Posts By Madeleine Laing

LISTEN: Slumber – Body Crush EP

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slumber

‘Body Crush is Tasmanian solo artist Slumber’s first release; a collection of 2 years’ worth of work, made up of snippets, found sounds, and drowsily beautiful vocals from Tasmania’s Amber Perez. Perez also plays guitar in ferocious Hobart pop punk band Slag Queens, but with Slumber she’s turned her attention inward, making, in her words ‘dank sadgirl bops’ (and you’ll find no better description).

This EP came to me kind of like a balm against that constant low-level anxiety that we’re all getting, if not used to, bored of. Do you ever feel like there’s so much fucken blah blah everybody talking constantly out there that you struggle to even listen to music with lyrics in it? You’re like, oh god, please shut the fuck up? I do. But this EP is like restorative good company, like an afternoon spritz, like a friend who’s just as happy to spend the afternoon watching Seinfeld as talking deep stuff.

Dealing abstractly with ideas of romance with the self and others, the takeaway from these songs seems to be a kind of inner peace that comes from looking back at the past with a kind of forgiveness. With the inevitable backslide into wistful regret in ‘let u go’, a pretty highlight that brings glitches, birdsong and mumbled vocals together for a deep wallowing sigh. It’s the quiet acceptance in lines like ‘we are both the seas that we drown in / we are both our only way out’ that makes this EP more than breezy listening bleep bloops and more like a real document of progress and growth.

‘sick dank track #5’ is just what it says… kinda. An optimistic dance song to bring on the dawn ‘I’m getting better at being good to myself / I think I’m almost ready to let things work out’, Perez sings with a half-smile, multi-tracked vocals bringing the sense of euphoria to the only song I wanna hear if I ever go to the club again.

Listen to, or even buy (!) Body Crush on Bandcamp.

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LISTEN: Shrimpwitch – Gave Me The Itch LP

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Shrimpwitch

Shrimpwitch are the kind of band I wish I’d found when I was a teen – maybe it wouldn’t have taken me till I was 25 to start playing music. Cuz I don’t remember seeing girls be weird and funny like this, you know, not singing beautifully from behind the piano. These are the kind of heroes we need – ones fighting for a girl’s right to be messy and gross.

Their sound is extremely classic – rock and roll like the ’80s American bands who toured non-stop for twenty years; crusty, street smart, been-there-done-that-fucked-it-off. Surf rock guitar that went for a rollaround in the gutter. But with a thoroughly modern sense of humour, and outrage.

‘Leerers’ is a statement of personal fury that’s relatable to plenty of women, without preaching to the choir. ‘Mystique’ captures the specific kind of madness that comes from trying to maintain a cool and mysterious persona to keep ‘em all interested when you’re actually a leaking sack of blood and tears. They’ve also got that hip ‘trashbag, but make it fashion’ aesthetic, as shown in the very fun clip for ‘Digestion’.

Usually I prefer my rock and roll under two minutes, and songs like ‘Trouble’ and ‘Leerers’ deliver on the FUCK YEAH WE’RE PLAYING AS FAST AS WE CAN energy. But longer songs ‘Sever’ and ‘Digestion’ show enough of their more structured song writing skills to make it worth it. I like the messy, live-ish sound of the record in general, but sometimes I wish I could hear the vocals better, only cuz the lyrics that you do pick up are so good.

Considering how much energy and fun they’ve managed to pack into these ten songs, I can only imagine Shrimpwitch absolutely go off live. If you’re in Melbourne they’re playing a launch on January 19. But to paraphrase one hundred Shakira video commenters: COME TO HOBART.

You can buy the tape or digital album for yourself and any young girls you know right now here  

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WATCH: All the Weathers – ‘Jobs for Dogs’

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All The Weathers

I’m such a dumbshit it took moving to Tasmania for me to discover what, apparently, all my friends already knew and were keeping from me as some kind of sick joke: All The Weathers are one of the most exciting bands in Australia. It’s true, before this year I had absolutely no idea that just one band could be fun, arty, weird, funny, catchy, smart, brutal and beautiful all at once. Must be that mountain air.

It’s been a while since the band have released anything, but a few days ago we finally got a taste of their third record, called For the Worms’, out on January 21st. This first track  ‘Jobs for Dogs’ does the quiet-loud things with a frantic hysterical energy, dirty growling guitars and a video that combines a serious comment about animal exploitation with dressing up in broken wetsuits, dog masks and op-shop suits. There’s a lot going. You notice some new funny detail on every re-watch. Georgia Lucy’s voice is so good it wouldn’t really matter if she wasn’t that charismatic, but whether it’s on stage or on video (in this one she embodies a theatrical, mistreated greyhound or a villainous race-goer) she’s endlessly watchable.

