Mt Augustus – ’12 Hour Trip’ (mp3)

Ghost Notes – ‘The Nihilist’ (mp3)

After an age kicking around the Brisbane music scene supporting, producing and organising gigs for other bands, Mt Augustus have finally released their debut LP. The self-titled album is out now on Incremental Records and it’s a mostly acoustic affair. Like a more genuine counterpart to the slew of troubadours in this country, Mt August make music that is usually soft and sentimental without being superficial or saccharine. You can grab it here – it’s only being released on vinyl and digitally (no CDs).

Along for the ride are labelmates Ghost Notes, a self-described minimal/post-rock/jazz band who’ve also just released their debut self-titled album. I don’t really know how to describe their album without reducing it to ‘x post-rock band + y jazz-inclined band + spaghetti westerns‘ so I won’t even bother (you can fill in x and y by yourself). I can say that Ghost Notes’ debut is really good and worth getting your hands on – if you can handle songs that generally go for longer than 5 or 6 mins.

Mt Augustus and Ghost Notes both play the Open Bar in Melbourne this Saturday, Oct. 17 with Winternational and Light Lions.

www.myspace.com/mtaugustus

www.myspace.com/ghostnotesband

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Another stepping stone to Tame Impala’s world domination sees Tame Impala dropping by the famous Daytrotter studios. For the uninitiated, this basically involved them doing a live performance of three or fours songs, which then gets uploaded to the Daytrotter website along with a crappy hand-drawn picture of the band and a slightly pretentious musing on their in-studio demeanor. But seriously, Daytrotter do good shit and you should subscribe and get these sets emailed to you weekly – they literally do a new one every day. Points for commitment.

Tame Impala’s set is good in that it sounds a lot like their album only slightly less dense and a bit slower (think they’d smoked up a bit too much before jamming). I know why people don’t like Tame Impala’s live show. I think it works in a small setting but gets lost on a big stage, but these dudes are young and one album in, and as the Daytrotter session proves they have the musical chops to bring it live. If they get a bit more confidence/energy/switch to a certain designer drug, who knows what they can pull off?

It should be stated that their debut album Innerspeaker is still one of the best albums of 2010. If you’ve somehow avoided it until now, this is the day to rectify that.

Go >>>HERE<<< to stream/download the set (as soon as I can log into Daytrotter I’ll get something up, but FYI it seems to be a bit on the fritz. You can still stream it though).

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Gotye – ‘Eyes Wide Open’

This morning on Triple J Breakfast, Wally De Backer debuted the first new material from his solo project Gotye in almost five years.

I slept through this momentous occasion.

I loved his previous album Like Drawing Blood with every fibre of my being, and with a fervour I hadn’t felt since discovering the profane funk-rock of the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a ten year old in rural Queensland.  Every note De Backer sang, played and sequenced was full of pain, nervous energy and the hope that maybe if people were less shit to one another, life could be easier. It was the soundtrack to the honeymoon period of my first serious relationship and a life-buoy during the excruciating death throes of said relationship eighteen months later.

De Backer also appears to like a good nautical metaphor – this track’s refrain of we’ll walk the plank/with eyes wide open wouldn’t be out of place in the lyrics of ‘With This Ship’, a single from his other group The Basics. That’s just the problem though; ‘Eyes Wide Open’ sounds like a Basics track, not a Gotye track. I guess that’s the risk of dropping their Beatles schtick – without that, they’ve got the mixed blessing of a talented but disctinctive songwriter.

‘Eyes Wide Open’ hasn’t hit me like the singles from Like Drawing Blood or Boardface did. Perhaps it’ll work better in the context of an album.

You can pick yourself up a free download of this track in exchange for your email address over at www.gotye.bandcamp.com.

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The Laneway Festival 2011 Line-up has been announced. And it’s fkn MASSIVE:

Deerhunter – Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Holy Fuck – Beach House – Menomena – Les Savy Fav – Yeasayer – !!! – Warpaint – Blonde Redhead – Foals – Bear In Heaven – The Antlers – Gotye – Cut Copy – Cloud Control – The Holidays – Jenny & Johnny – Two Door Cinema Club – Local Natives – PVT – Rat Vs Possum – Stornoway – Violent Soho – World’s End Press

So much rushes through my head when I see that line-up. Here’s some of it:

Holy shit we don’t have to wait 18 months to see Halcyon Digest tunes live!

How heavy is that line-up on international bands? I assume local artists will fill out the line-up from this point on, but it’s still surprising and impressive and makes you a little proud to see Laneway nabbing the best line-up of bands of the summer – some of whom are actually quite ‘big’ (in some circles, anyway).

Not enough chillwave.

Laneway is clearly the savior to all the hipsters that were left totally devo’d about the great Foals-Yeasayer Clash of Spendour 2010. It would be pretty funny if they clashed, hey? But don’t do it. Don’t.

Speaking of devo’d/Devo, pretty stoked those Devo headlining rumors turned out to be untrue. Pretty unstoked those Best Coast/Caribou/Four Tet/Toro Y Moi/CFCF/Gonjasufi rumors turned out to be untrue.

Who the fuck are Stornoway?

Laneway used to have a stage almost entirely dedicated to electronic music and brought out some of the must inventive dudes in the genre, but there’s hardly an electronic artist on that line-up – except, you know, Cut Copy, World’s End Press, Gotye, PVT, Yeasayer and possibly Bear in Heaven (kinda electro). Still, nothing like when they used to put dudes like Four Tet and Mountains in the Sky on. Kinda thought that’s the hole Caribou et al would’ve filled.

There were no Toro Y Moi/CFCF/Gonjasufi rumors except those fueled by me. Sorry if I got anyone’s hopes up. The Best Coast/Caribou/Four Tet brand of rumors were real (or at least not started by me).

Did anyone get up in time to hear Gotye’s new single this morning? (Breakfast radio may as well not exist in my universe). Given he has a new album coming out and close ties to the festival it’s appropriate that Wally DB will begin his ascent in Australian ubiquity at Laneway. I wonder what his live show will be like? I really dug his mini-orchestra shows, but was less amped about the one-man thing. Somewhere in between maybe?

Let’s drop Stornaway and get one/all of Toro Y Moi/CFCF/Gonjasufi, yeah?

In terms of Australian bands, there’s not a lot super surprising on the line-up (yet), but they’ve gone for some solid acts like Cut Copy, Cloud Control and PVT along with the aforementioned Gotye. That said, pretty impressed to see Rat Vs Possum and World’s End Press make the national tour (bar Perth) – two of the more exciting bands local bands I’ve caught live in 2011.

The Holidays and Violent Soho round out the local contingent. I’m told the former’s latest release is pretty damn sweet, will have to check it out.

In my haste to find out who was playing I totally skipped over the paragraph about a stage being curated by The Windish Agency (Chicago) and Eat Your Own Ears (London) (cheers to resident photographer DP for the tip). Does that mean the 2011, because it kinds seems like there’s not a lot of room left for another stage full of international bands hey? Either way, sounds cool.

Overall, pretty rad line-up. Super pumped. Every band on their that I’ve seen before has been well decent at playing music in a live environment, which is good for when you’re watching music live. The others are probably also pretty good at it too. So you should go. Do it.

Tickets for all the Australian shows go on sale Wednesday, October 20 at 9am and set you back $125 (+ bf).

www.lanewayfestival.com.au

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New clip from Melbourne outfit Mission Control who recently collaborated with US producer Memory Tapes on this tune.

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