Versatile Aussie singer-songwriter Ross McLennan (ex-Snout) is set to release his new album, All The Colours Print Can Manage, this week, and you can get your first listen of the fresh full-length here on theMusic.com.au today.
Due to land this Friday, 6 October, via Mistletone/Inertia, All The Colours Print Can Manage once again sees McLennan team with his expansive 10-piece backing band, The New World, bringing broad, sweeping orchestral soundscapes to complement McLennan's refined songwriting skills.
The album follows on from 2008's sophomore solo record, Sympathy For The New World, and has been about five years in the making, a creative process that generated much more material than McLennan saw fit to use in the final product.
"Some of the songs on this record are hopeful, some not … there is a whole other album on the cutting room floor," he said in a statement. "But I needed to get the balance between light and shade right."
The full-length's title "refers to very human visions of paradise: pictures fleshed out in hues from a colour matching booklet", McLennan explains.
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
"The colours have corresponding numbers," he said. "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."
With such broad instrumental arrangements at his disposal, McLennan has crafted an eclectic yet cohesive collection of songs that have equal footing in both optimism and bleakness, alternating between the cheerfully upbeat (as on, for example, Human Code) and downtempo/downcast (e.g. What's Mine & Yours).
"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," McLennan said of the album. "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 ironclad rules of the rotating earth and then there is a banana peel. The narrator has foot in each camp."
Ross McLennan & The New World will launch All The Colours Print Can Manage on Saturday 4 November with a matinee show at Northcote Social Club, featuring support from The Orbweavers.
Tickets are available now. See theGuide for more information.
