MY NAME IS NOBODY
(mynameisnobody.com.au)
9/10
There’s a sense of space here: vast vistas that can replenish the soul with their sprawling beauty, or unsettle it because of that very same expansiveness. Most of us, after all, cling with our fingernails to this continent’s seaboard, our backs to a desert emptiness that can excite a little psychic angst. My Name Is Nobody consists of three Western Australians: drummer Ban Vanderwal (who writes most of the material), Tom O’Halloran (piano, keyboards) and Lucky Oceans (pedal steel and national guitars). Although assorted guests join them here and there the trio is remarkably self-contained as it lets beguiling melodies unfold over slow, understated grooves.
They have a keen ear for layering sounds, so that the barely-heard, carillon-like piano arpeggios on Rambling Waltz, for instance, are precisely what lends the piece its disquieting depth. Perhaps no instrument so instantly conjures a particular sound-world as the pedal-steel, but those country leanings (supported by the presence of two Willie Nelson tunes) are somehow made more primal: the soundtrack to our pioneers, perhaps, rather than to sharp contemporary dudes in cowboy hats.