Clive Casey - Pinche País (2025) Hi-Res

Clive Casey is a singer and songwriter from Melbourne who channels his experiences across Australia and Mexico City into his debut album, “Pinche País,” of which today’s releases are taken from, “A Country of Heartache and Blame” and “Oh Mercy”.

These two indie-folk tracks are just two of nine vignettes out of the whole tapestry that makes up the upcoming “Pinche País”, in which Casey flexes his narrative muscles by conjuring up the lives of not-too-distant characters in the far-off land of Australia. The fantastic mosaic of the album stands as a musical equivalent to something between Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” and David Byrne’s “True Stories.” Except more Mexico-Australian and less, you know, American.

Casey’s vision is a hardcore, genuine gonzo illustration of a life lived to wildly different backdrops, and how the patchwork memories of each landscape profoundly shape his identity and narrative. For all its upbeat charm, “A Country of Heartache and Blame” is quite a conflicted song, intertwining a tale of romantic disillusionment with a kind of national disillusionment that is brought about by the disheartening going-ons of your country and the frustrating inability to do anything about it. This is not a political anthem of any kind, it is more of a very clever songwriting masterclass where two subjects can be beautifully tackled together by drawing elegant parallels.

“Oh Mercy” aptly lays closer to a Bob Dylan ballad (Think “Lay Lady Lay”) and has everything both lyrically and musically to live up to such a comparison, and this is not something I’m throwing out there lightly. I want to be very serious here and say that this is top-notch songwriting that shows the huge potentiality within Casey’s creative mind.

Casey has such a strong narrative slant to his songwriting partly because of his love of literature, as Casey recounts that the songs came to him while he was house-sitting on a farm in Victoria. One afternoon, as he lay in a creek bed with planes soaring above, he envisioned a character from Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood”, contemplating his journey in the following lines found in the song:

Planes fly over, over me
He’s flying back to Tokyo over the Timor Sea
Planes fly over, over me
He sees her waiting at the window
Blossoms in the breeze

“Oh Mercy” further reveals sharp and elegant prose that a bona fide bookworm has lovingly cultivated, and this is no doubt a recourse that Casey can’t help but fully exploit with everything he writes. His songs are deep, but they’re written by somebody adept at evoking and communicating complex ideas and emotions to a broader audience, so there’s plenty to enjoy on every level.