And we won’t win, don’t you know it’s we who run the… aw forget it…
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Alfred Soto: This Brisbane act has a strummy offhand approach to melody that recalls Louis Forster’s dad’s former band The Go-Betweens, and he does well to cede half of the vocal to drummer Riley Jones, who sets him straight on a couple things.
[6]
Vikram Joseph: Awkward, shambolic charm isn’t a novel concept in indie-rock, but The Goon Sax have rebranded it for the 21st century in a way that feels achingly genuine. I lived in Brisbane from 2015 to 2017; the band’s hometown launch show for their debut album was endearingly unpolished, taking place months after Up To Anything was released, in a bar next to the railway station which looked like it had quite possibly never hosted a gig before. Barely 18 years old apiece, they’d released an album of songs which were slight and laconic but deceptively sharp, full of both throwaway wit and intense self-examination, heartbroken but brave; it felt like their talent needed to be protected at all costs, like they might blow away in a stiff breeze. From the follow up We’re Not Talking, “We Can’t Win” is a gentle outlier, but it epitomises their vulnerability; it’s brittle-boned and hollowed-out, the edifice of self-deprecating humour and low-stakes Australiana (banana bread, 7/11, Shane Warne, etc.) stripped away to leave nothing but sadness and self-doubt. A rattling Casiotone For The Painfully Alone beat sets the scene; “I was told to distance myself from a situation when it makes me nervous,” is a line delivered with devastating naivete by, in separate verses, Louis Forster and Riley Jones. They seem to have learned a lot from their compatriots Dick Diver, masters of expressing wry, poignantly specific yearning with an Australian accent. When their two voices overlap in the coda, they sound at once so entwined and so apart, capturing an unbridgeable gap between two people who won’t ever be able to forget one another.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Listening with headphones, I mostly like how the snare feels like someone is chiseling something inside my inner ear. As the song progresses, The Goon Sax do something similar, carving out a space that slowly invites listeners to embrace the quaint pleasantries of their modest vocals and guitar strums. It’s charming.
[5]
Iain Mew: Few songs carry through on their premise as thoroughly as this — a trip through resignation so exhausted it’s an open question whether they’ll make it through without collapse. As it is they rally and build, but only to a series of lines ending in increasingly drawn out sighs, the final one delightfully ripping its way right out of the song structure.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Angst without emotion, writerly detail without a point, an indie pop arrangement without distinguishing musical characteristics.
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Juana Giaimo: As soon as I heard it, my ears immediately perceived the line “How can I feel alright when I’ll hate myself for it?” What an awful feeling, and it is incredible how many times I felt it this year. “We Can’t Win” reminds me of all those times when there seemed to be no way out, when it was all despair but I was so tired that I didn’t have the strength to scream and could only speak as lonesome as the voices in this song. The combination of the deep voice of Louis Forster and the sweet one of Riley Jones is like a caress, while the strumming of the acoustic guitar adds the warmth to unite them. I’ve already heard songs like “We Can’t Win” in many indie pop bands, but it just never fails to make me feel sensitive, nostalgic and less lonely in the world.
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Hannah Jocelyn: I loved the beginning, but the guitar came in and initially killed my enthusiasm. My camp counselor played Triple J music between breaks in summer camp, and while listening to that afterwards ultimately got me into Everything Everything, most of the music was slightly detached and awkward, like this. Yet initially I couldn’t get past the feeling that “We Can’t Win” went from Sleep Well Beast to San Cisco covering “Sleep All Summer?” I gradually came to appreciate this song because of that detachment – it really fits how tired the lyrics are, like if “Somebody That I Used To Know” was about a mutual breakup instead of a one-sided fallout. The lyrics are the same for both verses, but Louis Forster and Riley Jones have slightly different phrasing even as they come to similar conclusions. Also, not to be all Pundit Twitter about it, but is there really a better title for a 2018 breakup song than “We Can’t Win?”
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