FLANNELETTE murmurings

La Bastard Interview

2012-02-07T20:04:00.000-08:00

La Bastard are this band that’ve seemingly sprung up from nowhere and started gigging their way into the collective consciousness of the live music-going public. They moosh together rockabilly, soul, spaghetti western and garagey sounds and create what could be described as dancey surf pop, but it’s about something more than the tunes alone. Each band member brings their own je ne se quois to the stage and through a swelling culture of one-up-man-ship, their shows are becoming known for the unhinged-ness of performance.

Turns out La Bastard as a concept had been germinating for a while before they found themselves playing their first show about a year ago. There’s every chance they may’ve found their feet a lot earlier, had it not been for a slight misunderstanding and an overserve of funk. “I was in a band when I was only 15 with one of my oldest friends in Bendigo,” says singer Anna Lienhop. “Funnily enough,” chimes in guitarist Ben Murphy in the first of many interruptions during the course of the interview, “when we were about 17 and Anna was playing in this band, Sugarfiend, with her friend – kind of like Bikini Kill meets L7.” Lienhop adds, “And Veruca Salt. It was an all girl band.”

Murphy continues: “There was this battle of the bands competition in Daylesford and my brother Josh had a band who were playing and these girls were as well. Anyway, they beat my brother’s band.” And the prize? “We got to support Bodyjar,” Lienhop says.

The two met at the Daylesford show but weren’t to meet again for about six years. Both working at JB Hi-Fi, Murphy recognised Lienhop from the Daylesford show and had an accusation to level. “What had happened at that gig,” he explains, “was that my brother had taken all his pedals and leads and stuff and kept it in the storage area on the back of the truck and they’d been stolen by another band. I think my brother always suspected that these girls had taken them.” Lienhop clarifies: “I think it was the really shitty pop-punk band.”

From there they got together and jammed out some funk tunes but something wasn’t working. Lienhop opines that it may’ve been a lack of horns. “I have to say,” says Murphy, picking up the conversation, “it was probably my fault because I was bringing too many funk standards. Too much funk.”

They gave it away but an epiphany, of sorts, was to occur soon after at a Six Foot Hick show. “We were watching this band,” says Murphy. “We won’t name them,” adds Lienhop. “They were a support band for Six Foot Hick,” Murphy continues, “and they kind of had this swampy, garage, psychobilly kind of thing. They looked really cool and had really cool clothes on and had the right gear and the right kind of amps but they just kinda sucked. I think I said to Anna ‘it annoys me that you can just try to be a southern rock or garage rock or rockabilly band and just because you have good aesthetic you can get good support’.”

“We were just standing at the back of the room bitching about how we could do this so much better,” Lienhop says. “When we were watching that band no one was dancing, everyone was just kind of standing there. When Six Foot Hick came on, it was amazing. They kind of barrelled through the crowd and it was very interactive, so that was one of the things we tried to take from that.” They will bring some crazy shit to the Retreat this Friday. So if playing on top of bars and tables, crowd on stage, pillow fights, crowd surfing, and witnessing bassist Jimi Edwards’ lying down circle-walk while playing bass sounds like your cup of tea... You really should try and catch the show.

Orbweavers interview with Marita Dyson

2012-02-07T20:02:00.000-08:00

A STRANGE LIFE

Listening to Orbweavers is a mixed experience. Their tunes snatch light into darkness, turning what sometimes could, if treated differently, be rendered bright and light pop tunes into soft but quietly snarling beasts. Their mid-tempos create an urgency to the songs that defies the delicacy of instrumentation, yet complements the oftentimes bleak lyrical content, which explores our fragile human-ness and the inevitability of death. Listening to Orbweavers is indeed a mixed experience, but their investigation of darkness in light ensures their music is enriching.

Orbweavers’ second album Loom was released late last year. A concept album of sorts, the thing lingers around the factories and ex-industrial zones of Melbourne’s inner-suburbs. It’s a record that instils the feeling of Melbourne; it somehow captures the essence of what it is to stroll the bike paths and waterways on a cool winter’s eve. “I’m so glad that you have that feeling and a connection to the songs and places,” says singer/multi-instrumentalist Marita Dyson when I suggest many of the tracks on Loom create a minds-eye view of the Melbourne I know and love. “That’s not something that we consciously set out to do. We did want to write an album where the songs related to one another in some way. Maybe also with this album, we were writing songs that were about our lives and the environment around us because we were spending so much time in it.”

It’s the time spent in this city’s urban natural environments that lend Dyson and her Orbweavers’ songwriting partner Stuart Flanagan their thematic content, but equally it’s their method of exploration, on foot, that helps generate the rhythms. “I think a lot of songs, we write at a walking pace because we’re just walking through the streets,” Dyson continues. “When you’re walking, I imagine other people feel like this, you take in everything around you and there’s a certain pace and rhythm and so images and ideas fall into place. The Melbourne feeling of the songs maybe just comes from being in those environments, and the songs are just a response to those environments. They’re written in Melbourne thinking about Melbourne.”

An area of Melbourne that features on the record is the Merri Creek. The stretch of waterway runs from Wallan in the north and covers 70-odd kilometres to Dights Falls. The creek shares this conflict of darkness and light. Culturally significant for the Wurundjeri People, the creek was wrecked by the industrialisation of the city’s inner-north and to this day remains one of, if not the most polluted waterways in Victoria. Yet walking the banks there are many beautiful stretches of regenerating bush – there have even been platypus sightings in the northern reaches of the creek – it is, in a way, a symbol of healing. “Merri Creek is a very special place that I didn’t know about until we moved into that area,” says Dyson. “I didn’t know there were so many creeks in Melbourne until I read a book about waterways in Melbourne... So much is hidden by buildings and development and the only way to find some things is by stumbling upon them and even walking into them. Even the first few times I went to the creek, I wasn’t really sure what I felt about it. But then the more time I spent there I became really obsessed about finding new things. Whenever I’d go down there and find a new area I’d go ‘cool, I’ll have to come back to this bend or up a random path for a look’.”

Given the Melbourne-ness of the Loom material, it’s unsurprising community radio were quick to latch on to the recording – Triple R even granting the release Album Of The Week honours in October last year. “I felt like I was walking on a cloud to find out it was album of the week,” Dyson continues. “The making of the record is so internal and we spent a lot of time listening to it before it was released and... you bring it out into the world, there’s this feeling of not knowing how people will react to it. All the emotions that I felt during the making of the record can kind of make you, at the end of it, unsure what people will make of the recording. So it’s very heartening and very humbling when people react well to what’s been made. It makes me feel like I’m a child again, the happiness.”

The band also played a show in the station’s performance space. Part of the Cry Baby Sessions, they played a matinee show where parents and children were encouraged to attend. It could seem an odd combination due to the heavy content of many of Orbweavers’ songs. Dyson contests that the open-mindedness of children allows them to transcend any one element of a song or a performance and uncritically respond in an open and honest way. “Some of my friends who have children have told me that they sometimes find the record relaxing for getting their children ready for bed,” she continues. “It’s not that the content’s very soothing either, or the imagery.

“It was amazing to see children tapping along with pencils. Some of them were sitting really attentively and others were kind of climbing around and others were colouring in pictures. I really love children, I don’t have any of my own, but when I see them I’m inspired because they just don’t have any, not agenda, but they’re just very open and responsive to the world around them – I always find them very cheering.”

When asked how she now feels about Loom, having been granted a few months to breathe on the release, Dyson, in typically considered style, again draws comparison to the natural world. “When I hear it now I keep returning to that time,” she says, “which was last year during winter. Some of the songs aren’t that dark, but maybe have this undercurrent of, not sadness but... I just feel in my daily life this transience of life and I will die at some point and every day is just a strange experience and a strange moment to be alive and to know that I’ll die. Maybe that feeling might be a layer underneath everything. It’s not that I feel scared or worried about dying, it’s just something that’s there, in the environment as well in plants and animals and just the experience of life. It’s always there, this feeling that time’s passing and it’s not going backwards, it’s just going forwards and on. I don’t mean it in a heavy way. I’m looking at some pine needles that have fallen from a tree and they’ve dried out and reminding me of time passing.”

Harmony interview with Tom Lyngcoln

2011-12-13T20:46:00.000-08:00

“You have all these worries when it comes to playing in a band,” says Harmony “slave master” and singer/guitarist Tom Lyngcoln, “particularly when you’re organising things. The one thing I never have to worry about is just how fuckin’ good Jon [Chapple] the bass player is.” Looking around the rest of the cast, you’d imagine he doesn’t lose a lot of sleep. Born out of a (very cute) newlywed agreement between Tom and wife and drummer Alex to set aside some time every weekend for songwriting, Harmony quickly morphed into a six-piece aural explosion. Along with Chapple on bass, the couple brought in the nothing short of exquisite vocal triplicate of Quinn Veldhuis, Amanda Roff and Alex’s sister Maria Kastaniotis.

Those who caught Harmony’s Melbourne Music Week performance at Pony a few weeks back will attest to the band’s near-flawless execution of their innovative and matchless songs. Key to their sound is that the treble of the vocal harmonies be cut by Chapple’s bass. Mr Lyngcoln enthuses that it’s not only bass playing that Chapple brings to the band. “The guy’s a machine,” he says. “[Harmony]’s the first time he’s played bass since Mclusky and I reckon that’s a crime. He brings an energy, this unpredictable tension to things. At first I was like ‘Jon, can you please not leave the stage to take a piss halfway through the set, can you not go to the bar halfway through the set’. Then I got bored and thought ‘You know what, just let him do what he fuckin’ wants’... We accept that if you give him slack he’ll produce genius.”

Armed with the songs carved out of Mr and Mrs Lyngcoln’s matrimonial lounge room, the band came together in waves. “We didn’t take it for granted,” he continues. “Every single person who we discussed and thought about said yes so that really helped. It’s just worked really well. Everyone has completely different personalities and for some reason everyone just tolerates each other really well.” But, regardless of musical pedigrees, the misshapen songs were difficult to nail. According to Lyngcoln, it was hard work and touring that bent the music into shape – though the moulds may have been lost along the way. “It’s like this slave master who’s holding people captive and making them perform things they don’t wanna do, like some kind of war experiment,” he laughs. But of creating the material, he reckons they had to loosen the reins and let the music take its own form. “It comes from wide and varied listening. You take all the things you’ve been listening to and you have a theory and you try to punch out that theory and no matter what it’s going to come out as skewed as your perspective of things. I guess my perspective’s a little white, creepy soul type of thing – it’s pretty horrid. On paper it looks like a hate crime which we perpetrate on music.”

Testament to the quality of the songs (and quite possibly one of the local music coups of the decade), Lyngcoln managed to land bona-fide living legend and Tom Waits collaborator Marc Ribot for guitar duties on Heartache. “I’ve got this mate in the UK who’s played [sax] with Tom Waits,” Lyngcoln continues, “and I thought I’d get him to do something, but he was kinda lukewarm about it. Out of frustration I turned around thought ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna track down whoever represents Ribot and have a crack’, fully expecting the standard response that is: ‘Mr Ribot is really busy’ and ‘you write shit songs’. He came back to me and said he really wanted to play on this and this, and I said ‘Well, that’s not what I asked’.” The resulting number is the next single to be released from their outstanding self-titled debut album. Lyngcoln doubts Mr Ribot will make it out for the launch.

Samson McDougall

Future Of The Left

2011-11-29T16:18:00.001-08:00

'Polymers Are Forever' (Remote Control)

(previously published on ArtsHub)

The only thing in the world more exciting than getting my hands on Future Of The Left’s hot new six-song EP is that I, amongst a few thousand friends, will be seeing them at Meredith in a couple of weeks – that and the fact they’ve got an album out early next year. With FOTL there’s never a pang of ‘what if it’s not as good as the last one’ as they are and ever will be a band at the cutting edge of wit and social commentary. More than that here (and more to the point), their deformed structures and perverted guitar stabs act as cruel extensions of their wrath.

The EP opens with possibly the most overblown Mike Patton-esque theatrics we’ve seen from Falco (no minor accomplishment) and this buzzsaw bass and keyboard combination. The title track is so fuckin’ sexy, subversive and far beyond anywhere they’ve been thus far, you’ll be jamming it on repeat and rendered useless for the next 20 minutes or so. (Hint: if you’re suffering at work, take it into the dunny and bliss out for half an hour – a definite anger buster.) Once you get past the opener, you’re grabbed around the throat by the rapido punk gem that is ‘With Apologies To Emily Pankhurst’, which comes about as close to Mclusky’s ‘Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues’ in tempo as FOTL have managed yet (though I’m certain Falco would despise the comparison).

The thing bounces along through the mid-section and third number ‘New Adventures’, despite lacking in the instrumental dynamics of the previous two, rewards in a purely lyrical sense: The daughter had his laugh/ but not his smoker’s cough/ it must have been the lack of tar in heroin. ‘My Wife Is Unhappy’ brings a delicate guitar line into a keys-heavy listen and also that sick feeling that FOTL are on the edge of eruption – it burns slowly but with intense heat.

The final couplet of ‘Dry Hate’ and ‘destroywhitechurch.com’ boil over and inject the memory of this listen with a bile-y combination of the stained cartoonish chest poking and out-and-out spleen bursting tantrums that only FOTL can deliver. This is as well-rounded-a punk EP as you’ll find anywhere right now and will result in much breath holding leading into their Meredith show and near-future album release. And that’s punk in the (proper) say what you fucking think subversive sense.

Samson McDougall

Fucked Up interview with Damian 'Pink Eyes' Abraham

2011-11-22T16:49:00.001-08:00

Never to be labelled as anything near conventional, it’s a strange concept to see Toronto punk kings and queens Fucked Up touring the world with Foo Fighters. It’s not an irony that lost on ferocious vocalist and basically most-punk-man-on-the-planet-right-now Damian ‘Pink Eyes’ Abraham – yet he maintains there are strong links between each member of the now stadium rockers and his punk rock upbringing. “When we first met the Foo’s on Toronto, we’d heard from our friends The Bronx who’d opened up for them, that they are the coolest people you will ever meet, prepare to be shocked,” he says. “And so I was like, yeah, how cool can they be? Let’s be honest, I’ve met some cool people.

“Nate [Mendel] from the band was in Brotherhood, one of the greatest hardcore bands of all time. They were one of the bands that got me through high school, I loved that band to death... Basically all of the band – with [members of] Sunny Day Real Estate and The Germs – played in a band that was so pivotal for my musical awareness.”

To backtrack, Fucked Up are now ten-year veterans of the punk rock scene. In that time they’ve delivered over sixty releases (mostly singles and odd-length 7”s and 12”s) including three studio albums. Their second full-length, The Chemistry Of Common Life, scored much critical acclaim and won them the Polaris Music Prize. Their live shows are notoriously brutal and their onstage antics have garnered respect and disdain in equal measures (MTV won’t be calling them back in a hurry). They famously played a 12 hour set at the Bowery in New York City in 2008 to celebrate the Chemistry... release and were joined by members of Vampire Weekend, Dinosaur Jr, Les Savy Fav and others on stage. They’ve (unsuccessfully) sued Rolling Stone Magazine and Camel Cigarettes, they’ve played ATPs and pretty well every other major festival in the world, they’ve just released their third album – an 18-track rock opera set in Thatcher’s England called David Comes To Life, for which they’re apparently penning a prequel – and they’ve even covered Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas for a fund raiser with members of Yo La Tengo and Broken Social Scene, along with Tegan & Sara, Bob Mould, Kyp Malone, GZA and more.

There’s no doubt they are a big fucking deal, yet Abraham’s warmth and modesty is disarming down the phone line. When I suggest the new record had me reaching for the liner notes like I was 14 again, he recalls a similar youth. “The best thing you can hope for in a band or for anyone who’s trying to do anything creative is that something you make is engaged with by other people... We live in a world now where you don’t necessarily have to engage with music, there’s not necessarily any cost to it so you can go and listen to it and process it and then move on. There was a time where I would pore over the liner notes and where I knew the lyrics to every single song.”

Though their roots run deep into the American hardcore of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Fucked Up express a variance in song constructs that suggest wider influences. Abraham confirms that his musical upbringing was as much Sonic Youth as it was Black Flag, and elaborates that it was more the idea of punk that moved him more than any particular sound. “A lot of the stuff that’s perceived as punk these days runs against what I perceive punk to be,” he continues. “But there’s always been a legitimate beating heart to the scene and y’know, you can’t stop an idea. The idea of DIY punk is a very powerful one if you’re a kid and a fan of music. You don’t really wanna be a cast from the heavens rock star, you just wanna be someone that plays music because you love it. DIY punk is a great way to make music and be involved in music because you just do it yourself and you literally take complete control of a situation. As a kid you have very little power in your life and here you’re given power. You don’t like the music you’re hearing then start your own band; you don’t like the bands that are coming to your town then book another band; you don’t like the records that are coming out then put out a record. It’s just so awesome that this idea never really died. And I don’t think it ever will die. It will continue getting co-opted and bands will keep ‘selling out’ and moving on but it’s gonna stay pure because there’s always a kid who’s gonna say ‘fuck that band in the mainstream, I want a band like this’.”

The early stages of Fucked Up saw distributors refusing to carry their material as it did not adhere to the usual confines of what a ‘release’ should be. They found like minds in Deranged Records who were happy to carry whatever they produced. The albums came slowly as the band grappled with the gravity of stringing a group of songs together in some sort of continuum. But after the success of Chemistry... they were confronted with an entirely new pressure. “After the last record we felt that we had an insurmountable amount of hype on us y’know. I really felt like we had hit a point where we were like ‘where the hell are we gonna go with this record?’ Chemistry... really felt like, it was really flattering, but it felt like they’d painted us into a corner in a way.”

Thankfully this external pressure played a large part in the development of the concept of David Comes To Life. “We thought we’d do this record that we wanted to do anyway and we were kinda like if people don’t like it, they don’t like it. So we made it a concept record with this idea we’d been playing around with for a long time.”

There has been much conjecture in recent weeks over the band’s future after Abraham was quoted as saying that he is sick of touring and needed a break. At least during this interview there is little indication of the band’s imminent demise, though he talks of an altered course. “I have a feeling this will be the last full LP with me as the sole vocalist of the band,” he says. “I’m pretty sure that’s the direction we’ll end up going in and that’s for a variety of reasons. Number one, I don’t wanna get the band to a point where it gets stale and you can’t really dial it back from a concept record. Where do you go? I guess a quadruple live record’s the logical progression [laughs]. We’re at that stage now where there’s gonna have to be some changes. And that’s not gonna happen tomorrow, but definitely down the line.” He adds that they’ve just completed The Year Of The Tiger and that they’re planning a prequel EP to the new record surrounding Veronica – the album’s leading lady. Diehard fans fear not... It doesn’t seem likely they’ll be tossing it away just yet.

Samson McDougall

Royal Headache interview with Joe Sukit by Samson McDougall

2011-11-22T16:46:00.001-08:00

“It’s hard to explain the way that it’s just changed over the last three or four years,” says Royal Headache bassist Joe Sukit of his base of Sydney and the resurgence of live music. “It started out as a very, at least when I moved to Sydney, as a really DIY warehouse kind of space thing. Bands couldn’t play at pubs, that was pretty much it, there were no pubs to play. But over the years, there’s all these bands and kids that couldn’t really play their instruments being forced into this situation where you make it happen however you can. But it feels like in the last couple of years at least they’ve just evolved into these really great bands and everyone’s writing really great songs and making really great records. It’s really an inspirational place to be and it’s exciting because everyone’s behind each other – and y’know, if you don’t support each other what have you got? We’re on our own, so we make do.”

As a definition of the punk ethos, the above statement reads about as conclusively as I’ve ever heard it put. Through venue closures and the might and power of the Australian Hotels Association that reigns supreme in New South Wales, emerging musicians were forced into a situation of creating their own realm, completely independent of any existing structures, which had become more suffocating than supportive. And waddaya know, the music is coming out on top.

A sweet product of this transition are Royal Headache. A mish mash of members of established Sydney bands, they converged in the garages and warehouses of the city to produce something unique, untried and ultimately satisfying. “Every person in the band is obsessed with music and not just one type of music either, but everything,” continues Sukit of the sonic thrust of the band, which sits somewhere between the realms of punk rock and soul. “Essentially, at the core of every single kind of music that we like, there’s a rawness and a realness to it. Whether it’s hip hop or whether it’s punk rock, you’ve gotta believe what they’re saying. And also you’ve gotta sound authentic and real otherwise what’s the point? That’s the main thing that we try and get across; definitely that’s the main thing that inspires us to do real shit.”

They dropped a self titled debut album earlier this year and it was jumped on by independent radio. Though they haven’t been regular visitors to Victoria thus far, their few shows will remain etched in the minds of anybody lucky enough to have caught them. The quality of the shows they’ve played here speak for themselves – Flip Out and Golden Plains before they even released an album – but their first full-length release and subsequent release party visit this weekend, have been a hell of a long time coming. “We actually recorded it about a year and a half ago,” Sukit continues. “We recorded it in one day and then it was just a process of... Shogun wasn’t happy with a couple of vocal tracks so he was back in for another couple of gos, going back and recording with a couple of different people and then... Ultimately it was about us going to America and our trip over there for Goner Fest that sort of kicked our arses and we thought all right, we’ve gotta get this thing mixed and ready and out. If it wasn’t for that, we probably still wouldn’t have the record out. It was just a matter of getting the record to sound the way that we’d sort of envisioned and do the songs justice really.

It has been worth the wait. The album is dripping in this old world soul built out of solid straight-up garage jams. “It worked out for the best in the end. It was a bit dumb that we laboured over it for so long in the end, but to tell the truth we spent a lot more time just not talking or thinking about the record, so it just sat there doing nothing. To eventually get it out was just a huge relief. It was taking a huge toll on us, y’know, we weren’t able to just get out and do what we wanted to until we had that gone. We just had to get past it I guess. The aim is by next year to have a completely new set and never have to play these songs again until the reunion tour in 2020 or something.”

On the band’s recent US tour, they drove the interstates on a steady diet of fuck all – sleeping on floors and hangin’ in bars until gig time. Sukit was not overly convinced of many of the bands they caught on the tour, and he tells me that apart from Goner Fest, a lot of the music they experienced while there was less than inspiring. But if there’s a positive to be drawn from the experience, it’s the reinforcement that Royal Headache are on the good path. “We went over there with no expectations and just figured that we’d go over and have a holiday and take the band so we could make enough money to make it to the next city on the map,” he continues. “We didn’t really expect to go over there and do anything or for people to come to shows, so every single night was a different thing and a surprise. It was fun; we spent a lot of time in the van just looking at highways and stuff. Then you get to the city and sit in the bar for four hours before you play. That side of things, after a month of doing that, and going back to stay with the two people in the club that want to put you up for the night – so you’d go back to their ghetto apartment and sleep on the kitchen floor – after a month it can get draining, but we had fun. America’s a weird place.

“You’re going around and most of the bands that we played with each night, it’s like they’re afraid to show themselves or be themselves within their music or as a band. It’s like a show. They’ve gotta come up with a character or have a gimmick and this is what they are, but it’s not actually who they are as people. There’s something really confronting or ugly about Royal Headache when they see that. To go and watch a bunch of people pretend to be someone else is not exciting to me, I don’t find that interesting. We’d rather just get up there and do our thing. It was a strange thing, the type of thing they’re used to... Like even the punk bands, it’s like they’re this kind of band and they sound like this band and they’re influenced by this sort of band. I don’t think Royal Headache are really like that at all. I think that was a little confusing and confronting for them.”

Dick Diver Interview With Alistair & Rupert

2011-11-22T16:37:00.001-08:00

Dick Diver didn’t so much burst onto the scene so much as sneakily weasel their way under the music radar. They’re the kind of band that you hear once and they’re instantly recognisable. The only way to describe their sound is that it leans in obscure angles. There’s a familiarity in their poppy rock tunes, but their guitar tones feel like they’re sloping off to the bar and their vocal harmonies feel like happy accidents. They are a four-piece band made up of tonally identifiable individuals – they mix and match these unique voices in playful and interesting ways.

