The Cruel Sea’s first album in 23 years, Straight Into The Sun, caps a stellar return to action for the four-time ARIA winners.
As the band summons up a sexy hip-shaking swing on the title tune, Tex Perkins sings: “I’ve got a long list of things I should not have done/But now I know I’ve really only just begun.”
And the album tingles with the excitement of a fresh beginning, from the easy-rolling country-blues of the second single Waste Your Time to the shimmering ’60s pop flavors of You Shine and the images of nature painted by the instrumentals Razor Back and Storm Bird.
The energy of their live performances and classic ’90s albums like This Is Not the Way Home, The Honeymoon Is Over and Three-Legged Dog made The Cruel Sea one of the most popular bands in the country. Straight Into The Sun captures the essence of what everyone loved about them in the first place, under the influence of ’60s surf music and atmospheric Western film soundtracks but always open to exploring different musical directions.
That is all there on another key track, How Far I’d Go, where a sun-kissed slide guitar and a rock-steady rhythm work like a balm to ease the guilt and pain in the lyric. “No one could ever know, just how far I’d go,” Perkins sings, drawing out the tension until the reveal of the song’s final line. As with so many great songs by The Cruel Sea, there is not a note or word too many.
No one knew such a powerful burst of new creativity was a sure thing when the band regrouped for a tentative rehearsal in 2023. For Perkins, guitarist Dan Rumour, bassist Ken Gormly and drummer Jim Elliott, it was the first time making music together since the passing in 2015 of James Cruickshank, whose tasteful parts were such an elemental force in the band’s first six studio albums.
But the spark was immediate in the rehearsal room with Cruickshank’s friend Matt Walker joining the band on guitar and keys. They were up for the challenge to return to the stage to support the first-ever vinyl release of The Honeymoon Is Over for the album’s 30th anniversary, and the power of new songs in the set was evident by the time they closed 2024 touring the country supporting Cold Chisel.
On the day of that first rehearsal, Rumour handed Perkins a CD of new song ideas, five of which became songs that feature on Straight Into The Sun.
Perkins says: “What really struck me about those new demos was how they were similar to the early songs Danny brought to The Cruel Sea. Back then he had a strong surf instrumental called King Tide and I started hearing words for it because that’s how his guitar sounded to me.” That became Down Below, a song that opened a lot of doors for the band and provided the title of their debut album.
“The song that became Straight Into The Sun could easily have been another instrumental because the guitar part was so strong,” Perkins says. “The phrase ‘straight into the sun’ was something my partner Kristyna said, and I thought, ‘I can use that!’
Inspired by the quality of Rumour’s new songs, Perkins searched through old cassettes to see if anything had fallen through the cracks. “I found a Danny tape from 1990 with a piece we had worked on and all I could remember of the lyrics was “you shine” and “we all bathe in the light”.
Part of the appeal of Perkins’s lyrics, and the band’s music too, is that it leaves so much open for the listener to make their own interpretation. Some might hear the lyrics of You Shine as a reference to their late bandmate James, but the original premise of the song was about the adoration of someone by a group of people.
“I wanted to keep the idea as a collective, so it was broader than just a simple love song,” Perkins says. “I really like the line ‘You shine without the need to be seen’. You are shining anyway. It’s just the way you are.”
Walker fits seamlessly into the frame, co-writing Anyway Whatever and It Ain’t As Easy, a country-rock song that touches on some of the territory of Bon Scott’s timeless lyric for AC/DC’s It’s A Long Way To The Top. “It’s a warning from an elder to a newling of the perils of a life outside the flow,” Perkins says.
The album was recorded at Soundpark and Union Street Studios in Melbourne, with the band and Roger Bergodaz producing. Straight Into The Sun is released in autumn but as ever with The Cruel Sea, summer is deep in its bones, thanks in part to the heatwave conditions as they were recording.
The distance since their last album has given Perkins a new perspective on the band’s core strengths: “No one plays like Dan, Kenny bubbles along and that wouldn’t work if you didn’t have a drummer like Jim who is so precise and anchored. Everyone is quite different, but each element is so necessary.”
