Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Something For Kate, EMI, 2020.
One of my favourite Australian bands, Something For Kate, is back with the first single off their new album due for release later this year.
It’s been a long time between drinks for the band and their fans.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since the release of Leave Your Soul To science (2012) and although the band has never been prolific, eight years is a very long wait even by their standards.
Frontman, Paul Dempsey told Triple J’s Dan Rowe that the band had been meeting on a regular basis to work on new material over the last couple of years and Situation Room came out of one of those sessions.
It started with a Stephanie Ashworth bassline, comprised of a sliding series of chords, that turned heads and inspired Dempsey to start writing.
The song is a classic example of the best of Something For Kate.
It’s a soulful ballad with a powerful Dempsey vocal delivered over a backdrop of that simple, but haunting, bass line mixed with drummer Chris Hyndman’s sweeping drum fills and topped off by overlays of Paul Dempsey’s vivid guitar sounds.
Situation Room makes the long wait worthwhile and although the song wasn’t written about the pandemic – it’s actually about a situation where all your best laid plans for total control still don’t get you what you really want – the song takes on additional meaning as a result of our current, isolated, situation.
Situation Room and the other album tracks were recorded in Bernard Fanning’s studio in Byron Bay and mixed in Toronto Canada before final mastering in Perth Australia, which means that these tracks have done a lot more travelling than any of us will be doing in a long time.
The band is keen to present their work to the public but when that will be and in what format only time will tell.
In the meantime we have this track to whet the appetite and the prospect of more to come before the year is out.
