Sam Shinazzi

Album Reviews

The C-Minus Project
Less Than Perfect Day

Oz Music Project

It's midwinter in Sydney. Frost on the tracks at the train station in the morning. The lone lights upstairs in the terraces against the blocks of darkness and cold cement. The seamless way in which one seems to have their heart torn to little bits and scattered to a brisk nor'-easter at the same time each year, just as temperatures begin to creep below 15 degrees on a consistent basis.

All these empty houses, bus seats, beds and desolation are firmly in Sam Shinazzi's territory. 'Less Than Perfect Day' is the sound of the world freezing over and the ensuing flight inside. These are songs of intense introspection, strummed as though it was frost settling on the guitar-strings rather than warm human fingers. At its best, this record is pure lacerating heart-ache, as painful as the frozen webs of tears on your face walking home after she or he left you high and dry on City Road at midnight; appreciating this record is an undertaking, a conscious response to the challenge it lays down. As such its rewards are significant, even if the sadness of it all can at times be overwhelming.

'Town Where You Were Born' opens with a slowly swaying acoustic guitar figure before Shinazzi's collaborators kick in with glistening country guitars and muffled, lazy drumming. The alt-country vibe is perfectly suited to Shinazzi's lovelorn lyricism and evocations of distance and landscape. 'The loveliest morning is leaving,' mumbles Shinazzi in his lugubrious whisper of a voice; it's a whisper made of treacle with cask wine, chased down by bargain-basement pharmaceuticals while looking at the sun move across the carpet. The country inflections also help keep the pace slow; every blow is given chance to register against the cold skin and heart. 'Lainie K.' sees the girl from two grades above you at school who taught you about records moving to the city, Robert Cranny's attenuated piano combining with Shinazzi's guitars like breeze rustling the long grass against one's ankles; this is the C-Minus Project at its most beautiful, utilising delicate melodic touches as consolation for the bewildering absence of flesh and blood and reaffirming one's own fragile spirit in doing so.

Nonetheless, the more conventional indie pop jangle of 'Goofy' employs a lighter lyrical touch and some shimmering keyboards from Cranny to provide relief from the encroaching cold. It isn't stayed for long though, as 'Cold Winter's Day' returns to the slow, circular guitars, piano and Shinazzi's wisp of a voice; the tone and subject matter is again one of loss, the song distending from the frailty of a memory. 'Don't you think about it too/ like I do,' explains Shinazzi, Liz Payne's backing vocals sounding as though they are being sung from half-a-dozen train stops away. If the obsessive circular rhythms and melodic motifs of 'Cold Winter's Day' weren't enough, 'You Better Stop Breaking My Heart' outdoes it for sheer pathos, Skye Sams' piano as cold as the bathroom tiles on the loneliest morning you ever saw, Oliver Heimbach's cello deep and resonant, the lingering memory which makes the duration of the moment almost unbearable; 'this is the end it's not the start,' sings Shinazzi before stopping dead as he utters the chorus, as though it were too much, before finally letting it fall from his lips.

The Gram Parsons love-in of 'GP' takes up the alt-country approach once more, but revels far too much in its own sincerity. Death and heartbreak become the thing of fetish, an ornament for a decidedly worthy pastiche. It's here where the record sags, in spite of single 'House Near Bridge' which complements the earlier 'The Moon and the Stars' in its (relatively) more sunny Joe Pernice jangle. '747' comes off as equally flat as 'GP', recounting one's wish to get on a plane and see the world in a pretty lullaby of guitars and Shinazzi's voice, but strangely cloying in its buttoned down desperation; 'let's move away and chase the dream,' sings Shinazzi and you wonder if he's got a shot at the next Disney animation feature soundtrack. Far more intriguing is 'Up and Over There', with Adam Gregorace's e-bow creating appropriately spooky squalls of noise, evoking the whistling of distant trains in the night and the hum of TV sets as Shinazzi sends off a weary traveller from this waking life. It is an utterly compelling meditation on isolation and death delivered with a lyric so spare and childishly opaque it freezes your insides ('I can see you sitting next to me, sitting by my side/ and I know you're thinking of me tonight'). Indeed the only place to go from there is the wry pop of 'Tiger's Tale', Payne returning for a bout of call and response vocals as a spell of cartoon drinking and antics comes to a typically melancholic end as one walks home (most definitely alone) through the cold night.

As beautiful as Sydney can be in its full winter sadness, one wouldn't elect to stay there all year round. Such as it is with 'Less Than Perfect Day'; it's the less than perfect ones that you would rather not return to. Shinazzi writes beautifully and disarmingly plainly about loss and loneliness, and at times even hints at the exhilaration of regaining one's equilibrium ('House Near Bridge'), but taken as a whole this record is nearly all-pervading in its bleakness. Whatever sunlight there is comes like slats of gold through the blinds at sunset, all the sadder for their spareness. As good as some moments on this record are, when played from start to finish it tends to leave one cold, especially in its awkward, uninspired middle section which prevents it from building towards something other than the void with which it continually confronts the listener. Shinazzi's songs can freeze the moment wonderfully well, but in the end you wish you could give the guy a hug and assure him that the world keeps spinning and these days won't last forever, that someday soon they'll just be memories within the fuller and brighter spectrum with which all the seasons leave us. A strong statement as a debut with songs that demand intense and close listening, most certainly, but one that intimates bigger and better things rather than achieving them.

Tim