I've seen Neil Finn in concert in various forms at least seven times, and along the way I've encountered a handful of opening acts. Opening acts, of course, are pretty hit and miss, and I've been bored by more than a few, but maybe the best I've ever seen, at any concert, is Don McGlashan. McGlashan, a New Zealand singer/songwriter, came out ahead of Crowded House at a concert in Washington, D.C. several years ago. Working with only an acoustic guitar, he played several tuneful, engaging songs, mainly promoting his then new album Warm Hand (2006). I enjoyed those songs, and ended up downloading one for free on Amazon. I also enjoyed McGlashan's contributions to Finn's supergroup 7 Worlds Collide on their album The Sun Came Out (2009).
But mostly, I was enraptured by a song called "Anchor Me." "Anchor Me," with its foreboding melody, was a beauty performed live, and it's the song that really inclined me to learn more about McGlashan. What I learned is that McGlashan used to front a band called the Mutton Birds, and "Anchor Me" was their signature song, appearing on their second album, Salty (1993). In New Zealand "Anchor Me" is a classic, but the Mutton Birds never made an impression outside their homeland. That made Salty very difficult to find, but finally I did, and I was very excited to hear it.
The studio version of "Anchor Me" is a different beast than its acoustic equivalent. Beginning with steady drums and heavy bass, "Anchor Me" lets its chords gradually build, sporadic electric guitar filtering underneath McGlashan's haunting melody. His voice is great here--unadorned, but insistent in a way that brings out the emotional intensity of the song. The guitar picks up gradually, revealing a compelling chord progression. Then finally, the song explodes into its beautiful chorus. Everything works. The arrangement works. The bridge works. The album version may be decidedly different from the live version, but a great song is a great song.
"Anchor Me" doesn't pop up, though, until track twelve of a fourteen-minute, hour-long album. What of the rest of the material?
Salty begins with "The Heater," which was, apparently, an even bigger New Zealand hit than "Anchor Me." I'm not sure why. Don't get me wrong--it's not a bad composition by any stretch. And it works fine as an opener, the heavy electric guitar and creepy bass introducing the somewhat edgy sound of the entire album. But melodically, "The Heater" doesn't have a lot to offer, which makes it more interesting than good. The same can be applied to the lyrics, really. McGlashan, the band's primary songwriter, shares credit on "The Heater" with the rest of the band, but the lyrics are his alone. They're distinctive, but I honestly can't make a lot of sense out of them.
By contrast, second track "Ngaire" has a great lyric, crafting a very specific scenario--waiting at an airport for a plane that, on landing, does not hold the woman the singer has been waiting to see. Melodically it's a bit stronger than "The Heater" too, but it's hard not to want the chorus to reveal more of a hook than it actually does. The chords are mostly there, and the words are there, but McGlashan, this time writing alone (as with "Anchor Me"), doesn't quite hit on the melody to make it work.
Unfortunately, that's really the way the entire album goes, and even more unfortunately, "Ngaire" is probably the best McGlashan composition here outside "Anchor Me." Atmospherically, Salty is an engaging album, with a sound that recalls Crowded House's Together Alone from the same year. The guitars are heavy with a bit of an alternative sound, and McGlashan's euphonium, which he came on to play a couple times during the Crowded House show, is often an affecting touch. But where Finn always finds the melody, McGlashan meanders, whether it's in the upbeat "In My Room" or the unremarkable "Too Close to the Sun." McGlashan's chord progressions are too interesting for the music to be wholly unengaging, but he seems not to know what to do with the chords. This is perhaps most notable in "No Telling When," which includes in its chorus a chord so jarring that it never feels properly like a part of the song, no matter how many times it appears.
The album bottoms out on "The Queen's English." Lyrically, it's a fun song, mocking the myopia of the English-speaking world with the chorus, "The Queen's English was good enough for Jesus Christ, / and it's good enough for me." Musically, it's an obnoxious groove that lasts over seven minutes. If the material surrounding it were strong enough for a track like this to play off it, that wouldn't necessarily be a problem, but on an album like this the result is tedium.
A couple of the album's stronger tracks actually belong to bassist Alan Gregg. Gregg writes three songs solo on the album, singing two. His voice is interesting--a lot more basic than McGlashan's, with a heavily accented simplicity that actually reminds of Squeeze's Chris Difford, though in a higher octave. Indeed, there's a bit of a new wave sound to Gregg's work, a decade too late. His songs aren't as complex as McGlashan's, but after the dark feel of McGlashan's songs they really work. "Wellington" is a sweet song intended less as a tribute to New Zealand's capital than to the woman who lives there. "Esther" feels especially new-wavy, with an organ likely from keyboardist/guitarist David Long providing more of a keyboard emphasis than you hear anywhere else on this album.
It's funny--I don't hear these songs and see Gregg as a stronger songwriter than McGlashan. He's nowhere near as inventive. But Gregg's songs do work more consistently. McGlashan struggles. "You Will Return" is a pretty decent track, featuring a guitar that feels almost like a banjo and more prominent autoharp than you usually hear on a rock album. The chorus works, building naturally on the subdued verses--at least once we finally get to it. Otherwise, though, most of the material here, while sometimes interesting in the moment, doesn't really hit. And an hour is way too long for an album lacking enough good material to cover forty minutes.
I was quite looking forward to Salty, but the album has proved a considerable disappointment. It'd be pretty hard to justify picking up another Mutton Birds album, if I could even find one. Maybe I'd built this up too much in my head. Maybe I wanted another great New Zealand musician to add to a list that already includes Neil Finn, Tim Finn, and Bic Runga. I'm still going to seek out Warm Hand, but honestly, I was so disappointed by Salty that I pretty much had to make myself add Warm Hand to the list.
None of that is to say the album is bad. But it's not good, and very much not what I'd hoped. "Anchor Me" is worth any listener's attention, but best to avoid the rest.
"Anchor Me":
