Grace Cummings broke through with a Bob Dylan cover filmed in her Melbourne, Australia home, a performance so brilliant that it earned her a record deal with King Gizzard’s Flightless Records. A few well-placed props in that video provide some visual insight into what makes her debut album Refuge Cove so strange and captivating. There is, of course, a photo of Dylan himself above her right shoulder: an immense influence on her bold acoustic strumming, harmonica playing, and imagistic songwriting. There’s also a Grateful Dead record on the turntable, keying into the more cosmic places she takes those sounds.
The most visible face in the video is her most unlikely source of inspiration: a Rolling Stone cover featuring the late AC/DC frontman Bon Scott, displayed prominently on her shelf. His band’s libidinous ’70s party anthems might seem miles away from her sparse psych-folk, but the two artists have more in common than just where they grew up. Like Scott, Cummings isn’t content to merely sing along to her melodies. She tears her low, surging voice to shreds, braying like she’s beckoning you from the opposite end of a crowded room. It adds an eerie, intense quality to her music—a desperation behind the calm of her arrangements. In another era, she might have fronted her own rock’n’roll warhorse.
Her classic influences guide her toward an album that feels proudly out of time, and its nine songs feel like variations on one stark, psychedelic vision. Many of them are written in open tunings so that the lowest strings rattle pleasantly in the background, complementing the natural movement of her voice and words. In the opening track, “The Look You Gave,” her lyrics summon the ocean, moonlight, and wind through mountains, as her delivery, slow and ebbing, strives to create its own atmosphere. “In the Wind” closes the album at the piano, the gravel in her throat summoning the darkness in her words.
The few musical accompaniments on the record feel spontaneous and half-imagined. The delicate backing vocals and fingerpicking in “Paisley” and the out-of-tune piano in “Sleep” give the sense of something captured just before the feeling was lost. Her lyrics add to this elusive quality. On the album’s shortest song, “Just Like That,” she asks for someone to join in harmony but cuts herself off before she seems to have figured out the melody. A similar sense of uncertainty carries the highlight “Sleep.” In each successive chorus, she compares herself unfavorably to a legend in a different field: artist Brett Whiteley, Big Star songwriter Chris Bell, and Meryl Streep. It might sound like self-deprecation, but Cummings casts it as a kind of affirmation. With Refuge Cove, she’s carved her own path worth following.
