Description
Their first album of new material in over a decade, the release finds the group near the height of their powers, delivering one of their strongest collections of songs to date, masterfully arranged and performed by a band with over 25 years experience together.
Led by chief songwriter Phil Kakulas and producer Dan Luscombe, Close Your Eyes and See combines the honeyed vocals of singer Rob Snarski with long, reverby trails of pedal steel, tremolo guitar, violin and keyboards. The result is a meticulously crafted album of dreamlike torch songs, bruised ballads and atmospheric rockers that sounds both classic and contemporary.
By anyone’s reckoning, The Blackeyed Susans’ 2009 best of retrospective collection, Reveal Yourself, would have been a fitting conclusion to an illustrious career, but a sense of unfinished business and a clutch of new songs that called out for The Susans ‘treatment’ put paid to that. In 2015, recording for the new album kicked off at Birdland Studios, Melbourne, before relocating to The Drones’ TFS Studio, Bakehouse Nth, where the group worked intermittently on the record throughout 2016. Patient Blackeyed Susans’ fans were finally rewarded when ‘Lover or the Loved’, the first single from the album was released in December 2016, along with three exclusive bonus tracks.
Lush, beautiful and mysterious, Close Your Eyes and See is a response to the wonderful and woeful world we live in – an appeal to keep your dreams alive, even when it feels as if you’re living in a nightmare. If the outside world poses difficult questions, the answers may just lie within.
