After a decade exploring the seventies blues rock of his youth with Datura4, Australian legend Dom Mariani returns to the guitar pop that made him famous – at least in the world of fans who dig such things as power pop and garage rock. Mariani is, of course, one of the world’s foremost practitioners of that particular style of six-string-driven music, and he’s on fire on Apple of Life. As with his various bands (DM3, Stems, Someloves, even Datura4), Mariani prefers to get right to the melodic point here, eschewing complexity for the probity of four/five chords and his winsome voice. Whether he’s rocking hard in the muscular “Just Can’t Wait” and “World On Its Head,” popping out on “Jealous Love” and “Sad State of Affairs,” or crooning a country rock ballad with “Take It All Back,” Mariani wastes no time laying on the hooks ‘n’ harmonies, reminding us that there’s still nothing quite like a tune that hearkens back to the sixties while still sounding of the moment. Power pop and its adjacencies can sound old-fashioned, even quaint, in the twenty-first century, but when it’s in the hands of a master like Dom Mariani, it still shines brighter than the sun.