They arrived a couple of years back and have played a few shows. They managed to get an EP, Arks Up, out at some stage and it was a cracker. Then we waited and we waited and they seemed like they’d all but disappeared. In fact, if it weren’t for the odd live performance and the fact that a couple of them play in other bands around the traps, you could’ve sworn they’d dropped off the planet all together.

Then, as if from nowhere, they finally drop an album. The thing is better than good. It captures all of their tonal slackness and packs a real sense of humour outside of the, often narrative-ly straight up, Australian stories it tells. Founding member Alistair McKay explains it was the writing of these songs that caused the hold up. “Both Rupe [Edwards] and I write pretty slowly,” he says “We write a lot of songs but we’re not happy with most of them. This is the first record that we’ve done with Steph [Hughes] and Al [Montfort] doing stuff as well. We recorded a bunch more that we had but we settled on ten that we wanted.

“I reckon Rupe probably throws out about 90 percent of the stuff that he writes, I write fewer songs. Al writes heaps of songs but he’s in six bands; Steph’s in three at the moment and it was just a matter of going up, recording a bunch of things and having the time to sit back and think relatively critically about it and pick out which songs we thought fit together.”

Of the large amount of material that Rupert Edwards discards, he puts much of it down to his own belief in the songs more than the stock of audience or those around him. “I don’t really worry about or care about whether people can relate to it or not – if that happens, that’s great,” he says. “I’ve gotta be happy with being able to sing something. I’ve gotta be happy and feel good about singing it. Not because it’s all autobiographical, it’s all pretty made up, but some stuff just feels OK to sing and other stuff just doesn’t.”

The songs paint a picture of inner-suburban life. Numbers like New Start Again paint a pretty grim portrait, whereas Flying Teatowel Blues or Seagulls offer snippets of daily life and Head Back slaps a cheeky grin across the arse end of the record. It’s accomplished, without being self conscious or arrogant. The songs string together like a wee narrative all of their own – albeit a brief one. “Pretty good,” answers Edwards when questioned how he feels about the record now that it’s finally on the shelves. “I guess it’s been so long in the making and it feels like it’s been so long since we recorded it to now. This is a pretty common thing with bands I guess, but I feel pretty over it in terms of waiting to have it out. I’ve listened to everything so much now that it’s just weird that everybody’s just hearing it for the first time. So I’m feeling good about it but it’s just a weird thing that there’s been such a delay I guess.” He still reckons he’ll be able to bring some enthusiasm to their launch, “Playing them live is still heaps of fun, I’m not at all over that.”

New Start Again marks the group’s first attempt at shared writing duties and the rewards are plain. The calibre of songwriting is bolstered by the use of vocal pairings that alternate through the listen – it’s never a bombardment or four-way vocal harmony, but the changing selections of vocals to songs right through lends the thing freshness and light. “Maybe the way the band formed, Rupert and I had played together for a long time with just us two,” continues McKay of the band’s incorporation of shared writing and singing duties. “So when we formed for the first bunch of shows that we did and for the EP, we had a bunch of songs that we’d written and so naturally it sort of came as a top down kind of thing. But now that we’ve played together more and spent more time together as a band, it’s just developed organically into a more collaborative thing, which is great. It’s much more enjoyable for everyone; I think you get the four different voices a lot more, I enjoy it a lot more personally.

“It’s never been a very laboured process. Put it this way: I don’t think many of the song pairings that we’ve done on the record have been done other ways. They either started with someone singing and then someone joining in at practice and the rest saying yeah that sounds cool. Or when we’ve recorded, someone will jump in at the last minute and try things. Actually we tried a couple of extra over dubs and that kind of stuff in terms of vocals. Generally we tried to sort of cut back. We didn’t want to end up sounding like the Beach Boys or something. Even though we all like the Beach Boys.”

The recording took place in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and the thing was captured by producer/musician about town Mikey Young. There is warmth to the album that smacks of a bunch of people having fun and not taking the process too seriously. They recorded the album in a couple of days, largely live in the living room of a house in The Dandenong’s. Sound kind of intense? Not at all says McKay.

“I wouldn’t use intensive,” he laughs. “It was really great. It was really relaxed and just a lot of fun.” The set up was pretty simple; their gear, Young’s “very impressive preamps”, some mics and a laptop. McKay agrees the vibes achieved are a lot about the chemistry of all recording in the same room. “We’ve never tried it that way with Dick Diver,” he says of attempting to capture their sound in separate booths. “Rupe and I have done recording in a studio separate, and it was just awful, I didn’t enjoy it at all. Especially with Dick Diver being a vibes band, for want of a better word, we just kind of, y’know feed off each other and I guess we’re a bit loose and sloppy as well and you lose that if you’re playing by yourself or playing to a click track or if you’re even in different rooms.”

Royal Headache (gig review)

2011-11-22T16:30:00.001-08:00

Curtin Bandroom

There’s a bloody line out the door when we rock up outside Melbourne’s most underused venue, the John Curtin Bandroom. It’s surprising that a not-often-seen-in-Melbourne Sydney band, Royal Headache, can pull such a crowd for their belated album launch, yet we’re informed that the room is near sell-out despite the doors having just opened. And this has happened regardless of the fact that Useless Children – you’d expect for many, an enormous drawcard – have (apparently due to a health emergency) vanished from the bill.

With the reshuffle, Woollen Kits start a little late and move us through a crash course in pretty straight-up garage rock. Their stuff is toe-tapping good, catchy as all hell and they hold a large majority of the room in their hands despite a shitty mix. We jostle for a decent spot and explore each sonic corner of the room and find that front of stage is the only area that sounds any good. With a rapidly filling space, this does not bode well for the headliner.

Royal Headache burst onto the stage and thrash out songs – one, two, three, four – without even breaking a sweat. Their live tunes feel faster and the instrumentation is gloriously sloppy. Said mix is as poor as the opening act so we again flank the crowd and power for front centre. There’s a decent contingent of moshers in close and we’re forced to play along.

Vocalist Shogun pleases the audience on removal of shirt revealing the physique of a whippet and too-high pants. Such is the nature of Royal Headache; there is purity of spirit, truthfulness to (collective) self that transcends the hip-ness of their soul/garage appeal. They plough through most the album and further – Really In Love, Eloise etc; though sadly no Honey Joy – oblivious that a large proportion of the audience are experiencing their sound through a kind of muffled vacuum afforded by the room. There was a risk of sameness creeping in to this bill once the dynamic Useless Children were removed, but Royal Headache stand and deliver proof that they’re worthy of any hype that’s preceding them.

Samson McDougall

Dick Diver

2011-11-22T16:11:00.001-08:00

‘New Start Again’Chapter Music(A

(Album review previously published on ArtsHub)

There’s something instantly recognisable about the music of Dick Diver and it’s not just carried through the vocals. It’s a tonal thing – a sort of lilt in the guitars and fluidity of sound – and it somehow reacts with my brain chemistry in a pleasant way, making each song likeable and memorable. They’re the kind of band that you see once and their tunes remain with you. The great thing about this is that whenever you see Dick Diver again, you recognise your little song buddies and you actually feel part of it somehow – you connect.

Dick Diver have an amazing tune called ‘Tender Years’ which they released on their EP ‘Arks Up’ in 2009. The song was a regular show closer for the band from the early days and I felt slighted that they omitted it from an all-too-brief ten-track album. Initial reservations aside, ‘New Start Again’ ambles ever so slightly through the first number ‘Through The D’ and I’m wondering whether the wait for a debut has been worth it. It has all the trademark slack tones and tangled guitars, but as an opener it fails to grab. Second song, ‘Hammock Days’ however, rights the ship and from here on in the album takes shape as a collection of Melbourne stories structured around fab lyrical passages and fine guitar work.

The exploration of vocal harmonies pays off here. A double-fronted unit (Alistair McKay and Rupert Edwards), they have the luxury of leaning on the vocal support of bass player Al Montfort (also of Straightjacket Nation, UV Race and, more recently, Total Control) and drummer Steph Hughes (Boomgates, Children Collide) – no slouches in their own rights. Rather than saturating the album in four-part vocals though, they subtly dot pairings through the recording to fantastic effect.

The album’s nexus comes in the form of sixth track ‘Flying Teatowel Blues’. The almost talked vocal is cut by the most unforgettable and simple chord progression and ripping solos, the thing is so understated and perfect it feels like they’re not even trying. Coupled with Twerp’ self-titled debut (also out this month), ‘New Start Again’ has summer barbecue written all over it, yet both records convey this shadow of sadness that lingers in around the edges of their songs. It’s thinking people’s barbecue music, and is in every way well worth the wait.

Samson McDougall

Sand Pebbles (images from High Vibes Festival 2009)

2011-09-21T16:33:00.000-07:00

Sand Pebbles are living proof of the healthy state of music in Victoria. They represent a strata of musicians who hold down career-type jobs and dedicate a portion of their free time to the band. That’s not unusual in itself; what is unusual is that they’ve been doing it for about 12 years now and have just released album number five. That’s healthy output by many career-bands’ standards, yet the Sand Pebbles have managed to keep it steadily rolling through the love of creating alone.

In their latest release Dark Magic, Sand Pebbles enter new songwriting territory. Known mainly for pulsing psychedelic jams, this album sees the band stride ably into more folk-inspired terrain. It’s nothing to freak out about if you are a fan of their mind benders, there’s enough of their ‘usual’ sound on the record to ease the transition. But Dark Magic shows experimentation with new sonic thrust, vocal dynamics, and relationships and complexities between guitars.

The band are one of the only around to have members’ ages spanning four decades. It’s a strange dynamic, and odd that they found one another at all, yet it grants the five-piece authority over the entire history of rock’n’roll as direct inspiration. With all five active as songwriters, I was curious as to how they can manage to bring it together at all. “The thing that ties us together is a sense of humour really,” says Bassist and self-professed ‘boss’ of the outfit Chris Hollow, “and the music but when we get together it’s always very funny.”

“Chris and I will be the loudest at expressing our opinions,” says guitarist Ben Michael X, “but someone like AT [Andrew Tanner, guitar/vocals] who’s the wise old silver fox, he just kinda hangs back and ends up getting his own way. Everyone only probably writes one or two decent songs a year. Seriously, all these singer/songwriters who want you to buy ten songs about them breaking up with their girlfriend, fuck that! You end up with two great songs and eight shit ones. You’re better off with five songwriters and you get the best of what they’ve got... We’ll save all the crappy ones for our solo records.”

Putting me on the spot, Hollow asks which song I like best from the release. Scrambling, I tread the diplomatic route and suggest the folky elements as a point of difference from their previous works. I also, thankfully, point out album closer and exploratory dreamscape Blue Eyes In Black & White, for which Michael X and Hollow claim partial pen duties. “Tor [Larsen, guitar/high vocal parts] went to Scotland and did the Highland Way,” explains Michael X of the folkier elements, “which is a walk across Scotland and what 500-years-ago Scottish youth did to become men. While he was doing that he met lots of freaky people living in huts in the Scottish highlands and just got into folk roots. So a lot of his lyrics on this record are traditional folk songs. Long Long Ago, I’m pretty sure is a 17th century folk song.”

Larsen’s vocals find new legs on this release. As a one-in-a-million shot coupling for Tanner’s voice, Larsen steps out of the shadows on Dark Magic and up into shared lead duties. One of the results of this is single Occupied Europe (Take Me Across The Water), in which Larsen’s singing defies his age, experience and even gender. At a recent performance in which Tanner was unable to play, Larsen stepped into full-blown singing duties for the duration and did not miss a beat. After the show I asked whether he’d found it difficult and he said, “I could tell you that I struggled, but really it was just a lot of fun”. This takes nothing from Tanner’s chops, as follow up to the aforementioned single Another Way To Love reinforces – all dulcet harmonies and building guitars – but Larsen’s exploration of his talents is allowing the band a breadth of freedom to delve into new wells of sonic inspiration.

“The thing about Tor is that he’s just unafraid to be pure, he has that quality,” says Michael X. Hollow adds: “And it made those songs completely different. Most of those songs that night were absolute Andrew staples, so it was like being in a different band. It comes very naturally to him.”

Sand Pebbles had the honour to be asked to play the Stephen Walker benefit show earlier this year alongside Dirty Three, Dave Graney, Gareth Liddiard and more at the Forum. As long-time fans of Walker’s Triple R radio show Skull Cave, the event touched upon what it means to be part of the music community. “We were fans of Triple R before we were musicians, our goal was never to be on Triple M or Triple J,” says Hollow. “It’s a real thrill. When we’re being played [on the station] everyone still texts each other, it’s still a real buzz.”

“Being a music fan, I grew up listening to and loving the Skull Cave, it really informed me,” continues Michael X. “It was the first place I heard the Velvets when I was a teenager and the Stooges and all that kind of shit. When we put out Ghost Transmissions I remember being in a shitty mood at home... I got in the car to go out and get some takeaway and [Walker] played Black Sun Ensemble. It was just one of those great moments in music when you go ‘fuck I’ve listened to this station all my life and it’s turned me on to all these songs that inspired me to write these long jammy kinds of songs’ and then to hear it on that station, I was pumping the air.”

This aversion to the mainstream and passion for music has led the band into a running association with Galaxie 500 and Luna main-man Dean Wareham, which will culminate in Sand Pebbles supporting Wareham in his upcoming tour of Sydney and Melbourne. For Sand Pebbles, to be acknowledged by an artist they admire, be it Stephen Walker, Dave Graney (who offers a fitting passage on Sand Pebbles in his memoir 1001 Australian Nights) or Wareham, far outweighs the prospect of any commercial success.

“I look at 20-year-olds now in their Nirvana tops and think ‘fuck dudes, grunge fucked music! It fucking ruined it and you are a dead-shit bogan for liking that shit’,” says Michael X. “I’ll go on the record as saying that Nirvana are fuckin’ bogans. There was Luna and Galaxie 500 playing these wonderful, great rock’n’roll songs with so much more beauty and depth.”

“As an artist, he’s never let us down,” adds Hollow. “He didn’t let us down in the ‘90s and it was all grunge, he still played music that wasn’t fashionable at the time.”

“If he says ‘do you want me to play guitar on your record’ or ‘do you want me to help put your record out overseas’, that’s like wow,” continues Michael X. “Would you want some businessman liking you or would you want some musician who you’ve grown up respecting liking your records? Like rather than a commercial radio cowboy [hat] wearing cock face or a great musician that you love. It’s no fucking contest.”

IGGY POP: ROADKILL RISING

2011-09-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

SHOUT FACTORY

Easily the sickest thing about this collection of bootlegs from 1977 to 2009 is the completeness of the package. The thing comprises four CDs, traverses 64 tracks (mostly live bootlegs) and covers a total of well over four hours of Iggy. So for somebody (myself included) who’s a fan but hasn’t necessarily tracked the career of this punk god blow by blow, this document brings together any and all of the shit that’s cemented Pop at the forefront of rock’n’roll for the last forty-odd years.

The discs outline tracks from each of the four decades Pop’s been doin’ his business. From the opening bars of Raw Power you’re taken there. It’s striking through the first disc (the ‘70s, der) the amount of soul and funk thrown into the mix. I Need Somebody scrapes the gutters of loneliness, while Search & Destroy plays out as vital as it’s ever been, in a recording from a Cleveland club in 1977. For bootlegs, the general sound quality ain’t too bad either. There’s jeering, and moments of crowd violence and abuse, but somehow it all adds to the ‘punk’ of it all.

The subsequent discs offer more than enough variation on thematic and sonic exploration to satiate something in every listener. Whether it’s the Nightclubbing and Shades ‘80s period of Pop/Bowie collaboration (and if you don’t know shit about that, read Paul Trynka’s bio Open Up & Bleed); the raw power of his ‘70s material that rocked the UK years before the Sex Pistols arrived on the scene while listeners at home scratched their heads and nodded along to America (the band); the heroin chic of his ‘90s shit, which incorporates the (also Bowie co-write) Lust For Life and this writer’s all time favourite Candy; or whatever he’s been up to in the last decade (not quite so hot, but you can’t deny his live shows); there is some motherfucking thing here for every motherfucker and that’s that.

Beyond the notables there are nestled gems to be discovered and the covers he pulls out across all four discs are glimmering insights into the inspiration of the man. Van Morrison’s Gloria gets a rework (replete with the chorus blasting ‘I.G.G.Y.P.O.P, Iggy Pop!’). Rock’n’roll (you know, the old-type stuff) classics You Really Got Me (Ray Davies), Hang On Sloopy (The McCoys), Real Wild Child (Johnny O’Keefe), and Louie Louie (Chuck Berry) all get a run through along with a bunch of curios including the Batman Theme. The lack of liner notes and limited selection of photographs detract from the thing, but only in the sense that you wanna know more, immerse yourself in this world, be at these shows.

In experiencing Roadkill Rising in a gluttonous fashion, what is really illuminated is that this one guy (and arguably through his various incarnations and collaborations) has pretty much shaped any punk rock variant you listen to today. Not only was he doin’ it first, but he’s still standing, doin’ it last. And his pop sensibilities and rare song writing genius have allowed him to transcend genre (incorporating soul, gospel, rock’n’roll, punk, post-punk, new wave, etc, etc), time period, fashion, social strata, gender, age and language barriers to deliver himself to the world, time and again. For this we should all be thankful. If you don’t love Iggy Pop, there is something seriously fuckin’ wrong with you; but if you do, you will love this release. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Samson McDougall

Sand Pebbles: Dark Magic

2011-09-06T21:15:00.000-07:00

Entering into this, the Sand Pebbles’ fifth album, you find yourself in familiar territory. Distinctive guitar tones circle beneath Andrew Tanner’s strong vocal, which kicks off about ten seconds in and is joined by Tor Larsen’s twenty-odd seconds later. The guitars gather over one another, delays and echoes bounce around for a bit before gradually converging into rippling melody. Spring Time (Who Hasn’t Lost Their Head?) is classic Sand Pebbles. Melding elements of ’70s psych with ’60s folk and pop, it acts as perfect pallet cleanser – once wrapped-up some six minutes later, there’s no question where you are. Second up, Because I Could continues on the same trajectory (it could almost play as the second, albeit more thumping, part of the opening number) but from here Dark Magic veers into some new and exciting territory.

The alternation between Tanner and Larsen on this release broadens the canvas upon which the band can draw. On single Occupied Europe (Take Me Across The Water) Larsen holds complex lyrical patterns singlehandedly and delivers the vocal track of the record. Third number Long Long Ago sees Larsen steer us through the first of a series of straight-up folk songs. His voice emerges from a largely backing role and commands the Sand Pebbles machine onto bold new ground. On first listen you’d almost swear they’d brought in a female vocalist, such is the sweetness of his voice.

Still, the rare and beautiful combination of Tanner and Larsen’s voices has come to define the Sand Pebbles’ sound, as the title track along with the brooding Another Way To Love reinforce. That and the inimitable guitar signatures and irregular rhythms, which are given room to breathe in the more instrumental closing couplet. These signposts guide the listener through an otherwise complex voyage and ease the transition from genre to genre.

Regardless of contributions from Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham, Luna’s Britta Phillips, Spiritualized’s Will Carruthers, et al., which are for the most part difficult to pinpoint, this record signifies an alternation in flight-path for Sand Pebbles and at the same time grounds them as one of the most innovative and important acts Melbourne has produced in recent times. This is a band willing to explore and diversify to their strengths and possibly to the detriment of their more psych-leaning audience. It’s a bold record with hidden jewels aplenty, and no great surprise in that.

Samson McDougall

SIMONE FELICE INTERVIEW WITH SAMSON MCDOUGALL

2011-09-01T20:43:00.000-07:00

When Simone Felice’s daughter Pearle came into the world during a thunder storm last year, he looked at his child for the first time and wondered whether she’d come from a better place. At 33 years old the man, a native of the mountains of New York State, had endured a level of suffering and personal tragedy to rival most lifetimes. His pain is reflected in his music, through his writing with groups The Felice Brothers and The Duke & The King, and further explored in his first novel Black Jesus. The story paints a bleak depiction of small-town USA, the disconnectedness of societal elements and the US war machine; and tests the depths of desperation and depravity experienced in our modern world. Yet there exists, as with his music, a thread of light – a music of chance occurrences – that alleviates the gravity of the work.

“I feel like humanity is teetering on the brink of complete degradation and collapse, but you know, at the same time I am hopeful,” he drawls from his Mountain barn/recording studio where he works. “In some ways I have to be because I have a brand new baby who’s one year old. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, so I have to look on the bright side and realise that we have love and the sun still shines and there’s food on the table and fire in the stove. I have a great task laid out before me now and that is to try to make her world as light and as good as it can possibly be.”

Declared legally dead for seven minutes as a 12 year old, Felice survived an aneurism but had to re-learn all basic motor skills. The same condition struck him another blow last year when a series of fainting episodes revealed an irreversible calcification of his aortic valve, which led to emergency open-heart surgery. Heartbroken by the loss of an unborn child in 2009, the arrival of his first child has, as any parent will tell you, altered Felice’s outlook of the world and forced him to pay greater heed to the beauty the exists in the day-to-day.

“When I was a kid there was always the shadow of the cold war and nuclear destruction at any moment,” he continues. “There’s always been war and famine and hatred and rape and bigotry and greed but there’s also always been love and laughter and smiles and babies born and songs and art and so I feel like it’s a scale, like in an old market. The scale sits this way or that and it always seems to be sort of in balance, although you could argue that it tips to the dark side more often than not, but like I said, I have a new way of lookin’ at life. So when my baby was born and I looked at her, I thought I can learn something from her and we can learn from the wisdom and the innocence and the wonder that the children have in their eyes.”

It’s interesting then that Black Jesus paints such a grim picture of humanity? “Have you ever read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?” he queries. “Well, that’s a spot more grim than this book and he won the Pulitzer Prize for it and Oprah had him on her book club [laughs]. My book is like a children’s story compared to that. I don’t think there should be too much controversy about it.”

Where Black Jesus goes further than The Road is that it names names. Black Jesus is not only a grim depiction of the lows that humans can reach, but it deliberately points the finger at the US government and armed forces for their crimes against the world while infiltrating big business and the mechanisms of fame in the same downward spiral. Overall, however, you’d have to call it a human story – a story centred on some very insignificant people from a very small town.

“I hope that people will be able to relate to it because it tells the story of regular people, the common folk,” he continues. “I wanted to tell a story about people that are on the fringes of society, these are the people that I grew up around. That little town Gay Paris is basically the town I grew up in just with a different name. So a lot of those stories and a lot of those characters are based on people I knew growing up.

“I think it’s important as a writer to write what you know, to tell the truth. I’m so happy that this book is out and that people can read it. It feels like a real gift to me because I’ve been writing stories for a long time and poetry a long time so to have it out there now is a really special feeling for me. This is the first of a handful of interviews I’m doing and it’s kinda hard to believe. I mean, I’ve put a lot of records out and done a lot of stuff and played for a lot of people and hopefully moved people through my work, but it’s another thing to have a book in print for people to hold in their hand and take on the train with them.”

Dredging these stories from the same realm of personal experience, it’s no wonder there are similarities in aesthetic and thematics between his prose and musical output. “I think that they overlap thematically sometimes because the characters and stories kind of spring from the same well. But to bring a song to life for instance or prose to life, they are completely different disciplines. I think that they are branches of the same tree, but the fruit is different.”

