Peter Bibby – Drama King | Album Review
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Spinning Top Records
I’m no stranger to drunken chaos. There’s the time in my sophomore year of college when I blacked out at a sorority pregame and was “asked” to please go home. Or junior year when my roommate took me to her date party, and I spent the whole time puking in the club bathroom after too many tequila shots. Or the many, many instances of chugging from plandles in frat basements and then promptly getting on a table for the rest of the night. What I’m saying is I, like many others, spent a good chunk of my late teens-early twenties leaning into a drunken menace version of myself and consistently ignoring my limits.
Then, at some point, due to either a growing self-awareness or a developing anxiety disorder, embarrassment kicked in. I’d cringe at friends’ tales of my antics from previous nights, wonder what people were saying about me, and hope to god I didn’t run into anyone important. This started to happen at the same time the world shut down, so I took it as a great chance to get some distance from alcohol altogether. By the end of college, I would barely finish one drink on any given night. Nowadays, I’m scared to even get buzzed, and the last place you’d find me is the club. I soberly threw up from heat exhaustion at a Cass McCombs’ show at Union Pool last summer, and the number one worry I had was anyone in my vicinity thinking I was a messy drunk who couldn’t handle herself.
The people’s prince of Perth, Peter Bibby, has gone through a similar sober renaissance as of late. His newest record, Drama King, chronicles his back-and-forth between leaning into the numbing effect of alcohol and realizing the damage it is instigating. Being recently sober himself, the Aussie rocker explores the internal dialogue that comes with overcoming your dependence on alcohol and getting increasingly dissatisfied with the partying experiences you once found life-changing.
A through-and-through independent, Drama King marks Bibby’s first time working with producer Dan Luscombe, or any producer, for that matter. With this new partnership, the production and instrumentals are crisp, consuming, and chaotic, with sonic highs and lows that mirror the often unstable path to sobriety. There’s country twang on opener “The Arsehole” and B-side “Old DC,” near-metal guitar thrashes on “Fun Guy” and “Bruno,” and reflective ballads on “Companion Pony” and “Baby Squid.” These elements exist separately and together, like on “Baby Squid,” which takes a waltzy track brimming with strife and completely blows it out by the end, with a ripping guitar solo and guttural vocal delivery that perfectly encapsulates the duality of what it takes to get sober. “Fun Guy” gives a glimpse of the anger that comes with realizing substances aren’t working for you but not quite being ready to give them up. The track blends surf rock with death metal guitar riffs, similar to King Gizzard’s PetroDragonic Apocalypse, ripping through the speakers with an intensity that matches the pure disgust our protagonist has for his old party routine.
Bibby looks at sobriety from all sides, giving us POVs of him at his worst and his most confident. “The Pricks” tells a story of a bar fight, complete with slurring vocals that clash with the major key pop rock instrumentals. Meanwhile, the jangly opener, “The Arsehole,” provides a thesis statement for the entire album with the line, “No one seems to come and talk to me / ‘cuz I’m the arsehole / It’s plain to see.” Bibby has a vocal style akin to Courtney Barnett’s conversational half-spoken-word delivery, adding another layer of personality and emotion to the whole LP.
On “Bruno,” we see the distaste Bibby has for his party persona in lyrics like “Bruno is a piece of shit / He’s got no idea and nowhere to get one,” which show his frustration with the endless cycle of knowing you’re drinking too much but not being able to stop. Lyrically, Bibby is extremely blunt about his past. It’s clear he’s getting sick of his blackouts with the lines like “And all my dreams they fade away / No faces and no names / I’m getting tired of it” on “Old DC,” a track that juxtaposes Americana country twang with somewhat crass and unforgiving lines about being stuck in bad habits.
“Terracotta Brick” is one of the most revealing and personal tracks on the album. Bibby speaks to his lowest points through a metaphor of building a wall around him to block out any potential help, emphasizing the loop he finds himself stuck in when it comes to alcohol (“And you’re part of a vicious cycle / That keeps on spinning round”). You can hear Bibby’s inner turmoil in his vocals, with the guitar and piano sauntering around him and providing the truest ‘ballad’ on the record. “Terracotta Brick” is an emotional low, but it’s also a high in showing that Bibby is aware of his self-destructive tendencies around alcohol, which is necessary to push past them eventually.
Album closer “Companion Pony” explores Bibby’s desires for partnership and how alcohol had previously ruined potential relationships. Bibby compares himself to a lonely old racehorse looking to escape the intensity of derby life. It turns from a pretty depressing song to one with a hopeful end, hinting at a positive path forward. The track gains momentum and incorporates choral backing vocals and bright pianos, leaning into the idea of coming out on the other side of the uphill battle that is sobriety. The last lines of the record give a very ‘running off into the sunset’ happy ending to the whole story: “He’s gonna run / Over the hill / Around the bend / Jump right over the electric fence / Find that companion pony / And they’ll keep on running.”
Cassidy is a music writer and cultural researcher currently based in Brooklyn. She loves many things, including but not limited to rabbit holes, Caroline Polachek, blueberry pancakes, her cat Seamus, and adding to her record collection. She is on Twitter @cassidynicolee_, and you can check out more of her writing on Medium.
