Tagged By melbourne

PREMIERE: Love Migrate – ‘Pippa’s In The Highlands’

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Love-Migrate

This is the first we’ve heard from Love Migrate in over a year – and the newest track from their upcoming EP, Shimmer Through the Night.

According to the band, the song is “devoted to the loss of love”. As Love Migrate usually do, melancholia and old flames are poured all over the lyric sheet. The band always seem to piece the parts back together with earnest though. They do it again here.

In ‘Pippa’s In The Highlands’, there’s a vacant space between Eddie Alexander’s lyrical lines where those stark 4/4 drums become so apparent. It exists only for a fraction of a moment, but feels suspended for much longer. Eddie’s bleak, but tender disposition makes this emptiness seem all more defined. This track is like being slowly coaxed into someone’s bedroom; steered around memory stakes, peering at stuff other’s ex-lovers forgot to collect – and then taking it.

‘Pippa’ seems nice. Wonder what she’s doing now. Catching the last train home. Doing groceries on a Tuesday. Hanging out with someone else in the same bars.
For all star-crossed anxieties, life just goes on (one Kurt Vile riff at a time).

The band have been kept busy in holed up in warehouses, bedrooms and other music making spaces around Melbourne’s northern suburbs recording their new EP. Shimmer Through The Night is out through Flightless/Remote Control on Friday May 22nd.

Love Migrate are launching the EP at the Gasometer Hotel on Thursday the 28th of May with Sunbeam Sound Machine & Crepes.

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PREMIERE: Jarrow – ‘Last Monday’

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The name of Dan Oke’s first EP is Legitimate; a credible slice of reassurance every musician needs to know that their music is Out There and in the ears and hearts of the people Dan Oke makes music under the guise of Jarrow. He recorded the EP between his home in Footscray and a beach house in Anglesea. Oke sent us an email last week with this tune, and I’ve spent the rest of the week over his excellent older material flavouring the best-of scuzzy drum machines and Connan Mockasin’s Caramel.

Here’s the internet debut of ‘Last Monday’, so feel spesh everyone. It’s a lo-fi, upbeat strummer, with the treble switch turned up somewhere between Snowy Nasdaq and the dust balls gathering at Fergus Miller’s feet.

According to Oke, the track is about routine consequences of routine drinking on a school night, presumably penned around the Bermuda Triangle of venues (Tote, Gaso, Old Bar).

Support Jarrow by purchasing his debut EP, Legitimate, available on Bandcamp from the 14th of May.

 

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LABEL PROFILE: Breathlessness

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Breathlessness is a tiny, close-knit label formed in Hoppers Crossing, a suburb on Melbourne’s outer edges, where the label’s founders and current signees grew up. (A number of them even lived on the same street). The first Breathlessness releases appeared last year – Vulpix’s debut EP, Swarms, and Finx by Splendidid – and the label’s third outing, the self-titled EP from psychedelic duo Sun Bazel, came out in March.

The collective consists of only five or six core players: Jordan Barrow of Vulpix moonlights as a guitarist in Zac Terry’s band, Splendidid. Daniel Prieto, who plays bass in both oufits, is releasing his debut EP as DPDP (titled Afterglow) through Breathlessness in June. And last summer two members of the Splendidid live band, Jack Foy and Harry Hayes, wrote the material that became Sun Bazel’s first release.

Both Vulpix and Splendidid make sweet-sounding dream pop that could have come from a four-track abandoned circa 2008 and unearthed in someone’s basement like forgotten treasure. Built from rippling arpeggios and close, fuzzy drums, these tunes are heavy on the reverb and not afraid to enter the red. Sun Bazel’s psych-pop, meanwhile, circles woozily, composed of deceptively simple lines of detuned synths and phasered guitar.

Breathlessness is hosting a label party at the Shadow Electric Bandroom this Sunday, 26 April. (Stay calm – they’ve explained everything you need to know in this easy-to-follow tutorial). Splendidid and Vulpix will be performing live, and there’ll be DJ sets from Sun Bazel and DPDP. Erik Scerba, who mixed and mastered most of the label’s releases, will also be DJing. Scerba makes Tumblr-fied hip hop beats as Yoshimitsu, his sounds skipping from cloud rap to glo-fi and warped muzak. Don’t miss it.

