Luke Steele has the name of a porn star, but the God-fearing heart of an altar boy. A rather eccentric altar boy who, on the Sleepy Jackson's 2003 Lovers debut, admitted to fantasies of "wear[ing] a miniskirt into town," but who also never forgets his humble position on the celestial food chain.
Where Lovers' flights of glam-pop fancy concealed what was essentially a bitter break-up album (see: the still-stinging double shot of "This Day" and "Acid in My Heart"), Personality: One Was a Spider, One Was a Bird makes us privy to even more intimate conversations-- ones with the man upstairs and the unruly tenant down below. Like another, more famous Australian songwriter, Nick Cave, Steele presents God and the Devil less as religious deities than mythical personifications of morality and temptation. But where Cave's lyrics revel in the fire and brimstone of the scriptures, Steele simply portrays God and the Devil as characters in an unfolding domestic drama, placing them in mundane scenes-- "Witches in my swimming pool/ Devils in my brother's room/ How long 'til God knows that?"-- that are as confounding as they are grounding.
Fitting, then, that the war for Steele's soul should take place on a musical foundation that was originally set by a man who had a somewhat conflicted relationship with religion, to say the least: Sir John Winston Lennon. (No surprise, given Steele's professed Fab Four fandom, though Lovers had us believe he was more a George Harrision kinda guy.) To be completely reductive, Personality is the album Lennon didn't release in between Mind Games and Walls and Bridges. But then as Steele correctly assumes, symphonic 70s soft-rock is the closest that secular pop music ever got to capturing the sound of heaven. Or at least it provides the cinematic dream-sequence version of it: soft-focus melodies, a chorus of sexually ambiguous angels cooing helium-high harmonies, a string section floating on a bed of the clouds, slide-guitar sweeps that glide into eternity.
The album was recorded with a seven-piece band and a 24-piece orchestra, and it's easy to imagine all of them playing their parts while dressed in white silk pajamas. But when you look past the high concepts, clunky album subtitles, and ridiculously solipsistic cover art (featuring a topless Steele carrying a wounded twin version of himself, seemingly marked with stigmata), Personality is an immediate, alluring, and frequently arresting song cycle that plays to Steele's core strengths-- his dreamily effeminate voice and melancholic melodies-- while wisely abandoning Lovers' half-hearted attempts at mod garage-rock ("Vampire Racecourse") and electro-disco ("Tell the Girls That I'm Not Hangin Out").
If Personality is missing some of the cheeky charm Steele brought to Lovers' pedal-steeled standout, "Miniskirt", the album's blissful ignorance of prevailing indie faddism will serve it well in the long run. And even though the God vs. Devil showdown ends more in a stalemate than apocalypse-- "How was I supposed to know I was on my own?" Steele asks on the closer, gazing skyward while the orchestra pit blares-- hopefully it's just an easy ploy to set up the sequel.
