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Australian cult power pop singer-songwriter, best remembered for his groups Young Modern and the Zimmermen (and their classic 1985 single “Don’t Go to Sydney”), returns with his current outfit. The new album 12 STITCHES includes ten new band originals that combine melody, invention and wry humour with compacted guitars and drums, as well as a Brian Wilson tune and stunning interpretation of Split Enz’s 1975 classic “Time for A Change”. Half A Cow is proud to present the second album by John Dowler’s Vanity Project entitled 12 Stitches. To be released May 1, digitally and on CD, the album is the second by the Melbourne-based vehicle for singer and songwriter John Dowler, a man who was a key figure in Australia’s alternative rock’n’roll scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s. The Vanity Project are a culmination of his previous work, one that touches on the art-pop rock of the first band Spare Change and the pub folk-rock of his ‘80s band the Zimmermen, with the melodic pop rock/power pop of his late ‘70s band-most-likely, Young Modern, at its heart. *** In his 1981 feature on John Dowler in Roadrunner magazine (recently anthologised in Roadrunner book The Big Beat, itself named after a song Dowler made popular with Young Modern) Melbourne rock writer Adrian Ryan commented on Dowler’s then-new band, the short lived Everybody’s So Glad. He said they played with a certain kind of soul, and a type of sound that hadn’t been heard in town since Paul Kelly & The Dots underwent a line-up change too many, and since the Saints were last in town. It was the kind of sound that “had nothing to do with horn sections and screams, but rather with jangling guitars, a passionate beat, allusions to something half forgotten.” Everybody’s So Glad certainly had the jangling guitars that Ryan was referring to. And it wasn’t some insipid jangle-pop sound; hell, he made reference to the Saints! Granted he was talking about the second incarnation, but classic Bailey tracks likes “Simple Love” and “In the Mirror” are some pretty tough jangle. As Ryan alluded, something similar could also be heard in the early Dots, a band that Dowler had ties to via his first band Spare Change, who moved from Adelaide to Melbourne in the mid-‘70s and who provided an early home-base for Paul Kelly when he did the same a couple of years later. Indeed, Spare Change guitarist Chris Langman was in the Dots, and a bit later he and Dowler reunited in a band called the Glory Boys, who recorded the first version of the now-classic “Leaps & Bounds”. While Spare Change’s impact faded (although another member, Bob Kretchmer ended up in Icehouse), and the Glory Boys never really got started (although their bass-player Nick Seymour ended up in Crowded House!), John Dowler made a solid impact with the two other bands interlaced in his first decade or so of making music. Young Modern were “Australia’s first power pop group” according to California’s Bomp! magazine. Their sound was born of the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Byrds – “Mr Tambourine Man” – and galvanised by the grit of the Velvet Underground, Television and the Stones. They were the biggest thing in Adelaide before being picked up by Cold Chisel and The Angels’ agency and moving to Sydney, where they crashed and burned. Melbourne '80s folk-rockers the Zimmermen had the scything but joyously melodic mid-‘80s indie-chart topper "Don't Go The Sydney". They received much love in international roots-jangle circles alongside the likes of the Long Ryders and early R.E.M. before signing to Mushroom. Of course, the Zimmermen gave up a couple of early members – Steve Connolly and Michael Barclay – to the nascent Coloured Girls, and also featured former Dot Mick Holmes. To those in the know, John Dowler and Paul Kelly may have seemed, for a while, linked as purveyors of this soulful jangle. While Dowler is not quite its sole proprietor these days - a fine string of bands, from Even to Charles Jenkins’ various outfits to the Livingstone Daisies (featuring Michael Barclay) to the Girlatones have all worked it - he certainly remains its elder statesman. He’s the guy who saw the Byrds in Europe in his teens and was covering the Velvets, solo John Cale, MC5, Flamin’ Groovies and first album Springsteen back in ’74 with Spare Change. He’s the guy who was talking about Big Star in Young Modern interviews in 1978. And these days, he’s the guy with boundless knowledge, exquisite taste and fine song writing chops who’s bringing it all together in one of Melbourne’s best groups.