the golden rail

Here’s the thing with pop music - at least for me and probably for many of you, too. First impressions count for a lot; I'm impatient. And the initial take-out from a spin of “Electric Trails From Nowhere” was how grown up the music sounded. 

For two reasons. As the bio says, “Electric Trails” is the output of a 30-year songwriting partnership between Ian Freeman and Jeff Baker, the Melbourne-via-Perth principal members of The Golden Rail. The other factor is that The Golden Rail sounds like none of the music that passes for “contemporary pop” in 2017. 

The Golden Rail are bringing their consumate Mellbourne via Perth guitar pop to Sydney for two shows this month to launch their new album “Sometimes When”.

As direct participants (or side players) in The Palisades, The Rainyard, Header, Summer Suns, DM3 and, more recently, The Jangle Band, The Golden Rail are eminently qualified to give Sydney a jangle pop lesson, and you can catch them at two shows.

Friday, February 16 finds them at a new venue, The Butcher’s Block, In Dulwich Hill where they’ll be supported by Inner Western Delta locals The Smart Folk. The next afternoon, The Golden Rail will play Gasoline Pony with John Kennedy’s 68 Comeback Special. You can hear and buy the album here.

Melbourne-via-Perth power-poppers The Golden Rail have released this as a taster to their forthcoming album. With a cv that includes playing with Header, The Rainyard, The Jangle Band, DM3, The Palisades, and Showbag, you could suspect it’s going to be good - and it is.

“Oh My!” Is lilting jangle-pop with with a sweet chorus reminiscent of a Robert Forster song. Written by the band’s creative core ofJeff Baker and  Ian Freeman, it sounds like it dropped right out of the sky during paisley pop’s mid-‘80s heyday...right after the Go Betweens had seeded the clouds. 

If you heard the debut album you know what to expect: These four veterans - supplemented by producer and multi-instrumentalist Nick Batterham - have been around too long to put a foot wrong, so it’s stellar guitar pop all the way.

With origins going back to Perth popsters like The Palisades, The Rainyard, Header, Summer Suns, DM3 and The Jangle Band, a
re-grouping in Australia's music capital, Melbourne, would be hard-pressed to fail.

The 10 songs are co-writes by guitarists-vocalists Jeff Baker and Ian Freeman and they're exactly what you don't expect to hear on mainstream radio. In other words, they're full of understated melodies, feels that sit back in the pocket and chiming guitars.

The Golden Rail's evocative sound winds things back to the '80s, capturing echoes from the preceding decades.