- Cameron Smith is one of the harder working musicians in Brisbane. Even the work he does producing other people’s records would put him across the line, long before you get to his own long list of musical projects like Ghost Notes, Tape/Off, Spirit Bunny, Tiny Spiders and of course, his solo outlet, St Augustus.

Seven Days is the second full-length for the project and it’s an intimate and melancholy collection of songs, almost certainly more so than the first lot. Unsurprisingly, for a guy like Cam, you can throw a lot of genre tags at what he’s done here: acoustic folk, indie-rock, slowcore, alt-country, but if there’s a unifying factor it’d have to be the cloud of gloom that hangs over them all. Even the artists I’m reminded of when listening to Seven Days -Ben Salter in its ringing acoustic moments, or Low in its slow-burning rock- are renowned for their tremendous sadness.

As you’ll hear from opener and recent single, Latest Disaster, the bittersweetness of the music could go either way, and it’s left to the lyrics to make things haunting. The song speaks quite neatly for that effect and for the album: “Devoid of any other meaning / Or any context that can ring true.” When you boil everything else away, you’re left with truths that are awkward, concerning, perhaps devastating. Although the song is aimed at someone else, the result, of course, bleeds back on to the writer and listener too.

Like an attempt to dodge the eventuality the following cut, Always Ends, bursts out like a fuzzy Dinosaur Jr. or Guided By Voices ode, throwing hands up in the air in amused frustration. As you can probably guess, it’s a fruitless gesture. Limit, Limitless is back on the inevitable, downward path. Cam was aiming for Jason Molina in the chords, but he really cuts loose in the vocals, which was the first time I realised how much he could sound like Ben Salter.

Run Away is an older song that you may have heard before and appears here in a folkier lilt. It’s actually a very specific twilight zone kind of story based on a dream about all people being an identical but new copy of themselves, every day of their lives. It’s a pretty chilling idea to begin with, but, before knowing the exact derivation, lyrics like “It's just one day in a life when in fact it's a lifetime in a day” seemed like an allusion to the mundane repetition of daily life, in a lifetime that’s disappearing before your eyes. You’ve got a chance to break out of it: “Run away from who you are, this could be your final start / One last chance to have things over again.” Perhaps that was the underlying meaning of the dream.

I could detail the various sadnesses that populate the whole album: acknowledging the pain and death of loved ones; drinking nights away in bars when you’re rapidly becoming old enough for it to be worrying; inappropriate reactions to the accidental death of acquaintances; learning nothing from a lifetime of tribulation; I’ll stop there, I don’t want to bring you down.

Seven Days is named for its recording process. A commitment to banging out a song every day for a week that expanded into a whole LP. Cam has written of it as an exhausting process, leading to sparse, rough cuts. Ultimately this recording of raw creativity turned out to be satisfying, surprisingly so, for him certainly, at least in purely musical terms. Interestingly Cam never speaks of the unloading of all his lyrical preoccupations and whether it was cathartic or not. I don’t know if listeners will find it a release. I find myself drawn back to the lyrics of Run Away and wondering: perhaps there is no hope of relief while you’re still in the midst of it all, missing the last chance to flee. As Cameron Smith throws himself ever more energetically into his music there seems little chance he’ll turn away from it all and, doomed or not, his creative record offers a wide-ranging opportunity to think on it.

- Chris Cobcroft.