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MEDIA: Reviews: Falling Swinger

Falling Swinger

4 stars out of 5

by Shaun Carney - Australian Rolling Stone, September 1994 (issue #500

With Falling Swinger, his seventh solo album, Stephen Cummings has taken a sharp left turn in musical direction. Without doubt, the album, produced by Steve Kilbey, is a bold departure for the Melbourne singer. Kilbey appears to have viewed Cummings' talent as being something potentially lighter than air and has loosened the performer's moorings. This has enabled Cummings to drift upwards , into a world of soundscapes, transforming his approach to songs and singing and allowing him to finally shuck off the last discernible traces of his influences. Falling Swinger sees Cummings as a man liberated from his time and his age.

There are few of Cummings trademark pre-midlife crisis musings. Indeed on this album's penultimate cut, above a cloud of Kilbey inspired atmospherics, Cummings looks back: "I was so full of insecurities, I wanted to scream or shout/Hey, but what was there to worry about?" Sonically, too, the unadorned "traditional" soft-rock arrangements that characterised 1992's Unguided Tour - and conferred upon that album an occasional dreary worthiness - have been overlayed with a range of voice treatments, echo effects and mild electronics. Many songs conclude with little synthesised codas, added touches that underline Cummings' extra sense of adventure on Falling Swinger.

Although this album represents the shock of the new for Cummings, it also contains a whiff of the old-fashioned. It's varied, not based around any obvious singles, and thanks to the Kilbey-Cummings collaboration, carries a depth and sense of wholeness. There's even a move into the weird: Kilbey's "September 13" is a standard-issue Church song except that Cummings, not Kilbey, is doing the singing.

Cummings relies less on percussion and rhythm here than ever before and songs such as the near-formless "Sliding Across A Blue Highway" and "Wish the Show Was Over" rely on his narrative powers. The latter is probably the most unusual song Cummings has written, a near-spoken retelling of a frustrating conversation with his infirm mother that boasts an arrangement amply reflecting the tension inherent in intra-family conversations. Cummings has, during the past 10 years, made several truly great, if underappreciated, albums. This could well be his best.

Falling Swinger

by Jon Casimir - The Sydney Morning Herald, 1994

Excuse me while I go a bit overboard. Cutting to the chase, this is the best album Stephen Cummings has ever made. It's also the best local album of 1994. Falling Swinger is a drifting, dreamy travelogue, a collection of carefully realised, intoxicating visions.

Produced by the Church's Steve Kilbey, it displays a revitalised, refocused and realigned Cummings, bursting with creativity (it may also be the best album Kilbey has ever made).

Cummings sounds more relaxed and confident than ever, his breathy, slightly husky tones caressing the work of a group of musicians which includes long-time collaborator Shane O'Mara, Grant McLennan, Chris Abrahams, Kilbey, Bill McDonald and Tim Powell.

The 13 tracks range from the crystalline simplicity of What Was There To Worry About, God Knows and 100 Different Ways to full production numbers such as The Big Room and Sliding Across A Blue Highway.

Very much an album of understatement and gradual revelation, it keeps everything pretty much at mid-tempo, which allows a consistency of tone that, thanks to the imaginative instrumentation and atmospheric effects, never becomes dull.

Almost every song functions on more than one level, with sonic subtexts and undercurrents waiting to be discovered on repeated listenings. And isn't it nice these days to find an album that isn't exhausted of interest within a week?

The real success of the venture is that, in presenting the songwriting and singing of Cummings in a new light, it has expanded his strengths rather than abandoned them.

Previously, on albums such as Good Humour, his excursions took him out of sight of what has made Lovetown and A New Kind Of Blue important works in the mid '80s.

Here, the Cummings hallmarks are carefully integrated - thus, the sensual groove of As I Rise works effortlessly next to the more traditional piano base of Fell From A Great Height.

Even September 13, a Kilbey composition which sounds remarkably like a Church track, give or take the Miles Davis soundalike muted trumpet, sits perfectly in place. Early copies offer a free seven track live CD as well.

© Jon Casimir - reprinted with permission

Falling Swinger

by ??????? - Drum Media (Sydney), 1994

...a striking work of brooding atmosphere as stylistically diverse as anything recorded by Cummings but evoking a mood, an ambience that will surprise those who thought they had him pegged.

[anyone have the full review?]

Falling Swinger

by ??????? - Green Guide (The Age), 1994

Easily the most arresting album Cummings has recorded... hits you gloriously between the ears from the outset...

