Emerging from the always nebulous fringe-fringe scene of Brisbane’s indie underground during 2013, Edith Thomas Furey began by rehashing tired post-punk and shoegaze tropes.
Five years later, his sound hasn’t evolved, but the context is once again ripe for a bedroom producer who has a basic command of drum sequencing and the ability to adequately wield a guitar trem-bar. Combining the atmosphere of a Joy Division cover band with the pop sensibilities of a Cocteau Twins cover band – occasionally punctuated by Springsteen-esque nonsensical gibberish – ETF provides the listener with a passable imitation of a hallowed era in sad music while simultaneously inspiring aspiring bedroom producers to sit up and exclaim: ‘Is that all it takes? Hot damn!’
Composed and recorded under the auspices of a fevered existential crisis in the early months of 2018, ‘Sleep Well, My Love’ documents the taped confessions of a musician who has finally learned to use the Yamaha four track tape machine he bought off Gumtree at some stage one Christmas holidays. Overcoming the maddening, crippling self-doubt associated with producing music that only ever strays briefly from insipid imitation, Edith Thomas Furey has created an EP that at once combines the lo-fi aesthetic of a producer who has watched five or six YouTube videos about how to use a rack compressor purchased from Cash Converters with the lush, ambient wall of sound of a producer who has worked out how to stack a bunch of cheap modulation pedals purchased from Cash Converters. Out of this morass of misplaced, amateur ambition comes a collection of songs that is honest and achingly sad, striving towards something approximating authenticity in spite of all its deplorable superficiality; a soundtrack for the creatively damned in an age characterised by profound artistic confusion.