These differences in process extend far beyond the constructs of musical collaboration. The editorial process especially required Felice to completely remove ego from the equation in order to ‘dance’ with the editorial knife for the sake of the vision of the work. “I wrote the first few lines of that story in 2005,” he continues. “I had a friend that went to Iraq and fought there and came back with injuries, though they’re the kind that you can’t really see... you know what I mean. So I wanted to tell a story about the traumas of war and I wanted to tell a story about how love can save your life and how we can see in different ways than with our eyes. I got a really great editor in London, who believed in my story and really encouraged me and helped me, and I’ve found over the past two years I put it down on paper and I hope people like it.

“It’s like with music, a good producer will illuminate the great parts of your song and help you shed the dead skin of the other parts. That process was really great. It’s interesting to trust someone to put a knife to your creation. But if it’s the right person and you can trust them then you have to surrender to the knife. And if you let them in, then you do the dance together.”

...AND YOU WILL KNOW US BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD SAMSON MCDOUGALL – INTERVIEW WITH CONRAD KEELY

2011-09-01T20:39:00.000-07:00

Conrad Keely, one half of Texas’s ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead brains trust, seems pretty relaxed. When I catch up with him in his – spiritual at least – home in Austin, he’s recovering from a hangover (it’s about 9pm his time, must’ve been a pretty big one) and lamenting the mixture of tequila and beer. It’s OK though, because outside of his media commitments this evening he’s living in some kind of dream existence by the standards of many. At the moment, he informs, he’s putting the final touches on some visual art for an exhibition before heading into the studio at some indeterminate future time to work on what will be the eighth ...Trail Of Dead album in about sixteen years. All this means that his other, more recent, creative endeavour, a novel, will have to wait for a while as he negotiates the rigors of life as a multi-faceted renaissance-type man. Yet when explained he’s living the dream of millions he offers, “It’s nice to hear that because in some ways I feel like I’m the consummate slacker.” Bastard.

...Trail Of Dead was born out of Austin in the mid-‘90s. The product of the fusion of, for the most part, two young creative minds, Keely and Jason Reece erupted onto the scene and by the release of their third album in 2002, the Pitchfork perfect-scoring Source Tags & Codes, they had the medium to heavy rock world in a spin. Their sound melds elements of psychedelia, punk, Brit pop, even classic rock, and somehow manages to defy identification with regard to time and place. By Keely’s estimation, their sound resulted from the converging and alignment of two differing music pedigrees. “When we first met as kids our musical backgrounds were more contrary,” Keely says. “As soon as we established a common ground they’ve pretty much been parallel since then with the real exception that Jason’s been into ‘90s hip hop and I’ve been more into folk than he is. As far as common background, now it’s very complementary, but when we met, he was the hardcore punk rocker/skate punk; he turned me on to Dag Nasty, the Descendents, Fugazi and all that stuff. I was the ‘70s prog rocker, I turned him on to Pink Floyd and Rush and Genesis, the classic rock.”

There is a Britishness to ...Trail Of Dead that distinguished them from the US grunge and hardcore explosions of the mid- and late-‘90s and strangely brought them into line with much of the Brit pop of the same period. This different-ness, and the growing reputation of their wild stage shows, allowed ...Trail Of Dead to sidestep the attachment to any one ‘scene’ and develop their material on their own terms. “I was born in the UK, I’m an Irish citizen, maybe that’s where it all comes from,” Keely continues. “I’ve never thought of it in those terms, it’s something that we do almost subconsciously I guess. Other than that I don’t think that there’s any way for us to explain it. We’ve never really wanted to sound like our time period, to me we’ve always wanted to sound futuristic, that was always the goal. In a way it was our goal and personal mission to ourselves to create a type of music that we pictured being played in another time. It’s difficult to articulate but every album we’ve done has basically been a product of our environment at the time.”

For good and bad, the band have been able to push forward with each release without the constraints of actually writing for a particular audience. In doing so, they undoubtedly alienate listeners through a constantly morphing aesthetic. But, as Keely explains, it’s allowed the band to develop a continual narrative, of sorts, across and through all of their releases to date. “For me, every album is an experiment launched from the previous album,” he continues. “And although I’ve heard feedback that each album we do is drastically different, I don’t see them as being that drastically different at all. I see them all as being part of a continuous journey. I’m not strict about the narratives. I don’t tell the story of Tommy, the deaf dumb and blind kid you know? It’s more about leaving as much up to the listener as possible in terms of how they want to build that narrative.”

The novel Keely is writing centres on a character featured on the artwork (also by Keely) on the cover of this year’s release Tao Of The Dead. In fact, he reveals that the narrative is intertwined with Tao... and somehow the band’s music and the novel are interconnected. “The book that I’m working on is more of an accompaniment, [the record and the book] accompany one another,” he says. “I’ve been working on the book for years. When I did the artwork for Tao Of The Dead I introduced the character for the first time. It’s a sci-fi fantasy, steam punk in aesthetic, set in a future world where it surrounds the boy that’s been on the last two album covers, who’s a type of telepathic savant.

“I think it’s a great time for literature and books in general. There seems to be a lot of great stuff coming out now and a real sense of resurgence and interest, especially among the young adult crowd. Novel writing is very challenging; it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. When I’m in book mode, that’s all I’m doing that day. But at the moment it’s my art, there’s an exhibition coming up so I’m finishing a piece for that. Then there’s the record, so the book has to take a back seat, which is fair enough because the book is going to take longer than any of these other things and I don’t want to rush it.”

Thankfully ...Trail Of Dead have set aside a little time to pay a visit to Australia in September (only their third visit to date). We’re hoping their devastating live performance hasn’t slowed too dramatically, as their two previous visits have registered as entries in the rock mythology of the last decade. As far as Keely is concerned, the passion for creating music under the ...Trail Of Dead moniker is as alive as it’s ever been – they still have unrealised creative goals. “We try not to kill ourselves,” he says of touring. “We used to be far more aggressive about touring but not so much now. Jason’s got a kid, he’s raising his son, so he has to have time off which frees me up to work on the book. The thing that feels the best about it is knowing that we haven’t achieved our goals. There’s these musical and artistic goals and visions that we are still striving for, still searching for. Perfection eludes us and in some ways I don’t want to necessarily achieve it, I always want to be striving for it and as long as I still have that sense then I’ll always feel we have something to accomplish.”

Henry Wagons – Interview by Samson McDougall

2011-06-28T21:58:00.000-07:00

Henry Wagons exudes a natural charm, a gregarious larrikinism; on stage or in person he is instantly likeable, a born performer. His band, Wagons, operates as an extension of this personality. Somehow he’s managed to surround himself with the right mix of mates and musicians to deliver this little piece of himself, and themselves, through the media of country music. The sum of it all is a heaving meat party. Their shows are famously wild, unhinged and unbridled affairs. You can’t help but be swept into the open sweat-soaked arms of this band; drawn into the panting bosom of the beast. All they ask in return is that you love them like they love you... and they most undoubtedly do. You can tell.
Having been forced into guitar lessons at an early age, Wagons didn’t practice and claims in those early years he “Never really took it up”. The instrument gathered dust through his adolescence and was not revisited until he started university. Looking back on the past ten years – which have included five album releases, numerous national and (recent) international tours, awards and ultimately resulted in his existence now as a full-time professional musician – it’s frightening to think that all of this stemmed from what was realistically a happy accident. With an instrument gathering cobwebs for all those years, it was only a matter of time before it was going to be played, or discarded. “I did an arts degree because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” he says. “A philosophy degree only has 12 contact hours so there’s plenty of time to do other things in between. I had to do something, so I picked the guitar up again. I never stopped.”
There is very little about Wagons, bar his fortuitous nomenclature, which rings of country. To describe him, you’d lean towards words like urbane or cultured – he hosts an arts segment on the ABC for God’s sake – you could take it as far as saying sophisticated. That’s not to say that country folk can’t or don’t express such qualities, but Wagons exists and seems to belong in an urban setting, his fingernails are clean so to speak. It’s unsurprising then that his initial forays into creating music came in the form of rock bands (a hard-rock outfit called Breaking The Law of particular comic value).
Witness Wagons play and you’ll understand he was destined for a life in the limelight. His profile leaking off of stages and into the wider cultural consciousness through his recent forays into media reinforces this. Armed with a solid base knowledge of music handed down by parents he describes as “open minded and supportive” of his pursuits, there is no question in his mind he’s following the good path. “My Nan always talks to me about how she wants me to give up music and get a real job,” he says. “I go and visit her every week when I’m in town. She says ‘doing music makes you tired’. I think doing five gigs in five days is nothing like working in a television factory like she did five days a week. I get the feeling she would’ve had to’ve coped with more industrial strength noise and more hard labour than I do, so five gigs in five days doesn’t bother me. It’s a pretty cruisy job.
“Being in front of the camera, I get a very similar creative rush as I do on stage. It sort of stretches the same muscles, having to do stuff on the fly and play with words, it’s all exciting stuff. But music is my passion and my number one go-to for stretching the creative muscles. When it comes down to it I’m just an attention seeking only child, so by any means [if] I can get people looking at me and giving me their attention, I’m happy for it.”
Equal to the providence that saw Señoir Wagons return to his instrument, his entry into the realm of the pastoral stemmed from circumstance rather than design. “Wagons [the band] came along at a pivotal moment,” he continues. “I only knew about five or six guitar chords and my drummer gave me an American Recordings Johnny Cash record. I was reading a Cormac McCarthy novel at the time and had just seen Dead Man, the Johnny Depp/Jim Jarmusch film at the cinema. That combination, that triad is what made me make some fucked-up country music.
“I never really thought about it, at the time it was just a fun thing to do, but ever since it’s had this weird kind of momentum which has accelerated over the last couple of years. It’s always had enough of a gathering snowball effect to keep going for the ten years I’ve been playing in the band.”
This snowballing has forced the Wagons machine from the comfort of their inner-city environs and thrust them into the countryside – forcing them to front up with their self-deprecating brand of alternative country in the beating heart of the scene. It brings about some interesting questions in terms of audience: who is it that listens to Wagons? On what levels are listeners engaging with the earnestness of some of the songs, while rolling with the relative comedy of others? And, most importantly, how can they be sure when the joking’s done and the ‘real’ country’s begun?
“In the early days of Wagons, the most country we’d get would be a suburban barbeque – we didn’t swing too far from a foccacia and a latte,” he concedes. “Because we were so Melbourne-centric, there were concerns that what we did wouldn’t really translate. But I found that with each new frontier there’s more similarities than differences. There’s an odd similarity in playing in the country and playing in town. Sure, after 2am differences start to emerge but ultimately what it comes down to is a bunch of people getting together on a Saturday night that like watching live music and getting pissed, who are in for a good time and if there’s a band there that can deliver it, then they will have a good time.
“The further out of the capital cities we go, there’s a higher likelihood of having an amazing night. In the capital cites, whether in Australia or in the US, you pretty much know how it’s going to go: you’ll be playing in a civilised bar, sure there’ll be a couple of shit-faced people but you pretty much know how they’re gonna behave. When you get out into the sticks, there’s always a bit of an edge to it, you never know quite how it’s going to go. It can be really fun and an amazing time or it can be an absolute heartbreaking nightmare where everyone is just crumbled and cruel. Either way it leads to an amazing evening.”
This attitude in conjunction with the self-assuredness of the show plays no small part in winning listeners over from urban clubs to festival stages and country halls. To have the balls to remove yourself from your comforts and ‘put out’ in strange environments agrees with the universal concept of fortune befriending the bold. There’s something very human about testing yourself, pushing the bounds of what’s attainable for those brazen enough to dare; Wagons encapsulates and translates these concepts with precision. “Everyone in the band likes, as Dave Graney calls it, ‘rude music’,” he continues. “It doesn’t mean swearing or violence, but music that isn’t timid or mild mannered. Whether it’s Si [‘the Philanthropist’ Francis]’s passion for brutal hip hop or Mark [Dawson]’s love of Otis Redding, everyone in the band likes big and brash music, so we like to put on a big show. It can be a surprise when people turn up to their corner bar and get a bunch a dickheads pretending like they’re headlining Woodstock, [but] it’s entertaining and it more or less works.”
This belief that anyone can have a crack; that if you love it, you should chase it; and that the reward should be weighed in the connection with audience and the energy that brings, is a large part of what sets Wagons apart. Their appeal is broad: making everyman music with a sense of humour and self-derision. It’s a very Australian concept, and it seems the further they stray from the capital cities, the further they are prepared, and expected, to push the envelope into the ‘rude’.
“There’s some kind of parallel universe between Bunbury Western Australia and some shitty bar in New York or London. It’s the same guy with long curly hair and a trench coat that doesn’t really say much but comes up and talks to you in a quiet voice after the show and you think, ‘I talked to that guy eight years ago at a bar in Brunswick’. It’s a parallel existence that these creative people and music lovers have, and I’m coming up against it and enjoying the company of these people wherever I go. I was originally worried about when I’d tease the crowd or berate someone or make fun of some things, but the further out you go, the more people love to hang shit on their friends. I don’t think I can control what I do enough to change it from place to place. I can’t help but be a smart arse.”

The Black Angels – Interview with Christian Bland

2011-06-28T21:51:00.000-07:00

Christian Bland of psychedelic rockers The Black Angels is not one to complain about the pressures and drag of being a touring musician. As we speak he’s excited to be gearing up for a flight to Spain, which will see his band playing Primavera Sound festival for the first time. Though, until now, strangers to Spain, The Black Angels are no strangers to festivals. Hailing from Austin, Texas – home of the annual industry showcase South By Southwest – The Black Angels have played, amongst others, no less than two All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and SXSW. It’s unsurprising really, given the natural association of the festival psyche and psychedelic music in general, but Bland puts the band’s natural leanings to festival stages down to a commonality of mind between musicians and audience.
“It’s great because they’re big gatherings,” he says. “When you have a big gathering of like-minded people it makes it all the more powerful. All Tomorrow’s Parties, they’re really awesome, something we’re really in to. We played at the one in Camber Sands England, which is like a beach holiday place that’s abandoned the rest of the year, and we played the one in Kutsher’s in upper-state New York, which is an old country club and straight out of The Twilight Zone.”
In moving from Florida to Austin in 2002, Bland set himself the task of finding the right people, in what he believed to be the right place, to form and band. Initially hooking up with childhood friend Alex Maas, the pair experimented with upwards of thirty local musicians over two years before discovering Stephanie Bailey. With the benefits of hindsight, the process obviously paid dividends, but Bland maintains that he had faith in the quality of the town to relinquish the players he was looking for eventually. “After living here for about two months I got in touch with Alex,” Bland continues. “We’d grown up together since I was about 11, so we’d done all sorts of creative stuff but never played music together. It was two years before we finally found Stephanie and once she joined it really started to take off.
“There’s a band playing every night of the week here so when we’re home we’re always goin’ downtown and checking out friend’s bands. There’s a real good thing happening here right now. There’s a lot of music that’s up my alley right here in Austin. SXSW has a major influence. When our friend’s bands come down for SXSW they always say, man we’re movin’ to Austin. They get the bug.”
With access to a huge range of local and international artists in Austin every March, Bland decided it would make sense to hold a celebration of the psychedelic acts that were visiting. Thus a new festival, Psych Fest Austin, was spawned and, as Bland explains, what started as an excuse to hang out with their touring friends and other like-minded musicians rapidly grew into a three-day extravaganza of all things psychedelic. “It’s continually grown,” he says. “We started Psych Fest the weekend before SXSW in March 2008. The idea was first to see which of our friend’s bands were coming for SXSW and ask them if they could come a couple of days early and play at our festival. The first one was just a Saturday then the next year it grew into three days. We’ve started to fly bands in who are leaving before SXSW. This last year we did it at this old abandoned power plant here in Austin and it was really awesome. It was maybe double the capacity of the last year. It’s just been a gathering of all of our friends and is really one of my favourite times of year these days.”
Bland credits his initial interest in psychedelic music with his first experience of hearing the space-age ‘60s-inspired jams of Brian Jonestown Massacre. “Once I discovered them,” he continues, “it opened doors to discovering bands like The Warlocks or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – they were the centre point for where it started for me. I started playing guitar when I was like 21or something and they just inspired me. My Mum and Dad listened to the oldies stations when I was young and that’s the music I fell in love with. So when I heard Brian Jonestown Massacre, they sounded like that old stuff in the modern day and I just thought man I wanna be a part of that.”
Sharing a stage with BJM’s Anton Newcombe in 2006 was an obvious highlight for a band that have, through extensive touring and festival appearances, been allowed to rub shoulders with many of their heroes and contemporaries. In playing as the backing band in 2008 For legendary psych God Roky Erikson though, The Black Angels were to not only able to fulfil a dream of backing one of the band’s biggest influences, but also play an integral role in Erikson revisiting a painful yet incredibly productive and influential period of his life. “One of the reasons I wanted to move to Austin was [Erikson’s former band] the 13th Floor Elevators,” Bland continues. “Getting to play with him was surreal, it was crazy. Alex and I had seen him play a couple of times around Austin and after we saw him we’d say, man I wish he’d just played a couple more 13th Floor Elevators songs. So when we got to back him as a band our goal was to get him to do the first five songs off their first album.”
Bland explains that though Erikson would regularly perform some of these songs, they figured the others were too painful for him to revisit. What they discovered when practising with Erikson prior to their shows, were far more pragmatic reasons for him avoiding the material. “I didn’t know if he’d like to revisit that time of his life because it was rough,” Bland continues. “That was when they were taking all the LSD and he got caught with one marijuana joint and they were gonna throw him in jail for a long time, like five years, or he could go to the mental institute for like two years. So he went to the metal institute and they gave him electro-shock therapy. It really screwed him up. It’s crazy, for one joint, what a waste.
“We realised that the reason he didn’t do [the songs] was that he didn’t remember how to play them. So we invited him over to our house and Nate Ryan and I would sit down with an acoustic guitar, a music stand and the words in front of him and re-teach him his songs. It was pretty challenging at first because he was so frustrated that he couldn’t remember the songs but he just kept plugging away at it. We knew that in the recesses of his mind he must’ve known them because he’s sung them hundreds of times. Eventually it just started to click and he was playing them and lo and behold we got to do the first five songs of the album while we were playing with him in his backing band.”

FUCKED UP: David Comes To Life

2011-06-04T20:23:00.000-07:00

ALBUM OF THE YEAR???

The slow trickle of free downloadable singles from this – Fucked Up’s umpteenth release, third full-length album and first rock opera – suggested a marked change of tack for Toronto’s largest punk export. For a band that have constantly dismantled and rearranged the very fabric of what recorded music should resemble, it’s unsurprising they would further push the limits of what they’re capable of, but a 78 minute rock opera by anyone’s standards is a stretch.

Introduced early to our hero David, we traverse a fictional account of life in Britain during the Thatcher years. With Damian Abraham’s trademark screams muted somewhat, bassist Sandy Miranda’s vocal melodies blur the edges of what has largely institutionalised Fucked Up as a punk outfit. Melded with extended ‘straight’ rock jams, as opposed to the usual thrashing assault, the vocal dynamic bends the paradigm of where exactly their music sits. Guitar parts lock into a steam train of a rhythm from the outset with delicate almost Neil Young-ish lead touches. The effect is more the heaving of pulse and breath than the changeable and often borderline violent passages fans would be accustomed to.

The tempo and overall feel shifts through brackets of songs rather than the individual numbers themselves. They trick and tempt with brutal abandon at times (fourteenth track I Was There is as critical as any previous release), but in holding out from relinquishing the psychosis of their earlier material, they deliver a work that is remarkably listenable and will define this band for years to come. Undoubtedly, given the quality of the record, destined for minor accolades on a path to obscurity, David Comes To Life stands firm as what in a just world what would be heralded as a shining example of what’s within reach for those bold enough to dare.

Samson McDougall

I Dream In Transit – Interview with Steven Heath

2011-06-04T20:20:00.000-07:00

“People kept Saying David Lynch, David Lynch, David Lynch but I’ve never seen his films,” says I Dream In Transit’s Steven Heath when queried about whether the band’s nightmarish compositions would make for killer movie soundtrack material. “Something pretty strange, a little bit dark, I think. When I hear Sigur Rós I think of icebergs for some reason. What I see in my head is like a 1940s movie with the sound turned down, and that doesn’t make for a very entertaining hour and a half.”

For the moment Heath’s sights are set on this weekend’s Paranoia Pop mini-festival he’s organising at the Workers Club. I Deam In Transit’s insomniac dreamscapes will be joined by Cuba Is Japan’s high-seas adventures, A Dead Forest Index’s discordant brooding and a bunch of other, equally boundary-pushing, outfits for what is shaped to be an aural extravaganza for those bold enough to experience it. “The idea behind the event, and even calling it an event and not just a gig,” Heath continues, “is that all of these bands do express things differently with their stories and experimenting with sound. Hopefully it will be a listening event where people can come along and stand in the dark and have things happen around them.”

A recent relocation to Melbourne from Sydney has opened the door for Heath to get involved with more events like Paranoia Pop. He explains that while he thinks the quality of music in Sydney is equivalent to anything that’s happening here, the numbers of gig-goers pale in comparison. “We fit in to the music scene here a lot better,” he says. “I don’t think I could have put this kind of event together in Sydney. There’s a lot of interesting projects up there but there’s just not the audience for it. There’ll be a lot of fascinating things up there but Sydney people just don’t go and see them for a lot of reasons. It’s just not as welcoming as here. In Sydney people tend to prepare for a Friday or Saturday night out but when they go out they don’t really seem to be enjoying themselves. Here it’s about going out as opposed to the preparation.”

Interestingly, similar thematic sentiments run through I Dream In Transit’s music. As their name suggests, their tunes somehow revolve around a disorienting core of the airport lounges and restless wakefulness we experience during travel. “We came up with the name at the airport in response to the idea that it’s a very strange thing to do to be a person who’s constantly in transit,” he continues. “I guess the idea of air travel and way we live now is kind of strange, a weird form of psychedelia. So the idea of jetlag we tried to convert into a sound.”

The results are strikingly accurate given the existentiality of the subject matter. There is a familiarity in the mood of the music they create that floods with recurrent memories of the forgotten ‘in-between periods’ of our journeys. It’s a universally appealing concept, and one that will make for a unique live experience. “It’s all we knew in a way,” Heath continues. “A lot of the psychedelic music being made I enjoy but the lyrics and the concepts don’t really mean anything to us. A lot of it was centred around the Vietnam War and themes of the ‘60s, even with bands like The Black Angels, bands making music now. What we did know was airports and travelling and industrial areas and shopping malls – anonymous empty spaces and so we just tried to convert that into a sound. It’s not really about overseas; it’s more about the process of getting there and the in-between periods of life. It’s a weird kind of grey area of existence that nobody seems to notice when they’re out of it. We tried to remember it for some reason.”

