Ambitious Lovers “Stranger Can I Touch You?”
CDR 2006 Warren Street Youth Records


I fly from Dublin back to London and for the first time have a place to sleep (having spent my first few days sleeping in the arrivals lounge at Heathrow), so I drop my bags and head straight out to a show of The Dead C/Charalambides at The Luminaire. After getting on the wrong tube, missing buses, and walking in the opposite direction, I get in just as The Dead C play their first chords. I stay in the one spot the whole gig and for it’s duration this kid with sheepy brown hair keeps looking at me like he knows me. When The Dead C wrap it up he turns to me and says ‘Are you Chris?’, and it’s Joel, from Brisbane, who I’d met a couple times while I was on tour, and he’d posted me his band Ambitious Lovers’ first two CDRs. He’s in England for Christmas to stay with his sister who’s just moved over, so we exchange UK mobile numbers and agree to meet up for some other gigs.

I see Joel the next week in a record store in Notting Hill and we’re looking through the goods pulling stuff out and saying ‘heard this?’, and I without thinking run into an Arto Lindsay record that’s only 3 quid, pull it out, and Joel looks a little dismayed as I ask his opinion. ‘I’d heard there was another Ambitious Lovers from the 80’s but I didn’t know they were a band people were into’, he say's or something along the lines. I explain the DNA/Zorn etc connection to him and get an ‘oh’, then I put it back and we move on.

Later, we go to see Scout Niblett and Joel pulls out a copy of his new Ambitious Lovers CDR. I am immediately pleased to see some of the most creative packaging I’ve seen in a pretty long time. The front and back are a full colour digital print of an original painting by someone called Allan, who apparently named the album and perhaps even put the packaging together, though on that it’s not specific. The printout is on some pretty thick stock, which has glued to it on the inside two CD cover-sized pieces of cardboard probably cut out from a box picked up from a supermarket. The little information supplied with the CD is printed on stained old yellow paper, each paragraph torn from the sheet and some edges burnt, and glued to the card with fresh dollops of black paint spattered on the corners. The CD sits in the middle in an unattached sleeve like a sandwich, and it’s all held together by a piece of string tied with a bow.

Having no CD player, I don’t get to listen to the album until a few weeks later when I’m up north. I knew this was a four-track recording, and honestly wasn’t expecting much out of this album. Their earlier recordings are fairly amateur, the ukuleles and Joel’s voice often fall out of tune, scale and key, the only thing constant being their sincerity. But on “Stranger Can I Touch You?” Joel’s voice is more than bearable, in fact I’d even go as far as beautiful, a mixture of quiet falsetto and belting straight from the stomach. The second Ambitious Lover Miriam also gets a larger singing part on the album, with many of the tracks written as duets, and also taking the lead on two tracks. Joel and Miriam’s voices both contrast and compliment each other, the latter showing a lot more classic beauty against the raw emotion of Joel’s tremelo-ing.

Of all the bands in Australia trying to fit in with the new DIY folk movement, Ambitious Lovers are one of the few that have managed to pull off the elsewhere already overdone ideas of junkyard percussion, fragmented song structures and cheap alternatives to the acoustic guitar. If not only for the uniqueness of their voices, but also for taking the time out to write a balanced mixture of hooks and content. The recording is just the right mix between lo-fi warmth and analogue clarity, and despite the limits of the standard cassette tape, to give an idea, the album would probably fit more comfortably on the roster of Young God than K Records. And there might be room in there somewhere for a well-flowing record full of memorable songs like these.