Album Review: Dyson Stringer Cloher – Dyson Stringer Cloher

There’s an undeniable intimacy to this collaboration between Jen Cloher, Mia Dyson and Liz Stringer. The powerhouse singer-songwriters released an EP and toured extensively under the Dyson Stringer Cloher moniker in 2013, before splitting off to conquer their own corners of the local and international indie music scenes. Now they’ve finally reunited for a full-length album and they bring the listener right into the room with them — you can virtually smell the beer and see the artists’ stage-lit faces as they reveal themselves to the eager crowd.

It’s quite a show. The trenchant, Cloher-led rocker Falling Clouds frames the album as a manifesto for women and gender non-conforming artists too often relegated to a supporting role: “Nothing against Paul or Nick, but if you want to be remembered then you better have a dick.” Such gendered iconoclasm broils along in the background and comes to a head later on in the album with the equally resounding Be Alone, a boot-stomping statement about self-actualisation, where to be alone is a gesture of power rather than passivity or failure.

Not that the album is entirely didactic or chest-beating. On the contrary. Dyson Stringer Cloher's ten tracks happily plumb an array of modes and moods. There’s an energy to the album that seems to have absorbed the entire oeuvre of women-led rock music. With My Hands delivers its chunky guitar riff and rimshot-driven chorus with a swagger worthy of The Runaways; it is tailor-made to get audiences jumping. Elsewhere Believer is stadium-sized rock that winks at The Jezabels.

The arrangements and musicianship are as solid as the songwriting is memorable – from the tightly wound beats and dialogical guitar section that steer future road trip anthem The Other Side down its sombre highway, to the brushed snare and picked guitar that bring colour and texture to the bitingly confessional Young Girls. All of which provides a perfect setting for the three-pronged vocal onslaught, the contrast and complementarity of the singers’ voices helping to ensure that this collaboration is as aurally rich as any.

Lest you fear that Dyson Stringer Cloher are taking themselves too seriously, for a change of pace there’s, well, Too Seriously — a tongue-in-cheek gospel-country romp delivered with alternating lead vocals and honky-tonk flair, and more than a little Wilburys-esque goofiness. It’s a moment to both celebrate and lampoon this whole supergroup business, albeit coupled with a little obligatory hard-bitten wisdom about rising above life’s more bruising knocks.

Be Alone’s pounding drums and haze of fuzz guitar bring things to a rousing climax ahead of the album’s stunning benediction, Can I Borrow Your Eyes. Sung largely a cappella, aside from a wafer-thin bed of synth, the closing track finds the singers’ voices blended in perfect three-part harmonies, their contrasting styles united into a singular vision. It sums the album up nicely, and leaves the listener to slip back into the world warmed by the knowledge that these are three artists who’ll be remembered, together and alone.