Tagged By totally mild

PREMIERE: Totally Mild – ‘Today, Tonight’

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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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LOOK: Paradise Music Festival 2015

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Photographs by Nelson Armstrong and Bec Capp

 

If you thought the barrage of FOMO-inducing photos on of picturesque Lake Mountain was over – then shame on you. Good things take time. You should have known that we’d post our Paradise Festival photos a week later than everyone else with these film photos capturing moments of bliss, tinies and 90s latex cameos.

Film takes time to process, and so does the brain to process memories. The week after a festival, (especially one with a club) can be a rough one. Congrats to those who did attend. You made it. Thursday was a particularly shit one for me. Now that I feel good again the memories feel even better.

For those of you who did attend, maybe you will find your face in the crowd, maybe not. Either way you will look back with nostalgic warmth on the weekend that was. Maybe you are traumatised from lugging heaps of unnecessary crap up a mountain. Perhaps you only remember watching hippies making bubbles and wondering why club kids wear white at a festival.

Or maybe you don’t latch on to the negatives. I remember watching an unbelievable sunrise on Saturday morning that I wasn’t able to photograph with justice – and don’t have a big enough vocabulary to describe. Maybe it was dancing in the afternoon sun to Totally Mild and The Harpoons and thinking that everything in the world was alright. Whatever it was, this three-year-old baby of a festival is located in the most picturesque setting.

Paradise Festival is truly unique and will continue to do great things for local music. For those who missed out this year, the feeling that you could/should/would have attended will only intensify as Paradise grows older.

 

See you in 2016.

 

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Check out our previous Paradise photo essays, here and here.

 

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See full photo set below.

 

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LOOK: Totally Mild – Europe Tour

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Totally Mild recently returned from a two month jaunt touring around Europe with Terrible Truths. Here’s some snaps the band took on tour – playing in-stores in Paris, filming video clips in German gyms and chowing down on vending machine burgers.

Totally Mild have been nominated for three Age Music Victoria awards in the ‘Best Album’, ‘Best Emerging Artist’ and ‘Best Band’ categories. Voting is open to the public until November 6th, so swing some kudos to your favourite local acts here. 

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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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