Video: Anthony Rochester – "I Love You"

There’s something about that accent. The dryness of it, the somber quality — English wit squeezed free of its little moisture. Yes, by some feat of culture or isolation, Australian singer-songwriters have managed to become the world’s current finest purveyors of sad pop songs. Sweden may loom larger on indie-pop maps these days, but those songs have less gravity, ballooning upward with helium melodies.

The male human heart weighs an average 10.5 ounces, and all of that heaviness is felt in the music of Aussies including Guy Blackman, Ned Collette and Anthony Rochester, whose “I Love You” is less a declaration than an embarrassed admission. The video is a similar exercise in gallows humor, splitting the one-man-band into a checkerboard of identically gloomy musicians. It’s very Jon Brion meets The Brady Bunch, if they were to find themselves inverted. I hear the toilets Down Under flush backwards, too. It must be something in the water.

(Anthony Rochester’s website)