Camp Cope has never been a band intent on shaking up its style. Listening to How To Socialise & Make Friends, the Melbourne trio’s 2018 sophomore album, is very much an experience in almost a single, sustained tone and sound throughout its runtime. You could be forgiven for not realizing one song had segued into the next, so alike in musicality are the tracks, even when the tempo slightly adjusts or the lyrics transition themes. Rudimentary drum patterns, cool meandering bass lines, and strummed chords, arranged in roughly the same way—lather, rinse, repeat.
But for all the repetition baked into the deceptively simple songwriting (and Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich’s searching bass work is under-appreciated as the band’s secret weapon), there’s one element that towers above it all, never predictable or pat, even when the music sometimes is. Georgia Maq has one of those voices that just commands. It’s what Roland Barthes called the “grain” of the voice—that ineffable element that is more than the timbre and pitch and tone. It’s “the body in the voice as it sings,” as he put it, and some musicians seem to go beyond the qualities of a normal human voice in song, cutting through our receptors as though the concept of passion itself were about to rip loose from their articulations and enter our world. Janis Joplin had it. Kurt Cobain had it. PJ Harvey has it. And so does Maq.
Her voice, clipping syllables and pulling at vowels as though they were loose teeth, often begins with a subterfuge. Songs will start with Maq riding the line between just a few notes, like she’s casually rehearsing the melody of a track as it begins, not yet fully committed to the sound. But these plays at being just another casual singer, having fun fronting a band, are almost always instantly undone by two things.
Firstly, the lyrics. Maq’s have always been intensely confessional and lacerating, a staple tradition of vulnerable lyric writing that she cranks into overdrive nearly every time. It’s hard to think someone’s phoning it in when they deliver lines like, “I’ve been seeing my / seeing my own death… I’ve been laying down, I’ve been goin’ down / giving strangers head,” as Maq does in the opening lines of new album Running With The Hurricane. “If this is the bottom, I can show you around,” she informs on the title track, another memorable couplet, or “I remember the way I loved, but I lost it / and I never felt it again,” on the jangly rhythm of “Say The Line.” There’s less super-precise detail here than on the last record, but the abstraction can add potency: You don’t know exactly what she means, but you know what she means. You know what I mean?
And second, her vocal performance possesses a signature intensity that erupts without fail, every track. Even on more muted numbers, as in the first part of “The Screaming Planet,” there inevitably comes a part where her singing transcends the confines of its melody and measure. Few singers can make mellow drawls sound as if they’re about to explode like verbal C4, yet Maq pulls it off.
For those who have yet to discover the power and potency of Camp Cope’s singer, Running With The Hurricane is an excellent introduction. Sonically, the lo-fi indie vibe of the last two albums has expanded and filled out, transforming Teenbeat Records-style pop into rich Americana. There are tracks that evoke the specter of other great artists in the genre—particularly Waxahatchee, on songs like “Blue”—though the introduction of keys and backing harmonies can conjure up associations with the off-kilter pop of That Dog, were the ’90s outfit playing Neil Young covers instead of distortion-heavy bubble-grunge.
Crucially, the music serves as the ideal showcase for Maq’s traffic-stopping singing. Even great voices need the proper accompaniment—her solo record, 2019’s Pleaser, has some killer moments, but never serves her as well as the music she makes with her band. Even older, wiser, and more thoughtful in the four long intervening years since Camp Cope’s last record, Maq still sounds like she has so much to express that it’s going to burst out of her. Thank goodness this soulful, engaging music is there to help it break free.