Death Mattel

DAN1386
Nonzero, 2005

I get anxious a lot. Today it's because I have a story due for a magazine and not enough time to write it. I haven't written an in-depth music feature in a year or two, and I'm worried that I've forgotten how to do it. This morning I sat staring at my blank computer screen for a good four hours, shaking and struggling to breathe, before giving up and deciding to write this column instead. Anxiety seems to be a difficult sensation to express in pop music. Unlike anger or excitement - or even paranoia - I've never heard it captured very well in song. There are a few tracks that come pretty close, though. One of them is called 'Free', by Sydney band Death Mattel, from their album DAN1386.

'Free' opens with a happy little piano melody and imagery straight out of a suburban fantasy. It only has a few lines of lyrics: "There is the sun, it's out/ A symbol of warmth and happiness/ Your shopping is done and rent is paid... you're free." On the first iteration, the words are sung in a relaxed voice and the keys prepare you for a quirky pop song in the vein of Ben Folds Five. There's no warning about what comes next. On the forty-eighth second, right on the enunciation of "free", an enormously loud drum loop and electric guitar crash down like the sky falling to earth. The effect is paralysing. In the background you can hear a woman singing the original lines over and over again, just too far out of earshot to hear the words properly, while layers of impenetrable noise build up over the top and a drum machine goes tst-tst-tst-tst-tst like a skipping CD that you can't turn off.

That description probably makes it sound horrible, but 'Free' has been one of my favourite songs since I heard it a few years ago. Needless to say, it reminds me of anxiety – the claustrophobia, the person's voice just out of reach, the nervous tic of the drum machine and especially the sheer irrationality of it all, as if the original song was crushed beyond recognition for no discernable reason. Most of all, I like 'Free' because it is so incredibly loud that when I put it on it drowns out every thought in my head. Noise as silence. You used to be able to hear it on Death Mattel's MySpace page. Maybe they'll put it back up.