Melbourne artist Geoffrey O'Connor has attempted to distance himself from the notion of mere retromanticism in the past, but his image is a clear evocation of a particular pop cultural moment—specifically, the 1980s. He's always shrouded in dry ice and purple lights, his hair bleached blonde; on the album insert for his latest album, Fan Fiction, he's leaning coolly on a Roland synthesiser. Without knowing the first note, you can already hear the plastic click of a drum machine.
Fan Fiction continues the sonic retro-futurism of his solo debut Vanity Is Forever, as O'Connor layers chintzy, thin-sounding synths over reverberating disco guitars, guiding it all with his breathy, nasal whine. Every dazzling melody is sandwiched together, maximalist and swollen in a dizzying spectacle. Even when O'Connor slows it down, there's too much going on to feel truly settled. O'Connor counterbalances, or maybe accentuates, his dark lyrical matter with lusty 4/4 rhythms. On some tracks, like early single "Jacqueline", it's easy to mistake a sense of lyrical tragedy for a good time, but Fan Fiction's core conceit lies in asking you whether they're mutually exclusive after all.
O'Connor frequently nods backwards in time, but he's also part of a contemporary moment in Australian music. Fellow Chapter acts like polymath Darren Sylvester and leather-daddies Standish/Carlyon, as well as recent Remote Control signees Client Liaison, are all gauzy embodiments of arch seduction, turbo-capitalist production, and indulgence. In the New Australian New Wave, corporate culture is mined for aesthetic value, yuppies are the new hipsters, and nihilism has been usurped by the possibility offered by wealth.
But O'Connor's power moves are just the shadow cast by his burning submissiveness. It's clear that the relationships he details are built on addiction instead of trust, so Fan Fiction portrays O'Connor as helplessly willing, a wretch begging for punishment if it means at least one night with someone. "Please" finds him begging a woman to take the frustration of her failed relationship out on him, while "Another Time" is verb-heavy and overwrought, reading like erotic fiction. "My Greatest Hit" uses the triple-entendre of junkie dialect, music industry jargon, and PUA grossness to go full-on stalker, while "Into My Hands" praises O'Connor's target of obsession as the final miracle. On album closer "Centre of the Room", O'Connor swirls sex and death into destiny and gulps it down—a mortal resignation which, given the album's sequencing, seems all too appropriate.
On Fan Fiction, O'Connor is drowning in his nymphomania, and the only time he kicks against the tide and shows a little agency is on "Giving It Away", in which he casts off the trappings of a previous relationship. The notion that personal heartbreak is more epic and unknowable than any heartbreak that came before it is a common delusion, but that just reinforces O'Connor's cretinism. The woman in "Her Name On Every Tongue" enraptures every boy she meets, hiding anxiety behind charisma; on "Please", a female target has been ruined by 12 years of "the same clumsy fuck."
O'Connor also describes her having sex with said clumsy fuck as "playing dead", which could just as well describe all the characters on Fan Fiction. Although there are hints of personality traits that occasionally shine through, the characters detailed throughout largely seem like they've been robbed of their own lives, prisms through which O'Connor can examine those hidden impulses. And so O'Connor makes himself into the villain, or at least the antagonist, of his own work, and Fan Fiction never suggests that any of this is admirable or contemptible—it just is.
