I remember a warm summer morning in January 2009, sitting with Gareth Skinner on the balcony of Sydney hotel. We had been woken early by group of drunken teens frolicking in the hotel’s swimming pool. Nursing a mind-crushing hangover, I remember calling Skinner a cynic. Without a beat, he replied, ‘A cynic is what an optimist calls a realist.” Listening to Looking for Vertical, Skinner’s latest cello-driven opus, it might be easy to focus on the seemingly misanthropic cynicism of songs like “Your Pointless Life”, “Amateur Hour” or “There is No Light”. But this would be to miss the point. For Skinner isn’t a cynic, nor is he an optimist, or even a realist. Indeed, Looking for Vertical is far too thoughtful, complex and ultimately human body of work to fit neatly into such narrow categories.
At the epigraph of Confederacy of Dunces (one of Skinner’s favourite novels), John Kennedy Toole quotes Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Looking for Vertical is the restless work of an artist committed to the refutation of mediocrity. Like Ignatius J. Reilly, the anti-hero of Toole’s novel, Skinner’s work sits outside the mainstream: it is an indefinable blend of rock, pop, classical and art noise, driven with a baroque grandeur by Skinner’s inimitable cello playing. Unlike Reilly, however, there is a rigour and virtuosity to Skinner’s rejection of the mundane, ordinary and mediocre. A better comparison might be to the social criticism of artists like John Brack. For like Brack, Skinner’s work places expectations upon the listener and upon the very world around them. Their work presents a call to arms against stupidity, against the banal and against the vacuous. In doing so, they place expectations upon society – expectations that things could be better, smarter, more thoughtful and ultimately more human.
As a result, Looking for Vertical is an album filled with unexpected surprises. When he wishes, Skinner can conduct a world of sweetness and light, where sweeping cellos swoon in a feast of intertwining melodies [‘Intro’, ‘Interlude’, ‘Epitaph’]. At other points, Skinner’s cello takes on a tortured metallic squeal [There is No Light], or creates a freight-train rumble of driving rhythms [‘Looking for Vertical’]. In the world of Looking for Vertical, everything is in its right place, unless it fits better elsewhere, when it is inverted, distorted, ripped apart, twisted and torn beyond recognition. But this is not ‘quirkiness’ for its own sake, and Skinner’s work never devolves into self-indulgent zany-ness. Rather, Skinner’s experimentation appears as a natural extension of his restless and demanding ethos.
Virtuosic without recourse to flashiness, Looking for Vertical is brimming with the clear joy of playing – the pleasure taken in experimentation and in pushing his songs, arrangements and performace to their limits. The listening experience is, as a result, infectiously enjoyable. Songs like ‘Looking for Vertical’ and ‘More than What’ bounce joyfully along with a rhythmic insistency as primordial as any rock band, whilst driven by Skinner’s wild cello playing, which has no peer in Australia or abroad. No other string player can match both the artfulness of Skinner’s intensity, with his range and virtuosity. But it is perhaps, Skinner’s ability to transcend this virtuosity that makes Looking for Vertical such an exciting record to listen to. As Skinner sings in the song of the same name, “I don’t want your pointless life’. Looking for Vertical shows an artist who wants something much more – something exceptional. Fortunately, Skinner isn’t too cynical to think that it is something that we might all enjoy.
Looking for Vertical is available now 2009 through Rubber Records.