The whole things brims with personality, charm, force and passion. It’s a breath of fresh air, especially for those times when it starts to feel like there’s not enough weird stuff happening in Australian music, when it’s all getting a bit too cool. Oh god I’m starting to sound like those Triple J dads asking why no one makes music like TISM anymore. Ignore/kill me.

All the Weathers are a band who write great songs which lets them be as wacky as they like and you always want to see where it’s gonna go. Hopefully the record brings a tour cuz their live shows are anything and everything but boring. Lucy, and bandmates Callumn Cusick and Gigi Lynn are all hectic multi-instrumentalists and make kind of a mix between the tightest band you’ve ever seen and wonderful chaos.

A second video, ‘Fast Lane’ was released on the same day but I didn’t find out about that until I’d finished writing this post. Ah-whoops.

Pre-order ‘For the Worms’  from good Tasmania record label Rough Skies here

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LISTEN: Bitumen – Discipline Reaction LP

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bitumen

Like every inner city nerd who couldn’t find a warehouse party with an event invite and maps, I love industrial music. Like every weepy romantic who stopped being cute ‘n’ tortured a long time ago, I love post punk. And, like every right-thinking person, I love metal. This deadly tough and dramatic record from Melbourne’s Bitumen is the best part of all three.

The album opens with the dance track, ‘Lash’, and there’s some beats here and there across the whole thing you could make a party out of if you were really committed. But at its heart this record is sinister. They play with the goth, old-timey references in the titles ‘Sicker Dowry’, ‘Pound of Flesh’, and keeping these songs out of a modern context is important. It wouldn’t work at all if these songs were about Tinder and Newstart and missing the bus. I think we’re maybe a bit sick of that anyway. I know I don’t want to hear about my own life in a song any more. Yuck. Give me darkness and depravity, power, violence, dangerous seduction. Not more constant niggling anxiety.

A lot of guitar bands are using drum machines now – it makes sense, give the people something different, don’t have to worry about a kit, hey, you’re playing clubs now. But it’s for this kind of music that drum machines were invented. Cold, precise, robotic, not a hint of swing or groove. The bass is tech without being distracting, guitars tense, tight and massive.

First single ‘Twice Shy’ comes with an unsurprisingly dark and moody film clip, it’s a good punchy single, but doesn’t quite do justice to some of the complexity of the rest of the record. But that is honestly some nitpicky shit. I’m trying to avoid slavish enthusiasm. It’s not working.

‘Pound of Flesh’ is my favourite song because it is drone and desire and it is absolutely huge. Until like a minute from the end it builds, guitars groan and rattle and shake the foundations. Kate Binning whispers ‘I’ve been watching from a distance I’ve been waiting for a signal…’. Then it opens up with her frenzied spat vocal. ‘Pound of Flesh’ and ‘At Bended Knee’ are both revenge horror movies, menacing anthems for the wronged; ‘I’m not quite who I used to be’ ‘I take back what you took from me’.

I think the secret to Binning’s power is how absolutely in control she sounds through the record. Plenty of vocalists could get lost in the sea of riffs and synth hysterics, but the vocals always do them one better, sounding a bit sicker, a bit darker, a bit more crazed. No monotone drone under reverb (well except in the obligatory atmospheric track ‘Wriggling Signal II’, but who doesn’t like a bit of atmosphere) the vocal melodies hit just as hard as anything else. Cardinalidae is the stadium track in an album full of stadium tracks.

This record, to me, is so extremely Melbourne, but without the bad parts. It’s that self-confidence, style, cool, with just enough edge, but it doesn’t try too hard at any of it. It’s dead serious, without crossing that thin sneaky grey line into being silly. Which is hard. Most bands wouldn’t even try, let alone pull it off this well.

Buy this good record from the good label Vacant Valley

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LISTEN: Sarah Mary Chadwick – Sugar Still Melts in the Rain

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Sarah Mary Chadwick cover

At an art show in a convict-built gunpowder warehouse in Hobart someone brings up Sarah Mary Chadwick. They’re telling a story about a New Year’s party where they’d turned off the party songs playing at midnight to belt out songs from 9 Classic Tracks. ‘Have you heard the new one?’, I ask. They say they haven’t. ‘It’s much much sadder’, I say ‘it’s really… hard’. Their eyes light up. ‘Oh fuck yeah.’

Is it unfair to call our love of public sadness a kind of fetish? We respect people who spill their guts in public because in real life it still feels kind of illicit. Like when you start to get into an unexpectedly deep conversation with a not very close friend and start telling them about an ex boyfriends dick problems or some mutual friend you actually hate or how you once took a lot of pills ‘just to see what would happen’, and then afterwards feel that rush of regret. Revealing ourselves feels good, until the shame hits.

