Tagged By Sydney

PREMIERE: Beast & Flood – ‘Abie Poe’

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Beast & Flood are a Sydney trio who make music that sounds like protest – that is, if you can protest a sinking feeling in your stomach. Listening to their knotty, anguished rock, it’s clear these guys feel there’s something broken. The guitars are menacing and the drums punch and stagger, while the vocals swing from dissonant dissertations to an outright wail.

Beast & Flood have been gigging in and around Sydney for more than three years now, but they’re yet to put out a full-length album. They have four releases under their belt so far – three EPs and a blistering single, ‘Amber’. A number of these tracks have now been collected and re-recorded, along with some new material, to form the band’s debut LP, Laguno, which is out 22 June through No Safe Place.

‘Abie Poe’ is Laguno‘s second single, following last month’s ‘Look at the Fish Swimming’. (An exuberant little number in it’s own sharp-edged way, ‘Look…’ might be Beast & Flood’s first properly ‘pop’ song). They’ve spent a lot of time in the studio with this stuff – starting recording in July last year and finishing up in February – and it shows. These tracks are sprawling, composed of several movements, and landing in intensity somewhere between post-hardcore and ’90s emo.

‘Abie Poe’ (named after a character of the same name from Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel) opens with swooping chords and chiming harmonics, like Sonic Youth in one of their more melodious moments, before drifting into harsher twists and turns, screams and then release.

Beast & Flood will be touring the new album across the east coast from June to August. Catch them at one of these dates:

25 June – Rad, Wollongong

26 June – Blackwire, Sydney

9 July – Rics, Brisbane

10 July – The Bearded Lady, Brisbane

11 July – Beatdisc, Parramatta

16 July – Phoenix, Canberra

17 July – Metro, Adelaide

18 July – Vice Bar, Melbourne

24 July – The Brisbane Hotel, Hobart

1 August – Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle

7 August – The Boatshed, Manly

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INTRODUCING: Beef Jerk

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More Australian than getting workers comp for six months after spraining your ankle and then spending it all on Winnie Blues and schoeys at your local. Born in Sydney’s incestuous inner west, Beef Jerk drop the ‘y’ from everyone’s favourite chewy strap of cow, and induce a feeling of catchy ambivalence in whoever is lucky enough to be near the stereo when their music comes on.

They’ve just released their debut LP, Tragic, which is packed with dark humour, a constant backbone of off-kilter strumming and the occasional sax-breakdown courtesy of Millie Hall (Destiny 3000, Bridezilla). The songs come thick and fast, and at 15 tracks there was the possibility the music would become stale. However, Beef Jerk’s consistency is remarkable as they unnervingly inject their deranged, saturated pop sensibility into songs with titles like ‘Footy’, ‘The Last Chiko Roll’ and ‘Stay At Home Dads’.

Beef Jerk are destined to become a layman’s new favourite – their music is lackadaisical, but naturally so. There’s no force to it, the tunes oozing and grunting their way from Jack Lee and Mikey Branson’s mouths and fingers as naturally as a foreman yelling, “Tools down, boys!”.  Armed with just wry humour and a sweet but slightly out of tune guitar, Beef Jerk are gonna be on high rotation for a while.

Beef Jerk have some gigs coming up in Sydney and Melbourne:

12 June – Grace Darling Hotel, Melbourne w/ Black Vacation, Chook Race, and Gentlemane (RSVP on Facebook)

15 June – Northcote Social Club, Melbourne, supporting Cool Sounds

27 June – Hermann’s Bar, Sydney

10 July – Brighton Up Bar, Sydney

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LISTEN: Angie – ‘Out of Age’

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It’s always kind of bugged me that not being able to really sing has never stopped dude musicians from giving it a crack, and being liked. Most of female-fronted bands, even the most underground, that get any attention have a ‘pretty’ voice front and centre. There’s nothing pretty about the vocal on Sydney artist and musician Angie’s newest single ‘Out of Age’. It’s monotone, almost tuneless and rubs up against the guitar line like steel wool. It’s attitude that’s important here – a stretched kind of desperation that keeps you on edge for the whole song, an uneasy balance between drone and hook.

‘Power Pop’ were never words I thought I’d be ascribing to Angie after her excellently dark and dogged first EP Turning, but she herself calls this a track “a pop tribute”, With a guitar line as huge as the one here, the shoe fits. But that guitar just repeats over and over – never breaking into the big sunny chorus that you’d expect from someone other than Angie. It drills itself into your head and stays there.

‘Out of Age’ is the first single off Angie’s forthcoming record Free Agent, due out later via Rice Is Nice this year. And an exciting one, because it tells us that anything could happen – throw your expectations in the trash.

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BEHIND THE SCENES: Okenyo – ‘Just a Story’ video

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A few days ago, Sydney neo-soul artist Okenyo dropped the video for ‘Just a Story’, the slinky and dexterous lead single from her forthcoming EP, Mirage – and we got a sneak peek at the behind-the-scenes photo shoot. As you would expect from Zindzi Okenyo (remember this tour-de-force appearance?), the results are sexy and very stylish.

