Indie rock is a game of inches. Nebulous genre categorizations aside, if you're playing a guitar and you're kind of successful-- but not Mumford & Sons successful-- you're going to get lumped under one massive umbrella. It's alright though. It allows for nuance and pathos and explorations of ideas and lifestyles that we all generally thought were pretty well tapped. Wavves made getting bored and smoking weed into a melancholy, weirdly pessimistic headspace, Real Estate found contentment in the suburbs, and then made songs about how being content can sometimes be stifling. And for Melbourne, Australia's Fergus Miller aka Bored Nothing? Well, hopefully he doesn't get lumped in with the other nothings-- Wild Nothing, Cloud Nothings, nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to achieve.
Get past the name-- an unfortunate circumstantial thing and nothing else-- and the great parts of Bored Nothing's self-titled record make themselves clear. Miller wrote these songs while bumming semi-homeless around Australia for a few years, and as a result, they occupy a similar mindset: Miller and the characters in his songs are perpetually stoned, bored, or existentially lost. Sometimes all of the above. It's territory that's been covered before, but he has a way with words and a clear-eyed honesty that's incredibly refreshing.
It's probably not an accident of sequencing that the album opens with "Shit For Brains", a song which includes lyrics-slash-album-mission-statements like "What's wrong with sleep?/ Oh compared to weed it's cheap/ But my dreams are always keeping me awake" over a laconic guitar line that is as lazy as it is pretty. Right away, Miller's set the stage for what he's about, which seems to pretty much be hanging out alone, stoned out of his mind, silently freaking out about the world around him.
Miller is so adept at digging his fingers into this sort of life, that, over the course of the album-- which is really a collection of singles, each its own screwed-up world-- you start to get fatigued. You've heard the soft guitar fuzz of "Darcy" before, but that doesn't mean it's not still great, the riff on "Popcorn" could be a lo-fi Blink-182 demo, but it doesn't mean you can't relive your best worst teenage moments inside of it with glee. Miller's songs are loose and fluid and vital, even when they're familiar, it's just that there's a whole lot of them.
Miller's a modest songwriter, though. He isn't trying to reinvent rock, and besides, music mutates too quickly to even make an attempt, but based on the gems here, if he really wanted to go transcendent for a whole album down the line, he could. "Darcy" is a close to perfect piece of brief power pop-- it features Miller playing with the classic quiet/loud rock mode, his lyrics gumming to sugary guitar fizz. It's a sweet, ambiently angry couple of minutes. Then he's on to "I Wish You Were Dead", which, title alone, probably says a few things.
The flaw here is that all these songs together are too much to absorb, but Miller probes deeply without ever coming off as sappy, skillfully weaving through breakups, self-loathing, skipping school, and poor decisions without sticking to his own sadsack introspection. On "Charlie's Creek", the album's quietest track, he sings "I would forget to be sad all the time/ And you would forget how you fucked up your life/ And how your husband's not home half the time/ And you never take time out to write" with brutal economy-- this feeling of wasted life is as universal as it is specific. He never attempts to provide answers, he just lets us know that he doesn't have them, and that's perfectly alright.
