‘All snakes, no ladders, everything counts, but maybe nothing matters’ Burn Up With The Trees

Dan Kelly isn’t just a songwriter; he’s a world-builder. The multiple ARIA and AMP Award nominee’s albums arrive after years of refinement, craftwork and tinkering. The music goes far beyond anything obvious or straight ahead to encompass the nexus of Dan’s idiosyncratic perspective, unerring gift for character portraiture and impressionistic storytelling. Each record acts like an epic Australian novel, but the arresting effervescent imagination of his beautiful melodies, masterful guitarwork and the saturated texture of the production.

Dan’s breakthrough albums with his band The Alpha Males, Sing The Tabloid Blues (2004), and the J Award-nominated Drowning In The Fountain Of Youth (2006) painted a frenetic portrait of Melbourne's share house life. Dan Kelly’s Dream (2010) presented a series of vignette travelogues of eccentrics and outsiders. Leisure Panic! (2015) made his focus geographical, a panorama of Northern New South Wales, introducing more folk and pastoral elements into his signature anime-inflected adventure rock.

A rumination on cycles of time, GOLDFEELS, takes us on a journey through the goldfields of Dja Dja Wurrung land in Central Victoria.

Birthed from a maelstrom of family grief and pandemic isolation, the album sounds as wide open as the landscapes that inspired it. Written by Dan alone at the piano, the album is sonically sparser than the infinite layer cake sound of previous records, with propulsive percussive energy locked into a heavy, steady groove. GOLDFEELS holds you in dawn and dusk, moments of reflection and speculation. Biblical imagery and apocalyptic raveups sit alongside lost love, the insidious pull of online radicalisation, environmental degradation and classic DK character odysseys like the epic Sea Shepherd Cook.

Produced and engineered by multi-instrumentalist Dan Luscombe (Courtney Barnett, The Drones, Amyl And The Sniffers), the album also features a crème de la crème, de la crème, crème de la crème of Australia’s most respected musicians: Tropical Fuck Storm’s Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel, Jess Ribeiro, Amanda Roff (Harmony, Time For Dreams, Don Walker), Ben Woolley (Marlon Williams), award-winning saxophonist Julien Wilson, Gus Agars (Marlon Williams, Robyn Hitchcock), Peter Luscombe (Paul Kelly, The Black Sorrows) and Tom Lyncolgn (Harmony, Nation Blue).

While the album deals with darker and heavier themes than he has explored previously, it still brims with unexpected and invigorating moments of music on every track, pulling from influences from the most idiosyncratic sides of Sly Stone, Neil Young and John Lennon, flavours of yacht rock and classic indie rock.

Mostly, it still sounds like Dan Kelly music, just the next evolution forward for an artist who has always been driven to find new frontiers of imagination and exploration.