Samson McDougall

VALENTIINE interview with Vanessa V

2011-06-04T20:18:00.000-07:00

This dude was telling me, ‘They’re like early ‘90s stoner or grunge music man, you’ll love it’, and he was right. Valentiine draw heavily on a sound synonymous with that period. Think L7, Breeders and Veruca Salt and you’re half way there. Catching them live for the first time is like a (mild acid) trip down memory lane; but more than that, their songs stand up so strongly they’ll be buzzing around in your head for days.
Love Like, the first single from their about-to-be-released self-titled debut, was launched to a packed Old Bar as a sweet little seven inch earlier in the year. The audience on the night was like a sliding scale of age and musical fancies from old rockers banging away at the rear of the room (including a couple of noted local via Tasmania hardcore exponents) to the cutest bunch of barely legal rock girls dancing circles in the front row. For the band, the leaning towards a known period of rock’n’roll was more a case of saluting what they love than trying to replicate the past. “We’ve all got the same influences,” says singer/guitarist Vanessa V. “I started playing guitar because of Veruca Salt. It’s always gonna come through but with each song we write there’s more of us there if that makes sense. The roots are there, you can still hear where we’re coming from but there’s more of ourselves in there.”
Recorded at Brooklyn Sound by – fellow lover of all things 1994 – Malcolm McDowell, the record is shaped to translate this timelessness of a known aesthetic whilst allowing the quality of writing to shine through the wash of nostalgia. For the band, Vanessa continues, it was hugely important for the recording process to be as light hearted as possible. “The record came off sounding exactly the way we wanted it to sound. We were really worried about recording with someone who’s pushy or that we didn’t feel comfortable with, but we just gelled. It was always fun, the sessions never dragged and were never boring. We just fucked around really and somehow made a record.
“I don’t think we’d record with someone that didn’t like the music we like. I couldn’t imagine as an engineer sitting through hours and hours of music that you didn’t even like. He was passionate about the stuff we laid down. It wasn’t audacious; it was just laid back and really cool.”
Having packed out the Old Bar for the single launch, Valentiine are stepping it up a notch for this Saturday’s album launch at Melbourne’s veritable home of rock’n’roll the Tote. With a cluster of worthy bands on offer on the night, it already smacks of one of those, not infrequent, all-killer bills the venue is famous for. For Valentiine it goes hand in hand with being based in this city – the diversity and quality of acts on offer every week is unsurmountable. “I don’t know if Melbourne’s always been this way, we feel really privileged,” she continues. “Yes there are a lot of bands but there’s so much really great stuff happening, it’s buzzing. The venues, especially places like Old Bar or the Tote really know how to put together a good bill.
“The reason we wanted the Tote for the album launch was that the first time we played there was a Tuesday night and we felt like absolute rock gods. There was no one there, like five people or something. Then we played there a ridiculous amount of times. I think they have this rule where you can’t play there twice in one month, so we’d change the name of the band and play second time. It just became a second home like it is for a lot of bands I guess. The Tote is so a part of the record, it wouldn’t feel right anywhere else.”

Samson McDougall

Ironhide: Interview with Lochlan Watt

2011-06-04T20:10:00.000-07:00

For whatever reasons there’s a common sentiment in music that somehow metal is derivative of classical and orchestral compositions. In a broad sense this could considered true – after all, all music is derivative of historical forms – but for some reason the tempo shifts and, at times, over-blown theatrics of metal draw parallels with Wagner or Bach or whomever.

Though classically trained, Lochlan Watt of Brisbane metal outfit Ironhide doesn’t necessarily adhere to these comparisons. For Watt the attraction to the heavier forms of contemporary music was born less from compatibility of application and more out of frustrations with the modern world. “It’s just the outlet I guess,” he says. “Metal’s for me basically. I started getting into metal when I started questioning the world around me and I decided to learn a bit more about how life actually works. My introduction into metal coincided with finding frustration in life and even from a musical point of view; I had classical training so technical music has always held my attention. I get bored of simple song structures, not many other genres really give me that same kick.

“Some people will say that metal is really similar to classical music, I don’t think so. It’s not that similar really, although with Ironhide, you could look at it in that way in that our guitar player [Shaun Burke] is pretty much the composer. He writes it all, demos it all; I guess the only real difference is that when we get into a jam room with it as a group we’ll make a few changes and suggestions.”

In terms of defining Ironhide’s sound, the words blistering, brutal and absolute spring to mind. In metal circles it’s not that simple. With so many sets and sub-sets existing within the same musical realm it can be difficult to differentiate styles without forcing parameters of sound or listing band comparisons. This may all seem like unnecessary pigeonholing but the genre of ‘heavy metal’ is so vast these days that one man’s metal can be another’s nursery rhyme. “In terms of where Ironhide fits into everything, we’re in a bit of a no-man’s land I think,” continues Watt. “If you had to find a succinct term to define our band then metalcore would probably make sense but I don’t think we sound like a typical metalcore band. We’ve been describing our sound as technical metal with punk vibes and post-metal influences. There’s a bit of sludge in there and doom as well. It’s definitely technical and definitely heavy, but definitely not death metal and it’s too metal to be hardcore so I’m not sure... we just float around. Some of the younger bands coming up, we feel a bit of a musical connection to, like The Idols, Acid Snake and Capeweather – bands that have elements of metal and hardcore and punk or whatever without having to be like a big scary metal dude.”

The loss of the Arthouse in Melbourne and the impending doom facing Brisbane’s bastion of heavy music Rosie’s is flagging tough times for metal in Australia. Thankfully the (albeit brief) resurgence of interest in ‘90s sludge and doom bands along with the ascent of cross-genre festivals like Soundwave and more specialist festivals such as Doomsday are allowing a new cohort of metal fans access to the healthy outlet that the music allows. “We’re about to lose Rosie’s, which is the main metal venue up here,” Watt continues. “Most of the shows are supposed to be moving to the Jubilee Hotel, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few months, it’s a bit of a turning point in terms of Brisbane metal. I don’t know what the fuck I’d do if it wasn’t for metal and heavy music. I’d have to find another outlet – maybe I’d be in jail. There’s nothing else quite like it to give you that release.”

Samson McDougall

Evelyn Morris (PIKELET) Interview

2011-05-10T23:32:00.000-07:00

In some kind of fate twist, Evelyn Morris’s brainchild and rapidly expanding Melbourne institution Pikelet would never have existed had she not succumbed to the usual teenage angst and pressures of trying to be cool. Dreaming of a life as a concert pianist, Morris studied the instrument throughout her childhood only to turn to the drums in high school attempting to break away from the stifling constructs of classical music. From here she branched out, dabbling in varying media and styles from hip-hop to punk. It was in punk music that Morris found herself a home as drummer for local exponents Baseball and psych/punk brain melters True Radical Miracle, amongst numerous other collaborations including a spot in Japan’s Boredoms ‘Boadrums’ performance at last year’s International Arts Festival.

Pikelet is about as far removed from any of this as imaginable. With its inception very much a bedroom project, Morris as Pikelet weaves delicate beautiful textures through varying instrumentation and a loop pedal. Not so much raging against the frenetic aggression of her other musical couplings, Morris explains that Pikelet arose as a mechanism through which she could explore the more beautiful aspects of the world. “I’d tried everything,” she says. “What I found was that when I enjoyed [music] the most was when it was really hard and really fast so that’s how I ended up playing in punk bands. Then the Pikelet thing was just a big reaction to that cause I felt like there were other things I wanted to try that were kind of quiet and more melodic. I wanted to do more of a singer songwriter thing so I tried it using a looper. At the time I was going through some soul searching because my mum was sick so it was like a reaction to circumstances. It occurred to me that there was nothing I could do about it so there was no point being angry. It was more about finding a way to look for beauty in it and making something that was healing.”

Frustrated with the limitations of what could be achieved live with a loop pedal, Morris enlisted the services of a few friends to help out. Through the necessity of these unions, Pikelet has now become a bona-fide four piece. With a Soundclash grant allowing the band to recently engage in an intensive song writing period, Morris explains the forthcoming third album will be a markedly different beastie indeed. “It sounds more grown up or something,” she continues. “The right people came along, so it just made sense. They were the inspiration to get the band together, like the Blues Brothers or something. It wasn’t a calculated thing; it was [again] a reaction to circumstances. There was a lot missing from what I wanted to do live. When I recorded at home it was thick and layered with heaps going on and I couldn’t present that how I wanted to live so I thought it was time to get a band. It hasn’t been totally smooth but any creative process has some bumps in it. You have to navigate people’s ideas and different places that they come from, it’s been really interesting.”

Signed to Chapter Music upon presentation of Pikelet’s first demo, Morris credits the label’s creator Guy Blackman as a driving force in the continuation of the project over the years. Further to this she believes that it’s people such as Blackman that make Melbourne a great place to live and work as an artist. “If he hadn’t been around in terms of emotional support, I don’t know if Pikelet would be around anymore,” she adds. “In Melbourne there’re so many people doing so many different kinds of music that you never get caught up thinking yours is the most important. It gives you the freedom from your ego to explore your music without too much of a grandiose idea of what you want it to be.”

Mike Noga Interview

2011-05-09T18:01:00.000-07:00

Mike Noga occupies a table at a North Fitzroy cafe and throws down a few mouthfuls of his lunch as one journalist exits the media sushi train and the next one moves in. He’s bright, welcoming, engaging—his eyes are a wild blue up close. Unphased by the press commitments of the day (though he does admit he’ll be having a proper drink pretty soon), Noga has a new solo record he’s excited to talk about. His enthusiasm about the projest is disarming.

Noga is best known as drummer for ballad-punk dynamos, and relentless tourers, The Drones, with whom he’s been playing for six years now. It’s been almost that long since Noga’s released a truly solo album—his last 2006’s Folk Songs—and this new record The Balladeer Hunter marks a dramatic leap forward in song writing and overall completeness of feel. Ten heartfelt songs weave a striking yet gentle and simply beautiful series of tales here—clearly the defining work of a man who’s output has been significant in all its forms thus far.

“I just always played music,” he says. “It always felt like the natural thing for me to do. I got into bands whan I was young and growing up in Hobart, which still produces heaps of great bands. I made the move [to Melbourne] when I hit eighteen and was always in bands and always writing songs.

“The major turning point was when I went and saw The Drones when they were nobodies, maybe at the Empress, and I was completely blown away. I didn’t know them at all but I ran into [Drones’ front man Gareth Liddiard] Gaz at a pub a couple of weeks later, introduced myself and just said ‘even though you don’t know me if you ever need a drummer, if your current drummer quits or anything happens, you have to call me’. He said, ‘Ok deal’, and we shook hands. It’s quite a romantic story and when we talk about it now we remember lookin’ each other in the eyes and thinkin’ I wanna be in that band.”

It was three years before the phone call arrived. When it did, Liddiard asked Noga if he’d be able to pack his bag for Europe for a six-month tour. “I had to quit my job and take a leap of faith,” Noga continues. “I’d seen [The Drones] a lot in those three years I didn’t talk to Gaz, and thought fuck these guys are mind blowing. So I took that leap of faith and that was six years ago.

“I’ve been really fortunate in the last five years that I’ve been able to live off music. It’s not easy, it can be a huge sacrifice. I’m broke, put it that way. I don’t have life insurance or any of that kind of stuff. Still there was never any question of a different career, it’s just always what I’ve done and felt like it’s what I really want to do.”

The Drones’ story is one of great successes in terms of industry/peer recognition and international following, but the nature of the music business these days dictates that the touring band will prosper, so tour they did. For Noga, however, the road is not conducive to the writing of his own music. So arrives the double-edged reality of ‘making it’ in music not necessarily being the ideal creative environment even if it does facilitate survival.

“We’re lucky that with The Drones that we can tour and make some money,” he continues. “We can go overseas and survive and we’ve got enough profile now that we can come back with money in our pockets which is nice. But in times like this when The Drones aren’t playing and the money starts to drop off, I sometimes wonder what I’m doing?

“Touring’s really hard on relationships. I’ve just gotten back from five weeks in Europe opening up for Band Of Horses, which was amazing. Even though five weeks doesn’t sound that long, it can be really tough on a relationship. It’s hard. There’ve been quite a few moments over the last few years where I’ve gone ‘fuck it, I’ve had enough, I’m not playing music ever again, I’m bowing out, I’m done’.”

The recent Band Of Horses support tour came as a pleasant side-effect of friendships forged on a Drones tour with the same band some years back. The trip gave Noga the chance to play his brand new material to large crowds in Europe and, he claims, gave him the re-invigoration of spirit he was looking for.

“You move into a phase like this one where I’ve just done this record that I’m really proud of,” he continues, “and I’m filled with a new sense of vigour, ready to go and all excited about music and about playing live again. I’d never played this stuff live with a band before but [Band Of Horses’ singer] Ben invited me over to go on this tour and support them. They’re in a position no where they’re that big that they can pick and choose who they want. They could have taken Will Oldman or whoever they wanted, so I said sure, I’ll come over and play this new record of mine.

“The first gig was is Lisbon and we stepped out on stage to play these songs for the first time to 3000 people in this theatre screaming and cheering. From there it just grew and grew and in the end we were playoing these huge theatres, all sold out. It was incredible, a dream come true. We just got back the other day, it’s a bit hard to adjust to reality. You get home and you miss playing in front of 3000 people every night and feeling like a rock star. Now I’m sitting at home watching Two and a Half Men.”

With Gareth Liddiard’s solo project Strange Tourist still warming record-store shelves, there will be inevitible parallels drawn between the two works. Really, when you explore the two records, the tendency towards balladry is where any comparison begins and ends. “It certainly raised the bar that’s for sure,” Noga says of Liddiard’s influence on his song writing. “I just look at all my friends and go ‘fuck they’re all so talented’. If there’s any influence from them it’s been just to work harder to try and get up to their standards. It’s a pleasure to play with these people every night, to hear these amzing lyrics and songs. It makes me want to keep chipping away at it and get better and better.

“I don’t treat this as a side projsct or a one off, like the drummer from The Drones has done a record. I’ve been doing this for a long time.” In fact, he tells me, the bulk of the material for The Balladeer Hunter had been in the works for over a year before he recorded it. “For a lot of people this may be the first album of mine that will come into their vision. For a lot of people this will be their first taste of me... that sounds disgusting. It isn’t something I take lightly.”

DIGITAL RADIO FOR COMMUNITY STATIONS

2011-04-12T23:32:00.000-07:00

This Thursday morning at 11am, nine Melbourne metropolitan community radio stations will simulcast, live from Federation Square, for the first time on a digital platform. In Adelaide the following day six stations will be launched onto the digital grid and over the coming months capital city community stations will join them with a regional roll out to come in the near future. Unlike the planned phase-out of analogue television to make way for a purely digital platform, digital radio will be offered as a supplement to current analogue services, which will include text and graphics and allow increased broadcast quality and reach.
These events mark the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia’s successful negotiation of the legal and political minefield that has been the lobbying process. As Australia’s largest media sector (over 350 long-term stations facilitated by around 23,000 volunteers) it was imperative that community broadcasting found its place in the digital realm. In an acronym and jargon-laden process that has taken over a decade to complete, CBAA President and Melbourne metro station PBS Manager Adrian Basso admits there were times when he wondered whether this moment would come.
“I’ve been working in community radio for about 12 years now and even back then there was talk of digital radio,” Basso says, “so it’s nice to get to a stage of actual realisation. Years ago when we were meeting and looking at all the legislation and wondering whether there would be funding or no funding, we were looking at a lot of heavy documentation like contracts and ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission] deliberations—a minefield of stuff. So to be finally here makes it very rewarding.”
In a broad sense, digital radio is a good match for community broadcasting as it enables an increase of potential output by extending services beyond the time and space limitations of the analogue spectrum. Basically stations will be able to squeeze more of whatever it is they do into the same day and extend their content to a far greater listenership. Where commercial stations will invariably use any technological advancement for the increase of advertising revenue, community radio will actually reap the benefits of pushing programme development and creating new methods of information delivery.
“Whatever platform for media is available it’s critical that it’s accessible and that it allows people to participate and that it’s not just the preserve of commercial interests, or just part of the massive ABC empire,” says Radio Adelaide General Manager Deb Walsh. “There’s a different type of media and range of content that’s produced when people get in there and do it themselves and it can’t be created by other models; it only comes out of the environment where people come in and determine the content themselves.”
There is a commonality of interest in the community broadcasting sector that bonds the dramatically divergent continuum of stations together. Whether using the medium for religious programming, rural information or speciality music, news, information or foreign language shows, the key is communication. Regardless of who you are and what you have to say, community radio allows you to do so in an environment free of the influence of government and the advertising dollar.
Melbourne’s nine and Adelaide’s six metro stations joining forces for the launches will be a public show of solidarity and celebration of the diversity of voice within the sector. Associations between community stations are nothing new, Basso explains, and the realisation of these years of hard work to get community radio up on the digital grid is a huge step in ensuring the continuation of relevant independent voice.
“Simulcasting the nine metro stations is our official way of celebrating the digital launch in a unique way,” says Basso of the Melbourne launch. “The launch itself is a strong indication of the community stations being very collaborative and if you combine the nine stations’ audiences it will be very potent in terms of impact. It’s a strong acknowledgement that we are an important part of the community and that we do say things and talk about things that other broadcasters don’t and won’t and never will.”
The Adelaide launch in the city’s Central Market differs in that will see the six metro stations set up in a circle yet broadcasting separately. There will be doughnuts in the shape of ‘0’s and ‘1’s being handed out by ‘servers’ who will be offering the public a ‘byte’. “We’ve got the corny angle covered,” says Walsh.
In terms of ‘real life’ plans for new services, community radio sits in a unique position in that stations can freely explore new and exciting ways to integrate text and graphics into their information delivery without the burden of having to sell anything. Though initially much of the content available on digital radio will simply match the current content, Basso is excited about the realm of possibilities for new services and believes community radio will lead the charge in terms of finding exciting and innovative ways to make use of the medium. “We’ve always been embracing of new technology and innovative approaches,” he says. “I’m sure each station will do it a little bit differently, [but] the sector’s really used to squeezing as much from as little as possible.”
“We’ve seen it with commercial radio so far that such is the extent of the advertising that the entire radio station becomes an advertisement,” continues Walsh, “they’ve come up with that exciting new model. We’re interested in doing something that on a platform level is very different. What we’re thinking about are different ways of communicating or different uses of radio that aren’t in the set of standard formats that exist on radio. We’re interested in a bit of a reinvention of the medium to take advantage of some of the fantastic advantages of radio like it being free, being inclusive of everybody and being something you can listen to while you’re doing something else. They’re the great advantages that radio has over other media.”

Samson McDougall

Those Darlins

2011-04-10T18:59:00.000-07:00

Screws Get Loose
Spunk

Every now and again there’s a song so feakin’ catchy and brattish and wrong that you can’t stop listening to it in spite of yourself. The title track from Those Darlins’ second record Screws Get Loose is one of these numbers. A wobbly three-chord jangle sets the scene for some vocals so skewed in terms of tonelessness and (lack of) lyrical coherence that you can’t help but fall in love from the first listen. Can’t blame me for what I choose/Screws get loose. Can’t change me after all the abuse/Screws get loose. Can’t blame me for who I use/Screws get loose... genius.
If you had the opportunity to catch them at their recent Meredith or associated shows, chances are you would’ve fallen in love with them already as, undoubtedly, the Darlin sisters Jessi, Nikki and Kelley are the hottest Tennessee spunks in rock’n’roll today. And they fuckin’ know how to bring it. The only thing that sucked about their Meredith slot was, in a stroke of programming moronicism, the festival had them playing virtually last thing on the Sunday while most punters were licking their wounds and stuffing their soiled camp gear into busted bags.
While Screws Get Loose fails to bring the wild abandon of a Those Darlins live show, it acts as a fair taster and doubles as a great driving record. There’s enough variation of tempo from number to number—from $’s warped shadowy school-yard taunt-i-ness to Fatty Needs A Fix’s Ramones-like bounce. The obvious comparison here is with Atlanta’s Black Lips, and you’d have to say at this stage the boys have the edge. But, damn it, if Those Darlins are capable of the song-writing brilliance of the title track here, who knows what infectious delights they’ll bring us in the future.

Samson McDougall

Cuba is Japan—interview with Cameron Potts

2011-03-31T20:15:00.000-07:00

Cuba Is Japan is a band with a clear focus. “I had this idea of forming a band that would write about explorations,” says founding member Cameron Potts (also of Baseball and Ninetynine fame). “I’ve always been fascinated by them so I wanted to do a band that only did records about certain events in history.”
The band’s name (somewhat less predicably than the glut of other Australian bands with foreign place names in their titles) stems from Columbus’s first voyage upon which he reputedly mistook the land mass of Cuba for Japan. At the time there was no concept (in Europe) of the Americas or the Pacific and it was widely believed that Japan lay at the Eastern tip of the earth.
Their debut 7” is a beautiful thing. Comprising two ‘scenes’ from their forthcoming concept album about the great Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the globe in 1522, the package features a hand-knitted sleeve guard by Otto & Spike and beautiful artwork by Dylan Martorell screen-printed on boy’s school shirt fabric by Brisbane’s Matt Deasy. To cast your eyes on the thing is to need it. The run is limited (for obvious reasons) to 300 and will be available from the launch on April Fools’ Day.
“CDs are so redundant now,” continues Potts, purring and stroking the packaging of their own vinyl release. “I’m in a label [Alpine Areas] with a few other people that are into doing interesting releases—things that are really unique. With the miserable nature of downloads I think people these days appreciate something that’s a bit of a gift. We’re thinking about maybe a Pets With Pets [release] with Lego covers. A lot of bands are really keen to get on board.”
The 7” acts as a little taste test teaser for the group’s aforementioned forthcoming album Canvas, which judging by Potts’s enthusiasm will eclipse even the single in gorgeousness. “It’s a double album which will open out like sails of a ship and will be made of real sails,” continues Potts, eyes crazed with excitement. “There’ll be a Pacific side and an Atlantic side—all the stories broken up with intermissions, it’s gotta be done right.”
In line with the uniqueness of the sleeve design and artwork, Potts explains that Cuba Is Japan adopted a fresh approach to writing the album, which will be out in September. “We all researched it together [but] we all wrote songs separately, chapter by chapter in chronological order—like from go to whoa; leaving Spain to coming back. We all had a part in assessing it in our own way and bringing it all together as a band. Some of us just took sections, like I took the Pacific and Darcy [Pimblett] the Atlantic. We all had our own bits.”
Their music consists of soaring arrangements of violin, guitar, bass and keys. I wondered whether the grandiosity of the task they set themselves limited the arrangements to the bleak and murderous subject matter they were tackling? On the contrary, Potts says, Magellan’s journey—while tragic in its outcome, with a three-ship fleet of 227 men reduced to a dying crew of 19 upon return to Spain—produced many instances of triumph and wonder.
“There’s a lot of joy there,” he continues. “Like when Magellan found the strait that no one thought existed through to the Pacific, right down the tip of South America. They were six-months out and the crew just wanted to go home but he believed all that time that there had to be a pass and it almost sent his crew mad. Also when they first hit the Philippines after sailing the Pacific for four months, it was like the meeting of a first culture that would never happen again. It’s such a great canvas. If you give yourself a story, you can really stretch your musical abilities.”

Samson McDougall

Thrones—Q&A with Joe Preston

2011-03-31T20:11:00.000-07:00

There are musicians that rise to fame, take the money and vanish into the ether. Other’s crash into the median barrier and burn in a blistering ball of self ruin. Then there are those who grind it out, hammer away at the brittle coalface of rock’n’roll, carve out a niche for themselves and graft out new and interesting pathways for other pioneering spirits to explore. Joe Preston is one of these musicians, a man who in certain circles is revered as a trailblazer, a groundbreaker; but chances are you wouldn’t recognise him if he turned up asleep on your doorjamb.
For many, Preston’s solo outlet Thrones is the stuff from which nightmares are made. A slightly confronting collision of bass, vocal punishment and looping zaps and booms, it’s not children’s birthday party music—or party music at all. But for those who paid attention to the likes of Melvins, Sun))), Earth or High On Fire (for all of which Preston has played), the Thrones tour this April represents a rare opportunity to see a true innovator at work.

Are you writing music right now? If so, as Thrones, or with whom? What (if any) Joe Preston releases can we expect in the near future?

JP: I operate at a glacial pace as far as writing and recording goes, but I do in fact have some new things coming out. I finally decided to put out my own records, and there is a split 12" with a Washington band called Sedan coming out very soon. I hoped to have them in time for this tour but the test pressings just arrived on Monday, so it will be another month. I'm also extremely disorganised, so distributing is the next hurdle, but hopefully by the time they are finished I will have my website up and I'll be selling them through mail order as well as at shows. I'm planning on putting out another 12" in the next year (hopefully this one), some cassette releases, and then re-issues of the first couple Thrones records on vinyl. High hopes for a man who can barely remember to leave the house wearing pants.

Given that you’ve been playing music for twenty-odd years now—and that those twenty years have seen dramatic changes in the landscapes of the music industry and media/communications in general—how do you feel about the state of modern music?