But this record. This record is harrowing. It’s hard to look at right in the eye, real depression. When you’ve made so much of your life about being an unlucky sadgirl. Then you realise you’re pretty well adjusted and life is not bad. And THEN a record like this comes along and puts you on your knees with its power. That weak part of you hopes that it’s kind of put on, a bit of artistic licence to make a record. Maybe at shows she makes a couple of jokes about what a downer it is, says something ironic to lighten the mood. But right here and now all we have is this music.

Gone is the one-organ show and tinny dance beats. The minimalism and slight dinkiness that alleviated some of Roses Always Die’s darker moments. On first listen Sugar Still Melts… might have you begging for a hint of a drum machine. Something that takes you, if not to the dance floor than at least to the corner of the bar, swaying your hips and looking come-hither at whoever catches your eye. But instead it just builds and builds, the enormous weight. ‘It’s Never Ok’ is so dramatically catchy, the music sounds like she’s about to turn it all around and bust out some great empowering life affirming line that just never comes. The chorus is ‘I’ve got a lifetime of practice/ at keeping the hurting inside/ and tying myself to a lover/ who can’t tell I’m even alive’. I interviewed Chadwick once and she talked about the image of ‘Life Is a Cabaret’, this huge sad show tune at the end of the musical Cabaret. And even though she was talking about Roses Always Die at the time it feels even more apt for this record, especially in the beginning with songs like ‘Flow Over Me’ and ‘It’s Never Ok’. It’s full of showstoppers that leave you bruised but like you want to go back and feel it over and over again.

We (listeners, music writers, whoever) often want artists to grow and progress in a recognisable narrative. We like breakup albums followed by love albums followed by ‘mature’ records about life and art. We like stripped back acoustic records followed by balls-to-the-wall highly produced pop records followed by a nice middle ground. The way Sarah Mary Chadwick is growing is something hard to recognise. To say her records are getting sadder is reductive. Nothing comes close to the dewy sweetness of something like ‘Aquarius and Gemini’ off Nine Classic Tracks, but really it’s about diving deeper and deeper into the feelings that have been around forever. She’s rejecting another kind of narrative too, the one about grief, the ‘time heals all wounds’, the one that tells people to stop talking about it, to stop making people uncomfortable. ‘Dancing Slowly’ is a heartbreaking picture of how you can become trapped in moments that have defined you, getting stuck and watching the world pass you by, needing help but knowing no one can give it ‘I just need a lighthouse/ I just need some energy’.

She’s still a searing judge of character, the way she strips an ex-lover down on ‘Bauble on a Chain’ is not so much a ‘fuck you’ as a ‘fuck me for falling for it’. For real people grief can make you difficult, morose, hard to be around. God forbid, ‘negative’.  But when you can turn it into a kind of art it also makes you attractive to people who want to seem deep and understanding. Chadwick sees through this – on that song her lover reveals themselves as wanting something a lot prettier than anything she’s got to offer;  ‘you want a prop with only lines / that ask your favourite things to eat / and then enquire about your day’. And she’s realising how this all sounds even as she’s singing it ‘when I describe it / this has no semblance to love after all’. That familiar feeling coming to the end of a relationship or friendship and wondering what the hell that was.

All her world-weary knowingness is stripped away in the heartbreaking ballad ‘Five Months’ with its almost childlike rhymes ‘five months without you is too long / so come back when you hear this song’. This is one of the few songs on the album where it doesn’t seem like Chadwick is commenting on her own feelings while she’s singing about them. Every now and then she’s slip in some reference to second-guessing if she should be making these big statements, like in opening track ‘Flow Over Me’s’ lines; ‘some of us can take it / some of us don’t make it/ some of us are fakers only ever be heart breakers’ and ‘all tied up inside my mother / never really knew my father / this is boring to you’, but ‘Five Months’ she gives in to naked wishful thinking. It’s a delicate song, a dream world this close to falling apart.

I go back and forth over whether there’s something to take from this record. I don’t think there has to be, I think as a thing, as a document from a person who’s gone through more than any of us have or probably ever will, it’s beautiful and worthy and basically above analysis. But maybe there’s a hint in ‘Wind Wool’s slowly lilting piano ballad of fighting your own brain, giving up, memory and friendship. It’s one of the record’s shortest and simplest songs, and gives us the line ‘I’ll die/ you died/ we die’. But she also seems to rally something close to a knowing smile in ‘some people think skies should be blue all the time but me I love a storm.’ Maybe this is the sentiment that us great fetishists of sorrow identify, or desperately want to identify with, that feeling of getting a little thrill as the dark clouds gather, to love that cleansing destruction of a good hard rain.