Tickets to Sunday’s show are available through the Shadow Electric website.

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Oh Mercy – ‘Sandy’

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The amount of music floating around on the internet right now is verging on the incredible. About 12 hours of audio are uploaded to Soundcloud every minute. For the consumer, this is a pretty neat deal – there really does seem to be something out there for everyone these days. Plus we’re seeing unprecedented opportunities for collaboration and cross-fertilisation.

For musicians trying to pursue a career in pop music, however, there’s a serious problem: namely, how to get the attention of bloggers, DJs and other industry types who are, more often than not, clique-y and fatigued from sifting through reams of one-sheets for bands they don’t really care about.

Marketing, I’d like to think, can only get you so far. More importantly, you’ve gotta be able to write and produce a track that cuts through pretty much immediately. Of course, this approach is kind of a blunt instrument. There are always going to be songs that deepen significantly over repeated listens, and bands with more experimental or cerebral aims. For music like that, isolating a core audience is probably the most important first step. To really break through, though, something more dramatic is going to be required.

In this new series, ‘First Impressions’, we’re going to subject a bunch of songs to the immediacy test – getting our contributors to review a track they’ve heard only once. Kicking things off is Jackson Rumble (in a step up from his last attempt to review a track without having listened to it at all), with his take on ‘Sandy’, the latest release from Melbourne band Oh Mercy.

………

Straight outta the blocks you can tell this comes from a place that worships at the altar of respectable modern rock tropes. Driving kraut rhythms, tremolo’d guitar, analog strings, girl’s name for a title. And whatshisname of Oh Mercy has a timbre to his voice and a way with a lyric that actually makes you listen to what he’s saying. Two lines in and I kind of want to know what’s going on, and why this chap is so terrified of being alone.

There’s tension here, as we wait for the War on Drugs-style, head-out-the-car-window, flying-down-the-highway payoff. As he beckons her to “come closer”, begs her not to leave – the rhythm motoring along – I’m waiting for the payoff: in which Sandy either walks out the door or crumples into his arms.

But I feel like the song takes a mis-step in the bridge, applying the brakes rather than launching into the stratosphere, as the best Springsteen-esque guitar chuggers tend to. Nevertheless, it kept me hanging on, eager to know how it would end. And in fairness, the song resolves like most things in life probably do – with a wheeze rather than a bang.

You can catch Oh Mercy playing the Newtown Social Club in Sydney this Wednesday, 22 April, and Melbourne’s Gasometer Hotel on Saturday 25 April.

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WATCH: friendships – ‘Monarch to the Kingdom of the Dead’

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friendships

When premiering friendships’ latest vid, the UK’s Clash Magazine lead with a description of Melbourne being a “hub for the arts”. Yes, this is true. Our CBD council boats of its arts prowess, and we’ve had a knack for producing globetrotting creatives who romanticise the bluestone-lined streets of Melbourne’s inner suburbs. Each one has its fair share of Melburnian tropes at the ready – cafes with Edison lightbulbs, white tiles, or a disinterested barista put-on for effect.

But, the Melbourne represented in this clip isn’t what you’d initially jump to if you’re looking to romanticise our fashionable inner city. The suburb, Footscray isn’t going to be featured in some Monocle roundup anytime soon. It’s one that hasn’t really given into the full force of gentrification, where wave after wave of immigration still continues to makes its mark. In the vid local cameos such as Ming Ming’s, Franco Cozzo or Little Africa shine like time warped diamonds in the rough.

It’s always funny to see this place get featured. It’s romanticised by outsiders who consider it ‘exotic’ — it’s ‘Footscrazy’ or ‘Footscary’ to others. It’s a world where a technicoloured multitude of random shit greets you at a dollar shop, where said colours have faded from years of neglect. friendships’ Misha Grace (a Footscray resident) produced this in collaboration with Melbourne-based artist Ami Taib. So it’s funny to see them capture the ‘burb’s mundane reality.