JP: Honestly, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon and don't listen to very much new music, and consequently don't keep up much with the state of modern music. To my eyes, it seems that even with all the changes in industry/distribution, ease of manufacture and creation, it's still just as trend driven as it ever has been. So I'd say the state of modern music is poor. But then again, there's no accounting for taste.

Do you think it’s easier to reach a wider audience today, or does the sheer volume of crap available online render good music more difficult to find?

JP: There's definitely a "wealth" of music being made these days, and it can be hard to wade through, but if someone is motivated to look around a bit, it's become so simple to have your music discovered by new people. I think the internet and its myriad sub networks are a great thing for someone who wants to make music but doesn't want to play the humiliating game of "trying to make it", that six degrees of separation theory really opens up fast as people communicate with each other almost immediately nowadays.

In terms of the changes that have occurred in the last decade or so (i.e. file sharing returning the focus to live, touring musicians rather than spinning dollars from album sales; the advent of sites such as MySpace allowing musicians to reach an audience regardless of major label profile etc.) what are the major benefits/drawbacks in your perspective?

JP: I like that file sharing has rendered major labels and their elitism (somewhat) impotent. I don't like that file sharing leads people to not bother paying musicians for their hard work. [It’s] a double edged sword for sure. I really like how quickly people devised ways to sell their music directly to fans without dealing with middlemen, or at least a few less of them. Conversely, there are lots of new middlemen ready to take a chunk out of a musician's cut by making it "easier" to get their music to a wide audience by encouraging them to use their sites, so it would seem labels are back with a change of clothes. For me, I have always sold more records in person at shows than I did through labels, so the changes don't affect me very much as I still tour regularly.

As a radio host on KMBT, you obviously embrace the independence of voice that community/public radio allows. What roles do you think radio, both independent and commercial, play in today’s music world?

JP: That's a tough one, here in the US radio is dominated, and I mean DOMINATED by corporate interests, so the closer you are to a population centre the less likely you are to hear anything on the radio that is not solely a vehicle for ads and profit. Our only national non corporate radio (NPR) is in grave danger of having their funding crippled. Internet radio seems to have stepped in and given a voice to a huge variety of tastes and opinions, which to me is wonderful whether or not the content agrees with me. I think saying "what the hell was that?" is a good thing when it comes to radio. My personal favourite radio stations are farm reports from the more desolate parts of the American mid-west; it is community reporting at its most basic and strange.

With the arrival of bands like The Sword and Mastodon it seems as though there’s been a resurgence of attention to the heavier outfits of the ‘80s and ‘90s (notably the sludgier stuff: Melvins, Acid King etc.). Is there much evidence of this in the US?

JP: I guess so, I definitely noticed more people into what I was doing in Thrones after I finished playing in High On Fire, and I don't think it was solely because I had been playing bass for a more popular band for a couple years. People often cite their influences, and the trails are easier than ever to follow back.

Whether as Thrones or as a member of the various bands you’ve played in over the years, your music retains a trueness of substance—you have not bent to accommodate radio air time or ever bowed to commercial pressures. Do you see this a lot in your musical circles? Who else are you inspired by in terms of a total reluctance to succumb to fashion or popularity?

JP: Thanks, that's sweet of you to say. I suppose I do see that in my circles, probably because I connect with people with a similar love of being themselves. Nothing inspires me more than seeing someone doing what they love to do, and obviously doing it for themselves. Lemmy comes to mind.

Samson McDougall

Mike Noga

2011-03-29T05:32:00.000-07:00

The Balladeer Hunter
Other Tongues

In recent interviews Mike Noga has made it clear that his latest solo effort The Balladeer Hunter need not be considered merely a side project by that drummer from The Drones. It would be easy to brush those kinds of comments off as pure rhetoric or egotism, and as a writer there’s always that twang of apprehension as you give that new record from a musician you admire its first spin. Is this going to suck?, you think. What will I say if it stinks? Thankfully this record shines from the first listen and in all its bleak loveliness does nothing but secure Noga’s song writing abilities as some of the best around.
The opening crisply plucked guitar and stomp box simplicity of the much rotated community radio darling M’Belle sets the landscape of this recording beautifully. The world Noga creates is a dark place and the sparse instrumentation provides the perfect half-cover for the loaded gun in the shadows of a dark alley or small-town heartbreak.
There exists a sliver of light on the record that guides the listener to safety even through the starkest funeral marching of Walk With Me where our sinister protagonist proclaims: Only trouble walks with me and it will stay until I’ve paid/For all the pain inside of you, won’t you come walk with me into the night... Endlessly. There are moments of Dylan-esqe grand country scoundrel-ism A Long Week, desolate Irish balladry Eileen and small reprieve in the strangely Ween-like I Will Have Nothing. The spaces between the chords here give enough of a glimpse of encroaching doom, but the beauty of the individual songs sucks you along blissfully in denial. A record to savour in a warm room on a cold night, The Balladeer Hunter is a wintery gem.

Samson McDougall

Mastodon—Live at the Aragon DVD/CD

2011-03-20T15:41:00.000-07:00

Mastodon were largely heralded as the band that would take the mantle that Slayer laid down some thirty years ago and finally push metal into the next millennia. The early signs were good and we hoped that their signature of rapidly morphing beat patterns and mucky guitar riffs would finally break ‘mainstream’ metal some new ground and away from the cringe worthy prog of the late nineties. What you get with the Live at the Aragon package is a pretty clear indication that either Mastodon have seriously lost their way or modern metal is destined for the laughing stocks.

Replete with Tool-like light and laser extravaganza, this concert reveals a Mastodon steeped in self importance and determined to implode in a heap of postured noodling and introspective trite. While many of the riffs are bordering on ridiculously good, no chord sequence is repeated thoroughly enough for the listener to sink their teeth in. Where Slayer prosper and Mastodon seem to fall down is in the commitment to their bottom end—in Slayer’s case an unhinging assault of bass and drums. This stuff flits and changes so much that you barely get your toe tapping before you’re off on another overblown tangent and left spiralling downwards to a dirty place called Progland.

The good news is that Brent Hinds’s nasal groaning sticks it right up the traditional growl and roar style vocals that dominate the genre today. Circle Of Cysquatch from their 2006 release ‘Blood Mountain’ offers a brief glimpse of the brutal beast in full flight, and the well behaved computer exec-type audience do get treated to a shit-hot light show and a band that, if not quite pushing the boundaries of heavy metal these days, are certainly not lacking in polish.

Samson McDougall

Some bits from Soundwave

2011-03-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

Despite the drug-dog madness that is the Soundwave front entrance area—you can get violently drunk at any of our over-priced piss pits folks, but we’ll be fucked if we’ll let you smoke a doobie on the lawn—the feel and layout of the Showgrounds is a breath of fresh air in an ocean of mediocre, shade and elevation-free festival sites in this town. A line for a line for a wristband for a line for some tokens for a line for a beer and bang, it’s on.

Texas lads The Sword kick things off with some down low, grinding psych. Credited in some circles for the rebirth of doom, The Sword’s bottom endedness brings the overblown theatrics of the singing into check as they pound their way through a sci-fi fantasy with Flying Vs. Closing number Winter’s Wolves seemingly encapsulates life itself in its marvellous grandiosity. An extra half hour and the aforementioned doobage would’ve landed them as contenders for band of the day.

For better or worse, the emo crap the kids were watching while Gang Of Four reeled out the set of the day probably wouldn’t even exist if not for the trail-blazing genius of bands like this. After thirty-five years, they continue to redefine what rock music can be. They are grating. Jon King’s vocals needle while Andy Gill’s guitar infects your very being. Their set revolves around early work with Anthrax, Damaged Goods and Ether from their 1979 release ‘Entertainment’ proving as vital now as they’ve ever been.

The only thing that sucks about Slayer is that they only have an hour on stage. Kerry King is forced to work a bit harder on guitar with Jeff Hanneman’s recent bout of necrotizing fasciitis—an aggressive flesh-eating disease and potential great song title—ruling him out of the tour. Dave Lombardo is the greatest drummer walking the planet and his work on War Ensemble has to be experienced to be believed. It’s South Of Heaven that steals it. Thirty years in and they can still thrash it.

Melvins are forced to wait while Rob Zombie finishes up with the theatrics. Guitarist/singer and be-affro-ed dynamo King Buzzo dons a favourite druid robe with bassist Jarred Warren kickin’ it in half a gladiator costume and shorts. The recent inclusion of a second drummer gives their sludgy sound extra marshiness but you get the impression there’s not a lot of love on the stage. On every other occasion they’ve been here they’ve ruled but today, sadly, they disappoint.

The Bronx’s Matt Caughthran’s face lights up on stage as the L.A. hardcore quintet rip through an identical set to the previous night’s Corner show. There’s no doubt the material from their first self-titled, though commonly referred to as the ‘White Drugs’, record—Heart Attack American, White Tar and Strobe Life—go down the best with an ageing audience, but the choices of newer opening and closing numbers, Knifeman and History’s Stranglers respectively, prove there’s no danger of these dudes slowing down.

Applecore Festival

2011-02-28T17:10:00.000-08:00

(Photo: Kim Salmon.)

In its ninth year, Applecore, that wee back yard festival in February, has gotten so large they were turning be-eskied would-be punters away at the gate. For those lucky (or smart) enough to have turned up/bought tickets early, the sun shone down on this fabulous sloping Thornbury lawn as floral-dressed ladies and short-shorted boys sipped cider and Dr Tim’s beverages respectively.

The mid-arvo was hot as hell. Well positioned umbrellas and boundary trees saved the building crowd from sun-related mishaps but there was no escaping the heat on stage. New Estate seemed right at home in the high twenties and ripped out a punchy little set of their contorted rock. Local shoegazers Lowtide really captured the essence of the afternoon with extended washy jams. The Ancients brought a new, more diluted rock than pop, attitude to the thing. Laura Jean again brought along the sweet shit and before you knew it you were riding down to High Street for another sixer and a fresh bag of ice.

For mine it was Kim Salmon that set the festival alight. As the imperceptible clouds gently opened for the first of many showers, Salmon steered the crowd through an immaculate grouping of jewels; his good-natured banter winning fans and his song-strength proving one guy alone with his Telecaster can mix it with any four or five-piece in town.

New Zealand’s The Blueness delivered a watery set of grunge-tinged Dunedin deliciousness, while the crowd reaction to Gentle Ben and His Sensitive Side was something of a phenomenon—like with the coming of some prophet all stood, saluted and danced. It may have been the timing, about seven hours into a sun-soaked booze session; or it could have been the rain, which was now coming down in wetting quantities; whatever it was, the mood of the party got set to ‘bring it’ and bring it these Queenslanders did.

A further soaking and associated delay sent this punter home for a hottie and a dry couch. The hardcore may have stuck it out for Screamfeeder, but this camper was happy enough to leg it.

Samson McDougall

Stephen Walker Benefit Show

2011-02-20T18:09:00.000-08:00

Reflecting on the recent Stephen Walker Benefit Gig brings on a montage of remarkable moments elegantly framed in the deep blues of the Forum’s interior skyline. These images would surely differ from attendees to performers to organisers to Walker himself, but there was an undeniable focus of energy that night. We found ourselves in glorious surrounds to enjoy a ripper of a party put on by a selfless few to help a man who has given a part of himself to the music community for thirty years. Given that all proceeds would contribute to stem-cell treatment for Walker’s MS, there was a gravity attached to the night that transcended the flawless, often stirring performances by all comers—an assortment of local artists that have moved Walker to move his listeners throughout the years.

These sentiments were invariably shared by the performers and DJs I spoke to about the night. “It’s the Ghost, you couldn’t fuck this up,” says Breakfaster Fee B-Squared. “You couldn’t have some lame-arse shit happening, you’d have to be on your game. It was exciting, wondering who they would end up with. And to end up with genuine fans of Stephen’s like Dirty Three and Warren Ellis saying what a privilege it was—it was amazing. I think Triple R listeners really get what music is, what it can do for you and how it makes you feel. The greatest honour as a broadcaster is when somebody tells you that you’ve somehow shaped their music collection. On the night you heard that a number of times, that Stephen had been this integral part of Triple R, the soundscape that became community radio throughout Melbourne and a real alternative to all the other shit that’s out there. They wanted to give something back to him.”

“He always gave people the freedom to play and say what they needed to on the station,” says fellow on-the-night DJ and Kinky Afro host Karen Leng of Walker’s tenure as Triple R Program Manager. “There was always a philosophy and an aesthetic there and he intuitively understood what was good about Triple R, where it should sit in terms of media in Melbourne and how it should agitate and stir the pot but also be accessible to the people as well. There was such a great feeling in the room on the night. When he spoke, it was everything you get on air. You could tell how much he loves the station, how much he values the audience and how happy he was that everybody was there, it was very touching.”

Given the quality of the music on the night, highlights are difficult to pinpoint. From the first bars of Sand Pebbles’ Wild Season to the death throes of Dirty Three’s Authentic Celestial Music, the standard of delivery bordered on astonishing. Walker commented that if he had have had a microphone with him for the night he could have presented the thing as a Skull Cave instalment with twenty minute brackets. With a different guest singer for each song, each indicative of a particular element of Walker’s musical tastes, it was the Skull Cave All-Stars that truly captured the ethos of the evening—a rag-tag bunch of misfits together especially for this one-off occasion. When I suggest to band facilitator (a term he’s not entirely comfortable with) and guitar player Phil Wales that any chance to permanently alter the trajectory of a man’s life for the positive is a rare and powerful thing, he tells me that by reading the smile on Walker’s face you’d realise that we already have.

By make-up the All-Stars—Phil Wales, Gary Young, David Bridie, Rob Craw, Pete Lawler and assorted guests—was representative of the association between the radio station and the wider music community. “It’s one of those things that Triple R and the music community do well,” Wales says. “The relationship between the two has been acknowledged time and again. They put together an event that you’d pay for even without a cause. That it does have a cause attached to it makes it very easy for everyone to get behind it. There was an amazing spirit in the room that night. It was very evident on stage.”

With each of the All-Stars’ hand-picked cover songs, the matching of vocalist to tune accentuated the connection between Walker’s ears and the breadth of his listener base through the musicians he’s spruiked over his thirty years of broadcasting. The All-Stars’ set built through David Bridie’s rendition of Magazine’s A Song From Under The Floorboards, Black Cab’s Andrew Coates and James Lee’s version of Joy Division’s Transmission, Kerri Simpson’s chanting and prowling interpretation of Patti Smith’s Gone Again, Rob Craw’s channelling of Iggy Pop’s Johanna and The Wolfgramm Sisters’ absolute nailing of MC 900 Foot Jesus’ Killer Inside Me and Tim Buckley’s ghostly Song to the Siren. It was an all-enveloping snapshot of any given Skull Cave episode and evidence of not only Triple R’s own but the wider music community’s respect for The Ghost himself.

“With these sorts of things you tend to do one run through with the band and one with the singers and that’s it,” Wales continues. “When I said to [ bassist] Pete Lawler that the hardest thing about organising these things is working out when the fuck everybody can get into the same room at the same time, Pete said, ‘that and working out which pair of leather pants to wear’.”

“I knew the Wolfgramm Sisters would nail it. I cast a vague eye upwards during Song to the Siren and thought, well, if you’re not fuckin’ happy with that! It’s a tricky song to pull off ‘cause there’s no time to it and you listen for this winding melody to work out where the chords should fall. It sounded pretty good from where I was.”

Referring to MS as ‘a mess’ on the night, Walker also quipped that it’s a bitter joke when your surname is the one thing you can’t do. Though open about his deteriorating health, Walker has never been of the nature to focus on this aspect of his life on air and therefore the announcement of the benefit show equated to a public outing of himself as an MS sufferer. “It’s irrelevant to most people who listen on the radio,” Walker says. “It’s like saying I’ve got pink shoes on today; they may think so what? It’s been a very positive thing coming out about it, there have been great bonuses. I’ve had some great emails and I met people on the night that have just been diagnosed, people who’ve tried different things or just wanted to know about it.”

Walker admits that he was terrified by the notion of a benefit on his behalf and he hoped for the Forum to be half full to at least avoid discomfort among the paying guests and performers. “It’s only a radio show, I’m the first to say that,” he continues, “but the show does seem to mean a lot to different people. Being an Australian I was a little twitchy about how it would go. Rather than say something good about someone we’d rather put shit on them, it’s a sign of affection. I do the radio show; I get maybe five or ten emails when I get home and a handful of phone calls during the show. I’m really not aware of how many people are out there and who’s listening.

“We do it [radio] for love; I certainly do. It’s a wonderful thing and a wonderful town to do it in. It’s just been a joy to me. I never thought I’d find myself in the position I did on the night of the benefit. I joked that it was like being able to go to my own wake. There were all of these amazing people being able to say how they felt about me and me to them without the filters. It was so lovely to meet all these listeners, the friends I haven’t met before, and find that we share so much in common. If not ‘the’, it was one of the greatest nights of my life.”

Samson McDougall

Luke Legs—Interview with Luke Hindson

2011-02-20T18:06:00.000-08:00

Luke Emmanuel Hindson’s talking voice is deceptively coarse in comparison to his alter ego Luke Legs’ smooth vocals. On the phone he demonstrates his natural story-telling talents, he has a lot to say; he talks cyclically, meandering through multiple topics in bursts of good-natured yarning. It’s no wonder he’s found himself writing country ballads. He takes time to let his stories evolve, relishes the chance to share. Hailing from a family of ten, you’d need to speak up or be forever sidelined you’d imagine. As Hindson explains, however, it was more a case of preferring to take the long way ‘round than him pursuing country music in particular.

“My favourite thing is punk bands that don’t make it so then they turn to country—that’s me pretty much,” he says. “I really like the story-telling side of country, it suits me. Some gigs I’ll show up and maybe only play one song ‘cause I’ll start telling a story and that will lead me away. I just like to get my songs across and get my stories out there through lyrics you can actually hear. Plus you can play it live anywhere, everyone likes a bit of country.”

Hindson’s debut album Why Oh Why (My Caroline), released this month, has such strong song writing and thematic cohesion it’s no surprise it’s been taken on board by Triple J and community programming alike. It wanders and wheels in equal measures—the delicacies of his lighter vocal moments are swept up in his veritable reinvention of the Whitney Houston-esque (his words, not mine) power ballad. “Different people I speak to have different favourite songs from the album,” he continues. “To me this means that either all the songs are awesome or they’re all mediocre. I think they’re all awesome [laughs]. I’m a walking, talking PR machine.

“A few years ago I was on tour with Jordie Lane doing my solo stuff and every night he blew me off the stage. It was embarrassing; I thought I was good but I was actually really shit. From then on I decided I had to start writing better songs, so I went back to the drawing board. I practised every day for a year and wrote and played for five hours a night. All I was writing about was the feeling of living in small country towns and being young and creative but not being able to express yourself because there’s not anything to do in these places. You just have beers with your mates and the same conversations, so most of these songs are about trying to get out. It’s not new, it’s been done before but it’s just kind of romantic.”

It’s this romanticism that opens Luke Legs up to the listener. These sentiments are universal, we can all relate in some way—some of us more than others. “Playing the East Brunswick Club recently I played the song ‘Why Oh Why (My Caroline)’,” he continues. “This guy came up after the show and asked me if the song was about Geelong. When I told him it was, he said that even though I didn’t mention Geelong in the words and he’d never even heard of me before he knew it was and had almost cried ‘cause it made him think about how he felt when he was growing up there.”

Hindson maintains it’s the live show that brings people back again. With arse shaking action and a random-by-nature aesthetic, the album launch is set to sell out. “I played a country fair where there was no microphone,” he says. “I had to sing through a megaphone, but they couldn’t get it onto the stage so I played on top of a fire truck, singing into the CB radio. I’m sure those people were thinking who is this guy and does he take a fire truck to every show? It can work in your favour.”

Samson McDougall

Miles Brown—The Night Terrors

2011-02-20T18:03:00.000-08:00

Though undoubtedly psychedelic by nature, Melbourne instrumental quartet The Night Terrors defy description. Even to label them ‘instrumental’ is something of a misnomer as Miles Brown’s Theremin sings in such a profound fashion that it nudges many ‘vocalists’ (garage bands, I’m looking at you) from their precarious perches. They are a band that transcends genre, audience profile and style. They have carved their own path and, like many ‘niche’ bands from this end of their earth, European ears seem somewhat more responsive to their distinctive take on psychoactive music.

Brown’s unusual choice of instrument sits remarkably comfortably wrapped in the waves of sonic propulsion the foursome creates. To have the opportunity to experience their fusion in intimate surrounds here at home is something not to be passed up. The band’s drawing and exhaling of sound is set alight by Brown’s weird and illusory Theremin playing—it’s like he’s playing the air itself, taming the atmosphere of the room and recycling the energy into melody. It’s a rare thing to behold and, as Brown explains, not a simple concept to grasp.

“There are a lot of variables,” he says, “that’s probably why you don’t see too many people playing them in rock bands. You take two opposing electromagnetic fields or plates and move them closer together and further apart. One plate is the Theremin and the other is your body. So not only does it react to my body but to everybody else around it. It can be affected by the temperature in the room, how many other appliances are on or how the stage is lit. You can be playing an awesome venue with great sound but the stage is too close to the toilets so every time somebody walks past it affects the instrument. It can be difficult when people come in close to try and work out how it works or if someone’s really rockin' out in the front row.”

The Night Terrors evoke the inner nerd in their listeners. Devotees will babble about the art and physics of the Theremin regardless of levels of understanding—it’s a geek magnet from hell and Brown is the first to embrace this. “Because the Theremin’s so unusual, it kind of stands out; it’s a door opener,” he says. “You soon find out who the nerds are. The Keyboardist from Black Mountain [Jeremy Schmidt] is the kind of guy who knows the serial numbers of instruments. I studied Theremin with Lydia Kavina who’s the grand-niece of Theremin himself, she was taught by him. We played a Theremin festival in Germany with about forty players. I met most of the European Thereminists there; it was a pretty unusual bunch of people. I played at the Sydney Opera House last year and got to jam with Lou Reed, Marc Ribot and Ichirou Agata from Melt-Banana. Lou Reed is a real gear nerd, he even has the same Theremin I have; all we talked about was Theremins. The downside is that after shows when you’re ready to go home there’ll be some dude in his forties with a ponytail wanting to talk Theremin.”

Recently back from their second European trip The Night Terrors’ year is off to a flier with support slots for Black Mountain and legendary psych pioneers Hawkwind here before their own fund-raiser to aid with another trip to Europe to play Polyhymnia—a Neo-Krautrock festival in Berlin—in March. This impetus is surprising to Brown who has been plugging away with The Night Terrors on the relative down-low for ten years now.

“It’s weird after so long,” he continues. “Initially I just wanted to see whether it would work putting a Theremin out in front of a rock band and seeing whether we could make a record. I never expected it to be released. It’s funny because for so long people were saying ya’ know, you should probably get a girl in to sing or why don’t you write a hit or why don’t you go more electro. We just consider ourselves really lucky to play with other people who make underground music and other people who appreciate what it is to stick to your guns and make it happen—otherwise we’d all end up playing garage music. I hear Hawkwind have a Theremin player too. I’m hoping for a Theremin off.”

The concept of Neo-Krautrock is hazy to Brown but the band’s interest in playing Polyhymnia was piqued by the mention of headliners Goblin. “We get compared to Goblin a lot and they are the archetypal horror movie soundtrack band,” he continues. “They say [Neo-Krautrock is] all these bands that are referencing Krautrock but combining it with modern sounds. We were trying to get a gig with a band called Circle from Finland who were touring the last time we were there and [the bookers] told us that they didn’t want us for that but that they would like us to play this festival in March. It was soon after we got back [from our last European tour] so we thought we wouldn’t be able to go but then we found out what the festival was and that they’d booked Goblin to headline, we just went ‘Oh my god’. We asked if they had any idea where and when we would play at the festival. When they told us we’d be playing right before Goblin we decided we had to go.”

