Savage Garden’s first and penultimate album holds the auspicious honour of being the third CD I ever bought. I bought it in Canberra for $10 from some little second-hand record store, and it was awesome. The songs I’d heard on the schoolbus were even better on my still-new CD player, that technological marvel. Mine just so happened to be identical to my mate’s CD player, on which I’d first heard Savage Garden in full. It’s amazing the things you remember... like my mate explaining to me how profound “Santa Monica” was. You really could pretend to be anyone on the phone, he elucidated.
I can’t help but be a bit fond of this album. Savage Garden’s simple format of a guitar, some synths and a kid who learnt to sing by mimicking Michael Jackson didn’t stop them from churning out a solid attempt at a pop album, and it’s still mostly palatable after fourteen years. There are a few pieces of mildly funky electro-pop stuck in the middle which are getting a bit cringe-worthy, but they’re made up for by the smoother, deeper tunes which book-end the album. Like everything from the 90s, this album tries a few too many fusions for its own good. But some of it just works, unlike a lot of Australian pop music from this era. Even after a thousand plays, “To The Moon & Back” is still an emotive song, and “A Thousand Words” can still get you deep enough into its groove to make you overlook glaring arithmetical exaggerations.
Probably among the least embarrassing of Australia’s cultural exports of the 90s. Chances are that you or someone in your family already played it until you were sick of it. It was that good at the time, and it’s still kinda got it.
Stand-out song: “To The Moon & Back”
How did we stand this stuff: “Violet”
Still surprisingly decent: “All Around Me”
