Mount Zero — Swapmeet

Mount Zero — Swapmeet

When I sat down to write about Mount Zero, the debut album by Australian indie outfit Swapmeet, I felt an immediate sense of disappointment. Not in the project— but in my own faculties. As I jotted down notes, I found my mind tending towards relatively easy cliches— I wanted to describe it on the basis of being ‘more than meets the eye’ or ‘deceptively straightforward’.

In a way, it is those things. It is what a debut album should be: an attempt to solidify the unique sound and image that a band has built up while paying its dues in the local and regional touring scenes.

But Mount Zero refuses to be reduced to that. In its pervasive sense of displacement, its slowcore-infused uncertainty and lyrical tentativeness, it is as distinct as it is familiar— even upon the first listen. Mount Zero is a sign of a band that has definitively found their sound. Since when is that not enough?

From the opening, driving strums of “I Know!,” there’s a clear confidence on display. But when the song advances into its refrain, with vocalist Venus O’Broin sending forth a deceptively hollow repetition of the track’s title, the digital disharmony and sheer, overwhelming fuzz of the crescendoing guitars underlying her voice present an unmistakable sonic thrust.

Swapmeet thrives on energy— conveyed through a sense of liminal displacement basking in the glow of indie-distortion and bittersweet deliveries. 

That energy is then carried into the title track, “Mount Zero,” and “Bonny,” with the former maintaining its intentional subtleties while leaning even further into the dynamic extremes established on the first track. “It’s not like me to suggest I want to leave,” sings guitarist and frequent vocalist Jack Medlyn, conveying a sense of indecision— of missed opportunities and uncertain futures.

But this isn’t fully crystallized until “Halfway,” which, in many ways, serves as the album’s quasi-thematic culmination. From the very first lines, “Halfway in and halfway out/Broke the only thing I cared about,” the listener is given a clearer picture than is developed anywhere else on the project. The transition between places— first a “run-down ‘50s kitchen”, then “the house we almost lived in”— situates the listener, however tentatively, in a concrete narrative image.

Where Swapmeet’s sound lives, though, is in the sense of uncertainty that pervades the rest of the track. 

“You” and “I” may be convenient lyrical devices to help position the listener within two undefined characters, but for Swapmeet, they establish a fracture of space and time. The back-and-forth, the hidden spaces in the relationship between the speaker and the unnamed Other are where the listener is meant to establish themselves, suspended there by the sweeping rhythms and chiming lead guitars that permeate the project as a whole.

Slowcore, insofar as it can be defined as a genre, necessitates that sort of tenuous balance. Swapmeet is not an outright slowcore group— in fact, they’re best categorized within the ‘indie’ bucket simply because of the sheer looseness and malleability of that term. But with those labels cast aside, it’s clear that what makes their sound so tantalizing is some combination of the usual strictures of those two styles. They are as subdued as they are self-assured— each strum and each narrative thread remains captivatingly unresolved.

The project, of course, doesn’t end at “Halfway.” On “2 C U” and “Seeds,” that infectious dynamism is extended even further, and in the swooning verses of “Sand” and the springing riffs that close “Personal (Don’t Take It),” the sonic freedom that underlies each of Swapmeet’s tracks presents itself again and again.

“My Heart Breaks II,” the album’s closer, is its most complex track, holding a true feeling of anguish in each of its inescapable twists and turns. In moving from wavering strums to urgent rhythms, from harrowing feedback to scattered percussion, the whole breadth of the project is encapsulated in one, six-minute sonic journey.

And there we are, right back where we began— at a cliche. But in the meantime, suspended between the purity and infectiousness and Swapmeet’s musings, Mount Zero expresses itself.

It’s an undeniably strong debut effort from a band that’s cultivated one of the clearest and most alluring sounds of any in recent memory.