Glenn Richards & The Venus Lakes: The Great Behind – Album Review

Big in his native land, less known everywhere else, Australian rocker Glenn Richards deserves wider acclaim for his intelligent, melodic songwriting. After securing domestic fame as frontman of well-established indie favourites Augie March, he’s now consolidating his career with solo album The Great Behind, bolstered by a UK tour. It’s the stuff of life, says Robert Plummer.

Artists can’t help but bear the stamp of the country that birthed them: like his homeland, there is something huge and elemental about the songs of Glenn Richards. This is generous, spacious music that envelops you with its warmth and intimacy while paradoxically triggering visions of vast, unconfined landscapes – it’s a sound that’s living in its own private outback. Call it Australiana, if you will.

After releasing eight albums with Augie March, plus a previous solo record in 2010, Richards recorded his latest project in the wilds of Tasmania, where he now lives, accompanied by local musicians. The moody, magnificent result is definitely an acquired taste, but soon becomes addictive if you let it. Best of all, you don’t have to have heard a note of Richards’s previous work to appreciate it – it works on its own impressive terms.

It gets off to an unsettling start with the hard-driving Pest, a song that gallops along as though a hellhound is on its tail. The lyrics seem to be addressed to someone possessed by an unknown force. “What’s that waking in you now?/What it is I can’t tell, but I know it keeps you very well,” sings Richards.

After that bracing opener, 1990Never soothes with its easy-going jangle, airy harmonies and twangy guitar solo. But inside the comforting musical cocoon, no transformation is taking place: the song is the story of a slacker unable to grow wise. “If I only had the courage to throw away the luggage and make the change,” the protagonist muses regretfully.

Things take a cosmic turn on Cold Hands Warm Heart, a track that could have been beamed in from across the Beatles universe. Richards still has the previous song’s baggage issues – he is “saddled with some empty cases or the contents simply don’t belong” – but heavy friend Johnny Depp is there to guide him. The pair’s haunting duet brings life to a lyric freighted with strange meaning: Richards revisits attempts to “piece the puzzle that was me” while taking “three steps forward into the undiscovered”.

The bleached bones of a glam stomp form the rhythmic skeleton of La Boue, evoking a French phrase for getting down and dirty – translated here as “yearning for the mud”. What could be more rock & roll, you ask? Fittingly, Richards appears as a Pied Piper for degenerates: “I am some entertainer/To lead you down to the lip of the river/And make you want to drown again.”

Does the album’s title track hold the key to all this weirdness? Well, yes and no. Described by its author as a “fever dream”, The Great Behind is an epic song of faraway longings and voyages of discovery. Yet it’s ultimately a journey of the mind as much as anything else: “And in the grey ship Anomie/I sailed round the Purgatree,” intones Richards solemnly.

A slow, malevolent fade-in heralds The Old Rotten Thing, building for more than a minute and a half before the vocals make their entrance. As the song takes dreamy, psychedelic shape, the words have all the hallmarks of an incipient bad trip: this is a song about death, after all. “What sickness do you bring, you old rotten thing?” asks Richards, facing down the Grim Reaper as he stalks the land.

Next up is The Chicken Wedding, which, er, marries a shambling Neil Young groove to some surreal lyrics. The inspiration comes from O Casamento Da Galinha, a satirical 17^th-Century Portuguese masterpiece rendered in azulejo tiles. The chicken princess portrayed in the work is also on the cover of the album: “Is she cold? Is she lascivious? Are these the questions that plague you in your sleep?”

Stuff Of Life is short, sharp and sour, a punky thrash and a stream-of-consciousness rant inveighing against artificial redemptive romance novels. “Kill me if I ever start in on the stuff of life,” howls Richards gleefully: time to stop and smell the roses, maybe? That’s what he does, more or less, on The Sign, a folk-rock meditation on the season of mists (“The first sign of autumn is on its way/Smuggled in the pocket of a perfect day”).

By The Sexy Mouth Of The Unseen River has Richards crooning his way, Ray Davies-like, through a set of barbed lyrics that rub up uneasily against the relaxed supper-club melody. There’s a perceptible sense of being in the lounge of the Titanic, although something far bigger than a mere ocean liner is holed below the waterline. “Know there’s no future under this rank advance,” sings Richards as he rails at society’s “stale arbiters”.

More Iberian art lies behind the genesis of the last song, The Fourth Chariot. Richards, recalling some paintings he saw in a gallery in Seville, works the memory into a moment of hallucinatory, tomorrow-never-knows euphoria. Finally, he spurns the chariot that “brings me to sunshine and sanity, then brings me to fire and madness”: he prefers a walk in the field, although he may fall.

And so ends an album of 11 enigmatic tracks which can only be characterised as Glenn Richards unleashed. For all the kudos that he earned for his work with Augie March, he attains new heights here – becoming more direct musically, although not always lyrically. If this is your first encounter with the man and his songs, rest assured: The Great Behind captures him at the very peak of his powers to date.

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Glenn Richards and the Venus Lakes have also confirmed a series of UK dates to promote the release of The Great Behind:

Saturday 10 October • London, The Spice of Life • TICKETS
Tuesday 13 October • London, The Water Rats • TICKETS
Friday 16 October • Brighton Prince Albert • TICKETS
Sunday 18 October, Hastings, The Albion • FREE ENTRY

For more information on Glenn Richards visit his LinkTree. He is also on Bandcamp, Facebook and Instagram. The official Augie March website is here.

All words by Robert Plummer. More writing by Robert can be found at hisauthor’s archive. He is also on X as @robertp926.