Monthly Archives For February 2016

LISTEN: Alex Lahey – ‘You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me’

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alex lahey

DO! YOURSELVES! A! FAVOUR! Yes, the caps is necessary, and yes, each exclamation mark is justified. Alex Lahey is a gift to Australian music in the same way that a serving of gourmet Italian pizza is a gift to someone who’s been eating Dominos their entire life. Although she’s only released two solo tracks, they’re endlessly listenable – guiding your hand to the repeat button like Darth Vader is Force-choking your index fingers.

Her first single, ‘Air Mail’, was a simple guitar pop number lamenting a long-distance relationship; it was irreverent, light and catchy, like Feist mixed with some Courtney Barnett. Now, for her second single, ‘You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me’, Lahey has stepped up the guitar crunch enough to snap the neck of a Bon Iver fan.

But, even with the pedal board lit up like Kings Cross pre-lock out laws, Lahey still maintains her signature wit and earnestness. The song begins with, “All I want to do is drink clean-skin wine and watch Mulholland Drive with you”, a line that’s sure to be grinningly repeated by the legions of Lahey nerds who are bound to pop up over the next few months. Then the chorus come on, catchy but still driving, with Lahey’s familiar openness and that smidgen of real pain which separates her from the pack.

‘You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me’ is a hell of a lot louder than Air Mail’, but both songs are like enormous arrows pointing to a future in which Alex Lahey has established herself as one of our country’s best young songwriters. DO! YOURSELVES! A! FAVOUR!

Alex Lahey will be playing some shows soon:

23 March – Old Bar, Melbourne w/ DIET. and Max Quinn’s Onomatopenis

26 March – The Hills Are Alive Festival, Gippsland

1 April – World Bar, Sydney

2 April – Shady Cottage Festival, Trentham

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PREMIERE: Totally Mild – ‘Today, Tonight’

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Totally-Mild

When you release a debut album as good as Down Time, you earn the right to gallivant around Europe for two months playing in basketball courts and sharing stages with Terrible Truths. That’s what Totally Mild did; graciously capturing a trio of live tunes to for their latest EP Alive In Denmark, which is released this Friday (including two new songs absent from the band’s 2015 debut).

While ‘The Next Day’ and ‘More’ have had their time in the sun either on record or live, ‘Today, Tonight’ is pretty unheard within Totally Mild’s repertoire. Lyrically, it’s not uncommon ground for lead vocalist Elizabeth Mitchell. She airs her anxieties of impending loneliness as a constant hurdle in living life as a functional adult – “I am strong and sensible but I don’t want to be alone”. The song borders on balladry, accompanied by a single guitar swooning away under her vocals.

Totally Mild have reasserted their dominance for bold album artwork, with some Spike Milligan ‘Ning Nang Nong’ levels of microworld artistry happening here. Whether ‘Today, Tonight’ is material from some upcoming studio work or not, it’s good to see the Totally Mild wheels turning.

Alive in Denmark is out this Friday via Bedroom Suck Records.

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LISTEN: Clever – ‘Your Eyesore’s Sweet’

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clever kewdi udi

When you’re kinda into punk music you get to hear a lot of bands that sort of play at being aggressive – in a posey rock’n’roll way – but it’s rare to hear something that legitimately shakes you up. Brisbane’s Clever have got me shook right up. Once I saw them play at a bowls club in the middle of the day next to bain maries full of make-your-own taco ingredients and it put me on edge for hours before I even touched one drug.

You can hear that charged-up brutality on the band’s first ‘single’, ‘Your Eyesore’s Sweet’, from their debut record Kewdi Udi, out 11 March on Homeless Records. It’s in the jumpy drums and bass, and Mitch Perkins’ relentlessly menacing vocals – I’ve listened to this song 10+ times (it only goes for 2 minutes) and can’t hold on to a word he’s saying. Fred Gooch from the Wrong Man holding this whole aural tyre-fire together with that sawing, immovable guitar.

If you’re a certain kind of person, hearing that Clever is made up of members and ex-members of Sewers, the Wrong Man (as mentioned), Psy Ants and Per Purpose is gonna be enough. For everyone else, this is powerfully – purely – sick stuff.

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LISTEN: Velcro – ‘Velcro’ LP

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velcro velcro

This Velcro record was recorded in 2013 and released just last week. I’d say ‘finally’ released, except I thought this came out ages ago and I’d already listened to it – so for me it was more of a pleasantly confusing surprise (REAL FANS may feel differently).

I guess because of that it reads as a testament to the things that never change. You still know what it’s like to not wanna go outside, to float around, to think about moving interstate – even though you know ‘green grass won’t last forever’, as singer & songwriter (but not singer/songwriter) Curtis Wakeling of the Ocean Party reminds himself on the lush ‘Sydney’. All I remember about 2013 was a feeling of profound boredom and restlessness –you know, like every early/mid/late-20s middle-class Australian. This is the ultimately relatable territory that this record claims.

The whole things is super matter-of-fact. Even when Wakeling sings about being hard to be around, or ruining things and watching people leave, it never feels like he’s trying particularly hard to make you feel one way or another – it is what it is. Comparatively, that nice’n’easy pop guitar skips along underneath (and sometimes on top of) the low-key, downbeat words. Ashley Bundang from Totally Mild backs Wakeling up for a few tracks, sounding like she was recorded while walking around the house singing to herself – intimate and unaffected.

