released January 24, 2019

Jeff Baker - Guitars
Dave Chadwick - Bass
Ian Freeman - Guitars and Vocals
Saki Garth - Drums
with
Nick Batterham - Keyboards, Violin, Cello, Viola, Double Bass and Backing Vocals
Andrew Batterham - Brass
Adam Simmons - Brass
Erica Menting - Backing Vocals

All songs Baker/Freeman

Recorded, produced and mixed by Nick Batterham
Mastered by Adam Dempsey

Reviews:

"Thankfully, I was born a double hard bar steward with no time for feelings, other than feeling thirsty for another beer and feeling bad if I do not watch my favourite football team lose, yet again, each weekend. I literally ooze testosterone from every pore.

As such, as an uber male, I have no need to talk to mates about my worries. However if I should ever decide to dip a toe into the perfume infested waters of ‘feelings’, I might well try and muscle in on the 30 year friendship of The Golden Rail band members, Jeff Baker and Ian Freeman,

For the music of their more recent bands, such as TGR and The Jangle Band seem to imply that you could both enjoy plenty of beer in their company and also have a shoulder to ‘refer’ to (not cry on – way too tough!) in the unlikely event that the end of a 20 year old marriage or the loss of a parent, might lead me to indulge in a moment of temporary sadness.

All joking aside, this really has all of the above, albeit not to the anti-estrogen excess I propose. At tomes, the production of the Nick Batterham, seems to accentuate all things manly and gruff. Tracks such as the superlative Just Fell in Love (see below), Regent Street and You Keep Me From Blue, just exude that Mark Mulcahy punch your nose vulnerability and sense of epic that is created by masculine guile rather than track length or aggression..

These tracks are The Golden Rail at their least considered but also at their most grandiose. It’s music each thinking man should beer to and is a sign that they will never really lose the essence of their previous bands such as The Summer Suns, The Rainyards and The Palisades as it is still remains heavily woven in their fabric.

However, as glorious as the above explanation sounds, it is typical of the Freeman/Baker juxtaposition that their releases have a perpetual dual aesthetic. Tracks such as Shine Patiently, The Sky is Always Blue (see below) and Saw You Go have the sweetness and melody that the Batterham production allows to breathe with the very slightest of sophistipop production bells and whistles. They are Aztec Camera / The Bluebells, in manner, whilst always retaining the jangle at their core.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the gushing words above may be a tad biased? Since the late 1980’s I have followed these two in all their bands and quite literally they could fart in a shoebox and record it and I would part with my hard earned money to hear the resultant grumble. However, just trust me, this truly is superb."

JanglePopHub, February 2019.

"Pretty Olivia and You Are The Cosmos more than two record labels, they are two trenches, two bastions from which those responsible for defending the melody with blood and fire. Let no one touch a hair to the melody! Or else there will be both Pedro Vizcaíno, from Zaragoza, and Javier Abad, from Alicante, using all their energy, all their heavy artillery, to keep it safe. It was a matter of time before two champions of good pop like them, preservatives of things well done, of vinyl edited with care and wisdom, joined forces. If you rush me, it was even necessary.

And what has motivated this union, they will ask. Well, thus, generalizing - and in this case, believe me, it is pertinent - I would say that everything is summed up in one word: Australia. Because there are a few of us who know that in the antipodes the best melodic music covered by electric guitars that has ever been heard has traditionally been made. From Easybeats, Saints or Stems to Hoodoo Gurus, Go-Betweens, Sameloves or The Church. Australia has always been there to keep intact a spirit, that of the purest pop, that the rest of the world has endeavored to distort. Pedro and Javi know this more than well.

The Golden Rail are undoubtedly a synthesis of what I speak, the perfect definition of this concept: a band that will not change at all some ways of doing that have not changed in decades, but that harbors in what it does the whole soul and about everything, the authority necessary to not need to renew anything. And I speak of authority, of true authority, because its members are not exactly newcomers: its members have militated in such important bands to build that "aussie sound" such as The Summer Suns, The Rainyard, Header, DM3, The Palisades or the most recent The Jangle Band. Several of them have already been edited by Pretty Olivia in the past and also with the first lp of the band at hand, Electric Trails From Nowhere.(2017). And if this already constituted a superb package of songs, Sometimes When , it is a real outrage.

And it was to be expected, because these 10 compositions are but the culmination of more than 30 years of collaboration between the two great protagonists of this story: Jeff Baker and Ian Freeman have passed through all those bands that we mentioned together, leaving everything in their wake. a style manual on how to make sweeping songs. Sometimes When is not only not an exception to that rule, it is the philosopher's stone.

It is absolutely impossible not to be seduced by the emotional intensity that these songs give off, for whose perfection and recording they have had the help of producer Nick Batterham (The Earthmen) in his Melbourne studio. There they have shaped a collection that escapes the usual constraints of rock made in their country, without, on the other hand, losing its identity at all. From the first bars of the wonderfully bittersweet Just Fell In Love we are already able to figure out what the thing is about. Sunny pop is very present, but it is not everything in the equation. And that is precisely what gives this album its great value, the absence of a script, the creative freedom that they have allowed themselves and that has ended up making songs perfectly different in principle from each other,to shape something as cohesive as what we have in hand.

Precisely: in this second lp of The Golden Rail we find that balance so difficult to achieve in which each song has a life of its own, but together they shape a common being, crying out to be heard one after another to understand everything. Although perhaps it is with the cloudier moments with which I in particular have found more enjoyment (Life Is A Dog Box, Shine Patiently, You Wear The Crown), for having managed to touch those "feels" -as Brian Wilson called them- that only the truly great ones reach, those melancholic passages would not be the same without the sun rising to shine between them. In this way, Don't Let Go Off The Light, Regent Street or the very bubblegum You Keep Me From Blue, make the perfect counterpoint so that the building is well planted and most importantly: it lasts.

Because we are not facing the typical product so far of listening a couple of times and then forgetting at the bottom of the hard disk, at all. This is a work of love, made by people like us. People who love pop. And they have made the album first for them, of course, but also for all of us to enjoy with them. The Golden Rail are speaking to all of us. All those of us who are huddled together with Pedro and Javi in ​​the trench of pop in defense of a very determined way of understanding it, non-transferable for the general public (although our mouths are always so full when we say that in a perfect world all this should be hits), which nevertheless is everything to us. This is that type of album, one of those that when you receive it in your home, you establish a relationship of brotherhood, of mutual salvation,that transcends any gross economic transaction. Here is kept the secret of happiness, the mother of all sleeplessness, the reason why we are here. A big cheer, then, to our two great generals, Vizcaíno and Abad, for safeguarding all this for us. We owe them our lives."

Alquimia Sonora, 2019