Strange Tourist  Strange Tourist is the debut studio album from The Drones and Tropical Fuck Storm frontman Gareth Liddiard. The album was recorded inside Blackburn Castle in New South Wales over the first half of 2010, and was produced with the help of Burke Reid. Its minimal, "austere" and "meandering" acoustic songs instrumentally consist entirely of Liddiard's guitar-playing, and are topped with his versatile and heavily ocka-accented vocals. Exploring themes such as isolation, jealousy, guilt, colonialism, wartime collaborationism, radicalism and many others, its detailed, narrative-based lyrics have been characterized as "dark and grinding", and are set in various periods of time as well as locations. Released through Shock Records and ATP Recordings, the album received critical acclaim from the Australian press, and (despite being scant) a very favourable critical reception outside of Australia. Its closing track "The Radicalisation of D", in particular, garnered a lot of praise and has been called the album's magnum opus. The album earned Liddiard a nomination for an ARIA Award for Best Male Artist at the 25th ARIA Music Awards, and was itself nominated for the Australian Music Prize. Daniel Baker of "The Quietus" described the album as "a deceptive subversion of rockist dogma." He describes the tracks as "sprawling venom inflected dioramas existent in their own haunted ecology." "With his first solo album," wrote Bernard Zuel of "Sydney Morning Herald", "Liddiard puts aside the physical presence of the Drones, forgoing that capacity for movement as well as variation in favour of none-more-bare presentations of voice and guitar. These are in effect spoken-word pieces with minimalist backing or, given their lyricism and focus, books on tape "read" by a man whose nasally, insistent voice is never going to be mistaken for that of a choir boy." Tim Dunlop of "Crikey" characterized it as "dark and grinding [...] "Strange Tourist" consists of [...] long songs with clever lyrics documenting the political and the personal." "Liddiard's characters and their world are invoked with such eye for nuance and detail [...]" writes Zuel, "that you feel covered in the tangy sweat of fear or frozen in the same miasma of indecision and enervation as his protagonists." Liddiard's vocals have been described as a "snarling Ocka drawl [...]