The Green Mist

THE GREEN MIST bio

The Green Mist is a veritable Australian super group assembled by music veteran Julien Poulson (Moler, Jen Cloher & The Endless Sea) who, while on a sabbatical back in his native state of Tasmania, on a cold and wild winters night, bumped into Brian Ritchie of Violent Femmes fame. The two started collaborating and The Green Mist began to form.

With a line-up featuring renegades such as Beasts of Bourbon’s Spencer P Jones, and the rest of The Violent Femmes appearing in the mix ‘Mariachi style’ adding distinctive acoustic rhythms. Charlie Owen adds his finest slide guitar, Helen Cattanach and Rosie Westbrook add bass, while Westralian chanteuse Tracy Redhead shares vocal duties with Poulson. The Green Mist is a band that calls upon folk, blues and cowboy song traditions.

Mist master Julien Poulson describes his band as “a collective, a Russian doll of bands within band, a bunch of ‘characters’ like the cast of a Sergio Leone Western - y’know, gringos, bandidos, femme fatales and all. The good, bad and ugly of Australian rock’n’roll. The name says it all, it’s a mist! This band has no walls.”

The groups’ debut album Next Stop Antarctica travels from dreamy instrumentals through to fully amped rock’n’roll songs. “It’s all about the ebb and flow, about low-light scenarios, fire, regrowth, then sunshine all over again,” says Poulson. Produced by Lindsay Gravina, The Green Mist’s sound is expansive; full of dark, brooding, sonic landscapes that conjure film-like atmospheres not too dissimilar to a David Lynch movie.

Opening track ‘Black Louie’s Ambergris’ features Brian Ritchie’s spooky Shakuhachi flute, it’s a dense instrumental piece based on a story, told to Poulson by his father, of two rogue fishermen who made their fortune chancing upon the world’s biggest find of Ambergris, while battling the extremities of Tasmania’s ferocious southern oceans. From this incredible opener the album rocks into ‘Strange Noises’ another swaggering instrumental. It’s not until track three ‘Roads & Cars’ that listeners are graced by Tracy Redheads stunning voice. This brilliant pop song flashes into view, then merges into the epic ‘Dirty Big Low’ featuring Charlie Owen’s sublime slide guitar. The journey continues until closing track ‘Something to Believe In,’ where Poulson’s song writing comes to the forefront, complete with guitar-playing reminiscent of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse at its blistering best.

On Next Stop Antarctica, The Green Mist has recorded a rich and accomplished album. It’s an aural road-trip where sounds and scenarios present like old pieces of Super-8. Runaways, alco’s, junkies and psychotics rub shoulders with the occasional hopeful soul-seeker. Narratives unfold like surveillance camera imagery: a shadowy neverworld of broken lives, cheap motels, too much booze, dim-lit city streets, winter hideaways, a myriad of small dreams, fragmented and shattered, like broken dressing-room mirrors in theatres that long-passed their glory days.