Great review in Courier-Mail

Stoked to see another great review of ‘Australia Restless’ in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper. I love Qld!

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/music/album-reviews-daniel-johns-swaps-the-chair-for-the-garden/story-e6frfn09-1227363811187 

Adam Gibson & The Ark-Ark Birds, Australia Restless

(One Crowded Hour) ****

There is always a place for the Aussie yarnspinner who brings the local into sharp focus and Gibson is in a line that goes back through Paul Kelly and Henry Lawson. He delivers these tales as spoken word backed by a band. This album follows two classic recordings as The Aerial Maps and the suburban scenes, the open road, the summer heat, the joy in the vernacular and the Aussie place names (Marble Bar, Tathra, Macksville, Ulladulla, Nullagine, Currumbin) remain central. These poems/songs play out like movies in the head, the bloke from the towing service who picks up a stolen truck and shoots through to the Gold Coast to flog the hot TVs in the back (The Years Nobody Cared What You Did). The Year Our House Burnt Down is the true story of a bushfire, and the album concludes with the epic Blanchey (You Were Beautiful), about the “pale-eyed daughter of the Carlton Careys’’ and her child born of an affair with her sister’s husband. I thought, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Gibson didn’t: it’s the story of his grandmother and mother.

Noel Mengel