TASH PARKER – WAKING UP

“It’s a cosy town, slowing down, barely breathing” (Somers). A 24-year-old singer-songwriter based in Melbourne, but originally from Kununurra in the North East Kimberley, Tash Parker writes with a strong sense of place and mood.  The songs on her debut album Waking Up are imbued with nostalgia, sadness and a painter’s eye for arresting detail. “Traffic is teasing, treading in my path, and I miss my train of thought” (Move Around). Her dense wordplay is buoyed by the lightness of her delivery, and inventive arrangements by  J.Walker (Machine Translations) and Wally De Backer (Gotye). In Move Around, quasi-orchestral interludes alternate with brisk, bossa-inflected passages: the effect is beguiling and totally pop. The main colours here are Parker’s vocals  and her delicately plucked guitar, but the shadings are varied and expertly applied: zithers, jazzy drums, vibes, a banjo solo, De Backer’s harmonies. She admires Joni Mitchell and contemporaries such as Holly Throsby, but in its plangent evocation of a rural childhood (and in Parker’s gift for matching word to melody),  her work puts me in mind of the Go-Betweens’ Cattle and Cane.
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