Erina Fair is the largest single-story shopping centre in the Southern Hemisphere. Located in the heart of NSW’s Central Coast, the centre boasts over 330 stores, servicing over 12.7 million customers each year. The place is a nirvana of suburban mediocrity. It’s got an ice skating rink, a fitness club, and an award-winning restaurant precinct. Paradise.
Structures like Erina Fair have been erected all over this great country of ours; epicentres of unremarkable Australian life. But there’s still some level of sentimentality attached to it all.
Sydney-based outfit 100 have shared their new single Weightless, the first single from their upcoming second EP, due out 2020.
For any person with interests that stretch beyond fitness and food-court cuisine, single-story shopping centres (and their towns of inhabitance) can feel a little unfulfilling. On their latest single Weightless, Sydney band 100 explore the journey of “kids born into mediocrity and low expectation, that choose to search for a life bigger and more challenging.”
100’s vocalist and lyricist, Rowen Tucker, grew up on the Central Coast. While it’d be easy for Tucker to repudiate the unlikely charm of suburban life, he balances a warped sense of nostalgia with a desire to escape its clutches. He’s not looking down his nose at the culture he escaped, merely highlighting the absurdity and limitations of it.
And provincial life definitely is absurd. Fittingly, Weightless plays out like a surreal mid-summer hallucination. There’s imagery of daytime soap operas, crowded suburban homes, and the aforementioned Erina Fair. “You come from nothing / It’s a cruel joke,” Tucker bellows.
Here lies the ultimate crossroads; Tucker melds an image of mundane life with a vision of looming death. You can settle into an early retirement watching Days Of Our Lives, or you can strive for something different, something better, running the risk of fucking it all up and losing everything you left behind. A cruel joke, indeed.
Listen to the new song above.