With Neo-Krautrock yet to establish itself as a recognised genre here in Australia, I was curious to find where Brown considered The Night Terrors to ‘fit’ in terms of musical comparison. He told me that despite their disparity from other musical groupings, they’ve found connections with musicians across a range of genres. “We haven’t got a scene, so we’ve always tried to latch onto everyone else’s,” he says. “In Australia our sound is so niche that there are people who are into it but not that many. In Europe there are heaps of people doing unique and obscure stuff, the more obscure the better it seems. There are a lot of metal acts here in Melbourne that say they’re progressive and we’re happy to jump in with them. We’ve done tours with doom bands and electro bands. One promoter in Germany said we were like a mix between hyper-gay electro and doom and we thought ‘yeah that sounds alright’. We’ve played crust doom metal clubs where everyone’s dreadlocked and anarchy and we think they’re gonna hate us but we always seem to go down really well. Those communities in general are really open minded, they’re always cool shows.”

Samson McDougall

The Night Terrors fundraiser is at Gasometer on Thursday the 3rd of March. Supports are Tantrums, Pearls and Spacerock DJs. 8pm start, $13.

Rites of Passage: Tattoo Festival

2011-01-31T18:33:00.000-08:00

Do the names Steve Byrne, Chad Koeplinger, Stacie Jascott or Erin Chance mean anything to you? Na, me neither. It seems these names, amongst others, mean a great deal in the tattoo community and the Rites of Passage Tattoo and Art Festival invited a couple of hundred of these peeps to show off their skills here in Melbourne.

It’s a curious concept, that of the Tattoo convention. Perhaps not so curious for industry types, who reap the obvious advantages of network development and exchange of ideas, but for the general public it’s a struggle to understand the benefits beyond the collection of tattoos from artists otherwise inaccessible. By attempting to entice the populous through other means—a mix of tattooing with visual art and live artistic performances—this festival’s aim was to bring tattooing out of the dark and to the people in non-threatening and entertaining surrounds. The trouble with this theory is that tattoo art is so far removed from the underground these days that it’s hardly the eye-popping exposé of days gone by.

The crowd (a mix of hipster types, hippy types, biker types, extreme motocross types and fringe-dwelling types) is sparse on Friday but fills out somewhat over the course of the weekend. Wandering through the open spaces of the Royal Exhibition Building it feels over catered, as if these sorry souls may have travelled from far and wide for naught, though most of the tattooists are working, in fact many are booked solid for the entire weekend.

Outside of the dozens of artists spruiking the en-vogue, bold ‘traditional’ North American fashions (swallows, pin-ups, swords etc), there are treasures to be found in the nooks of the building. If you look hard there are many distinctive variants on the popular styles ranging from floor-working Japanese artists to loin-clothed Mentawi Islander’s tapping out their traditional designs, true-to-life portraiture to German Minimalist ‘naive’ style technicians (scribbles and scrawls). To take time and really absorb all of what is going on here is rather mesmerising, though the over-representation of the bold North American imagery could leave the impression of it being all a little bit same-same—few appear to be really challenging the boundaries.

On the live stages musicians battle with poor sound quality (though to be fair it improves slightly as the weekend progresses), fashion shows roll out, talkers talk, competitions are drawn and carnival types jostle and cajole. There’s a visual art exhibition tucked away in one corner and lashings of merch tables but somehow it feels just a little slapdash. It’s sad to see the quality of Spencer P. Jones, Jess McAvoy or Sydney’s Snowdroppers perform largely unnoticed and you can’t help but feel this festival truly missed the mark in terms of mass public appeal. Fetishist Madame Lash pulls a decent crowd and Lucky Diamond Rich (arguably the most tattooed man in the world) impresses with his machete juggling and unicycle gags but really, with a sixty-dollar-a-day price tag the numbers just aren’t there and those who are seem focused on gathering ink.

Walking off into Carlton Gardens I wonder whether it’s been an enjoyable experience and I figure for the most part it has. Having browsed the stalls, garnered a nice piece of ink for myself and drank beer with members of Melbourne’s tattoo elite, I reckon I’ve done okay. Still, a question needles me (boom boom): Is the Rites of Passage ‘Festival’ more a convention under the guise of a celebration? A small distinction perhaps, but an important one for the paying public.

Samson McDougall

Interpol

2010-09-23T03:33:00.001-07:00

Interpol
Cooperative/Shock

Paul Banks’ atonal vocal style could be considered a limiting factor by a lesser outfit. In many ways it defines Interpol’s sound; you know it’s them as soon as he opens his mouth, it’s unmistakable. It also polarises listeners. For some the vocal is enough to discard their music as repetitive or drab, for others it acts as an entry point to something much larger, a temptation, a lure. Those that dare to immerse themselves in this, their fourth full-length release, will find apt reward in the riches within.
As per every release thus-far, it does take effort. At first glance the opening stanza is harmless enough, atypical of Interpol’s slow-twisting album openings. It leads you along a familiar path, takes you in its arms and pushes you off a cliff into the plummeting tumult that is fourth track ‘Lights’. You forget how you got to this point, revisit the beginning and discover a fiercely brewing cloud; it circles and contorts but you barely noticed.
There is a subtlety to this recording that may well be indicative of the band shedding the major label and going it alone. In the spirit of Radiohead’s In Rainbows (an enormous call I know, but one I’ll stand by wholeheartedly), Interpol manage to pay tribute to their past selves while taking an enormous step beyond anything they’ve produced to date. A simplified and less grandiose approach really lets the listener get a purchase on the thing and explore the individual elements of each song.
With the exception of ‘Barricade’, which could’ve been lifted from either of the band’s previous two releases, this album demonstrates a abandoning of both pretence and circumspection. Through this paring back they grant us entry to the world they create and allow us to experience all of its darkest places.

Black Mountain

2010-09-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

Wilderness Heart
Jagjaguwar/Inertia

Why a psych-rock outfit from Vancouver deems it necessary to relocate in order to build their next release between Seattle and L.A. is beyond me. The resultant effort Wilderness Heart reeks of discarding their collective identity and reinventing themselves as a more commercially viable product. The thing reads like a recipe: fast, slow, fast, slow, fast, power-ballad to heartfelt soul-searcher, and universality-of-consciousness-themed nonsense.
Black Mountain’s 2008 LP In The Future solidified the group as a bona fide soldier in the ranks of psychedelic rock-n-roll. They were a band that felt self-assured enough to shun the mainstream in pursuit of their own creative freedoms and leftist leanings. In stark contrast, the new record sounds like they’ve gone out, bought beachside property, invested in the stock market and listened to nothing but hard-rock and 1970s fantasy-themed concept albums from their bear-skin couches.
The opening number ‘The Hair Song’ is inoffensive enough but hardly comparable to the explosion of In The Future’s opener ‘Stormy High’. Sadly the recording slides steadily downhill from there with a two, three, four combination that smacks of insincerity in its soaring-eagle clichés and unsurprising sine-wave tempo shifts. We’re granted brief reprieve from the sickening grandeur of the thing with seventh track ‘The Way To Gone’, and then callously thrown back to the OTT theatrics of the title song.
The biggest disappointment here is that I don’t get a sense this is supposed to be funny. What could make for fantastic comedy-rock-opera, complete with exploding buildings and flying angel stage props (a-la Tenacious D), is weighed down by the gravity of belief that Black Mountain bring—they deny the listener the opportunity to laugh. One can only hope this is a minor pot-hole in the street of their story as they’ve shown us much more in the past.

Shihad Killjoy Live

2010-09-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

Northcote Social Club

Retrospective shows are risky business. At best the artists have the opportunity to reveal the class of early work, the timelessness of their art, to gift the audience a glimpse of a bygone era, and to offer up a small taste of the zeitgeists of formative years. At worst these events can lay bare the shortcomings of the artists’ early work, the un-classicness if you will. At worst they remind the audience of times they’d gladly left behind, of their own past poor judgement, and expose the depths of personal cringe we hide in our dark places. Shihad performing their 1995 album Killjoy fell somewhere in the middle range of this spectrum.
Being at university in Wellington in 1995, I lived in awe of these four lads who had seemingly ripped the lid off the heavy rock business and rocketed to the top of the music world—at least that was how we saw it. Killjoy was a watershed release for the band and it was no surprise that many of the songs stacked up in a contemporary setting. The opening bars of You Again gripped and chafed like sandpaper and the three-punch combo of the aforementioned, Gimme Gimme and The Call proved as immediate as the days they were written. From here the performance waned. Front-man Jon Toogood’s onstage antics were distracting at best and at times he was flat-out irritating. The flagrant posturing and heartfelt earnestness of the bloke made you want to puke at points and the use of backing track during slow-burner Deb’s Night Out was a particular low.
Thankfully the back end of the set revealed the best writing of the album and For What You Burn as an unexpected favourite. Guitarist Phil Knight was always the unnoticed exponent that started this thing rolling and his work this night further solidified this. We were spared the inclusion of any newer material in the encore, which concluded with the frenetic Screwtop from the band’s 1993 debut Churn. All up it was a pretty decent show but hardly enough to redeem Shihad from more recent indiscretions.

RRR. Make Contact

2010-08-10T18:18:00.000-07:00

The Triple R performance space feels like no other band room in Melbourne. It’s a serious space, no beer swilling chit-chat and rank odours, for people serious about music to experience the best of what Melbourne has to offer. Upon entry to the room, there is weight attached to the realisation that the show will be broadcast to a listenership of thousands. Beginnings to sets are marked by nervous introductions followed by deafening silence. The musician is respected here like nowhere else in town.
Since the building opening last March subscribers have borne witness to several seasons of free live-to-air events blanketing a cross-section of superb local artists. Showcased thus-far have been not the chart-toppers and fickle monthly flavours you’ll find at the larger venues and on commercial stations, but the guts—the veritable beating heart—of the local music community. From Wagons’ sweat-drenched swagger to the smooth country craftswomanship of Suzannah Espie; garage girls Super Wild Horses to the unhinged kookfest that is Ooga Boogas; the psychotropic hypnosis of Sand Pebbles to the indescribable wig-outs of Kim Salmon &The Surrealists; the renegade lyrical flow and beat-tasia of Curse Ov Dialect to the jag and grind of TTT; the intricate weaving of Fabulous Diamonds to the electro breeze of The Emergency; the jungle rhythms of Rat Vs Possum to the sound blockades of Black Cab; the floor fillin’ styles of Dexter and Gorilla Step to the reflections of Liz Stringer and Paradise Motel. Without mentioning the international heavies (Band of Horses, Justin Townes Earle etc...), the comedy (Daniel Kitson) and community events (speed dating, Liquid Architecture), the diversity and inclusiveness is obvious—and this list barely scratches the surface of what’s occurred.
Talking to live-to-air participants it’s clear these shows not only play a vital role in reaching a wider audience, but also they open the ears of listeners up to sounds and styles they may not have otherwise experienced. ‘These let you connect with people you otherwise might not reach,’ Curse Ov Dialect’s Peso Bionic tells me. ‘We play hip-hop, so we might only get played on certain shows, whereas with the live-to-air’s hopefully a lot more people are listening in.’
‘We played prime time on The Skull Cave,’ says Chris Hollow of Sand Pebbles. ‘It was incredible. Ben [Michael X] and I grew up listening to Stephen Walker, it was one show we knew we were going to hear long, wigged-out tracks and the first place we heard our own 13-minute track Black Sun Ensemble. Any success we’ve had, Triple R has been linked [with] in some way.’
There is something poetic about subscribers being active participants, directly responsible for the perpetuation and support of the music community. Through subscribing we actually fund the creation of fantastic programming and the facilitation of these events, which in turn bring us so much pleasure. The artists clearly win here also, with much needed promotion minus the usual money grubbery and two-faced profiteering of the music industry. ‘Triple R is the business without the business,’ Black Cab’s James Lee tells me. ‘Listeners subscribe for a variety of reasons. I subscribe because I'm introduced to new music I wouldn't find anywhere else. Hearing that music played live and connecting with the musicians who play it is a unique experience. Playing live-to-air is the ultimate way to connect with an audience. It bridges the connection between artist and audience.’
‘It's an immediate way to showcase your music to a bunch of listeners who perhaps haven't trekked out to see you live yet,’ says Super Wild Horses’ Hayley McKee. ‘To be able to perform through their radio and into their cars or kitchens is a very unique opportunity.’
‘Not only does Triple R play a heap of local and independent releases,’ says fellow Super Wild Horse Amy Franz, ‘they support local gigs and really help keep the community in the know about what's going on around town. I've heard a lot of great Melbourne bands for the first time on Triple R and thought, “yeah shit I'll go check them out this weekend”.’
Amongst the live-to-air contributors, the identification with Triple R as a selfless and fervent supporter of their art is tremendous. ‘I’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity of the DJs who’ve wanted to speak to us,’ says Kieran O’Shea of Rat Vs Possum, ‘who’ve been kind enough to give us ten minutes on air to talk about what we’re doing. The more Triple R can get listeners to support them, and artists to subscribe also, it just contributes to this overall thing we have here and makes it stronger and stronger and stronger.’
James Lee shares this sentiment. ‘Triple R gives local bands a voice. Radio is about community and music is the most ancient form of communication there is. Without someone listening, it's the old falling tree in the forest conundrum; is there anyone listening? Well Triple R listens and so does its discerning audience.’
‘It's great to know that there's love between the bands and the radio stations that support their music,’ continues Amy Franz. ‘It cements that Melbourne does in fact have a solid music community who collaborate together really well. Live Broadcasts are important to show the strength and versatility of bands, radio stations, punters, everyone. They get bands out of the pub and onto the airwaves.’
There is a historical relevance to all of this with the live broadcasts surviving as a record of what’s taken place. As a partaker in live-to-air broadcasts over two decades, Kim Salmon describes this ‘footprint’ as vastly important. ‘My first one at Triple R was in 1993,’ he explains, ‘I’ve heard those tracks played on the radio since. Any station will be inclined to play something they’ve had a hand in recording, but it’s really nice that they’ve got such a great place to record and perform in, the sound is pristine. As a venue it really stacks up because it was designed to serve these functions.’
‘My drummer Adam and I were the first ones to sign the wall backstage at the new Triple R performance space,’ says Liz Stringer. ‘Or possibly second after Kim Salmon and Ron Peno because we all performed that first night there. The closest to having street cred we’ve ever been.’
‘There's something really special about Triple R documenting live shows,’ continues Hayley McKee. ‘I kinda picture this amazing glittery musical vault where all the recordings will be preserved for future music lovers. Triple R has some seriously good karma coming their way... and hopefully lots of donations too.’

Triple R’s Radiothon runs from this Friday 13th August to Sunday 22nd. This year’s theme Make Contact epitomises the role of Triple R as Melbourne’s music community hub—the fusion point for musicians and music lovers. Subscribe at rrr.org.au or
9388 1027. Subscriptions can be paid up until Wednesday 22nd September for inclusion in prize draws. Reach out and make contact with the station that gives so much to our community.

Samson McDougall

Strung Out @ Hifi Bar

2010-06-14T01:09:00.000-07:00

When David Lynch’s warped Lost Highway antihero Fred Madison is queried about not owning a video camera he responds: ‘I like to remember things my own way... How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.’ This could be said of the ‘90s. I like to remember them as formative years full of great music and much enlightenment. The trouble with all these retrospective tours of musicians desperate to squeeze the last possible buck form their dwindling (or simply washed-up) careers is that, with the total exception of Pixies and a handful of others, they risk laying bare the hollowness of the era gone by, exposing the nasty shame you harbour in you darkest places.
To look at this Strung Out performance with some form of objectivity I forced myself to list all of the positives against the negatives in attempt to create some kind of balance.
Part 1: Good bits
When singer Jason Cruz’s whining voice is drowned out by the insistent double kick drums and three chord assault, the songs are infinitely better. The rhythm section is puckered tighter than a frog’s bottom and some of the alternating Rob Ramos and Jake Kiley lead breaks are Satriani slick.
Part 2: Bad bits
People actually still think this type of music is relevant. I dunno what caves you all sloped out of but music has changed—we should move on now people. If only Californian pop-punk (it makes me gag to use those two words in a hyphenated form but it’s the only way to get the message across that this ain’t hardcore, this ain’t metal, and this most certainly is not punk) were a dead end street, an infertile and childless mule of the music biz; but alas, from pop-punk emo spawned. And now we’re stuck with sulking assembly-line teenagers clagging up the public transport and generally bringing the whole damn vibe down. And yes, I hold the likes of Strung Out personally responsible. Through their flagrant disregard for the future and apathetic response to the early warning signs, we’re stuck with this trite forever. And that really sucks.

Tame Impala

2010-05-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

Tame Impala
Innerspeaker
Modular

There’s this white fuzz at the opening of the first track It Is Not Meant To Be that acts as a gentle teaser—the least refined moment on the album. They’re laughing on us with that, tempting us into an onslaught they will not bring. It’s a few seconds of disparity in a seamlessly sculpted work from possibly Australia’s hottest prospect right now.
Tame Impala seem to have skirted the teeth cutting period and jumped straight to the top of the pile. Their psych grooves feel impossible for their years, their songs are ready and their jams are oh so impressive. Bastards! I’d love to hang shit on this release so much it hurts. I want to hate them, I do. But alas, their debut Innerspeaker is a little ripper and I’m sure they know it.
From the restraint of the opener, listeners will realise this is a step away from their live freak outs. Some of the songs, Solitude is Bliss and the Cream-esque Desire Be Desire Go, will set alarms off in your mind—you know you know them but they’re strangely different, subdued, refrained. As a counter to the grip of their performances this record is bordering on Sunday afternoon couch time.
Instrumental beast Jeremy’s Storm is a steam train—all grinding bass and clashing cymbals, it’s a storm—but it’s so pared back in the production it’s as gentle as a guineapig. Subsequent listens reveal the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of main-man Kevin Parker, the stuff that suffers from the wash of guitar on stage. Further listening offers up new candidates for album favourites. The psychotropic Expectation comes close, but then you’re distracted by the classic lick of Runway, Houses, City, Clouds. It’s impossible to choose.
The pop sentiment these dudes are emanating scares me a little. The album amplifies the question of whether this will be a slow transition into the realm of popular music a la Silverchair? Heaven knows they’ve got the talent to take this wherever they’d like it to go. I just hope they find appeal enough in the Psychedelic realm to push on a little further, at least for one more.

Mojo Juju et al

2010-05-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

Mojo Juju and the Snake Oil Merchants
Sellin’ You Salvation

Hoodoo Emporium/MGM

This is a beautiful package. From Joe Vegas’ gorgeous artwork and digipak casing, to the ink selection and cracking cabaret country blues punk stylings, this album pretty much has it all. From the throaty openings of Catch Afire—‘I spent my last upon a tumbler of whiskey/A gin martini for a girl named Misty/She danced the cooch while I was smokin’ the hooch/And the devil stole my soul upon the moment she kissed me’—Mojo Juju’s voice steers a swingin ship through shaky waters. Her vocals boom, they tease, they chastise, but ultimately seduce the listener into a world of carnival misfits, ghosts and demons—all washed down with a bolt of whiskey and cheap cigars.
It’s the darkness and light that floats this boat so surely. As in their live act, the album fluctuates in tempo and mood dramatically from number to number—it’s unpredictable, it’s perilous. At any given moment, though bearings may seem clear, you can be thrown off on tangents that become no more predictable on repeated listening. These days it’s difficult enough to lure the listener in for a few songs or a side, this is and all or nothing deal—it must be consumed as a whole, it’s a journey and a very pleasurable one at that.
The creepy, contorted God and the Devil opens up the second side mischievously and leads nicely into the rollicker This Is My Home. Dance With You has to be the sexiest number on the record with pared back piano and Juju’s gravy rich vocals. A bit of banjo and horn blues with Sacred Heart of Mary caps off a great listen with refrain. At ten songs, you could feel a little short changed. The quality of this recording speaks for itself, however, and there is no doubt you’ll get value from spinning this one over many years to come.

Snowdroppers interview

2010-04-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

Snowdroppers

Ah festivals, tossing new musical balls in the air for the discerning punter. We found Sydney’s Snowdroppers (according to the interweb: a person who steals women’s underwear from clotheslines) late one night on the APRA stage at Byron’s Blues Fest and were seduced by the energy of their twisted country-blues-punk performance.
In Abbotsford’s Terminus Hotel, on some kind of promotional sojourn, on-the-spot jogging front man Johnny Wishbone along with string guy Pauly K and percussionist Cougar Jones explain their blues playing tendencies grew by default rather than design. ‘Paul and I were playing in a rock band and were asked to put a few songs together for this burlesque show that our now manager was putting on—possibly the last paid show we did,’ Wishbone tells me. ‘He wanted blues songs and we all listened to lots of blues, so we jumped at the chance to play this music that we were passionate about but had no outlet for.’
‘We’re not strictly blues by any stretch,’ adds Pauly K. ‘There’s definitely pop/rock elements in there and that probably explains why.’
‘We never went into it thinking we’d be a blues band,’ Wishbone continues. ‘We would’ve broken up by now because we’d be bored shitless by twelve bar progressions. We like to think we bring a little accessibility to the blues for those who may not have heard it before.’
There is an accessibility to the Snowdroppers’ sound that comes via the sheer scope of their influences. Classic pub-rock melds with country plucking, with punk abandon and gypsy irregularity. They quote influences as diverse as surf guitar, Delta blues, Chicago swing and Australian hard rock. ‘I was always into The Beach Boys and Kinks’ kind of stuff,’ Pauly continues, ‘whereas Wishbone and Cougar have been more into bluegrass and garage rock. If you can’t do any one thing well, do a few things as best you can—it’s a hit and run strategy.’
The Snowdroppers are all too aware of the implications of venue closures on a local live music scene. Sydney’s Hopetoun Hotel closure was well documented Australia wide and though they remain optimistic that the Sydney scene is as vibrant as it ever has been, there are concerns that the governing bodies simply have no idea what the people want. ‘It’s definitely harder to get out there when the smaller venues close,’ Pauly K continues. ‘There was all this talk in Sydney about loosening up and creating more smaller venues. They laxed it but the licenses are still hard to get. The licensing people’s stance seems to be that “We don’t want to be like Melbourne, sipping chardonnay, reading a book in the corner. We’re Sydney, we like big raucous pubs with sports and Kino, we don’t wanna lose that. It’s culture.”’
‘It’s everything you can get at home, in a larger area!’ adds Wishbone.
Crossing so many genre barriers it’s not surprising their debut album Do the Stomp met mixed reviews. The Snowdroppers remain philosophical that though their vigorous live act is near impossible to capture on record, they’re happy with the outcome. ‘Didn’t Inpress shit on it?’ queries Pauly K. I plead ignorance.
‘I take it [bad reviews] really personally,’ Wishbone admits. ‘Not in a violent way. More like a burn my clothes and cry in the shower kind of way.’
‘The first [album] is always gonna be a strange one,’ continues Pauly K, ‘because it has songs you just wrote and songs you’ve been playing since day one—some you’re excited about, some feel a bit like they’re just along for the ride. We knew it would be difficult to capture the live sound, so we decided to embellish it with stuff we couldn’t do live like horns and strings. Not so much to compensate what it would be lacking, but to take it in a slightly different direction.’
‘Yeah,’ concludes Wishbone, ‘they’re different beasts.’

