"Do It First", by The Crayon Fields.
Ah, Autumn. With the leaves starting to fall from the trees, and the colours changing from green to red and yellow, this is Canberra's time of year. One can be comfortably inwardly focused, and yet not be freezing cold. (Today it is actually a bit warm. A bit warm, I tell you!) There might be footy on the telly and you might not yet be sick of it. (Even if, as supporter of a certain team, you are already looking towards next season.)
This song by The Crayon Fields sums up the best things about this time of year, I reckon, just by sounding the way it does.
(I think their first album is great. It is redolent of the kind of innocent charm that pervades many great first albums by jangly, introspective pop groups. The trick is then to take that quality to the next level. You can't be naive and wide-eyed a second time (unless you are Jonathan Richman and can make a credible career out of it) (okay, Calvin Johnson probably managed it two or three times with Beat Happening, although even then their strongest album, "You Turn Me On", came about because they had by then (relatively speaking) "grown up"), which means you have to be something else. The second Crayon Fields album wasn't quite clear on what that something was, or was going to be. It came out in 2009. There hasn't been another record since, and the singer now has a solo album out, so maybe they never figured it out. Which would be a shame, if only because every second band over the last couple of years has adapted the basic sound of "Do It First", and a few of them have probably made some money out of it, or at least gotten recognition. "Do It First" isn't even on YouTube (a live version can be found there, but the sound quality is so awful it doesn't go close to doing justice to the fragile, autumnal grace of the recorded version).
But all is not lost, for you can download it here.
