Half a lifetime ago in indie-band years, Geoffrey O’Connor fronted Crayon Fields, one of a crop of twee indiepop bands to emerge in Melbourne (alongside The Motifs and early Architecture In Helsinki), doing folky acoustic solo records on the side under the name Sly Hats.
Then, in 2011, he put those things aside and was artistically reborn under his own name; his eponymous début album, Vanity Is Forever, was an exercise in lush, noir decadence; heavily stylised, led by vintage synthesizers, reverbed drum machines and the odd exquisitely coiffed guitar lick, it sounded somewhere between smooth yacht rock and the sort of sophistisoul one might expect to hear in a wine-bar in 1980s London; the lyrics, confessionals of seduction, a long way from the gentle innocence of his earlier oeuvre.
Vanity was, to say the least, an unexpected turn; also, a transitional work, a portrait of the artist caught in mid-transformation from becardiganned indie boy to suave creature of the night, one part Bryan Ferry, one part Zac Pennington. It was–had to be–a record of self-conscious artifice, some of which broke down towards the end as the mask slipped, revealing the twee urchin behind it, the two personae not yet reconciled.
His follow-up, Fan Fiction, is brighter, glossier and more comfortable in its skin, as some of the artifice has become second nature. This shows in the cover artwork (regal purple and gold, with a blond, denim-clad, Ray-Banned O’Connor brightly lit). The opening track, Never Have You Looked So Good, glides in; a confident synthetic drum hit, followed by major-key electronic bounce not a million miles away from late-period Architecture In Helsinki (only without the gleeful dagginess).
As it proceeds, O’Connor’s trademark themes—glamour, seduction, desire—reemerge. An affair between an ingenue and an older, more worldy man, with some ambiguity over who’s pursuing whom; a portrait of a star, an inscrutable cipher in her limousine (Her Name On Every Tongue), the ominous past tense in the deceptively upbeat Jacqueline; erotic submission over icy synth arpeggios (Please).
The main difference this time is that, in these tableaux, O’Connor is a mere observer rather than participant, describing his femmes fatales as he addresses (and perhaps mentally undresses) them; where he speaks in the first person, it is to confide his deep infatuation, which he does artfully, a luxurious, detached languor in his voice. Is he an infatuated admirer, or a smooth flatterer, playing the subject of his attentions like a cheap violin? Is it façades all the way down?
Sonically, there is a grandeur; coruscating synthesizers bespeak the decadent glamour of 1980s pop, before grunge and alternative rock made polish and maximalism equivalent to the cardinal sin of inauthenticity (a charge which would stick until the following century, when the hipsters started rejecting the ubiquitous mass-manufactured alt-rock and getting really into Hall & Oates). In Fan Fiction, O’Connor dives deeper into synthpop and disco, songs such as I Never Cry and Please embrace their cold fire and detached passion, all minor-key arpeggios, 4/4 beats and pulsing basslines, not all that far from vintage Pet Shop Boys or Momus’ Creation period; disco workout Another Time continues this, the vocals a hypnotic, metronomic monotone over the dancefloor synths. The penultimate track, Giving It Away, strikes a note of sombre valediction, as O’Connor enumerates things once dear over a synthpop background; this theme continues on a more languid note on Centre Of The Room, which eases the album to a gentle goodbye.
Fan Fiction is a more confident and stylistically coherent work than Vanity Is Forever, and shows O’Connor to have arrived at a destination in his journey of self-reinvention and made it his own. The next question is: where will he go next?
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Fan Fiction
By Geoffrey O’Connor
Chapter Music
Available at iTunes, Bandcamp, Chapter Music and local record shops.
