Of all the onscreen depictions of Australia’s natural environments, only George Miller’s 1979 apocalyptic classic Mad Max really captures the solitude and brutality of it all. The film evokes the dry, hot winds and terrifying silence like little else. Teething, the debut record by Brightness (28-year-old Newcastle musician Alex Knight) taps into a similar sense of Australian gothic. It’s a dry, beautiful debut that pushes beyond ’90s indie rock trappings and into rougher, more interesting terrain.
After years as a sideman playing drums, Knight set off on his own to write and record Teething. Stylistically, the album recalls other messy, lo-fi debuts like On Avery Island and This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. When he does expand beyond the tried and true palette of guitar and drums, it’s in clever and affecting ways, like when an organ emerges to underscore the second half of “Waltz,” or in the synth that augments the main guitar line in “Queen Bee.”
Rather than employing these instruments to make his work seem more baroque or polished, Knight uses them to make his songs dirtier, weirder. That synth line on “Queen Bee,” for example, pushes Knight’s vocals lower into the mix; as the song progresses, his voice becomes more and more distorted until it’s nearly one with the guitar. The use of horns towards the end of “Talk to Me” recalls Feist’s brilliant 2011 record Metals, another album that channels the brutality of nature. The work of these two musicians both has a beautiful mania about it, like they’ve been left to fend for themselves in the wild.
Knight’s lyrics sketch portraits of people on the brink of unraveling. On “Oblivion,” the album’s best song, Knight is less a narrator and more the voice in his subject’s head, poking and prodding at their anxieties: “You say the neighbors, they’ve been spying, that you can feel their ears pressed against the wall/And just how long have you been lying there, with bed sheet covers for a pall?” These kinds of unhinged and desolate characters recur in each song. “Surrender” deals with a figure who has to “neck a few more pills” in order to deal with the tedium of life, while the persistent repetition of the title phrase on “Talk to Me” conveys obsession. These lyrics fit with the album’s overall aesthetic, and while Knight isn’t above occasionally falling into cliche, he is never trite in his writing.
The odd result of all of this—Knight’s perfectly measured vocals, the often abrasive edge of his instruments—is that the songs can instill a kind of delirium after a while; Teething feels claustrophobic at times, especially because Knight’s concept of space seems to range between “sounds like he’s standing one inch from you,” to, “sounds like he’s standing one foot from you.” But he doesn't mind committing to the creation of a somewhat punishing work—Knight knows, after all, that nature doesn’t compromise to make its inhabitants more comfortable.
