’s this for a description of a record? “Like if Werner Herzog made a chamber-prog-punk record under DMT in The Chelsea Hotel.” That is as apt and vivid a description as any for The Academy of Sun’s new opus The Quiet Earth, a sweeping epic that takes in disparate themes and styles and forges them into an alluring soundscape.
The brainchild of Brighton, England musician Nick Hudson, The Quiet Earth is an album that often escapes easy description; there is a thread of psychedelic post-punk running through it, approaching a kind of mercurial Bowie experimentation at points. Hudson’s robust baritone and murky twists of melody can also recall Scott Walker and Nick Cave, while the intensity of instrumentation sparks comparisons to alternative bands like Suede and Pulp.
But in the lyrical concerns, which span topics as broad as the cold war nuclear arms race, queer sexuality, stifling organised religion, and irradiated landscapes, there’s a post-apocalyptic bent that adds a disquieting layer of darkness and intrigue. With a cast of musicians including Kianna Blue on bass and synths, Guy Brice on guitar, and Ash Babb on drums, The Quiet Earth plunges us into this strange world in an enveloping manner.
Hudson’s voice on the opening prologue “The Quiet Earth” is like the lovechild of Walker, Bowie, and Morrissey, as piano lines cascade up and down the keyboard and pretty harmonies weave in and out. Hudson sings ominously of airships falling from the sky “like punctured planets.” From there, the scene set, the album takes some remarkable twists and turns.
“Polestar” expertly treads the line between elegant grace and unsettling ambiguity, with playful piano, some gorgeous guitar and an arrangement reminiscent of mid-period Kate Bush that climaxes with all of these elements rising, like a peak, to the sky. The faster-paced “The House,” meanwhile, makes use of echo-laden vocals and a classic melody that recalls French chanson, or some of Leonard Cohen’s 60s work. It’s a smorgasbord of instrumentation, with wheezing harmonium, propulsive drums, bells, and an offbeat mouth organ straight out of The Wicker Man, the backdrop to a litany of vivid lyrical conceits.
Single “The Parts That Need Replacing” is a fantastic, angular Bowie-esque morsel of new wave post-punk, with its fluctuating rhythms and complex melody. For such heavy subject matter, there’s also some wry humour (“I cut your hair and missed a bit / and now your head drains on the floor”). “Kidnapping an Heiress” starts off musically not as quirky as its title may suggest, but wrongfoots the listener – blooming out of mid-tempo rock fare into beautiful finger-picking guitar and a deft, hook-drenched chorus with wordless harmonies to close out. It’s one of those inscrutable songs, as with many on the album, where it’s difficult to try and pigeonhole it in terms of genre.
The album’s centrepiece is perhaps the exquisite “Charboy in the Cinders,” a bizarre, carnival-esque epic. It’s a tapestry of programming, post-punk guitars, spoken word, female vocal harmonies, unsettling organs… it’s an intense, driving incantation that recalls something of the nocturnal splendour of Nick Cave’s performance in Wim Wenders’ classic Wings of Desire. “The scent of mandragora and the filth on all his fingers,” sings Hudson, on a song that matches the subterranean DNA of its lyric.
From there, the album ebbs and flows in intensity while never letting up its vision. The bewitching “Rose Devoid of Form” is softer and atmospheric, with beautiful haunting keyboards and organ recorded at Brighton’s St Mary’s Church, while the fuzzy interlude “Happy Nerve Endings” bridges the gap into the upbeat, pure pop-punk of “So What, Caravaggio” (which finds customary time for a tempo change).
“Don’t Touch the Animals” is a slow and reflective eco-waltz, based on a lovely piano figure, if a little purposely lyrically repetitive (listen out for the mellotron choir filtered through an 80s cassette recorder and the lovely violin by Lizzy Carey); while “Inferior Designs” shines a spotlight on Hudson’s excellent piano skills. “Couch Surfer,” meanwhile, is a bizarre mix of prog-punk and musical theatre, where unexpected chord changes, frenzied drums, squalling guitars, and harmonies abound, all with Hudson’s commanding voice front and centre.
The beautiful “Sky Tourism,” with its deliciously melancholy piano melody and lyric describing a “sky split with guilt,” takes the final part of the album in a new direction – but the listener is constantly kept on their toes, as evidenced by the frenetic pace of “Everything at Once Forever,” with its quick-fire lyrical delivery (listen out for a memorable couplet referencing Leonard Cohen), catchy hook, and insistent drum pattern. And then, just as the pace quickens, it slackens off again with the gorgeous closer “Cloud Prayer.” An elegant arrangement of organ, jazzy drums, fuzzy guitar, and Hudson’s voice reaching into its upper register, really does sound as dreamy as drifting clouds.
The Earth of Nick Hudson’s imagination is not, of course, quite a quiet one- it is a place of beauty, darkness, intrigue, weirdness, and constant unexpected turns into the leftfield. It is both very real and imaginary, and, especially in some of the times we are living in, blurs those lines deftly. It is an epic that rewards close attention to pick out all of the wonderful details and instrumental choices (among them, field recordings of a train taken from the ghost city of Pripyat, samples from the Russian station The Buzzer, a sample of birdsong from the grave of Alexander Litvinenko, and a meteorite hitting a lake in the Southern Urals); if you like your alt-pop on the proggy, punky side, with some existential, ecological and geopolitical dystopia thrown in for good measure, The Quiet Earth is definitely worth investigating.
