A LIST: Best Australian Albums 2010-2019
LOOK: Meredith Music Festival 2019
LISTEN: Dumb Things – ‘Time Again’ LP
LISTEN: Bert Shirt – Late Night Shopping EP
LISTEN: Yunzero – Ode To Mud
INTERVIEW: Mallee Songs
WATCH: Tralala Blip – ‘Pub Talk’
LISTEN: Joan Banoit – Clerical
LISTEN: Angie – The Underling LP
LISTEN: Brick Brick – Chip 4 Chip EP
LISTEN: Sweet Whirl – Love Songs & Poetry EP
Recent Posts
SEQUENCE: The Ocean Party
PREMIERE: Minimum Chips
We mentioned this in the Melbourne Music Week feature but now we can update you with the wonderful news that Chapter Music are releasing a 20th bday special compilation. Only available at the Melbourne and Sydney shows – as if you aren’t going anyway! ’20 Big Ones’ is a limited edition double coloured vinyl release with 20 tracks of rare and unreleased cuts from the Chapter bands of the last decades.We nabbed the Minimum Chips tracks ‘Jolly Jumper’ which was recorded recently and sounds very nice. The compilation features a wide range of interesting artists including many of whom are playing at the 2 birthday shows detailed below. The Laura Jean track is so beautiful you’ll forget all about those swedish First Aid babes and the Coolies from NZ have a wicked punk number on there too. Enjoy the parties.
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Sat Nov 17, North Melbourne Town Hall, 3.30pm – ALL AGES – woo!
with Crayon Fields, Twerps, Beaches, Pikelet, Laura Jean, Primitive Calculators, Jonny Telafone, Standish/Carlyon, Clag, New Estate, Bum Creek
Tix from MOSHTIX
Sat Nov 24, Goodgod Small Club, Sydney, 7pm
with Crayon Fields, Laura Jean, Standish/Carlyon, Guy Blackman, Jonny Telafone
Tix from MOSHTIX
FEATURE: Winter People
Dylan Baskind, the frontman of Sydney band Winter People says that a good song captures a specific mood in an exact way.
“It’s not a concrete thing you can say in words, but you know exactly what that song is.” He describes Leonard Cohen as a master of this and mentions the way Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis can captivate an audience.
“The Dirty Three do it in an amazing way with landscape feelings; they never waiver from it. They never put a false note in evoking those moods, I think that’s such an admirable thing,” Dylan says.
There’s obvious excitement in Dylan’s voice when he brings up a Greek performer called Psarantonis who Ellis hand picked for the All Tomorrow’s Parties bill. “Warren Ellis is like a really sane version of this guy,” he laughs.
From the way Dylan speaks with such passion about these artists, it’s clear he takes making music seriously. This unwavering enthusiasm was one of the reasons Winter People won over Harvest Festival organisers, landing them a slot on one of the more tightly curated lineups of the season.
There was no inside deal involved, no label band mate greasing the wheels and certainly no proven history of festival crowd pulling. Instead, it was an old fashioned letter addressed to the promoters pleading their case to play at a festival that represented common values.
“Most of the significant milestones for the band have come from letter writing and I wrote a letter to the Harvest promoter.”
Dylan speaks of the hedonistic culture in Australia and feels that it flows through to the festival scene.
“Harvest represents a pretty brave move against the reigning cultural climate here and I admire that. I felt a kindred outlook with that… so I put that in writing and sent it,” he says.
Those shared ideals between Winter People and the Harvest Festival are that the event is about music minded people coming together in a social way. “This event ensures there is an unhindered appreciation of music,” he says. It’s a sentiment certainly reflected in lining up Winter People alongside artists like Fuck Buttons, Mike Patton, Sigur Ros, Grizzly Bear and Los Campesinos.
Winter People released their debut record A Year At Sea in September. Dylan speaks candidly about the idea of the contemporary record format.
“Soon it will become an anachronism to release an album,” he says. The CDR length and the LP length were determined by the core constraints of how much can fit on the medium. A tradition was created that became almost a golden standard and as Dylan notes; “It’s an absolute quirk of the economic cultural industrial situation if you’re up around record labels that described that as a milestone of band having arrived.”
“If you can pull together 12 songs or how ever long, 45 minutes or so, the challenge is ‘the goodness of the album’. Everyone can agree their favourite album is the one you don’t skip songs on. So the challenge is – can you make two hours of music where you’re not gonna skip a song?”
