The Saturns – ‘I’ll Be Alright’ (mp3)

I’m a late convert to the church of The Saturns. I really only discovered their joyous blues and 70s inspired rock and roll a couple of weeks ago when I put on their debut EP Here’s The Saturns. If you’re sick of Jet peddling the retro vibe and killing it for every other band because they saturated the market, then perhaps you should throw on The Saturns to restore your faith in bands who are looking into the past for inspiration, and doing it with joie de vivre.

Vocalist Nathan Carr Daniel Holdsworth has the perfect rock voice, and in ‘I Could Be The One’ he shows it off with some great vocal howls in a song based around the 12 bar blues and it doesn’t sound stale at all. ‘Ease My Mind’ has guitars that twang along; the whole song having a Rolling Stones kinda vibe.

It’s all about fun for this Sydney five piece who burst out of your stereo with excitement, energy and uncontrollable foot-tapping rhymths.

http://www.thesaturns.com
http://www.myspace.com/heresthesaturns

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photo by Melinda Comerford

Nina May – ‘It’s Easy To Be Worst’

So this blog’s been in existence for over a year now and surprisingly, one of our most popular posts has been my inaugural post on Brisbane outfit Nina May over 10 months ago. A lot of things have changed since that post – namely, they’ve released their debut EP Make Love To Your Stereo; gone are the poor quality demos on their MySpace and in their place are rocking tunes from the EP; and I’ve hung out with their lovely vocalist Erinn Swan a couple of times and found out what she’s actually singing about in ‘Monsters In The Dark’… is it too late to renege my comments about said song’s lyrics?

What else has changed is that this four-piece has become somewhat of a musical juggernaut, thanks in part to a fantastic 6-track EP recorded at Modern Music Studios in Brisbane. When I originally heard ‘Monsters In The Dark’ I was enamoured by that song but the other tracks that were up on their MySpace page didn’t really do much for me. But since its release, the EP has been one of my favourite local releases for 2007. I’ve said many, many times that I’m a sucker for a rock group with a sassy female vocalist, and there’s not many that do it better in Australia than Nina May. A lazy comparison might be to recent visitors to our shores Paramore, but Nina May mix progressive and alt. rock elements with their love of a good pop hook.

Case in point: ‘It’s Easy To Be Worst’, the dark finale to Make Love To Your Stereo. It features backing vocals courtesy of The Veronicas Jessica Origliasso and what sets this song apart from the rest of the EP is that it sees the band branching out with their sounds and song structures – there’s great use of acoustic guitar and bass swells, and it crescendos into a thundering ending before abruptly being ripped back to a minimal harmonised guitar line. There’s hooks as well as some killer riffs.

Kudos goes to either Erinn or Jess who have some excellent screams in this song, and to Simon who’s the king of pinch/artificial harmonics. The band are also going to be playing live on MTV’s The Lair this Thursday night so anyone in Australia with Foxtel or Austar should keep an eye out for this band on their TV sets.

http://www.myspace.com/ninamaymusic

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The Captain’s Package – ‘Out of Focus’

To propagate my laziness, I’ll just quote a review I wrote of The Captain’s Package for The Brag sometime last year: “A melting pot of Faith No More and Mr Bungle-esque sounds with a B-52s mentality, their music isn’t easily contained within whimsical musical adjectives… (it’s) a side-step away from what most bands are composing around Sydney.”

At that stage, The Captain’s Package had some enthralling musical elements in place but some songs were better than others and they seemed to be searching for what “their sound” could be. Now they’re set to release their brand new record Happiness which was recorded with producer Evan McHugh and if the first taste of the CD is anything to go by, ‘Out Of Focus’, they’ve found their niche in a crowded scene. It’s a song akin to ‘House of Fun’-era Madness with the male-female duelling vocals of the B-52s. Ska meets pop meets avant-garde. They’re launching Happiness on December 1 at Bar Broadway in Sydney, and it should be a night of decadence and extravagance.

http://www.myspace.com/thecaptainspackage

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http://www.regurgitator.net
http://www.myspace.com/regurgitators

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Get your pop on while Ricki-Lee gets her boobs out.

Sorry, no MC Hammer here.

http://www.myspace.com/rickileeofficial

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The Chaperones – ‘Jacqueline’ (mp3)

It’s an apt time to post about two-piece garage rockers The Chaperones because we’re smack bang in the middle of their month-long residency in the darkened interior of The Excelsior Hotel in Sydney’s Surry Hills where they’re playing every Wednesday night.

The Chaperones are the girl-boy combination of the rather cute drummer Marissa Gillies (I’m not sure if she’s in any way related to Silverchair’s stickman Ben Gillies) and frontman Matt Vince (the girls will have to decide whether he’s cute or not… sorry Matt!) and, like a number of bands in this post White Stripes world, they’ve deemed a bass player unnecessary. To me, not having a bass player is a cardinal sin because there’s a whole frequency range missing and unless you build a custom guitar/bass like Local H’s Scott Lucas or have someone playing droning low-octave keys a la The Red Sun Band, you’re never going to actually hide the fact you’re missing a bass player.

This duo plays with plenty of panache and energy and have some really lo-fi, groovy tunes. Overdriven guitars and solid drum patterns give The Chaperones that indie/garage aesthetic and their debut EP has been garnering some healthy reviews. Still, a bass player would be nice…

http://www.thechaperones.com.au
http://www.myspace.com/chaperones

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Lady Strangelove – ‘Rotate (Part 2)’ (mp3)

It’s been a while since I’ve heard a band actually do old-skool psychedelica. There’s been a booming undercurrent of psychedelica-inspired bands in my home town of Sydney, but who knew they actually did it properly in Adelaide? Lady Strangelove are a funky rainbow cocktail of Wolf & Cub style rhymths, Hendrix inspired lead guitars which screech throughout and delay-heavy vocals which bring to mind Led Zep’s Robert Plant and former Pink Floyd vocalist Syd Barrett.

They call their music “psychedelica dance-rock” or “prog-dance”. It’s all very 60s technicolour/acid inspired with a touch of Mars Volta and The Music thrown in. I’d love to see these guys play live if they didn’t live so far away. Here’s hoping they come by the Annandale Hotel sometime soon.

http://www.myspace.com/ladystrangelove

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