Machine TranslationsThe Bright Door
Spunk / Mushroom

- For all that J Walker likes to grab an acoustic guitar and whip up a veritable storm of folk-rock, the name Machine Translations has always been peculiarly apt, for what was once his primary creative outlet. As you get stuck into his latest full-length, The Bright Door, the first since 2007’s Seven Seven, it becomes increasingly evident that behind his quiet and husky voice and the folksy strumming, there’s a rhythmic regularity, an engineered repetition, suggesting that somewhere, a computer with a soul, or at least a very complex algorithm for mimicking a soul is desperately pumping out music.

I had to hear it over a number of tracks before the feeling started to sink in, although now, listening back to advance single Broken Arrows, you can hear it in the Gamelan instruments that lay down complicated rhythmic and harmonic patterns right from the beginning of the number. It’s almost like Walker happily singing about how “our love will soon be free” is trying to distract the listener from the inexorable, grid-like qualities of the song, although they come back more fiercely as it progresses, galloping through to the conclusion.

What is evident, right from the outset, are Walker’s skills as a producer. The intricate layering of his sound, so that everything, from his whispery voice, the wailing guitars and an absurdly broken honky-tonk piano crashing across the face of opener Perfect Crime is completely audible, all at once. There’s a reason why Claire Bowditch, Paul Kelly, Tiny Ruins and CW Stoneking all went to him to produce their records.

The opening cuts of The Bright Door are some of its most naturalistic and compelling, recalling the gritty power of a rocker like Richard Hawley or, indeed, J Walker at his best, from his many records, littering the years, although his current output is probably more intense, deriving from - in his own words - “...a power-tool inspired, noise-rock culvert” and trucking heavy themes of being and death.

Even quiet moments like the acoustic folk of the album’s second song You Can’t Give It Back, are weighted down with unease. I keep recalling the album’s opening lines I got lost in human behaviour / I felt empty with the choice that we had. As J wrestles philosophical demons, there’s an autistic anxiety, something in him that seems, on occasion, barely human, that neurotically fixates on incomprehensible human frailties and keeps returning to them, revealing a cold mathematical quality of his mind, evident in the music as much as anywhere else: wailing, detuned violins over obsessively repeating song structures.

I don’t think The Bright Door was meant to be an easy record, by any stretch. Even so, listening to it makes me feel quite uneasy. Sometimes because of urgent and beautiful songwriting, but at other times for qualities I find it much harder to relate to.

- Chris Cobcroft.

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