Are there standout hits? Nah, it’s all pretty good – I like ‘Victoria’ for the chanty vocals and that plinky keyboard, which sounds so sunny against lines like, ‘it’s not easy to make friends / when everybody judges me / and I’m hard to be around’. The back-to-back combo of ‘Stranger’ and ‘Whine’ works well; both romantic tracks in an anxious, doomed kind of way.  Maybe your fave will be the slinky and gently-paced ‘Neglect’, or the almost-hopeful closer ‘12 Hours’. It’d be cool if this release meant Velcro were clearing the way for more recording. If so, see ya in 2019. If not, still pretty cool.

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PREMIERE: Great Earthquake – ‘Thought Broadcasting’ video

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great earthquake

Guys called Noah always seem to be pretty extraordinary. There’s indie director Noah Baumbach, who co-wrote a bunch of Wes Anderson movies, and Noah Taylor, the incredible Australian actor. And then, buried in East Brunswick, between the vintage stores and coffee shops, is Noah Symons – aka Great Earthquake.

Great Earthquake has a full-band sound, with intricate parts emanating from every instrument. This makes it all the more surprising to find out that Noah is the sole contributor. From splattered snares to smoky guitar lines and sprained keys, knowing it’s just him behind every sound makes the end product that more impressive. Play this stuff to a friend, let them soak in the songs, then drop that little golden nugget of information and wait for the inevitable, “Whaddya mean there’s not a team of Mozarts behind this masterpiece?”.

His latest output is a video for the single ‘Thought Broadcasting’, from last year’s EP of the same name. Hazy guitar chords spill from the track, finding ways to gel with the song’s many layers, while a subdued Symons murmurs “We have lost our way”. The video emphasises the track’s collage-like style, blending instruments, hands and colours into one hypnotic audio-visual smorgasbord.

Great Earthquake will play a free show at the Vic on the Park Hotel on 27 February, with support from Alyx Dennison. Details here.

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LISTEN: The Ocean Party – ‘Mess & Noise Critics Poll 2015’

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ocean-party

Mess & Noise, the highly respected underground music website, has been somewhat out of commission since mid last year. The Ocean Party, however, aren’t letting the site fade out of cultural consciousness. Lachlan, one of the group’s primary songwriters, says that 2015 is the first year the site’s respected critics poll has been absent since the Ocean Party started, and considering the stock they (and many others) put into those lists, a tribute of sorts was in order.

Their new eight track collection is made up of material that either didn’t make it onto Light Weight, or wasn’t considered up to snuff for their next record. This honestly makes me question their judgement, because Mess & Noise Critics Poll 2015 (yes, really) is a delight at times, and shows that if this is the stuff you’re ‘throwing away’, then you’re clearly from some sort of secretive society of prodigal songwriters with ridiculously high standards.

2015’s Light Weight, was bristling and bloodied – cracked skulls, black blood and dead men filled out its thirty eight minutes. It functioned as artistic endeavours often do – as a space in which the song writers (the Ocean Party has six) struggle and comprehend their lives and themselves, and Light Weight never shied away from uncomfortable realisations. Many of those frank sentiments have carried over into the material on Mess & Noise, with opener ‘Cool Boys’ wasting no time – “I put my hand through the wall/my heart just fell through the floor/my brains against the glass”. It remains clear as day that the Ocean Party harbours some of Melbourne’s prodigal songwriters, the riffs and melodies as sharp as ever.

On tracks like ‘Fight, Fight, Fight, Die’ the Ocean Party wears the discomfort of identity on its sleeve – asking simply “wrong body or wrong mind?” What’s identity though if you can’t even ascribe what you’ve done to who you are? ‘No Local’ has this boiling throughout it – “the best years of my life being no one/quarter of my life went by and I hardly noticed”.

Two instrumental tracks show up here too, but whether ‘Rivers’ and ‘Pleasure Ghost’ are actually instrumentals or just missing vocals is a question still hanging. The former errs into funk territory with a 80s pop soul guitar groove carried along by sharp drums.

It’s ‘Fun’ though, that is the best song of the group, carried through by its chorus. Fuzzed synths wash under a beautiful call of “I’m fading out again/just like I always have” –  a melancholic mantra of missed moments and half remembered festivities that ought to find its home reaching out from scores of voices at Meredith. It’s a song built to sing; and the fact that it didn’t make it onto a formal release is mind boggling.

Mess & Noise has the same minor issue of almost no thematic coherence aside from varying forms of misery, much like Light Weight did, but it’s got some absolute gems on it. So here’s a toast to the Ocean Party’s B-sides, the things that the rest of us call A-sides.

 

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PREMIERE: Beloved Elk – ‘The Light of Dead Stars’

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beloved elkMelbourne duo Tina Nguyen and Amy Wright aka Beloved Elk have just landed ‘The light of dead stars’, a dark, lilting alt rock track with a fittingly melancholy film clip to boot. Footage “made in our shed” and frames from family movies of the girls respective childhood cuts away to a spotlight moving through tall grass, searching, revealing and being generally apprehensive.  

Two-piece bands have a habit of over-compensating with sound for their lack of womanpower, but not here. ‘The light of dead stars’ sees Nguyen and Wright fit snugly with one another.  The light, accented, guitar hook and more hi hat than kick drum produce a restrained balance. It’s a stripped back version of their last EP’s sound which sees Wright’s vocals stand in equal stead with Nguyens tight rhythms, with the vocal melodies mirrored in the guitar lines.

The new track carries an ominous weight, the source of which is difficult to pin down without the clip’s help. Neatly compressing angst is a serious endeavour, and Beloved Elk make music that requires your full attention without being draining.

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