However, Dylan doesn’t agree that the album should be a contained conceptual statement. He says that the basic unit for music is the song. “What matters is the wholeness of the songs, as opposed to the wholeness of the album.” It’s an interesting point that flies in the face of changes to the way music is being currently made, distributed and consumed.
To Dylan, the concept of an album seems almost secondary to the vessel of a song. However, Winter People have released a typical format LP and will promote it with a tour. You’ll still find it in big box retailers for $20, despite a culture that he says; “Are going to chose a few of their favourite tracks and share them with their friends”.
“As all translators gripe about, there are words that just don’t carry over and there are things you can say in one language that you can’t say in another. You can get the point across and that is what’s important. A good book in one language is still a good book in another … and I hope the same of these songs.”
What hasn’t changed though is the performance of music itself. “Music is at an interesting crossroads. It’s definitely in a crisis on its industrial scale, certainly the 80’s behemoth that it was is sickening and dying at an incredible rate … what you will likely get is a return to a chitlin’ circuit mentality of people who can make their living while they are playing. It’s not gonna be a glorious pursuit; well it’s not a glorious pursuit at the moment,” he says.
Dylan finally reflects that “maybe this is not a bad thing for the future integrity of those that get involved,” – a sentiment that may well prove to be significant in keeping Australian music honest.
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Winter People play Harvest Festival in November.
Sat 10th Nov – Melbourne, Werribee Park
Sun 11th Nov – Melbourne, Werribee Park SOLD OUT
Sat 17th Nov – Sydney, Parramatta Park
Sun 18th Nov – Brisbane, City Botanic Gardens
HAIL ANGUS
If you’ve had the pleasure of meeting Angus Tait, you would agree he is a calm man with a nice beard. Angus is a freelance Graphic Designer, whose significant other is music. Approached by Who The Hell to redesign the identity and website, Angus kindly pushed aside his guitar peddles and 18 month old child to produce these new digs.
Along with his sophisticated aptitude for colour and nicely snubbed nose when it comes to typography, Angus also cleverly guided Who The Hell through the build with his knowledge of wordpress, HTML and CSS.
Angus also recently released his first Iphone App called Dashi. Last year, somehow between having a child and earning a buck, Angus found time to make a beautifully crafted tool for learning the basics of Japanese reading and pronunciation. So if you’re thinking about being a groupie for the next Last Dinosaurs tour to Japan or want to read lyrics by the Tenniscoats, this app is less than $2 well spent.
COLLECTIVE PEG #4
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ANDREW MCMILLEN
Andrew McMillen (@NiteShok) is a freelance journalist based in Brisbane, Australia. He writes for Rolling Stone, The Australian, The Global Mail and Qweekend, among others. Find an extensive collection of his work here: andrewmcmillen.com
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Urthboy – ‘Empire Tags‘
This is a classic example of telling an Australian story through hip-hop; a vision of the local version of the artform at its strongest. It’s my favourite track on Urthboy’s fourth album Smokey’s Haunt, released October 19 via Elefant Traks.From instrumentation and production through to lyrical content and message, this is simply a killer track. The Australian flag issue gets nudged every few years and I’m glad that Urthboy is doing the same through a contemporary medium.”From a time when the empire tagged the globe / We ain’t cleaned that graffiti off the front of our home,” he raps; in the album liner notes, he writes, “Let’s keep it simple, the flag of another country sits in the corner of ours and that’s some shit straight outta the 18th century. We’ve been staring so hard at the past maybe we’ve gone cross-eyed.”
I feel pride when I listen to this: for my country, for our freedom and ability to question the status quo through song, for Australian hip-hop, and for Urthboy himself. I’ve followed him since his 2004 debut Distant Sense Of Random Menace. It’s been a pleasure to watch his talents grow and grow. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.
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A.H. CAYLEY
A.H. Cayley (@ahcayley) is a Sydney writer, editor, broadcaster, and, evidently, hat-feather collector. She is the deputy editor of PAN Magazine, curator and host of quarterly live-reading night Confession Booth, a presenter on FBi Radio, and a contributing writer for publications like Time Out and The Big Issue, but she devotes most of her words to local music over at Mess+Noise. Her personal work found here: www.ahcayley.com
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Lower Plenty – ‘Nullabor‘
I broke up with the man I was supposed to marry a few months ago, not long after Lower Plenty’s Hard Rubbish came out. The whole situation was so hard and so sad, and for nights on end, lying paralysed in the dark on my best friend’s sofa bed while he tried to find a new place, and pack up the life he’d shared with me, and come to terms with the bombshell I hadn’t been able to hold any longer, this song, playing on repeat through a set of battered earbuds, felt like all I had in this world.
