Mistletone

Mistletone Records is proud to share “Selling Good News” by Ross McLennan, the first single from his forthcoming album All the colours print can manage, out October 6 on Mistletone / Inertia.

Ross McLennan and his 10 piece band The New World will preview the new album in a rare live performance at Melbourne’s Post Office Hotel on Sunday September 24 at 4:30pm.

• “McLennan puts a lot of himself into what he writes, each record is a reasonably accurate snapshot of his mental health; (and) his fourth solo record sees him balance his love of pop with some of the darker themes that naturally find their way into his songs. Anyone who has followed McLennan’s post-Snout work knows that the quality of his output hasn’t deteriorated in the slightest. Perhaps that’s because McLennan knows he must remain true to himself. It’s what McLennan has done throughout his entire career, and we’re all the richer for it” – DOUBLE J

A singular and illuminating songwriter, Ross McLennan dives deep into the collective subconscious whilst touching raw nerves which reverberate the anxieties of our times, giving his songs a revelatory and prophetic aura. The Ross McLennan hit factory has been open for business since 1991, when he formed Melbourne indie trio Snout and made an indelible impression on the Australian musical landscape throughout the 1990s. As Double J recently commented in their retrospective of Snout’s career: “Their shrewd handle on pop in all its forms meant that they could employ diverse influences into their sound – sometimes heavy, sometimes groovy, sometimes jangly – yet emerge sounding completely cohesive”. Since disbanding Snout, McLennan has made three unfailingly excellent solo albums and been shortlisted for the Amp (Australian Music Prize). Accompanied by his ensemble of strings, woodwind and a choir, Ross McLennan has manifested magical performances at Melbourne Festival, Brisbane Festival, Queenscliff Music Festival, Brisbane Powerhouse and the Famous Spiegeltent, and supported artists such as Cass McCombs and Matthew E. White.

All the colours print can manage is the title of the forthcoming Ross McLennan album and a phrase from the song “Selling Good News”. As McLennan explains, “it refers to very human visions of paradise: pictures fleshed out in hues from a colour matching booklet. The colours have corresponding numbers. The colours might look different depending on the paper stock they are printed on, and the light in which they are viewed. The people in the pictures are wearing clothes in a modern neat casual style. Complete families have died and are strolling peacefully through paradise with all their limbs intact. This is not so different to how the narrator views the world.

“Some of the songs on this record are hopeful, some not”, McLennan reflects. “This album took five or so years to make, and there Is a whole other album on the cutting room floor. But I needed to get the balance between light and shade right.

“I wanted to make a charitable album. To have some things that you could dance to and smile about, but not sell out sadness and despair. Across the record, there is a corresponding tension between physical reality and the mental drift to abstraction/distortion, the connected and the dissociative. There are the iron clad rules of the rotating earth and then there is a banana peel. The narrator has foot in each camp.”