Buy the record or forever live with that nagging feeling of regret.

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LISTEN: Wives – ‘White Dogs’

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Wives

Wives are from Canberra and they know how to do it!

*link to video*

End of article.

Nah, we promise this is still a serious music blog. So, Wives are from Canberra and they know how to make music that makes its point, hits hard, no frills, no fuckaround. This new single is post punk at its best, minimal, cutting and cool. The video does everything that good Australian horror does – juxtaposes our perfect landscape with deeply flawed white culture. Beautiful pink galas and native flowers, framed in soft pastels, the chorus breaking into a scene from Summernats – a car festival that seems to attract an especially rabid kind of rev head.

Personally I love a good old fashioned rally down a mountain, but what’s happening here, either in fact or in clever editing, is something that seems about to boil over with violent excitement. Burnouts and shirtless dudes in speed-dealers and sombreros, terrible cars souped-up to all hell. It’s ugly.

The concept is clear, but never over explained. The refrain of ‘let sleeping dogs lie/ no comfort in this home’ will be familiar to anyone who’s felt the extreme discomfort of broad, hyper-masculine Australia. They perfectly capture the can’t-look-away fear of a drunken ‘sporting’ spectacle in ‘I peer inside / the white dogs mouth open wide’.

This is one of the most commanding tracks I’ve heard in ages, and I can’t wait to hear more from their new LP Doomsday, out April 4 on Black Wire Records.

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LISTEN: Lowtide – ‘Southern Mind’ LP

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lowtide

Two weeks ago me and my boyfriend moved from Brisbane to Hobart. So you have to excuse me if I get a bit drippy and sentimental over Lowtide’s new record, a record called Southern Mind, a record that breaths transition, progression and a clear-eyed kind of optimism. A ‘letting go’ record with only a suggestion of melancholy.

Then there’s the other thing; Lowtide’s self-titled album, which, somehow, came out in 2014, is one of my favourite Australian albums of the last ten years. One I’ve never gotten sick of, still gives me the same kind of ache today. The main difference between that album and Southern Mind is the necessary letting go of lightness. There’s no such thing as an ‘effortless’ song or album, and most bands give up trying to pretend there is by their second record. So while nothing on this one seems as kind of incidentally perfect as Lowtide’s ‘Held’, the simple pop smarts they showed on songs like that one and ‘Wedding Ring’ have become something more complex, but just as listenable.

‘Elizabeth Tower’s’ ‘Open hands, go on your way / stand and deliver, your task is forgiveness’ is the album’s pop song, open-hearted and immediate, a perfect choice for the second single after the more scrappy ‘90s-feeling ‘Alibi’.  ‘A.C’, with its more straightforwardly pretty guitar melodies, opening up into spacious, introspective verses, may be the song that most resembles that first record, though sadder, more resigned. Though when Giles Simon [who’s since left the band] consoles with ‘separate yourself / you’ve had enough’ you still feel like it’s about giving up to move forward. It’s a striking song, particularly when all the atmospherics drop out for a few bars in the middle, leaving resonant guitar and bass and Simon’s vocals, matter of fact and unadorned. Final track ‘Fault Lines’ leaves you with Lucy Buckeridge’s impressively swooping, twisting vocals, sweet and searching. With its slow, steady rhythm developing over it’s 4 and a half minutes, it’s maybe the most structurally simple song, but also one of the more personal and intimate, the counterpoints of Buckridge and Simon’s voices, ‘you’re always on my mind / you used to say this all the time / you’re leaving’.  It works to end the album with a kind of meandering, band-wanders-off-into-the-distance fade out than a resounding bang.

We know why people dismiss shoegaze (or dream pop, which is… faster, brighter guitars? I understand genres) as kinda wussy, almost boring. It’s samey by nature, having a consistent tone, drawn-out effects, a sense of each song lingering through the next is all part of the charm, and if you need your music to beat you up to make a point then it’ll never be for you. It’s also the genre that attracts the most cliche kind of description. You know, people says ‘dreamy’ ‘wall of sound’ ‘reverb-drenched guitars’ in their 200 word new music piece and think you get the picture, when the real feeling of the music is much more complex and particular. Like, there’s nothing really dreamy about this record – it’s purposeful, composed, exact. And as much as, going in, I wanted it to be something romantic and pastoral about love and loss in a harsh southern landscape, it’s not that either. It’s beautiful in totally its own way.  And the only way to really find out how is to listen.

Buy this beautiful record via Rice is Nice here

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