There’s ‘I Can Hardly Stand’, which opens with another isolated guitar note, a solitary G this time, and flies through a diatribe: “It doesn’t matter who you are / Where you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve got / In fact probably the less you’ve got / The more likely you GET HIT”. On Domestic Minimalism, superb songs we haven’t heard, that could have comprised a Protest Songs alongside the Steve McQueen of I Want Too Much, include ‘Small Pieces of Me’ (“With your fair hands / And your big mouth / Rip my heart out”) and ‘You Break Me Up’, a song that would, guitar-wise, be nicely covered by The Wedding Present. And this from Dave Couse, a lyricist who does not lack verbosity. In ‘I Hope That You Fail’, the chorus seethingly states the song title, then, as Couse crescendos, his voice restates a single word: “I hope that you fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail”.Įven in songs two and a half minutes long, single highly selected words can be repeated such that they become a meditative mantra. In ‘I Never Had Any Medals’, which opens the album, there’s a metallic melodic riff and choruses in which Dave Couse sings “never” twelve times in a row: “I never never never never never never never never never never never never had any, had any medals”. He opens “Now that I’m sick” with those words and follows this dire state with many others - now that I’m timid, stupid, hungry, poor, angry - until he ends where he started: sick, sick, sick. In parallel, Dave Couse emphasises the lyrical subjects of songs through vocal repetition. Fergal Bunbury has told me “my perfect guitar part would have one note, repeated, forever”, and you can hear that here, while in ‘Why Must We Argue’, the opening notes extend to two. Its intro is a recurrent, jarring, discordant single note, A flat. ‘Now That I’m Sick’ was central to I Want Too Much and is equally so here. There are patterns in Domestic Minimalism. Kraftwerk, The Velvets, Donna Summer, John Coltrane, Lubomyr Melnyk, Arthur Russell and Floating Points & Pharaoh Sanders are among them. Terry Riley, Philip Glass, LaMonte Young, and Steve Reich are credited as musical minimalism innovators, while a 2023 book On Minimalism provides a list of artists from multiple genres. That made sense and if I recall one thing from Inter Cert Music, it’s that baroque means Bach, who was not much of a minimalist. Not least because the review that directed me to A House, Lorraine Freeney’s Hot Press double six for I Am The Greatest, used “baroque” to describe ‘When I First Saw You’. If we needed a third reason to immerse ourselves in Domestic Minimalism it might be that the title directs us to a different way of hearing A House: ‘Marry Me’, ‘Now That I’m Sick’, and their contemporaries being called minimalist. L-R: Martin Healy, Dave Couse, Dermot Wylie, and Fergal Bunbury. For an act to release the unreleased lets us know them better. Even a decade-long wide range of recordings conveys just a fraction of their experiences, emotions, and opinions. This quote came back to me after Fergal Bunbury recently said much the same thing: there’s far more to any band than everything they’ve released. And then you go and perform that version of yourself repeatedly for like a year and a half. The Sydney singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin, talking about her masterpiece Crushing, once told me how “bizarre” it was to be snapshot-portrayed and defined by her songs: “I write something privately. I Want Too Much, along with every A House album, gives generously to the listener, but there can only be so much shared on any album. As such, another thing Domestic Minimalism does is to expand what we’ve heard from A House. ‘Why Must We Argue’ was on side B of the CD single of ‘I Think I’m Going Mad’ but none of the remaining dozen were released until now. The remaining 13 songs on Domestic Minimalism are not on I Want Too Much.

The zero song starfall