SOLILOQUY - Louis Tillett (Origin)
Louis Tillett's name shouldn't need embellishment. The guy's been producing singularly brilliant music for three decades in and outside Australia. He's had mixed success at home with lengthy absences making his 
chart sometimes hard to plot, but has legendary status in parts of Europe.
"Soliloquy" takes the music back to basics with just vocals and piano. No safety net; songs stripped bare and the first time Louis has presented his music in such an unadorned state. It works fantastically well. Simple melodies, complex emotional themes, all powered by the man's sonorous voice and fluid playing.
Louis would be no different from any other musician in that he had doubts whether the whole packaged worked. His last effort, "The Hanged Man", disappeared without trace thanks to minimal promotion, so he was determined to make a mark with his new label. Most, if not all, the songs will be familiar to fans and Louis' ability to reinterpret and re-invigorate them is the reason that the album flies. Sometimes the direct approach is not only the simplest but most effective.
The piano-and-voice format takes Louis full circle, coming as he does from a classical music background. Of course he moved through experimental avantgardism to front Sydney's best acid punk band of the '80s, the Wet Taxis, and then through an ever evolving solo career at the centre of bands like Paris Green and The Aspersion Cast, and as a sideman for the Laughing Clowns and the New Christs. His own music's incorporated everything from southern blues to jazz. hard blues and straight-up rock. Strip all that away and you're left with songs. The stuff that can't be faked.
Sometimes dark, always mood-invoking and often uplifting, these 10 tunes include many of his best. "The Devil Knows How to Row", "Liferaft", "Hold Me" and "From Me To You" are standouts (your results may vary). Producer Steve Balbi's imparted a warmth to the mix that could make you think you're sitting in a warm and smokey Sandringham Hotel on a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon (site of a long-running Tillett residency for most of 2006), just before the rest of his floating cast of ensemble players joins in. In fact, "Soliquy" is the sound of Louis sitting in your lounge room, playing these songs (which is something a lucky handful of us have experienced).
In a musical world of prefab crap and ephemeral passing fads, music like this may be an anachronism if only for its honesty and warmth. Long may lighthouses like Louis Tillett keep burning bright. - The Barman
Available online at lousitillett.com
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THE
HANGED MAN - Louis Tillett (Timberyard)
It's been a long time between albums but Louis Tillett is finally back in
the racks with another distinctive, engrossing offering. "The Hanged
Man" (gotta love those black titles) is Louis' first truly solo
effort, with him playing all the instruments. As such it probably captures
Louis' mindset and feelings at the time of its recording, during an extended
stay in Bangkok, en route back to Australia from Greece.
Why and how it happened to be recorded there is a story in itself. Louis is
more appreciated in Europe than at home and was on his way back from an extended
sojourn in Greece when the opportunity arose to put something on tape in an
inexpensive Bangkok studio. Louis set to it, spending his own money and almost
five months working with an engineer enigmatically named "O". The
engineer's non-existent grasp of English made non-verbal communication the
modus operandi. The rhythm beds and overdubbed piano, strings, percussion
and guitar were laid down in Thailand, and vocals added back in Australia.
"The Hanged Man" is several worlds away from the first Tillett band,
the Wet Taxis in their original incarnation as a tape loop experiment or their
better known '60s punk mode. There's a touch of the jazz rock of his first
solo album, albeit with stripped-back arrangements that seem closer to "Cry
Against the Faith" than the low-key "Learning to Die". It's
probably valid to say that "The Hanged Man" contains elements of
all the Tillett solo canon, five albums of which have been re-released by Timberyard, but the emphasis here is heavily on piano and vocals.
The lyrical themes of "The Hanged Man" will be familiar to fans.
Louis has spent much of his solo musical career relating the story of his
long battle with the demons of schizophrenia. The telling of the story is
cathartic and probably never better related than in an ABCTV documentary "A
Night At Sea" a few years ago. Musically, Louis is still riding the emotional
waves of this world of dark visions, as songs like "Through the Dream"
relate:"Why must these phantoms haunt me?/Calling me back to the sea...The
main thing I want are for these voices to stop").
The waves take Louis away but ultimately bring him back to shore. And there's
redemption and optimism at the end, as "Back to the Sea" and "Teary
Eyes" show. This is the work of an inspired lyricist, and one who's looking
forward with more optimism than at many times in the past.
OK, Louis' vocals are occasionally a little buried and there are production
limitations, but the quality of the songs transcends. This is an album with
substance that demands a lot from the listener, but will repay that attention
many times over.
And the man himself
tells us there's another album recorded, ready to roll out, this time just
piano and vocals.
– The Barman