Penelope Swales and the Stranded Assets – Captains of Industry

Captains of Industry – Penelope Swales & the Stranded Assets

Digital CD review by Julie Cavanagh

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Singer, songwriter, instrument maker, lawyer, social activist, actor, teacher – that’s quite a resume for Penelope Swales!

She started her career as a solo performer, then decided (as you would?)  to make musical instruments from gourds and formed the ever popular Totally Gourdgeous with Mal Webb, Carl Panuzzo and Andrew Clermont.

Years of touring Australia and overseas was followed by a law degree, then employment as a community lawyer, while continuing to write and care for an ailing parent.

Following  all the festivals, touring and studying, she’s back doing what she does best with a new album, featuring old friend Mal Webb on bass, backing vocals and beatbox and classically trained Kylie Morrigan on violin and backing vocals, as The Stranded Assets.

Captains of Industry, although album number 16, is the first offering from Penelope in quite a long time, but it’s been worth the wait.

These songs remind us of how she’s been honing her craft over years of life experience and putting that into words.

There’s a lot of thinking material on this, as it runs a gamut of political and emotional topics from the Highland Clearances in Scotland in the 18^th & 19^th centuries, to big business vs climate action, indigenous rights and love and sex.

Cambridge Analytica (Only While They Need You) is a treatise on the effect of propaganda and false information spread by ‘consultants’ through social media, and references the appalling occurrences during the 2016 Presidential elections in the USA, and the attempts to influence the result.

It won the 2019 Songs for Social Justice Award, administered by The Alistair Hulett Memorial Fund, and I think it’s a song Alistair himself would have been proud to write.

Swales nearly captured that award again in 2020, as a finalist with The Ides of March in Christchurch, decrying the hideous massacre in two mosques in that city the previous year.

This is an album of modern day protest songs, skilfully tackling hard truths and emotional issues in the time honoured folk tradition.

A very accomplished production from Penelope Swales, with superb instrumental and vocal backing from Mal Webb and Kylie Morrigan, ‘Captains of Industry’ may only have 8 tracks, but each of them packs a punch.