For a long time, listing Footscray among Melbourne’s ‘cool’ haunts would’ve been a no-go. But now a string of younger Melburnians are capitalizing on cheap rents and large post-industrial spaces, and hosting Laneway is sure bound to shake off perceptions that it’s the inner city’s poorer cousin.

But for past or current residents, we just get on. Nobody’s getting knifed anytime soon, and nobody’s getting deprived of some ridiculously cheap okra. So take this video as an interesting juxtaposition of Footscray in its current state of flux — a perfect reading of the old and the new: a place where a gun shop can turn into an Ethiopian restaurant.

friendships are heading to the US in late May and are holding an art-show tour fundraiser. ‘Digestiblez’ will show at Friday May 1st at Forgotten Worlds, Collingwood. DJ sets from the duo and RaRa.

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INTRODUCING: Closer

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Closer is the ambient/noise project of Melbourne musician Liam Daly. It shares the grandiose aims of his former post-rock outfit, These Hands (Could Separate the Sky), but in place of cascading guitars are shifting drones built from sub-bass, white noise and tape hiss.

Over the past couple of years Daly has released two EPs, White Heat and Descent, and a full-length called In Search of Life. His latest is the neatly symmetrical Heartache/Lifted, whose two tracks both clock in at precisely 10:10.

The album has the neo-classical tenor of Basinski’s conceptual drones and some of the muted drama of Tim Hecker compositions. It’s not as centred and melodically rich as either of those artists, but that’s probably because Daly’s process is driven largely by chance. As he recently told Forte, Closer’s aesthetic is “not overly driven by specific mood or intent. Whatever noises present themselves are the ones I have to use. Whatever form the song takes, then so be it”. As a result, these tracks don’t build so much as they unfold, revealing new details and layers, each with different evocations.

In the same interview, Daly described Closer as “music that warps time and makes you feel without choice”. At times it conveys the inevitability of a glacier slowly collapsing, or that rushing noise that fills your ears during a panic attack or dissociative state.

‘Heartache’ is like the soundtrack to some unspecified dystopian era, whether industrial, medieval or post-apocalyptic. The highlight is ‘Lifted’, with its breathy synth washes and submerged vocals, which sound like someone calling to you from inside a deep cavern.

Though these songs would probably benefit from stronger melodic motifs, Heartache/Lifted is surprisingly gratifying for something that veers so close to sound art. Like most ambient music, this makes for great headphones listening – and probably a killer live show, too.

Heartache/Lifted is available now through Bandcamp. Catch Closer performing at Old Bar next Monday, 20 April, alongside Mollusc and Fourteen Nights at Sea. RSVP on Facebook.

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INTRODUCING: Totally Mild

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The presser for Totally Mild’s debut record Down Time gets on the offensive straight away – saying to forget about dolewave (strong words considering they’re named after the Aussiest show ever after Burke’s Backyard) and get on board with this new sound. Well, you’ll pry broadly accented mates singing about ciggies and stained carpet from my cold dead hands, but I like this a hell of a lot too.

Totally Mild’s ‘new’ sound has some strong Geoffrey O’Connor vibes to me. It’s less aggressively produced and hedonistic, but there’s that same woozy darkness in his voice as there is in singer Elizabeth Mitchell’s – both breathy and gauzy but with real underlying pain. These are relaxed, slow-paced songs, but by keeping the majority under the three minute mark, the guitar tone sunny and the harmonies plentiful, the band have managed to keep the record from dragging. A highlight for me is ‘When I’m Tired’ – a catchy, cheerful track about night terrors and fire. Happy-sounding songs about bad shit get made all the time, but rarely with the subtlety and smarts that these guys show across this whole record.

So whether you’ve ACTUALLY been hunting an alternative to the current Melbourne jangle-centric scene, or you just wanna hear something cool, Totally Mild are worth your time.

Down Time is out today through Bedroom Suck on digital and vinyl.

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