[anyone have the full review?]

Falling Swinger

4 1/2 stars out of 5

by ?Toby Creswell? - Juice magazine, 1994

...the tunes range from raw confessions to cooked commercial pop... sublime, Cummings at his best.

anyone have the full review?

Falling Swinger

by David Gilliver - from "Interpellator", CSU-Mitchell student newspaper.

The success of a Cummings album is predictable: it will be greeted with critical praise and complete public indifference. 1990's Good Humour made an attempt to overcome this by including a few respectable attempts at dance music, but the solid sound of these songs upset the balance of the album as a whole and it failed to sell. With his last effort, 1992's acoustic Unguided Tour he simply refused to even attempt sounding commercial (much of it was recorded live in the studio).

If that album was his music standing naked, then Falling Swinger is an album all dressed up and ready to go places. Steve Kilbey of The Church has taken charge of the production duties and the Cummings sound has never sounded so strong or confident.

The opening track The Big Room is an excellent example of the extent of these changes. The sound is unmistakeably big, driven by a rock solid beat, and fleshed out by insistent backing vocals and chiming guitars within a dense sonic backdrop. Over the top of it all, Cummings delivers his usual smooth and impeccable vocals.

Whereas the quality of Unguided Tour was derived from its subtle beauty, this album boasts both excellent production and thoughtful songwriting and performances, a combination that results in several great songs. These include the noble Fell From A Great Height (which Toni Childs has recently recorded), the tension filled I Wish The Show Was Over and the reflective mood of Days Chasing Days.

His traditional pop approach is not abandoned entirely. A number of songs are exactly what one has come to expect from Cummings, but Kilbey has embellished them with a variety of vocal effects and sounds, simultaneously enlarging the sound and retaining its delicacy.

The new production style, although admirable, is potentially dangerous for the idiosyncratic Cummings. It's great to hear Cummings pushing himself into new musical areas, but in doing so he risks losing the sure ground he stood on when rattling off his sometimes oblique lyrics. Part of his magic has always been his ability to lull the listener into the type of song they'd grown to know and love, while peppering it with odd and unsettling lyrics to make it distinctly his own.

He does this most noticeably in White Noise, a piece of pop heaven if ever I've heard it. The chorus is big and full of harmonies, the music predictably solid and as the song closes Cummings decides to croon "let's take a break for a television commercial" a few times. It's a sublime touch, simultaneously absurd and stylish. One can't help think it would all fall flat if the sound of the song wasn't so straightforward, but fortunately each track on this album has been given the production that the material deserves.

Some songs here won't jump out at the listener, but in the context of the album they are crucial inclusions (except perhaps the Kilbey-penned September 13). Although it is not quite the masterpiece that his past work has promised, it's as close as any in the Cummings catalogue. With the bonus CD of live-in-the-studio tracks, this is an exceptional purchase.

Falling Swinger

by Dino Scatena - "100 essential Australian Albums", Australian Rolling Stone, September 1997 (issue #539)

After a series of solid solo albums following the break-up of the Sports in the early 80's, Stephen Cummings joined forces with the Church's Steve Kilbey in 1994 to produce arguably his best work to date. The two Steves, it turned out, had more in common than just a dry wit and a wicked turn of phrase: "September 13" - a Kilbey composition - is an oblique celebration of the pair's shared birthday. From the opening track, the churning "Big Room", Falling Swinger promised to sound nothing like any of Cummings' previous recordings. One moment it sounded like the biggest thing you'd ever heard, the next it could be as delicate as ice cream.

Falling Swinger

from "Culture Vulture" column in The Australian magazine, May 26-27 2001

Stephen Cummings' world-weary, after-hours persona finally found a sympathetic collaborator in Steve Kilbey, who produced this critically exalted but popularly ignored album. All too often the solo work of this former singer/songwriter from '70s band The Sports had been unsatisfactory. Cummings himself was apparently oblivious to what it was that made his sensibility so affecting. Kilbey, the creative force behind The Church, who arranged and played on many of these tracks, assembled a group of fine Australian musicians capable of matching the radical shifts in mood, from the breathy sensuality of As I Rise to an unbridled production like The Big Room - players sensitive to Cummings's understatement. Each song is multilayered lyrically and instrumentally, rewarding repeated listening. In an industry in which hitting the youth demographic is valued above all verities, the category "adult-oriented rock" tends to be applied as something of a pejorative. In that it transcends the disposability of most chart pop, however, Falling Swinger really is music made for adults.


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