Scott and Charlene's Wedding – Any Port In A Storm

Just like catching up with your best mate at the local pub, Aussie band Scott and Charlene’s Wedding relay typical 20-something tales of working dead-end jobs, weathering failed romances and feeling lost in big cities that are equal parts dolefully honest and humorously self-aware.

The musical guise of former Melbournian furniture removalist Craig Dermody, SACW deliver indie rock like mother used to make it, with solid slacker vibes. His 2010 debut LP was a modest affair; only 200 copies were initially released, each packaged inside the sleeve of a charity-shop-bought record that Dermody had, with great wit, hand-painted low-brow cartoon scenes on to. My personal copy came housed in a sleeve of the seminal The Man From Snowy River, by Australia’s most famous poet Banjo Patterson, onto which Dermody had charmingly, cheesily painted into the scene a giant monster stealing a terrified sheep.

Offbeat, wry and thoughtfully DIY, it goes some way toward describing Dermody’s personality and approach. Where that debut, Para Vista Social Club, was an autobiographical time-capsule of his life at that time in Melbourne – replete with song titles referencing local haunts like Footscray Station and Epping Line – his latest offering takes us to New York, and charts his at times rather grim first year trying to find his feet in that behemoth of a city.

Opener ‘Junk Shop’ finds Dermody desperately trying to land a job, whilst the following ‘Lesbian Wife’ tells of the loneliness of being shut inside escaping Hurricane Sandy while one’s friends on the other side of the world kick back on Saturday afternoons, beer-in-hand. The cruiser style melodic guitar on ‘Fakin NYC’ belies the down-and-out lyrics: “I tell everyone I’m fine / I’ll let you in on a secret of mine / I don’t know what I’m doing any of the time”. The song details Dermody’s odd job working as a security guard at a VIP nightclub, where only celebrities and models were allowed in. Past interviews suggest he wasn’t so good at it – he’s admitted failing to recognise and subsequently let in the likes of Ryan Gosling, Kirsten Dunst, Scarlett Johansson among others.

The poignant crux comes in ‘Spring St’, where languid strumming reflects the anguish of seeing a lover go off with somebody else, but elsewhere there’s much humour too. On finale ‘Wild Heart’, another song about love, Dermody imparts, straight-faced: “You look like a movie star even when we’re hungover eating Mexican”.

From the song structure to the vocal delivery, everything’s fairly laid-back and far from groundbreaking, but such is its lo-fi garage aesthetic. The charm is in its unpolished sound, which makes the lyrics all the more relatable. Beyond the shitty situations they detail, there’s ultimately a strong undertone of ‘keep on keeping on’, and with a recent slot at Glastonbury and this release attracting attention far grander scale than their debut, perhaps that message of perseverance is really starting to pay off.