Album Review: Forty Thousand Sisters - Goodbye Broken Sled

If A Current Affair had better/any taste, they'd use this album as the soundtrack to one of their stories about disillusioned young people, as this is the kind of gritty and honest angst that's only found in Australian towns. Recorded in only two days by two people thrown together after meeting on a train, Goodbye Broken Sled sounds like the result of using drugs and alcohol to deal with the boredom of being unhappy in one of the most lucky countries in the world. This potentially sounds like irritating upper-middle-class whingeing, however one listen to the record quickly dispels any bratty notions.

The darkness, and happiness for that matter, sound like they come from a very real place. This formula has worked, and the dissatisfaction the artists feel about life translates to an incredibly satisfying album. Forty Thousand Sisters would be Melbourne's answer to I Heart Hiroshima, with equal nods to suburban life and iconography. Ferny Taylor's endearingly nasal vocals are surprisingly smooth and ideal for a guy the producer found on a park bench. Dyana Gray, presumably the other backpack-toting railway-track walker on the cover, yells and howls in one song then whispers harmonically in the next, easily being the most perfect foil imaginable to Taylor's guitars.

It all comes together with drums and bass by two guys presumably not found on park benches, as they pull the sound back from the brink of being too unpolished or unstructured. In Tinker, I'm Lost Gray crows “Daddy, I want to be a star”, and if this debut is anything to go by, she may not be waiting too much longer.