A Clean Kitchen sounds like it just floated in on *a* breezy night.

Over the past few years, surfer Creed McTaggart has been writing and releasing tunes under the moniker Cheap Gloomer. His debut full-length from ’23, Idiot Dreams, established his sonic persona: a forlorn cowboy caught up in these swaggering, acoustically driven ditties — it’s a pretty raw inward look at himself.

In a lot of ways, A Clean Kitchen continues where Idiot Dreams left off, while also building on it. Threads of ’60s rock and McTaggart’s stand-and-deliver style ring out, but the kind of world-building on the album is so much deeper and rewarding for repeat listeners. Give it a rinsing and sitar sounds, dissonant guitars, and swooning backing vocals reveal themselves underneath McTaggart’s Elvis-y drawl.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAw-7dW1tkA

“It is a mix of emotions — some love songs, some emo songs, and some songs I have no idea what they are about,” he said of the tunes, which is the most firm evidence that he wants to let them do the talking for him.

McTaggart credits producer Jez Player of the Pinheads for “making the tunes come to life and the band giving the songs a 3D aspect,” and it’s hard not to hear Player’s lo-fi approach throughout. Recorded at The Shed studio in Stanwell Park, McTaggart was able to tap the rich stream of Illawarra artists within Player’s orbit, enlisting James Kates on drums, Steve Bourke on bass, Bry Faulks on backing vox, Russell Webster on keys, and Luke Player with some lead guitar parts. You can feel that these players were given space to experiment in the studio, adding their own touches to McTaggart’s conceptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyMLruq62pc

Even though these songs have these “surfy” undertones, the high points on the album are too good to write it off as a surfer’s “hobby band”. ‘King Of The Clowns’ is this druggy slice of self-deprecation that sounds like a My Bloody Underground-era BJM tune, complete with this ghostly soundscape, while ‘Melt’ is a moment of acoustic meditation carefully positioned right at the halfway point.

Words automatically flow out in ‘Rabbit Tooth’ like some sort of rambling poetry, with lots of little gems contained in the sub-three-minute tune like “I break apart like tissue in water / You pick me up like a piña colada”. ‘Heart Spank’ sounds like if Lee Hazlewood was dragged into the bush on a bender and forced to write music at gunpoint; a washed-out country flower that is probably gonna be one of the live standouts.

A Clean Kitchen is out now on Silhouette. Buy it on Bandcamp here.