Two years and many hundreds of kilometres in the making,The Sunset Park is the new album from Australian band The Aerial Maps. The follow-up to the band’s acclaimed debut album In the Blinding Sunlight, The Sunset Park is the sound of a band forging a new path, taking little heed of convention and diving headlong into an idiosyncratic and adventurous space.
Moving on from the simplicity of what made their first album appeal to so many and expanding on that template in an unexpected fashion, The Aerial Maps have virtually formed their own genre. Led by the vocals and lyrics of Adam Gibson with Simon Holmes and Sean Kennedy as the core creative nucleus, plusan array of musical guests such as Greg Perano (Hunters & Collectors) Alannah Russack (The Hummingbirds), Paul Andrews (Lazy Susan), the Aerial Maps have transformed from a band lauded for their fond folky take on life in Australia to a outfit exploring the darker reaches of the country’s psyche, the often desperate lives lived beneath the hot sun and on the edges of the wide open roads through narrative and song.
The Sunset Park is an album which spans the breadth of Australia in its content and takes the listener on a journey in a fashion unlike any other Australian (or otherwise) release we can think of. A song cycle that begins in Western Australia and ends in Queensland,it is an ambitious record, one that takes a widescreen view of the country and hums with the distance and rawness of both the land and its people. In the writing of the album, vocalist/lyricist Adam Gibson undertook a long solo journey from the west coast of Australia to the east coast, soaking up the towns, the people and the landscape along the way – the result being a record that has a palpable sense of place.
Formed in 2007, The Aerial Maps released In the Blinding Sunlight in 2008 on the Popboomerang label, subsequently playing shows with acts such as David Bride, Mick Thomas and the Sure Thing and the Gin Club. The album garnered strong reviews and various tracks, notably ‘On the Punt’, received wide airplay on various radio stations. In 2009, ‘On the Punt’ was selected for an ABC Records compilation release titled Songs For Dadand in 2010, Blinding Sunlight was named as Best Spoken Word Release 2005-2010 at the Overland Poetry Awards in Melbourne.