Album Review: Working Title

Soaked Oats is a Dunedin indie 4-piece. Working Title is their first full length offering, crafted over the last 18 months in a community hall in the remote township of Okuru, Haast, on the West Coast of the South Island. Their Ambition was to explore “the contrasting ways we perceive and interact with the world, how we define ourselves through work, And the subtle shift from viewing objects in the world as fixed ‘things’, to experiencing them as processes and interactions unfolding”.

The first part of that mission statement comes through effectively in the first half from first track The Way it Works through to Something. There are characters in that first half like the cynical boomer of Behind Their Years and the idealistic little brother from Something who’s intractable world views are both a product of and a reaction to a world described in the whirlpool of tones of The Way it Works and Headline Opinion‘s ratcheting key changes, which sound like if Bob Dylan was in Talking Heads. The picture they paint is a world full of noise and activity with dubious intrinsic value.
I feel like Soaked Oats want me to quit my job and join a commune.

Simple pleasures is the track that feels like the axis from which the songs stop being about what Soaked Oats escaped and start feeling like the remote place they spent their time recording. It undulates like a VHS warping. The second half is where the songs feel like a place, tracks like Pink Beach and Lake Ellery feature vocals that sound like mist, chords that sound like water and melodies that sound like bubbles.

It’s less clear to me what they mean by the second part of their mission statement. Maybe viewing objects as a process means thinking about the entire life of a tree or something. Stubble on the face of the planet. D(a)emon has a ticking sound in it and it feels like the kind of revelation you’d have spending a lot of time at a deserted lake. The end of that track has a foreboding, almost nursery rhyme quality to it that sounds like ‘everything dies and returns’ typed stuff. The second half is less of a thesis than the first half, more of a collection of thoughts you might read in a book. Final track Day to Day has a last little section in the end where the main refrain is “I’m here for you. The stuff that you’re made of I’m made of it too”.

Working Title feels nearly chronological in its order. It starts like the band had 5 or 6 songs almost finished, went to record them over 18 months and found another 5 or 6 over that time. It’s fun to get the impression an album might have changed the people that were making it, while they were making it, then had that reflected back into the music on that album.