Ducks Ltd. have the soundtrack to modern life’s struggles.
When faced with writer’s block there are many worse go-to reference points than, ‘What would Orange Juice do?, but Ducks Ltd. – English singer/lyricist Tom McGreevy and Australian Evan Lewis (guitar, bass, drum programming) – are now confident enough to no longer reach straight for Edwyn Collins in times of frustration.
Now based in Toronto, the duo’s first album Modern Fiction was recorded in a basement and showcased a keen ear for hooks both past and present, specifically those made by the C-86 ‘jangle’ bands, Real Estate and maybe, in a nod to Lewis’ country of origin, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever.
If those kinds of sounds imply states of mind – of happiness, bell peals, summer afternoons spent doing nothing – then the essence of Harm’s Way is something different. Instead of life without responsibilities the songs here, McGreevy says, are, ‘About struggling, about watching people I care for suffer and trying to figure out how to be there for them. And about the strain of living in the world when it feels like it’s ready to collapse.’
This dichotomy is well illustrated by the opener Hollowed Out, its gloomy first stanza, ‘All we ever do is need/Eat, fuck and sleep/And then repeat forever’, bracing listeners for a song dealing with the idea, ‘That the horizon of possibility in the world is forever being drawn in to align with the edges of the imaginations of a small group of careless rich people’.
The fact that, like many of its counterparts, it sounds as if it couldn’t be further from its own truth is however something which takes time to get used to.
Perhaps nobody should be surprised. Part of the fabric of the C-86 milieu was playing music which sounded so potentially disposable and slight whilst the world was under the constant threat of the Cold War becoming hot. Distilled, on tracks like The Main Thing this whole ethos – dance like no-one’s watching because soon there might be nobody to watch you left – spills joyously into hedonism, the tumbling, paper-thin snare and glassy Rickenbacker tones falling over themselves in a rush to find any silver lining.
You may feel by this point like giving the pair a hug, or some cake. Equally, the temptation to just be selfish and put tunes like Deleted Scenes and On Our Way To The Rave on repeat whilst you have that Victoria Sponge to yourself may just be too much. It’s rare that somebody else’s problems sounds this, erm, good, but this is 2024 after all and guilt really is someone else’s problem.
If your sympathies might stretch a bit further then it’s handy to know that A Girl, Running shares a riff with The Wedding Present’s A Million Miles, but who’s counting. And in this through-the-looking-glass world, Train Full Of Gasoline is also allowed to lead with, ‘Here’s me thinking that this might have been an all-time low’, whilst pleasantly surfing twangy West Coast psych-pop.
It’s fun to play spot the best curated playlister, but surely the title-track is the avenue the pair unconsciously always sought to realise. A sugar rush of yee-haw tinged indie (that of the archaic sense), there the ying and yang, desolation and elation, trees and rubble coexist on a modern expression of the idea that even caring just enough feels like too much.
There is a terrible pun about not having to rip it up and start again, but life at the moment isn’t often funny. Ducks Ltd. have new inspirations, and Harm’s Way finds them in places on which at least the journey to sounds great.
