NIC DALTON AND HIS GLOOMCHASERS – PLAY ALL NIGHT
On the cover of Play All Night (the latest disc by his Gloomchasers), Nick Dalton beckons to the listener, a black cape over his cowboy shirt. Dalton’s a Sydney legend, having played with The Plunderers and The Lemonheads (and co-founded Half A Cow), but he makes for a rumpled indy-rock vampire: “I don’t have all my teeth, and I’m losing my hair. I’ve got children and tattoos, and they’re scattered everywhere,” (Take Me As I Am). In the last few years he’s lost his mother, found love, become a father. “I had a shop it liquidated, I took some drugs they medicated”, he sings on Okay Sydney, You Beat Me, a wry, vinegary slice of autobiography set to a folk-rock beat. He’s known pain and upheaval, but these songs are defined by rueful good humour and a kind of contentment. If his singing is sometimes a little thin, it’s also warm, and perfectly served by the arrangements – the banjos and mandolins, unfussy tempo-shifts and baroque flourishes recalling the country-pop of Lee Hazelwood and Harry Nilsson.
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