Green Buzzard - Amidst The Clutter and Mess (2019)

2017 was a weird year for Paddy Harrowsmith, the man behind
Sydney’s Green Buzzard. After releasing the “Space Man Rodeo EP”
the band had dissolved into a solo project, his relationship
had broken up and he found himself swimming in the classic
late-20s malaise of, “who am I and what the hell am I doing with
my life?”

“After the band, I was a kind of disillusioned with music and
took a bit of time off away from it. I wasn’t really sure what
to do,” Paddy says. “‘Amidst the Clutter & Mess’” was one of the
first songs I wrote in that period. I was trying to work out if
I still wanted to make music and if I did, what music I wanted
to make. I wasn’t really sure where my place was as a white
guitar playing guy. I wasn’t really comfortable making music
anymore. That song came out and set the tone for what the album
was going to be.”

The songs that followed started to paint a picture of
Harrowsmith wading through the clutter and the mess of confusion
to not only work out what kind of music he wanted to make, but
to also make sense of the world around him and to find his
place in it.

Armed with an album’s worth of songs, Paddy found himself,
physically at least, in producer Dave Sitek’s rambling studio in
the Glendale Hills in California. Home not only to the eccentric
Sitek (production wizz behind Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV On The Radio
and Weezer), but also to his Russian sound engineer, his brother
who tends to Sitek’s organically farmed marijuana plants
throughout the house and property, “Cuz”, his housekeeper and
childhood friend from Baltimore who sits in the garage all day
making necklaces out of pine cones, three huskies, three cats,
and an inexplicable number of BB guns.

It seemed Paddy’s mental clutter had found its perfect physical
counter-part. Strange then that out of the seeming mania of
Sitek’s space, came the simple mantra of less is more.

“It was haphazard,” laughs Harrowsmith, “but there was
definitely method to his madness.” And Sitek knew how he wanted
the album to sound. “He loved the songs themselves, but didn’t
like the way the demos sounded,” says Paddy. “And didn’t at all
want to do that kind of sound, ie make it all fuzzed out. A
couple of the tunes had a bit of a Smashing Pumpkins, layered
guitars kind of vibe going and he was like, “No, I’m not
interested in doing that”.”

Instead they began recording each track by stripping it back to
just acoustic guitar, de-cluttering the song, and then
rebuilding it back up with just its essential parts. “Once we
had acoustic, drums and bass on every track we kind of listened
back and were like, “You know what? They’re sounding great right
now as is, we kind of don’t even want to add much more on”,
Paddy says. “It was him constantly drilling into me a less is
more thing. At one point I was trying to do a fiddly guitar
overdub and he was like, “You fucking indie guitarists man!” and
named the track “Paddy Over-Doing It”.”

The result is a textured and perfectly crafted indie rock record
and while it’s far from being anywhere near a singer-songwriter
record, there’s a very human impetus at the heart of each song:
one person singing their song to you. “A real big inspiration
for that was Beck,” says Paddy. “Cos you can always hear that
in his music. Even though there’s so much going on around him,
it does actually sound like it’s all within one guy. It’s not
folk or anything like that, but you can hear that it’s just him
in there.”

This newfound clarity and directness also allows another aspect
of Harrowsmith’s growth as a tunesmith to shine. “This is the
first time the song writing has really reflected what’s going on
in my personal life,” he says. On earlier releases Paddy had
pushed his own story to the background, choosing to tell
fictional, conceptual and character driven stories over his own.
“I think it was a defence mechanism, a way to mask a lot of
things,” he says. This time though, his life and thoughts are
front and centre.

Across its 12 tracks, the record covers a lot of themes: break
ups (I Don’t Want To Be Alone), resignation (Nothing’s Happening
Here), the desire to up stumps and retreat to a rural idyll
(Country Living), acerbic takedowns of Sydney’s greedy excesses
(Suburban Dreaming) and existential confusion, as life and the
future seem to stretch out into uncertainty (Wooden Dog).

Ultimately though, Amidst the Clutter and Mess is a statement
about learning to be comfortable with yourself, no longer
keeping the world at arm’s length by telling fictional stories,
or hiding behind fuzz and overproduction. And for a debut
record, that makes perfect sense. It sounds like a coming of
age.