Brisbane has given the world many things — sunshine, attitude, a quietly simmering chip on its shoulder about Sydney — but it has rarely exported something quite as deceptively unshowy as Wattmore. Two brothers, a guitar riff that apparently haunted them like a persistent debt collector, and the good sense to call in Allan Caswell. The result is *It's Called Love … It's Called The Blues*, a single that arrives without fanfare, settles into the room like a man who owns it, and refuses to leave.
The British critical tradition demands we locate our coordinates. Think of the unhurried authority of prime JJ Cale, the narrative precision of early Steve Earle, the quiet menace of something that should perhaps not sound this comfortable but absolutely does. Wattmore occupy the borderland between country and blues with the ease of people who have never once worried about which side of the fence they're on, largely because they've knocked the fence down and are using it for firewood.
The song's architecture is deceptively simple. Layered guitars, harmony vocals, a groove that doesn't rush because it has nowhere particular to be — and yet knows exactly where it's going. Producer Lindsay Waddington deserves considerable credit here. Lesser hands would have overworked this material, added sheen where none was required, polished away the very grain that gives the track its character. Waddington keeps his distance and the song breathes. The rhythm never crowds the melody. The melody never upstages the story. It is the kind of production that only becomes visible when you start wondering why everything sounds so right.
The masterstroke, reportedly a suggestion from Waddington during album preparation, is the deployment of Caswell's spoken vocal. Australian country music has produced few voices as instantly recognisable, few deliveries as lived-in and persuasive. When Caswell speaks over this track, the song acquires something beyond its years — a weariness that is not quite resignation, a warmth that is not quite sentimentality. It is the sound of someone who has seen both love and the blues at close quarters and has decided, on balance, that they are essentially the same animal wearing different coats.
The brothers' playing throughout is a lesson in restraint. British audiences raised on the notion that guitar heroics require volume and velocity may need a moment to recalibrate. Wattmore communicate in control, in the spaces between notes, in the discipline of musicians who understand that the song is always the point. Their instinctive interplay — tight without being mechanical, relaxed without being slack — is the kind of thing that takes either years to develop or an entire childhood spent in each other's company. Possibly both.
*It's Called Love … It's Called The Blues* follows *Canadian Whiskey*, which apparently charted respectably in Australia and caught ears across the Atlantic. Where that single presumably opened the door, this one walks through it and sits down. It is a more confident statement — not louder, not flashier, but somehow more settled in its own identity.
British music criticism has always reserved particular admiration for artists who know precisely what they are and resist the temptation to be anything else. Wattmore, guided by Caswell's experience and their own considerable instincts, have made a record that carries no apologies and requires none. It doesn't inflate itself with importance. It doesn't mistake cleverness for depth. It simply does what it sets out to do, with a quiet authority that most artists spend careers chasing.
Caswell, characteristically, frames the collaboration with characteristic economy: *"They're keeping me young, and I'm doing my best to lead them astray."* On the evidence presented, neither party is doing especially badly.
File alongside the good stuff. Play loudly, or quietly, or anywhere in between. It works at every volume. That, in the end, is the mark of something built to last.