Album Review: The Chemist - Ballet In The Badlands

“What can we play as an old-fashioned band in a room that will make me reach for my shovel and dig?” The frontman for Perth-based band The Chemist, Benjamin Witt, would ponder this as he was in the early stages of completing the trio's debut album Ballet In The Badlands. As it began to take shape, the record developed a blues sound that could have emerged straight from the swamp, which has then been tightened by production, pulling it out into a folkier region.

While one portion of Ballet In The Badlands places all the emphasis on the group's gritty bluesmen attitude, somewhere along the line that aesthetic begins to peter out and soften into something far removed from the sinister air that resonates throughout the album's opening track Heaven's Got A Dress Code and the following, almost Spaghetti Western number Spray Paint Or Praise (Still A Statue In The Wind).

With the ruffian persona dropped in the more tame Nails In Mud, the band showcases a great deal of restraint. The drumming is carefully subdued as Witt navigates his vocals around the ebb of a guitar while an organ begins to fill the few moments of silence. It's the gentler moments on the record like this, December and Tonight, Tomorrow Is Sold where The Chemist really establish themselves as being great musicians. For what they're trying to achieve throughout a majority of Ballet In The Badlands, The Chemist are lacking the necessary audacity to pull it off. It's when they strip things back that they really impress.