The story behind Soliloquy is almost too cinematic to be believed. Jason McKee, the band’s lead singer, composer, and lyricist, first conceived the project in 1997 at the age of seventeen \u2014 a teenager so engorged with songs he needed an entirely new identity to contain them. He borrowed the name from Shakespeare, via an English Literature teacher, and there is something genuinely Shakespearean about what followed: the delays, the thwarted ambitions, the meeting of a girl at a Spiderbait gig that shamed him into action, the abandoned university degree. And then, finally, Melbourne’s brutal pandemic lockdowns arrived \u2014 and instead of resting on the material he already had, McKee tore everything down and began again.<\/p> The result is sprawling, ambitious, and \u2014 on the strength of this listening \u2014 frequently magnificent. Producer Simon Moro, who also handles the mastering, deserves significant credit for keeping so volatile a creative force coherent. Moro and McKee met at RMIT, and one suspects their working relationship has the easy shorthand of people who’ve spent years learning exactly how far to push each other. The record sounds expensive in the best sense: controlled where it needs to be, and glorious when it lets go.<\/span><\/p> And it does let go. Six of the album’s tracks feature a European Budapest orchestra, and these are the moments that separate Soliloquy from the indie pack entirely. The strings do not merely decorate McKee’s compositions \u2014 they infiltrate them, swell through the cracks in his voice, and transform what might otherwise be personal confession into something approaching the universal. It is the kind of orchestral integration that Australian independent music rarely attempts, and rarer still pulls off. Here, it is stunning.<\/span><\/p> The band assembled around McKee is no vanity project. Kit Riley on bass \u2014 a man whose CV spans Robbie Williams, Savage Garden, and Ross Wilson \u2014 brings a melodic intelligence to the low end that lifts every track he anchors. Peter Marin, likewise battle-hardened across Jet and Ross Wilson’s various incarnations, plays with the kind of restrained authority that only comes from a drummer who knows exactly when silence is the correct answer. James Ryan, carrying the torch of Men at Work, adds a distinctly Australian textural sensibility that stops the Budapest grandeur from tipping into the overwrought. Jessica McPherson-Riley’s backing vocals and Terry Hart’s piano complete an ensemble that feels genuinely curated rather than assembled \u2014 each player a specific solution to a specific creative problem.<\/span><\/p> Soliloquy is not a record for the impatient. It demands the full ritual \u2014 the good headphones, the chosen beverage, the surrendered hour. It is a record that positions itself consciously against the age of the thirty-second attention span, and it makes that argument not by being wilfully difficult but by being so consistently rewarding that skipping anything feels like genuine loss. McKee writes with the compulsive interiority his chosen name implies \u2014 these are lyrics that think aloud, that circle back, that refuse the easy resolution.<\/span><\/p> McKee promised a journey that would challenge every memory and emotion you have. Remarkably, preposterously, he has delivered one. Australia hasn’t heard anything quite like this from its independent scene in a very long time.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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