Justin Townes Earle

2010-04-19T21:04:00.000-07:00

Justin Townes Earle & Jason Isbell @ the Corner

Jason Isbell’s voice defies his aesthetic. Not that there’s anything wrong with the bloke to look at, but he’s kind of ordinary. You know? Like the Pixies are the most unassuming folk you’ve ever seen, or Daniel Johnstone—well not really like Daniel, he’s a bit different. More like an ethereal being has leant its voice to an average guy—quite the treat.
And as for Justin Townes Earle, whoa doggy! He’s a beast. He’s a lanky, gangly, awkward lumber of a man, but oh so fuckin cool. With a lineage like his (son of Steve, stepson of Allison Moorer, namesake of country god Townes Van Zandt) you’d expect goodness. Or maybe you’d expect pretence?
What you get with Townes Earle are wonderfully constructed country narratives. Whether you buy in to the myth of the guy (mal-adjustment due to absent famous father a fast-track to criminality and heroin addiction), the tunes are testament to a true talent.
Opener They Killed John Henry brought the freakin’ house down and set the pace for a slightly more rock and roll JTE performance. Isbell backed up beautifully and injected a marvellous vocal harmony element to the songs. It’s a brave man that employs the backing vocals of the likes of Isbell, but Earle seized control and stole the finger picking prize for the night during a stomping rendition of Halfway to Jackson, it was nothing short of jaw dropping.
As a comparison to a largely solo Blues Fest performance at Easter, this night’s show revealed a far less reserved musician and demonstrated clearly the depth and breadth of his arrangements. The level of enjoyment shown by both performers was indicative of two musicians clearly at the tops of their games. Or better still, and hopefully for our sakes, two musicians firmly on the rise.

The Dead Weather, Street Chant @ The Forum

2010-04-11T19:16:00.000-07:00

Testament to the glut of touring artists at this time of year, The Dead Weather’s second Forum show was far from a sell out. But y’know, with Massive Attack in the park and Pixies playing somewhere near the rail yards they did OK to pull any kind of crowd at all.
Kiwi youngsters Street Chant impressed. Their grungy grooves hark back to a time I doubt any of them would’ve been much more than a glimmer in their parents’ eyes, yet they pull it off with authority and smiles. Plus the drummer’s a freakin’ dynamo. Check them out! Jack White seemed impressed.
Regardless of how ‘super’ the amalgam of musicians about the stage (QOtSA’s Dean Fertita, Raconteurs’ Jack Lawrence and The Kills’ saucy goddess Alison Mosshart), you can’t help but be a little disappointed to see Jack White on drums. I’ve got nothing against drumming or drummers (see above paragraph) but, at risk of alienating myself from about a quarter of the music fraternity in this town (after a recent crack at bass players the only friends I’ve got are a couple of maraca shakers and the odd horn blower), a musical talent such as White’s is wasted, that’s right, wasted behind a drum kit—despite the fact he can smash ‘em like a pro.
In saying that, The Dead Weather were on fire from the bludgeoning ‘Treat Me Like Your Mother’ to the salacious White/Mosshart duet of ‘Will There Be Enough Water?’ at the death. It was Van Morrison’s ‘You Just Can’t Win’ that stole it for mine, however, with White seizing the audience in his oh so gifted voice and Mosshart bashing out percussion with her hands. As a counterpoint to a lot of the ‘super’ outfits that come around, The Dead Weather certainly have the songs. It’d be truly grand to see them take this further, as some more material would thicken up what’s already a pretty darned decent show. You wonder, with everything else these four have going on, whether this one will die a side project.

Sam McDougall

The Nation Blue

2009-10-10T23:43:00.000-07:00

The Nation Blue, Zond & Late Arvo Sons @ the Tote
It happens at least a couple of times a year, the good people at the Tote come up with a bill so well considered that you just know it’s gonna be a banger of a night. This one will be filed as a hum-dinger.
If you’ve caught any of my previous Late Arvo Sons summations it’ll be pretty well clear that I’m a fan. They once again set a new bar for themselves on this occasion with a crisp sound mix and sparked energy levels. With typical Australian surf-pub-garage rock style, guitarist Kent Thomas’ melodies came right off the page. Mark Lording’s vocals growled out from the pit of his gut and the rhythm section of Brett Frost (bass) and Stuart Reynolds (drums) banged out their firmest performance to date.
My new favourite band is Zond. These girls and guys have taken a car crash, injected melody, put it in a blender and unleashed it on our ears. Zond take rock (or post-rock, or noise, or something) to the edge of extreme and then over the brink. They are a must see, but remember your earplugs kids. They ripped my ears new arseholes!
Having caught The Nation Blue at the Spectrum Bar in a previous life in Sydney, I hooked in to guitarist and screamer Tom Lyngcoln’s on-stage psychosis and have never been quite able to shake the memory. Things aren’t much different this night and his fury twists and builds through a set of frustrated forays into the darkest realities of the Australian condition—colonialism, land theft and suburban boganics.
The hand blistering guitar spasms of 2007’s Exile seized charge of the room from the get go. Idiot from 2004’s ‘Damnation’ conjured the strongest crowd response, but it was the title track from said album that drove the nails the deepest—slowed to a crawl with venom. Matt Weston’s bass jags and Dan McKay’s drum fills were set tighter than a cat’s arse as these three brought a taste of proper hardcore back to town.

Slayer

2009-10-10T23:34:00.000-07:00

At the top of my Christmas list is a Megadeth sweatband. Perfect for tennis, shopping and in the garden, the Megadeth wristband will take care of all your sweat requirements. I’d pretty much only gone along to see Californian thrash metal gods Slayer, but Megadeth were a hairy surprise. Apparently their moniker is a deliberate misspelling of a term used to describe a million simultaneous deaths in the event of thermonuclear war—cool. Despite sound mix problems driving them from the stage for a spell, they seemed to thrive on the energetic crowd response and played on... and on... and on.
A white curtain dropped to reveal Slayer, full-flight, and the hugest pile of Marshalls you’ve ever seen. Only thing was, it was difficult to make out the song as Tom Araya wasn’t singing. Then he whimpered, “So my voice isn’t holding up too well so I’m not gonna be doing much singing tonight”. And the crowd goes devil-horned whack crazy not really grasping the concept that he meant he wasn’t gonna be singing much this night.
They rip through classics War Ensemble, Chemical Warfare and Expendable Youth and some newies—God Hates Us All a particular highlight—in largely instrumental fashion, but frankly, without Araya’s weapon of a voice, it all lacked punch. And I never wanted to say that. I barely even thought it was possible to use the words ‘Slayer’ and ‘lacked punch’ in the same sentence, but sadly it was true.
As a side-effect, Dave Lombardo’s machinegun drum fills stood out like dogs’ balls and you got a real appreciation for the tight fury of the guitars. It was never going to be enough to pull it off, however, and though Araya made honest attempt to growl out Hell Awaits and bits and pieces of South of Heaven and Angel of Death, the invitation for open mic karaoke towards the death was a bit on the nose. Having been so freakin’ excited for so long to finally see these guys, I have to question whether a call should have been made to cancel the show.

Late Arvo Sons album review

2009-10-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

Letters From Another Alphabet
Up Yours Records

These guys have been gigging around a heap over the last year or so and it’s been a treat to see them build on a little cache of great songs—canning some, keeping others, growing, polishing. Better still, Late Arvo Sons have had the common decency and sense to get an album out quick-sticks and keep the momentum up. Sure, to do so they’ve virtually had to do it themselves but, with the help of a few friends and plenty of heart, they’ve punched out a ripper of debut.

The biggest difference between Late Arvo Sons’ garage pub-thrash and so many others in town is that vocalist Mark Lording can actually sing. Think about it. There’s nothing flashy here, just honest Australian rock tunes, recorded live and mixed by Melbourne DIY guru and genius type Mikey Young (ECSR, Ooga Boogas etc...). Lording’s vocals steady the raucousness of the band, and while he’s no Frank Sinatra or Antony Hegarty, his simple lyrics sung with authentic gravel add integrity to the sound—he actually brings it from his internals and it shows.

Delicate moments fit with quicker surf tunes and classic pub rock well. What’s come to be the signature opener ‘Skin’ is about as catchy as it gets with call and response style screeching between Lording and guitarist Kent Thomas. Instrumental ‘Buckley’s Hope’ opens things out a bit, meandering ‘Make the Drop’ allows them to cut loose, while the up-tempo closer ‘Northern Nightmare’ steals it.

If Late Arvo Sons’ diversification thus-far is anything to go by, we can expect much bigger things for these four in the future. Tristan Ceddia’s pastel sharky artwork is living proof that a no-budget record need not be packaged shabbily, and the songs here lay testament to the band’s undeniable song writing and aesthetic appreciation. While some bucks and flash recording gear may well thicken up the sound a bit for the next one, Letters From Another Alphabet is a worthwhile sample of solid unsung, unsigned local goodness.

FLIP OUT 2009

2009-10-07T20:45:00.001-07:00

Finally it rolled around, the second annual Flip Out Music Festival, to herald the beginnings of all things festive and the return of that inner-idiot you left behind somewhere around Easter.
Repairs kicked things off with apocalypse keys and thunder percussion. It’d be easy to conceive that at the time of judgement, when the good people are diverted towards the light accompanied by some naff ABBA soundtrack, the bad people will be mustered into a hot and dark spiralling corridor with Repairs grinding out a death march.
The Twerps lightened things up, as they have a fabulous tendency to do, and kicked out some of the finest good-time music of the day. Their sound was bigger on this occasion than I’ve heard before, and some of the roomier numbers were downright goose-bump inducing.
Teen Archer was a contender for the spirit award. Their cover of God’s 1987 smash My Pal proved the highlight, especially given the tech difficulty which resulted in an extremely lengthened version—I could listen to that lick forever.
Dick Diver are the kings and queen of smooth. Every move is pure apple juice. A nice sax cameo enriched their groove while forays into keys added colour to some fine pop rockery and a reprieve from the onslaught.
Tassie’s The Native Cats were the surprise of the day. This two-piece mixed it with any of the larger outfits in both sonic thrust and aesthetic. Peter Escott is one charismatic and captivating fella. His vocals shifted through poetry and rhyming staccato, while Julian Teakle’s bass walked a marathon.
James Arthur’s Manhunt lived up to the hype I’d perpetuated in my brain. A proud ginger, Arthur’s command of American riffery and feedback is astounding. Their dusty desert storm grew and twisted to frenzy. With the beer taking hold (on both myself and the singer), this set proved a turning point of sorts. Everything ramped up a couple of notches and things started to get crazy.
Slug Guts pulled out their A-game and I was glued. Where I found the barking a little tiresome on the album, it captivated on stage and their song structures are unquestionable.
The Disbelievers pulled out some fairly straight but flat-out booty shaking rock-n-roll. My only question of their music would be a slight lack of lead melody, a little more would take great songs to fantastic.
This is where things get a little bit hazy, but it’s safe to say that Goodnight Loving jangled it up a bit with some super-light country pop goodness. Then the Ooga Boogas (on this occasion renamed The Doors due to possible legal problems surrounding their regular moniker) brought the party to the people with atypical good grace and tongue-in-cheek crotch gyration.
From hazy to absolutely hammered, all I can say about Wisconsinite Pink Reason’s set is that it dawdled into a crawl into a trot and around again. There’s an unhinged-ness about this guy that perfectly matched my own (and a fair few other’s I’m sure) state of inebriation at this point.
Super Wild Horses were the only recall from last year’s line up and their progression from then to now is almost unbelievable. Naked on the Vague and Royal Headache were a blur and I’d be making shit up to say I remember a sausage of either of them. But such is the nature of this festival—beer and great music and sausages and beer—you’d have been hard pressed to wipe smiles from dials all day. Once again a scene-less festival about music for people who love it, let’s hope it’s back again next year!

Black Cab, Sun Blindness and Sand Pebbles @ the ESPY

2009-08-31T02:17:00.000-07:00

This had to be one of the better bills of the winter, possibly the year. We north-siders tend to save our southward jaunts for something pretty special and with four or so hours of psychedelic brain massage on offer, no stinking river was stopping me.
The Sun Blindness served up roomy cotton-wool wrapped psych-pop with flair. I don’t know whether vocalist Tor Larsen’s had his pipes cleaned or if he could always sing this good. Could be that in his largely secondary vocalist role with Sand Pebbles he’s slipped under the radar a bit, but it was great to hear him giving it a belt. The vibe these guys emanate is hot sauce. I’ve got no idea how both Larsen and drummer Wes Holland managed to back up with the Sand Pebbles straight afterwards—something to do with the vitality of youth I guess.
Dropping straight into the endorphin inducing Wild Season, Sand Pebbles had the Gershwin room in a stupor. And the way these guys ducked and weaved through the most gentle and addictive grooves, grinning like mother fuckers while pumping energy into the crowd was a marvel. Between Andrew Tanner’s smooth, measured croons and Larsen’s sweet, almost feminine intonations, they possessed the vocal weaponry to counter the tantalising barrage of right-handed guitar—though Ben Michael X’s ray-gun string tweaks were fierce.
The latest offering from Black Cab ‘Call Signs’ is a tempestuous triumph. A lesser outfit would’ve struggled to recapture an audience swooning form the eminence of the openers, but Black Cab commanded the room like Charlton Heston at a gun rally. The single Black Angel granted a sliver of light to a performance of such gruelling intensity that it sucked the oxygen from the room, yet revitalised simultaneously. Andrew Coates’ voice appeared and vanished like a spectre, while James Lee’s guitar licks snapped with spring freshness and danced about the place.
This show was of the type that makes gig-going not only a pleasure, but a necessity. A true event with zero pretence, I’m closing my eyes to take myself back.

2009-08-03T01:23:00.000-07:00

The Twerps, Scott and Charlene’s Wedding @ the Empress

There’s something about Scott and Charlene’s Wedding’s sound that drags you back to the addled early eighties. It’s as if each song opens with up-beat optimism but steadily descends into hopelessness—occasionally madness. Their tunes are real, they’re immediate, and they’re desolate; yet simultaneously rocking. The angles are obtuse, the guitars are almost deliberately wrong footed, the vocals grate; but the combination excites. With Jarrod Quarrel’s contributions to both S&C’sW and St Helens, it’s difficult not to draw comparisons between the bands. His influence on the bass in this incarnation, though, lends weight to an enticing but determinedly flat sound and is well worth a listen in itself.
Last year the Twerps surprised with a far poppier sound than I would’ve expected. In the intervening months their growth as a unit has been astounding to this point. They strum and thump out surf licks without breaking a sweat, then push on through to barraging guitar walls and delicate balladry with ease. I tend to reject the ‘geek-rock’ label they’ve been granted; there’s something so fine-tuned-cool about these kids that no matter the levels of self-deprecation, confidence oozes from their very beings.
Central to any band’s progression is the ability and nerve to bust out the new material at the risk of ticking off a growing fan base. We’ve seen it with Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s rapid ascent and equally the Drones’—the implementation of fresh writing has been crucial to the continuing freshness of sound. Despite the Twerps’ obvious disappointment over Friday night’s performance, they should take heart from the fact that the packed room stayed firm and that any imperfections in their set were barely perceived by most. Truth be told, the Twerps’ songs are instantly recognisable after as little as one listen—surely to test the shiny new stuff is worth a punt and will be worth the pay off next time.
The biggest threat the Twerps are facing right now is not getting an album out before the warmer months. These are serious summer-time tunes and it’d be a fair coup to strategically release something in the springtime. While this performance lacked a bit of the spark of previous outings, with a little persistence, and any luck, these four will be sound-tracking our next summer.

VANUATU

2009-07-07T04:41:00.000-07:00

THE PRICE OF HAPPINESS
By Samson McDougall

What is striking from the air is the delicacy of the smaller isles in the archipelago of Vanuatu. They arrive from nowhere out of the immensity of the Pacific Ocean; greens, blues and yellows of such brilliance that you can’t look away. While the larger islands jut proudly in volcanic splendour, the slighter of the land-masses—many not much more than a flash of sand and an insignificant stand of palms—offer an air of fragility, hopeless against the persistent clawing of their endless blue surrounds.
In 2006, the Happy Planet Index declared Vanuatu the happiest place on earth. This study of 178 countries measured life expectancy, ecological footprint and life satisfaction to rank individual nations against each other. Across the board, developed, industrialised countries scored poorly: New Zealand finished 94th; Australia, 139th; and the USA, an abysmal 150th. Of the top fifteen countries, fourteen are tropical and have low-lying regions at risk from rising sea levels. Carbon emissions from the industrialised world may cause the devastation of many of these, the world’s paradises.
Pango Point lays at the Southern extremity of Efate—the main island of Vanuatu—ten kilometres from the capital of Port Vila. We stay in bungalows set amongst rambling gardens of fruit trees and palms; we sleep close to the shoreline, not far from the high-tide mark. The reef directly in front of the resort is well and truly alive. Electric coloured fish zoom and dart amongst corals so vibrant that they humiliate the reefs of Queensland—deserts by comparison. We are told that coral bleaching (stress-induced expulsion of symbiotic algae resulting in colour reductionindicative of climate change) is increasing in Vanuatu but, despite dead coral clustering amongst garbage on the beaches, there is little evidence at Pango.
The people of Vanuatu, Ni-Vanuatu, have put up with a long history of occupation and imperial governance. The US armed forces used the islands as a strategic base during WWII; the British and French squabbled over the territory for decades. A republic was formed and independence granted to Vanuatu in 1980. Bislama, English and French are the three recognised languages of the nation though dozens of regional dialects are spoken across the eighty-three island group. Many inhabitants are multi-lingual.
From the British and French the Ni-Vanuatu inherited strong cultural and economic ties; the currency (Vatu) remains strong in the face of global fiscal uncertainty. It is, however, difficult to ignore large chunks of the pie falling into the hands of expats, who sweat foully and posture over blueprints while the locals labour, ever smiling, for relatively little monetary gain. The discarded war machines of the American forces have become famous dive-spots and jungle attractions; yet an invasive weed minit mael (mile a minute), used as camouflage by the US troops, strangles the flora of the islands. There exists a duality here by which the people, eager to embrace the benefits of globalisation, remain ambivalent towards the side effects.
The Ni-Vanuatu smile continually, laughter rings around the streets and villages. Most inhabitants reside in basic villages of similar ilk to those of their forefathers. Women from the surrounding islands congregate at the Port Vila market which runs 24 hours from Monday through Saturday. Pandanis and banana-leaf baskets encase all manner of tropical vegetables and fruits. The dining section provides hot meals for the floral dressed vendors, many of whom camp with their small children alongside their produce for the week.
There is beauty in the simplicity of life in Vanuatu. Certain islands specialise in particular products. The women of Pentecost Island produce exquisite woven goods. There is mounting influence of global culture however. While some imports seem to fit appropriately—reggae music and thongs—the arrival of mobile phones has resulted in grotesque advertising blanketing buildings, shopfronts and even the market walls. In the most remote areas of Efate, bright red plastic service provider flags dangle from the awnings of ramshackle huts.
I paddle my surfboard over sharp, vicious coral-heads, which cause me to abort multiple attempts at wave riding—afraid of the razor-like tendrils. Upon finding my nerve, the waves are incredible. Translucent water sucks over the reef where large corals pass dangerously close beneath my board. The plunging dark-blue beyond the reef is testament to the power of the breakers, which arrive from Pacific depths to slam into the shelf. It’s from this vantage that I first notice the extent of retaining wall fortification around the resort and the proximity of the unprotected Pango Village.
In 2005, according to the UN Environment Program, the town of Lateu on the island of Tegua, Vanuatu, claimed the inglorious title of becoming ‘…one of, if not the first, [settlements] to be formally moved out of harm’s way as a result of climate change.’ The one hundred inhabitants of Lateu were forced to move half a kilometre inland due to increased flooding during king-tides. There are major concerns for Vanuatu’s coconut industry (31 per cent of all exports) due to increased saltwater flooding.
Although Vanuatu has been lucky to elude the path of cyclones for the past five years, large seas and king-tides combined with a slight sea-level rise could cause major destruction in many of the coastal resorts. Paltry retaining walls and barricades are eroded by the incessant licking of the Pacific. It is the coastal villages such as Pango that will bear the physical brunt of future weather events, however, villages that have existed in their exact locations for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.
Reef-bleaching and increased ferocity of tropical storms and cyclones will prove catastrophic to the tourism industry (responsible for 72 per cent of the GDP). In Vanuatu, where eighty per cent of residents exist without electricity, education is an expensive luxury and the annual budget designation for development and education is the equivalent of AUD$70, 000; there is very little, if anything, that can be done to prevent impending environmental disaster. The fate of Vanuatu, amongst other low-lying tropical island groups, is in the hands and on the heads of us in the industrialised world.
The strength of the people here is their ability to relish the positives and dispel the negatives from any situation. The nature of the Ni-Vanuatu is to smile in the face of adversity. Time-pieces are largely viewed as unnecessary; the default reaction in most situations is laughter. Life goes on in the islands; there is inevitability in the daily adversities of living in the developing world. Though the threats associated with global warming loom, I wonder whether the people here brush the realities aside through their easygoing nature or whether the dangers remain too frightening to confront.
In our travels around Vanuatu we discover many well-organised, localised conservation incentives; the Hawksbill Turtle sponsorship and breeding program on Moso island a particular highlight. In inland regions the focus is different; for those who live in the hills there is no awareness of the coastal environment as their food comes from other sources. The villages throughout Vanuatu are independent enough that one’s actions will seldom directly affect another. While a certain level of environmental awareness and intent is apparent in Vanuatu, there is very little cohesion between communities—environmental efforts appear well meant but disjointed.
As the primary food source, there is awareness amongst the Pango villagers of the importance of the health of the reef. In 2006 a seventeen acre no-take zone was established at Pango; ‘don’t walk on the reef’ signs dot the point. One morning we witness a foreign surfer reprimanded by coastal construction workers as he mindlessly trudges his way over the delicate coral. Unfortunately these same workers discard rubbish and all unused building materials into the ocean and onto the very same reef.
We sit along a makeshift bench seat; four tourists very out of place at one of Pango Village’s backyard kava bars. A few local youths line another bench and eye us wearily as our guide, Pango man Jonathan Simeon, brings us our next bowl and accompaniment of boiled banana. The kava is bitter but hardly as unpalatable as I had been warned. It is brown, murky, mixed in large garbage bins and tastes like grassy dishwater. Pigs, chickens, cats and dogs wander aimlessly. Jonathan explains that although the animals have owners, in the village everything is ultimately communal. If somebody has no job then they will clean the houses and streets of the village in return for necessities. Everybody here knows each other and the village community supports those in need.
As members of a global community, we have an obligation to consider not only ourselves but also our neighbours in times of crisis. The impacts of climate change in tropical low-lying areas are immediate. Drastic reductions in Carbon emissions in the industrialised world are required to slow the heating of our oceans, the melting of polar ice-caps and associated sea-level increases. While projections of emissions cuts by 2020 and 2050 are well intended, we can only hope that our attempts at rectification will not be too little, too late.

CASTLE TONES

2009-06-28T16:55:00.001-07:00

With this, the latest in the Mistletone showcase series, you got the distinct impression that the label was just plain showing off. Any number of the dozen outfits on this bill would have lured me along to a show, but to jam them all in to one venue across two stages for about eight hours—much of which was spent consuming beer—was kinda cruel.
And the Edinburgh Castle worked a treat! I have to say that I was sceptical of the choice to begin with, especially given the not-so-distant memories of the broken lift and bottleneck disaster that was last year’s Winter Tones at Roxanne Parlour. I now appreciate the lack of promotion of this event, not that there was any shrouded secrecy surrounding the show but there was restraint shown on behalf of the organisers. This allowed for a free-flowing celebration of music without the usual toe treading and elbow charges. In reality, they could have allowed twice as many peeps through the turnstiles. The door staff showed fabulous grace under fire in enforcing the one-in, one-out policy—hats off to them.
Music-wise the diversity was key. Though it’s unlikely that everything on the bill would have been to the taste of many, there was more than enough of an assortment of sounds to ensure there was just a little something for everybody... Ambiguous enough? Seriously, it was such a great evening I’m loath to rag on anyone. For me the Twerps’ effortless entertaining, Kes Trio’s sprinkling of pixie-dust, Dick Diver’s raucous energy (though noted lack of dick diving), Lee Memorial’s arranging and beats, and Ned Collette and Wirewalker’s sonic blockade kicked goals all over the place. In saying that, any of the night’s assemblages were contenders and with acts of this calibre across the board it feels redundant to inject any level of criticism—for once, it’d only be a matter of taste.
Of the four ‘Tones’ parties I’ve attended thus-far, I’d have to say this one’s the champ. This bodes well for the future of the series as there’s been a steady improvement on each occasion. Castle Tones attested to the reality that it takes smart organisation, not just great bands, to pay dividends in punter land. In this instance, intelligent arrangement and great bands produced a memorable night.

