Just add Salter

Ben Salter

ESOTERIC, existential, indie folk comes to the Dome next week in the shape of Australian songwriter and performer Ben Salter.

Here to promote his solo album Back Yourself, Salter brings a unique sound in tracks with intriguing titles such as Where Corals Lie, Isolationism and Spitting Imagery.

The wistfulness of The Muttonbirds lingers in the background of songs like Isolationism and in the rockier, edgier, electric guitar driven Nazi Paraphernalia.

Backed by piano, strings and saxophone the mood stays the same in the downbeat song The First Sign of Madness.

“The deep sad music soft and low/ when winds awake the airy sprite/ it lures me lures me onto go and see the land where corals lie/ the land where corals lie,” he sings in the opening track and brings to mind both the bleached light and bleached beaches of Australian writer Tim Winton’s stories as well the ageing magus-scholar Prospero on his strange island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

A Guardian reviewer has described Salter’s voice as “honey-gravel by whiskey and cigarettes and love. This is classic Australiana. This music could not come from anywhere else.”

Ben Salter is a founding member of Giants of Science, The Gin Club and the three-time ARIA-nominated Wilson Pickers.

His debut solo album The Cat (2011) and follow up The Stars My Destination (2015) are said to have established his penchant for eclectic, esoteric arrangements and sounds that take in elements of folk, rock, pop, jazz, country and beyond.