DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
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Martin Frawley
Undone at 31
(Merge Records)
★★★★
ON HIS first solo record Australian singer-songwriter Martin Frawley breathes new life into that pop music staple, the break-up album.
Having formed the now defunct indie band The Twerps with his new girlfriend Jules McFarlane, the relationship — and Frawley, it seems — came undone when he was 31.
With its Dylanesque drawl, intensely personal lines and twee instrumentation, opener You Want Me? is so good it threatens to overshadow the rest of the broadly chronological song cycle. Other tracks examine problem boozing, “meeting the parents” and the inevitable crash of the relationship with McFarlane.
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