Cowboy iconography has long since morphed from being overtly-masculine in the spirit of spaghetti westerns and John Wayne to kitschy costumery. Behind the cowboy-hatted, snakeskin booted persona of Cong Josie is Nic Oogjes, a Melbourne music veteran whose latest project straddles the line between hyper-masculine and wink-wink-nudge-nudge camp. He’s just released his debut Cong! via It Records by way of introduction – ten tracks in which listeners are immersed into grimy synths, sleazy saxophone, and Oogjes’ modulating, punch-drunk vocals delivered in lounge lizard croons and faltering falsetto that adventures up, down, and around the tonal expanses of the lowest octaves.
The name Cong Josie is not so cryptic as it might seem, Oogjes explains. “It came from an anagram generator, from the shortened version of my name, Nic. In the spirit of the project, the first thing that comes up, go with it and don’t overthink things. It’s still me, but from another angle.”
No stranger to playing characters, Oogjes was the larger-than-life frontman for wonky funk-punk eight-piece NO ZU (currently on hiatus). The band is known for throwing synths, bass, relentless percussion and brass into highly performative outings that left live audiences feeling both ecstatic and exhausted. Begun in 2007 as a quartet made up of art school friends, the band – for all its raucous fun – intended to challenge the machismo and colonialism that still underpins all Australian systems of governance, culture, law and life.
A few years ago, Oogjes began therapy in response to the stresses of touring and performing, igniting an exploration of his own identity through his onstage persona. Giving that persona a name was fundamental to the investigative process. “[Therapy] really started off something and opened a Pandora’s Box kind of thing, where I started seeing things very differently,” he explains. “[Cong Josie] is really more of a process of unravelling a side of me, or parts of me, that have been building, especially over my musical life in the last few years. I am probably naturally introverted, I keep to myself a lot, I’m not hugely social. I like gardening and drawing and writing and solitary things, from an only child’s upbringing… Even in my first band, I found this other side of me that just became somebody I didn’t quite recognize on stage, but also felt like I was blossoming in a debaucherous way.”
His co-conspirator in writing the album was long-time friend and enabler, Cayn Borthwick, who also wrote and performed with Oogjes in NO ZU. “Cayn has a little studio in Brunswick and when we were allowed in there, I’d go in there…” says Oogjes. “The majority of the album was written with Cayn – he’s classically trained… doing his PhD in composition, and [he has an] incredible music mind. He can play so many instruments… He’s just so open to things and then brings so much of his own personality into play, but the cool thing is that we both understand what the projects are and the limitations, and he knows exactly where I’m coming from. We can basically read each other’s minds.”
Oogjes told Broadsheet in 2017 that the foundation for NO ZU was the sense of absurdity and mordant humour in Nick Cave’s early post-punk band The Birthday Party. The same spirit of gothic, sarcastic wit exists at the core of Cong Josie. The sonic landscape of Cong! is the amalgam of Oogjes’ travels during the making of the album, from a Greek fortress where he recorded the vocals to “Leather Whip” to his own suburban Melbourne home, “using not much gear at all: a couple of synthesizers and a drum machine.”
The Grecian landscape also figures into the video for “Leather Whip,” shot in Mani, Greece. “It’s a beautiful place: really rocky landscape, the ocean is right there, and it’s got a fascinating history, a lot of fortified houses and towers, because there were a lot of clans and wealthy families shooting cannons at each other,” says Oogjes. He spent time there with his partner Margarita and their nearly three-year-old daughter Persephone, both of whom have namesake songs on Cong!.
Margarita’s parents live in Saidona, in the Peloponnese region of the south, not far from Kalamata. His in-laws had a little attic, so all he needed was an interface, a microphone, a little synthesizer and a computer. Though he had to work in his sparingly few moments along, two hours was just enough time to record “Leather Whip.”
Elsewhere on Cong!, breathy, romantic whoops on “Wedding Bells” emerge from a drum machine-sax solo-electronic keyboard funk. It’s a bit Serge Gainsbourg meets 80s goth-synth outfit Love And Rockets (remember “So Alive”?). Squelching, swampy synths sound like umbrellas pulling out of deep marshy pits in an attempt to escape an impending storm on “Lorelei.” The synths whip around like sheets of silvery rain and the faraway noodling of a lonely, electric guitar emerge now and again as if from a dream. “Lorelei” is perhaps even more gothic and bluesy than any of the other tracks, a particularly macabre way to end the album; it was inspired by the guardian angels who gave up immortal life for love in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings Of Desire.
Oogjes, a fan of the later, funkier, stranger work of Gang of Four, thought he was wearing his influences on his sleeve when he began recording Cong!, “but when I listened back, I could hear so much of myself in it,” he says. “That first track [“I Want a Man”] set the template that there’d be a fantasy element in each track, but there’d be something real and vulnerable if you scrape the surface.”
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