‘Nullabor’ kicks me in the guts and makes me feel suffocated and restless and tired, but at least that’s something. It inherits a place as distant, desolate and lonely as the inhospitable stretch of country after which it’s named, and it’s just as beautiful; it’s as stunning as the whole outback. That nodding, mournful beat sits heavy around your neck while Al Montfort’s unique, wavering voice tells such an immense story in so few words. For the purity of its sadness, ‘Nullarbor’ is at its heart an optimistic song; it’s about letting go, and it’s about freedom, as painful as it can be. Even in the depths of its apparent hopelessness, there’s still that glimmer of hope in its protagonist’s eye; that brief but steely reassurance that says you’re doing the right thing, and that keeps you driving on, numb, through the dust.
soundcloud.com/special-award-records/sets/lower-plenty-hard-rubbish
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MARCUS TEAGUE
Marcus Teague (@MarcusTheVine) releases and plays music under the moniker Single Twin.
His previous band Deloris released four albums throughout the ’00s and he is currently recording with a new project, Near Myth, who are set to release their debut album in 2013. He co-founded Mess+Noise and is currently the Deputy Editor of TheVine.com.au.
PEG(S):
(DAVE: Rules are meant to be broken and sometimes pegs don’t fit; so we went with all three of Marcus’s PEGs this month. Mostly because I couldn’t decide which ones to cut… I mean, could you?)
Collarbones – ‘Hypothermia‘
I have a tendency to either listen to a song once and move on or just loop things over infinitely. As with this. What I like so much about ‘Hypothermia’ is — apart from that weird whirring sound that hums throughout, like a generator next to the bins out the back of a bar, which in turn perfectly illustrates the late night, just-outside-of-everything fuge state that the song has in store — is that I don’t think even it knows what it’s doing. I couldn’t say if there’s a verse and a chorus. It’s propulsive and arch and longing and melancholic. It could be your party jam or your breakup song. It could be background music or you could learn all the lyrics. You could play it on a guitar or in your rock band. Everyone concerned sounds effortless. It scans as a true and an entirely self-generating four and a half minutes of music. I don’t know if people realise how hard that is to create. I can’t really think of anything better you could say about a song.
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Grand Salvo – ‘The Boy’s Story Of His Faithful Family Dog‘
Grand Salvo—Paddy Mann— is consistently making some of the most focused, technically incredible, and melodically and lyrically gifted music in the country/world. It’s just true. His musical universe is wholly contained and to be treasured. I’ve said it before, but if Paddy was from the UK or the US or, I don’t know, Iceland, he’d be globally revered, no doubt about it.
While his strength will always be finding nuance in simplicity, Paddy’s music has been getting more complex and layered across his six albums, although fundamentally his great gift is honing in on simple motifs and tweaking them, to the point of unearthing some crucial element that was hidden before. Or up ahead. His latest, sixth album ‘Slay Me In My Sleep’ is probably the Grand Salvo world at its most baroque, so I get that the passing listener might think it sounds fluffy or twee. Maudlin, maybe. Those people are wrong and idiots and missing out.
‘Slay Me In My Sleep’ is not a collection of standalone songs. It’s a self-referential, circular work that requires multiple listenings. So it’s hard to pick one song from the album. But the fact that he calls his dog a “teenager” in this is incredible.
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Ballads – ‘Your Mistake‘
Disclosure: I’ve been in two bands with the singer in this band. He never sang in my bands because he said he couldn’t sing. Even with a microphone in front of him on stage. He sent me these songs and I wrote back “Sounds great! Who’s singing?” He said it was him and I got really mad. Because he never sang in my bands and because I wasn’t in this band.
Ballads are all friends from Newcastle who came together in Melbourne and they’ve only released, I think, four songs, including a 7”. ‘Ballads’ as a band name makes more sense after you’ve heard their music. They’re not a folksy “woe is me and her” band. More forlorn and doomed. There’s a definite sleepy, half-drunk/broken Grizzly Bear vibe here. If you don’t want to skol shots and slink underwater in the bath looking up at the woozy light here I don’t know what would do it. They’ve got a Wurlitzer in the band and it makes me want one. I’m still a bit mad.
