Dial Up (Vinyl)

Peggy Frew is a best-selling, prizewinning novelist and member of legendary Naarm/Melbourne-based sadcore band, Art of Fighting. She has also at various times collaborated with Mick Turner, Mess Esque, Clare Bowditch, and Sainthill.

Dial-Up is Frew’s first solo album. It was produced and recorded in one week by Marty Brown (a long-term collaborator in Art of Fighting) at his Standalone Studios in Coburg. ‘The beautiful thing was how quickly and intuitively it all came together,’ says Brown. ‘We’d do one take or two, grab those moments and then build it up. Peggy played bass, she or I might play some guitar or piano, I’d put it through some crazy sound… The stories and the feelings suggested musical ideas without thinking very much at all.’

Frew’s fuzzed-up keyboards and naïve piano are anchored by sombre bass and earthy drums, and layered with spacey guitars. Brown’s percussive flourishes (singing bowl, gongs, clapping sticks) scatter themselves here and there – and right in the middle is Frew’s fragile but insistent voice, telling stories.

Luminous and ominous, the songs on Dial-Up are full of both vulnerability and bravado. Silver days, thunderstorms, broken-down cars and lonely winter train rides. The fraught sweetness of looking back. Mel Fulton writes: ‘Elemental, airy, spacious: Dial-Up sounds like the weather … an album that yearns for freedom, for connection, for romance, for home, and is wary of the impossibility of wanting so much, all at once.’