2009-06-22T18:53:00.001-07:00

Aleks and the Ramps
Midnight Believer
Stomp

It’s impossible not to be caught up in the tidal rhythms of the opening number 'Destroy the Universe with Jazz Hands', which typically contorts into an electro poppy feast. Typical in an Aleks and the Ramps sense, however, is as far from any traditional song writing as you’ll get. Lingering in the peripheries of so many musical genres, they’re impossible to peg down. 'Midnight Believer' is a consolidation of sorts; it acts as the best explanation of their signature complexities to date. All the while, the feel of the album barely resembles the live incarnation of Aleks and the Ramps at all.
You’re greeted by the delicious inky smells of a classy package, complete with gorgeous cover art and poster by illustrator Lily Coates—once you’ve pulled the disc out there’s not an ounce of plastic in sight. There’s a maritime peg to the arrangements that vanishes for spells but returns occasionally to remind you where you are. There’re crafty little samples in spots, clean acoustic rhythms and the banjo makes its marvellous self known throughout.
Structurally this album lends itself to improvisation and as a basis for a live show it will make fantastic root material. Gripe-wise, all that could be slandered upon 'Midnight Believer' is that it’s a little too short. With the sisterly nature of all tracks, one through ten, it’s an exciting prospect to hear it live, start through finish.
The elemental beauty of this recording lies in the crafted hidden treasures continually darting and enticing. The time taken in arranging may’ve been excessive but the detailing pays off. From moment to moment you’re never quite sure where they will take you next. By definition, this is what separates Aleks and the Ramps from anything else I’m hearing right now. There exists within this outfit the ability to pull (musical) rabbits from hats at every turn. It’s a narrative of sorts but it’s by no means ‘once upon a time... the end.’ More James Joyce than John Grisham, Midnight Believer is the literature of Melbourne music, but in no way inaccessible.
Sam McDougall

The Tote

2009-06-22T00:35:00.000-07:00

The Tote’s future is unwritten

In May, a nine-day closure of Melbourne’s seminal rock’n’roll venue, Collingwood’s Tote Hotel, sent a shiver through the music community. Like a corpse, the building itself seemed to sag on its foundations—her lifeblood removed, it felt as though she could implode on herself at any moment. If the Tote’s walls could speak (and if the carpet is anything to go by, there’s a pretty good chance they can), they’d bombard us with the stories of a true champion of rock music. The calibre of international touring acts that have graced the stage—White Stripes, Guitar Wolf, McLusky, Mudhoney, The Dirtbombs, Hellacopters etc—aside, the Tote’s greatest accolade has been its role in the propulsion of Australian music. Without the Tote serving up live bands and providing a launch pad for local musicians six-nights-a-week, Melbourne’s reputation as a world-class rock’n’roll destination would be seriously jeopardised.
It’s true that the Tote’s demise would only propel another venue, of which there are plenty, to the top of the local pile. And as we’ve witnessed with the closing of Fitzroy’s Punter’s Club, New York’s C.B.G.B’s, London’s Astoria and Wellington’s Bar Bodega, the passing of a music institution, while sad, is unlikely to spell the end. Still, the Tote has served a community (maybe not your local mother’s group, but a community nonetheless) for twenty-five years now and the historical significance of what’s been going on inside her withered frame should not be underestimated.
With the current lease expiring in October, rezoning of the neighbouring TAFE site opening development possibilities, an impending resale, increasing running and security costs, and a crippling licensing debacle, you’d have to say the odds are stacked against the Tote. That said, there’s every possibility that any and all of these problems could be surmounted. A sympathetic buyer may appear and snap the place up for a relative bargain at the current asking price. A ten-year lease might become available at a reasonable rate. The outcome of rezoning could favour a noisy pub and deter residential development of the adjacent block. The headaches of licensing technicalities appear to be over, though there’s little chance the government will back-flip on the high-risk security tag the bar has been assigned.
Hedging words abound—woulds, coulds, mays and mights aplenty—but film-maker Natalie van den Dungen remains optimistic about the future of this venue. Given the harsh reality that a crumbling Tote would create a dramatic finale to her Forthcoming documentary, which was intended as a simple celebration of our home of rock, Natalie insists that her heart remains set on the subsistence of her favourite haunt. “I have film-maker friends that say ‘wow that’d be great for your film,’” she laughs. “But I tell them that I don’t care at all. I would relinquish the entire documentary for the fact that the Tote will keep going.”
And she’s not talking about some fly-by-night project here. Natalie’s film (working title: ‘Loud and Proud’; commonly referred to as ‘The Tote Documentary’) will showcase the culmination of five-year's worth of concert and interview footage. “Initially my desire was to raise some kind of awareness that this is going on right here,” she continues. “I felt like what’s going on at the Tote should be celebrated. Even with nobody in the Tote, it still emanates its own character—it’s a living, breathing organism. You can’t create that without thirty-odd years of things happening and allowing it to grow. And it’s not just the building; it’s all the people it’s attracted. If it was to end, it would be the breaking of a community. The tote is this nucleus, this central point of the music scene. It serves a collective of people who love music. It doesn’t matter if they differ in any other way, they can come together on a musical level. I just wanted to declare the Tote to the world... and then save it.”
But saving the Tote was always going to be a huge task for one woman and a camera. “I had a dilemma when it sold last year. I was thinking ‘what if it shuts down? Maybe I should make the documentary now; I need to get it out there’. But then I realised I can’t save the Tote, but I can certainly help try and drum up some support or awareness.”
To achieve this and finish the Tote project Natalie requires funding. Part of the difficulty in attracting funds is that outside of Melbourne music circles—and dedicated rock’n’roll communities elsewhere—the Tote’s profile is far from huge. It’s loud, it’s dingy and it’s the exact type of place your mother warned you about. So despite the quality of the interview and live footage Natalie’s amassed thus-far, it remains far from an investors dream.
Still, Natalie remains philosophical. “If the people I’m applying for funding from don’t fund the completion of this documentary, they’re not the right people to make this. This is something to get very excited about. I’ve got amazing footage and it’s an amazing subject—it deserves it! Nothing about the Tote feels like it’s being mass produced or spoon-fed. It’s all about the appreciation of music. In this day and age, what kinds of communities are there? There’s sporting communities, there’s online communities, but where else can people of all backgrounds get together, hang out and talk about the world? We’ve got something special here and kind of precious. Anybody who knows this place would find it hard to disagree with that.”
With so many factors weighing against the continuation of the Tote, Natalie is stuck, somewhat, in a holding pattern until the situation is resolved either way in October. From then, she promises, her obsessive documentation of the Tote will finish; though it may take her moving abroad to physically stop her. From such naive beginnings, it is now likely that this film will prove a valuable historical reference. This, Natalie claims, was never the intention. “I didn’t start this to make a good documentary. I started this because I thought it mattered and I wanted to show that to other people. It’s about an open mind and a curiosity and sharing. Without sounding childlike, sharing is such an important thing. A big part of what I’m trying to do with film is to share what I am experiencing with other people for their sake. It makes me happy when people like it. It’s like [seminal Australian comedy] ‘The Castle’... You can’t buy what we’ve got.”

For more information about the Tote Documentary and a kick-arse trailer go to: www.myspace.com/thetotedoco

Sam McDougall

2009-04-26T17:09:00.000-07:00

The Swindlers—EP
Review by Samson

If heavy-ended, raucous, honest guitar music’s your bag; the Swindlers debut EP will prove about as reliable your Grandad’s Corolla and as solid as a Volvo station wagon in a crash test. The first few bars of the opening number Oh No welcome you to a familiar corner pub, sit you down in your favourite chair, offer you a pot and say, ‘Here ya go mate, don’t look so glum. Here’s some totally Australian, swaggering, rock-n-blues for your winter worries.’ Then they slap you around a bit for being such a sook.
Once you’ve negotiated the jitter-bug of an opener and waded through the rain-sodden sandbag grooves of the mid-tracks, the seven-handed speed blur strumming of Siren will get you rabbiting all over the place till your knees buckle and eyeballs hurt. The closer Boar Down will lure you back to the flood plains before bashing your brainbox with a combo of vocal, guitar and percussion staccato that’ll force you to spin the whole thing over again just in case you missed something in all the jumping and violence. And you will have, it just gets bigger and better the more it turns. Bloody nice package too!

Pink Fits review

2009-04-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

The Pink Fits, the Vandas, Midnight Woolf—the Tote

Holy fuck you get some line-ups at the Tote sometimes. It’s as if the planets align and some dirty little alien lasers a sweet, salty, hip-swaggering little bundle of rock-n-roll straight to Johnstone Street. I’d salivated over this particular show all afternoon, my expectations were higher than a hippy up a scaffold; and from the moment Midnight Wolf hit the stage running, I knew that I was home.
Midnight Woolf are the walking, breathing embodiment of a sweat-factory—and I mean that in the kindest possible sense. From leopard print Drummer, Rabbitfoot Annie, to howlin’ vox-box, Fuzzhound, The Woolf stamped, barked and growled their way through some fast, electric, swampy shit. There’s prickly punk stabs, there’s instrumental thrash jams, there’s covers (New Kind of Kick as a tribute to Lux a delight), and there’s beer swilling good times for all and sundry.
The Vandas broke up the rackety bookends of Midnight Woolf and Pink Fits nicely. That’s not to say these blokes weren’t clamorous, but there’s a polish to the Vandas, and such a well of obvious musicality, that is sure to lead them great places. Their brand is elegantly constructed Australian blues-rock, and the writing’s about as handsome as the duelling frontal combination of Gus Agars and Mikey Madden—they could barely keep their hands off each other. The Vandas’ approach is all-out. With no room for filler it’s a marvel they could’ve written so many impressive songs in a relatively short lifespan—such is the attention to detail.
Fresh from ‘the Gong’, the Pink Fits’ sucked the oxygen from the room with the ferocious tempo of their performance. The opening stanza consisted much new material which unfortunately suffered a poor mix. The Illawarra quartet showed grit in powering through the soupish sound without complaint though, and the mix improved markedly for the back end.
The third act from the Pink Fits was a riot of surf tunes craftily disguised as speed rock. Performing a rare extended headline show allowed the band to delve back to their roots and rip out the kind of shit you’d imagine they played in the Wollongong surf clubs of youth. This was less Hawaiian shirt and ukulele, more tattoos and V8s—the bad-ass, black surf-boarded, punk mother-fuckers from Point Break rather than Keanu Reeves and the girl… If you know what I mean?

Sam McDougall

Black Lips

2009-03-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

By Samson McDougall

Atlanta rockers the Black Lips smacked Australian shores in 2007, taught us how to party and left a trail of carnage in their wake. The Meredith Music Festival show was the business that myths are made of—a vomit soaked, man-pashing, up-tempo sweat-fest. The follow-up performances at the Arty and the Tote set new precedents for touring rock bands. They came, they got drunk, they experienced the city for a week and they punched out some of the performances of the year with a range of local supports including Eddy Current Suppression Ring, The Stabs and Straightjacket Nation.

Needless to say, touring with the Black Lips is not your average fly-by-night routine. There is a commitment amongst the foursome to thinking, and playing, outside of the square. Their resultant ethos has pushed them to the extremities of comfortable rock-n-roll destinations, including a trip to underground clubs in Israel and an emergency exit from India upon accusations of public homosexual acts.

It’s from the American interstate on the back of their latest release 200 Million Thousand that Faster Louder caught up with gag-jerking singer-guitarist Cole Alexander. Despite the Black Lips’ relative longevity (it’s hard to believe they’ve been doing this for almost a decade), Alexander remains adamant that age is not yet slowing them down. “We’re stronger than ever, we’re still robust and fertile,” he laughs almost imperceptibly through the crackle and delay of a mobile phone from the tour bus. “It’s actually getting easier. We try and stay chill and save energy until we’re on stage. I won’t talk a lot and just try and relax on a couch. I’ve had a lot of problems with sustaining my voice but it’s gotten stronger over the years and now I can sing a lot better. Some guys work out at the gym a couple of hours a day; I just play on stage for forty-five minutes. I just save all my energy for when I’m on stage.”

The Georgian roots of the Black Lips transcend their sound with equal portions of country, blues, old-style rock and punk. Still, Alexander recalls, it was no easy feat to break free of the Southern mindset and actually get their material noticed. “From a musical standpoint it [Georgia] was rich in resources like blues and country music. But as far as an industry for what we were doing, it was kind of tough. It felt like if we had’ve been in New York in the early 2000s and picked up on the whole rock thing there, we could’ve got big. We needed an outlet and once we started getting out of Georgia we started meeting with some success.”

There exists a nostalgic grainy finish to the Black Lips’ recordings that’s reflective of their adoption of analogue techniques. 200 Million Thousand pushes this ideology to the extreme with the newly released CDs being recorded directly from an original vinyl press. So is vinyl likely to (re-) take the World by storm? Is it the way of the future, or simply a grasp at the past? “There’s definitely been an increase in our vinyl sales,” Alexander continues, “but a lot of kids still download our stuff for free. I’ve always loved vinyl personally; if you listen close to the new CD you’ll hear a little crackle.”

“As soon as I started buying vinyl records I was hooked. It really wasn’t the sound quality that was the issue. In high-school I wanted to hear Grandmaster Flash and I couldn’t find the CD anywhere, so I went to this friend’s uncle who was a DJ or whatever and I could buy hip-hop records from him. I’ve always liked vinyl for the fact that you can find the stuff that’s not on CD or on the radio. I think eventually the CD will become extinct; we’ll be left with digital and vinyl.”

To be swept up in a Black Lips live experience is to be beaten about the brains with some unstoppably enticing tunes and an insatiable urge to get rotten. After all, if the kids on stage are in a frenzy then why not? Alexander explains that while the raucous nature of their reception in Australia was outstanding, the Black Lips harbour a similar response wherever they go. “We had a great time in Australia and it’s always good for us to go to rock towns and rock cities where people are really enthusiastic about rock-n-roll music. In saying that it’s pretty hard to differentiate as to whether it was much different or any better than anywhere else. The reaction is kind of similar all over the World. Even in India where it’s stricter, we played this one show where everyone went crazy and let everything go. There exists this kind of Universal rambunctious-ness.” Indeed.

2009-02-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

OW, MY FREAKIN’ EARS!

You wait for it all year, wiling away those long winter months, coat clad, scarf necked and boot shod into bleak Melbourne nights. You all congregate in the same scraggy haunts on Wednesdays, scouring the music papers for news of summer concert and festival delights to warm you heart in sweet anticipation, all the while keeping up with treats on offer around your inner-suburban winter traps.

Then it’s upon you. Last year kicked off a little earlier than usual with Flip-Out at the Corner—with the highest quality, wall-to-wall calibre of acts and no filler, we can only hope that that one comes back! Then everything changes. Life becomes such a frenzied mess of over-indulgence and aural abuse that your every day existence is shoved into a ditch until the heat comes off. Jobs are forgotten and lost, significant others alike. You are reduced to a warm tinnie gripping, singlet wearing, stinking, and greasy-skinned credit card disaster. But who can blame you? It gets better every year and you’re not getting any younger that’s for sure.

Meredith looms large with the promise of new talent and mad hallucinatory gaffer-tape Dictaphoned tent conversations to mark the end of the working year. You tramp out of the Supernatural swamp area with mud-invaded orifices and little recollection of anything but The Bronx’s set and some dude breaking his shoulder during the nudie run. Oh, and the rain… always back to the rain.

New Year hits hard with promise of more camping madness—you’d think you would’ve learnt your lesson last year, or at least have enough emotional scabbage from the Meredith washout to convince you it’s a terrible idea. Thankfully you’re better prepared this time as pastel-clad teens vomit red cordial and dry-root amongst the sheep shit crusted pasture of the obnoxiously overpopulated (and priced) festival grounds. It makes you feel a bit tired but thankfully your sweet camp-site allows you the luxury of retiring early and leaving them all to it.

Not wanting to be left lagging when the lunacy is over, there’s the local stuff to keep up with as well. Unfortunately the regular venues won’t relent with killer bills. After all, was it not the Drones at the Forum and Eddy Current at the Corner that topped last year’s best-of-gig lists? All the while you’re hammered by sideshows. You visit the Forum, the Palace, the HiFi the Corner. There’s a nasty Christmas comedown thrown in there for measure—much to the vexation of family members.

You are treated to all the worldly marvels of the first Australian leg of All Tomorrow’s Parties (if the rumours are true then we’ll be graced again next year), where fans of proper music can escape the bubble-wrapped fanfare of tweenie-fests and appropriately appreciate profound performances from the cream of local and international produce. You catch Dirty Three doing Ocean Songs; elsewhere, Fantomas perform The Director’s Cut and Public Enemy prove It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold us (them) Back—you could hardly fathom last year’s Sonic Youth does Daydream Nation—the Don’t Look Back series ensures a marvellous time for thirty-somethings loath to let go of their dissipating youth.

The kids build towards the Big day Out where you all sweat in the stifling racecourse car park and punish yourselves for being Australian. We grown-ups steal into the V.I.P. area where at least the expulsion of a weak bladder seldom results in a half-hour ordeal. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays throw up more gigs; frenetic sideshows erupt like pox all over the arse of your week—it’s the silly season after all—and then there’s the weekends. Thankfully you get a breather (of sorts) at Neil Young at The Bowl and then maybe catch Leonard Cohen sulking; it feels as though the dust may settle a little.

Then February arrives with Summer Tones—finally they’ve got this one right—by fuck, the line-up’s astonishing! St Jerome’s—skinny jeans and Oakley Frogskins; Soundwave— inclined to angular black fringes and scowling; Alice in Chains at the Palais—joy for the creaking bones and backs of the slightly more antiquated; Nine Inch Nails—machine noise and body-paint; and finally the backmarker, Golden Plains, to signal the end of it all—though with the class of the bill this year it’s going to be chaos until we drop mid-March. That’s of course if you consider the Blues and Roots, V and Splendour festivals to be of a dissimilar ilk to their summer compadres—outsiders thrown at us during the off season to remind us of what has been and what’s to come around again—hardly the same. And that’s only the weeping scab on the surface of it all; of course there’s the unyielding continuum of local established and developing talent you’ve been neglecting in the speed blur.

Eventually you’ll find yourself trudging out in a Victorian Southerly on your way to: the Tote, the East, the Northcote, the Birmingham, the Corner, the Espy, the Evelyn, the Empress, the Edinburgh Castle, the Toff, Old Bar, Pony, Ya Yas, or any of the countless other champions of the Melbourne music world—all the gems… Perhaps the Gem? You’ll arrive again at one of the dark, smelly, wondrously beer-soaked jewels in the crown of this fair city and breathe it all in, stop for a pot and scour the music pages for news of up-coming local delights and forthcoming summer festival pleasures. You’ll remember then that it’s not so bad amidst the sleepy chill of the back end of the year—rather pleasant, in fact, to be holed-up in a dark room on a dreary eve with some swampy guitar noise for company. And as the bands roll on through you’ll realise just how lucky you are to live in a town where it’s there for the taking week after week, year-round. In a corner you’ll vow to march on for the cause; because, undoubtedly, if these gifts are not perpetually embraced then they will surely be lost. Use it or lose it as they say… Amen to that.

Samson McD

Australia is the hottest place on Earth today and Melbourne is the hottest town in Australia!

2009-02-06T16:50:00.000-08:00

Today is likely to be among the hottest on record in Victoria, and the effects of the heatwave are adding up across the state.

THE weather bureau tells Lou Bennett it's 44 degrees. But he trusts better his own thermometer, rigged up on the back verandah. It says 52.

Fire crews scramble to contain Bunyip Park blaze

Increasing wind fans flames as fire pushes towards towns.

GOAT HUSBANDRY

2009-01-25T16:02:00.001-08:00

T'was a sad day at sunny Waimarama yesterday.

Dave had to part with his much beloved goats; Mr Pickles, Mischief and Glenda the nanny. Though Glenda made it clear that she was very unhappy to be forced from her half-pipe home (due to recent events I'd be happy to see the damn skateboard ramp razed to the ground for its insubordination and abuse of my elbow), my parents are now goatless and none the happier for it let me tell you. Goodbye my bleating, cloven-hoofed friends. You will be missed by all, good luck and best wishes...

Fishin' at dusk...

2009-01-23T00:15:00.000-08:00

The lazy sun setting over the sleepy town of Waimarama, Hawkes Bay.

I'M ON REDBUBBLE CHECK IT OUT

2009-01-21T23:08:00.000-08:00

I'M ON REDBUBBLE (arts site) AS thesamsonite.

CHECK IT OUT!

Appro says, 'shuddup and throw me the ball stupid!'

2009-01-15T15:02:00.000-08:00

My mate Appro reckons that nothing is as sweet in life as a new ball or stick. The waves continue to crank and strangely there's still no surfers in sight. I'm migrating back to sunny Melbourne on the 3rd of Feb, so I'm inclined to try and relax a little more also. It's kind of impossible to get too stressed here in this sleepy little corner of the world. And hey, things could be worse right... I could have two broken elbows.

2009-01-14T10:35:00.000-08:00

To the untrained eye, this outlook would create a perfect setting for breakfast. For the surfer with a broken arm, this vista is both cruel and torturous. The waves here in Waimarama have been cranking for a week now, with barely a soul in the water. What's worst though, is that you wake at a sparrow's fart here and have to endure hours of longing every day. Still, it's not to bad on the eye... Just a little hard on the brain.

2009-01-09T13:02:00.000-08:00

Another day in a fishing/surfing paradise being tortured with a broken arm. It seems the local paper is cashing in on the 'shark frenzy' this summer although I'd be more concerned with the amount of boating/river deaths so far this year. Apparently 300 million sharks are slaughtered each year; I'd wager that this is fractionally greater than shark fatalities on humans (The last death in NZ was way back in 1976). I don't reckon the media does the fish any favours with shock headlines directed at ignorant bumpkins.

Still, there is some beauty to be found in the garden... Ain't that nice.

Photo diary 1

2009-01-08T16:21:00.000-08:00

So i decided to illustrate a day in the life of an unarmed man but my day started out a little more exciting than most...

Fishing with the grown-ups @ Karamea, NZ.

CEREAL STORY

2009-01-07T14:30:00.000-08:00

Ok... so if anyone's interested, I'm gonna spontaneously write a portion of a story every day until it's done. It has no name and I have little idea where it's going. It's an experiment of sorts and the first installment will be up this arvo.

ALL PARTS OF THE STORY WILL BE CLEARLY NUMBERED SO EVEN A MORON CAN KEEP UP TO DATE!

2009-01-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

Well howdy folk, i've gone and done it...

Due to a broken elbow i'll be filling these pages with piffle for a while.

Join me if you think you can stomach it...

chur

2009-01-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

Well people, I broke me elbow (see diagram).

The trouble is that in the diagram the break looks like a crack, a door left ajar. In reality, the top of my radius looks like scrambled eggs. I now have a neat system of wires and screws (think mechano) holding it all in place.

I could be looking at a 3 to 6 month recovery period on this one so working may be a bit of a problem.

I'll update this daily for my own pleasure...

chur