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MEGAN GORDON
Megan Gordon (@groupiemagazine) is the unashamedly keen Managing Editor of Groupie at Pages Digital. She once dressed as Dobby the Elf at a Harry Potter screening she helped organise at Sydney University. She’s also spent some time in Montreal were she was cold, drank bad coffee, spoke terrible French and worked at Nightlife.ca in her spare time.
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Pear Shape – ‘The Coca-Cola Kid’
Pear Shape is one oddly sculpted sound situation you want to happen to you! The Sydney band crafts a decidedly exuberant brand of pop.
Their tune ‘The Coca-Cola Kid’ is as joyful as an advertisement for its namesake, only way less calorific and 100% more genuine. The band is also respectfully corporation free, producing their new EP (also named The Coca Cola Kid) independently. Underneath the playful hooks, there’s a serious commitment to solid musicianship. These boys may play silly, but they’re dead set committed to their craft Their songs are crisp, structured and lyrically strong.
‘The Coca-Cola Kid’ is one of the best pop songs written by an Australian band this year; it’s a real shame that it isn’t on repeat across more stereos. But as the sun starts to shine stronger, I have a feeling people’s thirst for this tune will grow. Drink it in kids.
www.facebook.com/pearshapemusic
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DAN AZZOPARDI
Dan Azzopardi (@dan_azzo) is the director of Sydney-based artist management and publicity agency, Mammal Sounds. Two years ago, he co-found Acid Stag, a music blog specialising in local and international indie and electro. Every Saturday night, catch him on FBi Radio, laying down sweat-inducing disco.
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Elizabeth Rose – ‘Give In‘
Admittedly, I’ve given a lap-dance to this song. The electro pop jam sports seductive vocals and a deep, grind-worthy bass-line, making it a total boudoir anthem. ‘Give In’ is the opening track to debut EP Crystallise from talented Sydney producer Elizabeth Rose. Due to its accessibility, it’ll likely be the 21-year-old’s next single release, and subsequently picked-up by mainstream media.
Do me a solid? Imagine your dream date straddling your lap whilst the following lyrics are being sung in an innocently breathy tone: “It’s too late to cool it all down; especially when the wheels are in motion, I can feel a reaction to the words coming out; and if you feel the need to survive, I got answers tonight, you just tell me how; why won’t you give in?”
If you reacted to the above with a stir in your loins, don’t feel ashamed – you’re not alone.
LISTEN: Running Gun Sound – ‘Just You See’
What has a hip shaking bass line, a double barreled chorus, and the dirtiest guitar solo this side of The Black Lips? It’s ‘Just You See’, the brand new track from Brisbane’s post-mod squad Running Gun Sound. The lyrics are a kind warning: “keep your hands where I can see/ and keep your eyes well on me/ we’ll get along just you see”, but even thinly veiled threats can’t keep this track from being pure summer fun. Guitars here are bursting at the seams with frenzied shredding and everything cracks along at a furious pace before coming to an abrupt stop, like a kid with ADD passing out after a sugar high. BRB, listening to this track 20 more times.
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Running Gun Sound – ‘Just You See’
LISTEN: Nite Fields – ‘Vacation’
Nite Fields are a dark as hell Brisbane new-wave electro band who make cold, hypnotic tracks swimming in grim atmospherics. ‘Vacation’ is the latest one of these. Sounding very much The Horrors in their Primary Colours era, its entrenched in deep, echoing vocals and dense, driving synth. This track is just smothered in likeable angst, but the repetitive bass and blunt snare beats stop it from drowning in it’s own moodiness, propelling the track forward before it turns into a hazy, surprisingly sweet synth driven jam at the end. This vacation sure isn’t fun in the sun, but a great tune nonetheless.
‘Vacation’ will be out one limited edition vinyl on November 17th through Lost Race Records. Nite Fields are also playing at the Lost Race Festival in Brisbane on the same day. Probably not a coincidence.
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Nite Fields – ‘Vacation’
Latest Comments
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Still trying to purchase!!!ANTHONY J LANGFORD
Cool track. Congrats Joshua. Hope the release is a success.Tristan
Man I love these guys. I can't believe they are not releasing any new music. I've been to so many…sophie
^^ I love Grimes! Banoffee is one of my new favorite music artists! :) I love With Her, Reign Down,…Ace
Read your review then listened to the EP. Fantastic ! Different to most hardcore punk I listen to. Somewhat more…