Photography by Shantanu Starick

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More photos after the jump

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LISTEN: Day Ravies – ‘Under The Lamp’ EP

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I’d always thought of Sydney’s Day Ravies as a kind of over-earnest band – one of the best things to come out of this shoegaze/psych revival period, definitely, but not particularly fun. With this EP, they’ve proved me well and truly wrong.

One highlight is the overblown synth on ‘Perennial’, the most dramatic and upbeat track, with the teasing vocals in the chorus (‘I left you wondering’) taking joy in their own mystery. Then there’s that distorted guitar on ‘Sleepwalk’, almost country at times, playing a lead line that stumbles all over the song, knocking everything else out of its way and having a great time doing it. The raw buzzing slab of noisy guitar on every song balances out the breathy vocals beautifully, and acts as a strongly grounded base from which the lighter layers of their sound can spiral out.

With ‘Under The Lamp’ Day Ravies have made their sound fresh again, and maybe finally kicked that ‘jangly’ tag that’s inexplicably clung to them  since their first release. They’re also a band that’s extremely confident and respected in what they do, so it’d be cool to see them push things further and get more experimental with future releases – go a little Frank Reynolds and get real weird with it.

‘Under The Lamp’ has been released on the band’s own brand new label Strange Pursuits, and you can get it as a cassette or download from Bandcamp.

Catch them on tour along the east coast in support of their recent ‘Hickford Whizz’ 7″:

Thursday, 12 March – The Curtin, Melbourne, w/ The Ancients + White Walls

Friday, 13 March – The Hotel Metro, Adelaide, w/ EMU + Yabbies

Saturday, 21 March – The Foundry, Brisbane, w/ Per Purpose + 100%

Saturday, 28 March – Union Hotel Newtown, Sydney, w/ bearhug + Weak Boys

Thursday, 9 April – The Phoenix, Canberra, w/ Black Springs + Mind Blanks

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LISTEN: White Shadows – ‘Give Up Give Out Give In’

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Does anyone care about Craig Nicholls anymore? Some people used to, but I got the impression that the songs stopped coming out the same after he put down the orchy bottle. In more recent times, promo shots of a rejigged Vines have circulated, featuring Craig and a couple of fresh-faced Sydney fellas spruiking a new album, but it seems few people paid much notice. I didn’t. Sorry Craig, but it just seemed that by album number two you were rewriting the same couple of tunes over and over again (granted, they were good tunes) – and people switched off.

So… does anyone care about Craig Nicholls in 2015? It would seem that Nick and Sam Littlemore do – they of Pnau, Teenager, Peking Duk, Empire of the Sun and Elton John fame – which could be a real shot in the arm for our hero from Sutherland Shire. They’ve taken a bunch of Craig’s songs (ones that didn’t fit the latest Vines incarnation, which seems encouraging) and done their thing to them. I’m predicting anthemic synths, thin guitar licks, a huge, processed vocal surging over the top of some driving drum machines. The stuff that more than a few guilty pleasures are made of.

Which sounds like it could be alright. Well, at least more interesting than hearing Craig drawl his way though ‘Homesick’ part 7.

So here is ‘Give Up Give Out Give In’ by White Shadows. I have no idea how it sounds because I haven’t listened to it, but I dare say I’ll give it a go. Which is more than I can say for the last Vines album.

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LISTEN: Nathan Roche – ‘In Dresden They’ve Been Dressing in Black Again’

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Itinerant, conman and genuine good bloke, Nathan Roche is one of the most prolific artists in the Australian underground right now – and he’s certainly the most flippant. He’s a self-published novelist, frontman of the now defunct Camperdown and Out, plus half a dozen other bands, and head of his own record label, Glenlivet-a-Gogh. Roche, however, harbours no romantic illusions about his creative endeavours. Speaking to Polaroids of Androids back in 2013, he described music as ‘a curse’ and claimed that there’s ‘no such thing as art. Like the food we digest and put into our bodies, occasionally we “pass gas” and a stench goes airborne.’

Well, in early 2015, an odour is hanging in the air again. The day after returning from a tour of Europe and the US, Roche went into the studio – via a trip to the Centrelink office – to record the third installment of his Newtown Trilogy: Cathedrals Made Outta Green Cards. The album’s 23 tracks veer from the brilliant to the ridiculous, replete with bad puns (‘S-Car Go!’) and spoken word interludes, including a woman enumerating the contents of her refrigerator in alluring French.

As always, the best moments on Cathedrals… channel the luminaries of 70s avant-rock – Lou Reed, Roxy Music, John Cale. I’m not sure if the second single, ‘In Dresden They’ve Been Dressin in Black Again’, is about Pegida, the vices of fashion or both, but it rollicks snidely along like something off Transformer, sounding less like pastiche than a skillful homage.

Roche has said that Cathedrals… is to be his final musical outing. (His Soundcloud profile currently reads ‘R.I.P.’). As a guy who somehow plays the role of piss-taker and straight-shooter simultaneously, I wouldn’t doubt him when he says there’s some sort of change afoot – but nor would I be betting on his disappearance. There’s far too much going on in Nathan Roche’s head for him to put down the guitar for good.

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