Product Code: VT481656675268
Original price was: $14.00.$7.00Current price is: $7.00.They say its hard to keep a creative partnership going after a while. Not so in the case of Good Morning in their seventh year of making music together, the Melbourne duo made up of Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons have only just now stepped into that most fruitful of creative endeavours: commercial real estate.
Theyre not landlords just yet: in fact, the early months of 2021 have seen Stefan and Liam sign the lease on a modest, appropriately scrappy recording studio in Melbournes inner north. The natural next step for two musicians who have always preferred to do things entirely themselves the band first formed after Stefan and Liam split the cost of a Foxtex 4-track tape machine Good Mornings new recording space is already yielding dividends: today, they release Mollyduker/Keep It, a new double-A-side single and their first new music since 2019s Basketball Breakups.
Good Mornings past run of two-track singles 2019s Take It Easy For Me, Stranger/Boy, Im Just A Loser For Your Love; 2016s Step Aside/Oppsie; and 2015s On The Street/You and A Vessel/Radiovoice are among the bands most beloved songs, and Mollyduker and Keep It are sure to join their ranks. Rich and warmly-hued, these songs reflect the Good Morning of 2021: a little more thoughtful, a little more virtuosic, and in no way any less anxious. These songs, written collaboratively, speak to the conditions under which they were made: first written in the two-week quarantine period after the band came home from their COVID-cancelled American tour, and finished as the first products of the new studio.
The pastoral, rangy Mollyduker, sung by Stefan, is a quintessential driving song, its steady, wiry groove hardly letting up over the course of its runtime. The songs ease belies its tense imagery: drunken spews, held tongues, and anxiety tokens abound. Stefan says: Mollyduker was something my Pa called me whenever wed be hanging out and working on his farm. Its a reference to me being left handed, however I used to take it as somewhat of a dig. The lyrics are a reflection on my relationship with him, as well as the farm itself, which has served as a home to a lot of my family over the years.
Keep It, sung by Liam, is no less inviting and no less heavy with psychic weight. A meditation on failure, drinking, and ageing, Keep It is laden with piano and warm, warping guitar soft-edged counterweights to the severed heads and flooding waters of the songs lyrics. Of Keep It, Liam says: Keep It is an ode to stasis, repressed feelings, substance misadventure and arrested development in your late 20s.
Mollyduker/Keep It also marks Good Mornings first release on Polyvinyl Record Co. (USA/ROW); in Australia & New Zealand, Mollyduker/Keep It is out on the bands own imprint, Good Morning Music Company Worldwide via Virgin Music Australia. A full-length for Polyvinyl will be released later in 2021, with details to come.
Good Morning formed in 2014, and have since then released five records: Shawcross (2014), Glory (2016), Prize // Reward (Bedroom Suck Records, 2018), The Option, and Basketball Breakups (both 2019). In that time, the band have played sold-out shows in Europe and the UK, Japan, and the USA.