The Darling Downs
From One to Another
(Carrot Top, 2008)

There is something both earthy and austere about the Darling Downs’ collection of 11 songs titled From One to Another. Steeped in sepia-toned gravity but also a restless, down-home twang, the twosome that composed this album of sentimental Americana are actually from Australia. That they didn’t, in fact, rise from the dusty roads of America’s heartland or the slippery banks of the Appalachian Mountains could come as a surprise for some upon first hearing their music. But, it soon becomes inconsequential where the duo hails from; no need to put a regional tag on the soulful sincerity found in such a plain and true collection of songs.

One half of the Darling Downs is vocalist Ron Peno of the ’80s/’90s punk band Died Pretty, and the other half is guitarist/banjo player Kim Salmon of Aussie rock bands the Scientists and Beasts of Bourbon. Both men are accomplished and esteemed figures in Australia’s music community; this project so named, presumably, after the western side of the Great Dividing Range in Australia, a rolling, pastoral region that’s dotted with various crops, farm animals, windmills, dilapidated wooden shacks, and rickety strewn fences, an expansive land that the music of the same name evokes in its rustic simplicity. The Darling Downs are humble and unpretentious, candidly refreshing in an age of laptop-generated beats and hip, urban scenes burgeoning in Brooklyn and beyond. The cover art alone practically mocks contemporary life—in hues of brown and grey, two worn and aging men grace the cover side by side, with sloping shoulders, cloaked in suits of seriousness and wearing forsaken expressions, a banjo clasped in Salmon’s arms. Such a picture recalls the rigid, dedicated mind of salt of the earth types that toil on the land, as could be found along the ashy soils of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, or in the deep, remote woods north of Wisconsin, or in Australia’s Darling Downs region.

These plucky, at times chilling, countrified sounds recall the music I bore witness to one summer while sitting on a rusty Appalachian back porch while volunteering to help a destitute family install improvements to their home. The man of the house played banjo around those parts, and though he hadn’t performed outside his own local town in some years, the hard and tender sighs of his instrument in that humid evening air sounds so much like the music found in From One to Another. Never contrived, just raw and real and quite beautiful.

Each song plays out like a resigned take on life’s sentimental journey, a melancholic and genuine exploration of the human experience, and its downtrodden beat and weary, dominating vocals derive a cathartic response from me; as an unfamiliar listener, I want to know where these tales come from, from which of life’s experiences the songs are written in regards to. Opening with the melancholic “A Moment of Despair” (“Bring yourself but beware / We are always in a moment of despair”), the album glides into the religious thump of “Gather ’Round (Stomp It Down)”, and the rest of the album follows suit, dark and contemplative, charged by somber recollections (see “Circa ’65”) and weepy reckonings (“Redeemed”), but also a self-effacing ease that’s easy to find in this brand of countrified soul music (“Something Special” and “There’s a Light Part 2”).

The Darling Downs have crafted an unrefined portrait of songs about man peering into his or her own life without those pervasive stimulants many of us are so distracted by. It’s refreshingly honest and well worth your effort—spin it ‘round a campfire with friends or in the shadow of your lone searching self.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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