Photo Essays

LOOK: St Jerome’s Laneway Festival 2013

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(Words/grovels by Mel Tan)

Festival reviews. Generally a good place to describe the weather in hourly increments, tweet-debate the best burger van based on the number of guys with sleeve tatts and flat caps standing in line, maybe say some nice comments about some bands.

Like every other media outlet covering this festival this year, I would have liked to wring out some nice prose describing every set in such detail so that anyone who who didn’t get along could have heard how awesome Real Estate were, smelt the sweat seeping from the abundance of tropical print, found out the truth about Alt-J’s talking voice etc.

On the contrary, my Laneway was a lot more shit. The bulk of my Laneway experience was spent spent standing in a 3 hour ATM queue. Consequences of forgetting $$ and choosing a halftime Gozelme over entertainment.

Three hours down, Laneway security tried to console all 70 of us standing in the heat with bottled water. Nice move guys. In light of forgoing a bad case of the munchies and missing out on all the bands worth seeing (Cloud Nothings, Japandroids, POND, Poliça, Divine Fits and our boy Chet Faker), I did catch some other good stuff on the day. Here’s a condensed version.

The Men take the record for the shirt-off drummer at Laneway in 3 years. Alpine swapped crowd banter for wolf howls…ain’t nobody got time for that. Twerps worked their usual scrappy charm on a big crowd. High Highs convince us that they should strongly reconsider their Aus citizenship. Real Estate played crunchy lo-fi jams off Days and some tunes off their self-titled. Shlohmo summoned the entire day’s supply of denim overalls, ‘man buns’ and stick-on face jewels to a 20m² pen outside the Future Classic stage. Flume‘s slot at 9.30 meant Bat for Lashes crowd was a little sparser than the turn out for M83 at the same time last year. Despite the smaller crowd, Nat Khan sung all the new stuff, sashayed around in her coloured tin-foil get up and still trumped as GODDESS. And to cap it the day off in true Laneway tradition, there was another cameo by man in a tree.

On a good note, Alan did cart along to every act on the day and managed to capture another great Laneway. Check out his amazing portraits below.

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Ali Barter 

 

High Highs 

Twerps  

Real Estate 

Nite Jewel

Cloud Nothings

Japandroids

Pond

 

 

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LOOK: Northside Records – 10th Birthday

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I’ve always been jealous of Fitzroy’s Gertrude St. For those of you not living in the World’s Most Liveable city, let me put it this way. SYD think Newtown, and BRIS think Fortitude Valley (the rest of you, well, make it up). Once a thoroughfare seen as the embodiment of Melbourne’s polar socio-economic disadvantage, the street has gone on to transform itself into one of Melbourne’s most hallowed hang out spots. And while the throes of gentrification have taken most of old Gertrude, she’s still got her soul, and quite a ragin’ one at that.

Northside Records has perched itself on top of Gertrude for 10 years now this month, and it’s fitting that a proposed in-store celebration turned into an accidental street party.

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LOOK: XMAS FUNRAYS ft. Them Swoops, Harts, House of Laurence + Two Bright Lakes DJS

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Us internet folk try to do some nice things sometimes. We spend our spare time trudging through all your submissions so we can say some nice stuff about your band in return for no money, minor thanks and getting expired cider at label parties. That being said, the joys of the internet are alright – ie: receiving things like this remix of ‘Absolutely Everybody’ in our inbox yesterday…

Last Christmas we decided to be good blog folk and raise some funds to help The Song Room. These guys spend their time implementing music programs and sending teachers out to disadvantaged schools in non-English speaking and indigenous areas. Good stuff.

We thought this was a worthy cause, so we gathered our fave bands, hung a shitload of Christmas trees from the roof of the Workers Club and turned and threw a damn good Xmas festivus to help raise funds for these guys.

House of Laurence bestowed some shoegaze goodness and their generous haircuts on all. Harts and his band, all dressed in white, did well at  doing the best live Prince hologram anyone could have asked for. There’s no lingering doubt that Them Swoops sound like Phoenix…but that’s never a bad thing, especially when your crowd wants to party like it’s 2009, or 1901, or whatever ya know. Eliza from Oh Mercy joined the guys on stage to shake some maracas for a cover song at the end of the night which I forget the name of because I was too wrapped up in warm fuzzy Xmas vibes/free Sailor Jerrys. And then Marty + Zoe +Tig from Two Bright Lakes turned up, played the best tunes and errybody spent the rest of the night prancing around to R&B jams and kicking around fake ‘snow’.

It was a damn festive FUNRAYS. Big thanks to the bands, dudes from Two Bright Lakes, Triple R, Sailor Jerry’s, Workers + everyone who helped us raise profits for The Song Room.

Real snow. Next year.

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EXPAT: High Highs

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There aren’t any specific inroads to make waves overseas if you’re an Australian artist, but moving to the US, Berlin, or some subcultural hub in Europe with good pastrami and a nice local is probably a good place to start. While Gotye is probably carving out a spot for his potential Grammy and Tame Impala have sold out enough shows in the US to afford proper shoes now, there’s still a ton of our Aus dudes making us proud over yonder. It’s hard to keep track on all our exports. It’s only when these bands make their prodigal return to the internet with a new collaboration, or bathrobe photos with German groupies that reiterates what we’ve been missing out on all along.

High Highs are Jack Milas and Oli Chang – an Aussie duo who’ve been based in Brooklyn for the last few years. It’s all hydrogen harmonies and blissful acoustica from these guys who’ve toured Stateside, had some nice words in P4K and sat down for lunch with Elton at Christmas. They’re returning back here in Feburary for Laneway, so probably best to get reacquainted.

We’ll be ransacking photo piles of Aussie artists overseas over the next few months, so if you’re an Aus act living overseas keen on sharing photos of good vibes, tour pizzas or your general nomad lifestyle, mail us – editors@whothehell.net.

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Facebook / Bandcamp

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