Album Reviews

LISTEN: Mere Women – Big Skies LP

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mere women

If there was any justice in the world Mere Women would be like, as huge as Smith Street Band but with the critical respect of like, Total Control. I reckon they could have been The Jezabels three years ago if your average Triple J listener liked things that are good instead of things that are bad. I reckon they’re so amazing.

It’s hard to overstate how important Mere Women’s  last record Your Town was to me in 2014 as a hyper-dramatic, desperate 21 year old. To hear something with so much fire and fury and power in its naked desire. Made me feel more and more terrifically crazy at the same time. Three years later and there’s another Mere Women album. And it sounds a bit different. And for one second I felt that knee jerk reaction to whine ‘oh but I liked it befooooore’. But just for one second, because Big Skies delivers something broader in scope and sound, that still crackles with the same intense dis-ease as the best of anything they’ve done before.

There’s less of those catch-in-your-throat, defiant guitar melodies that cut all other post-punk aping guitar bands into ribbons. But you already knew they could do that. Did you know they could write huge-sounding rock songs with depth and texture that still sound whip-sharp and lean? Or two in a row, like they’ve given us in ‘Birthday’ and ‘Big Skies’?

The three elements that have always made up the base of their sound remain unchanged; the interplay between strident, aching vocals, white-hot guitar and powerful, eccentrically technical drumming. There’s just more and more sound filling up the space, rounding everything out and making it something less easy to categorise.

‘Drive’, with it’s ‘I give up I give up / pick me up pick me up’ crazed muttering repetition brings some of their old recklessness and desperation. The vocals, roll over each other, the changes in pace and melody building to tense frantic verses into choruses that almost give the closure of a huge release but hold something just back. There’s a lot of disparate, busy and fast-moving parts across this record that could have made a mess out of lesser songwriters. Instead it all sounds – not easy, there’s nothing really easy about the sound of this record – but natural. They even made an echoing piano ballad like ‘Curse’ fit in a way that doesn’t feel shoehorned in.

It feels weird to say that this is a darker album than Your Town, because that was some heavy shit. But I think Big Skiesencompasses more than the kind of obsessive love and desire that drove the older record. They’ve combined personal and political into a generalise feeling of discontent, anger and fear. That all this darkness never drags just shows how fucking good these guys are at writing songs – they move with pace and purpose, beautiful and terrible.

You can purchase Big Skies from Poison City Records right NOW

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Mere Women are playing some shows supporting this record with some real hot shit supports:

CANBERRA – Thursday June 22 w/Wives & Little Lunch at The Transit Bar

SYDNEY – Friday June 23 w/ Marcus Whale & TAFEWRM at The Red Rattler

SYDNEY – Sunday June 25 w/ Oslow & Carb on Carb & White Dog & The Kirks at Urge Records

MELBOURNE – Friday June 30 w/Terrible Truths & Spit at The Curtain

BRISBANE – Saturday July 8 w/100% & Ultra Material

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LISTEN: Leafy Suburbs – Honda Jazz

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Leafy suburbs

When you work in retail and get to play your own music, you’re always looking for the holy grail: stuff that won’t piss of customers but also won’t make you want to attempt in vain to suffocate yourself with a paper gift bag. I thought this record from Leafy Suburbs was gonna be something like this – interesting enough but ambient enough to fade into the background. It isn’t really that. It’s a strange, surreal thing that I’m sure is making me a little weird to customers for the forty or so minutes of it’s run time.

There’s elements of a ‘nice’ kind of ambient jazziness, but it always gives in to it’s electro heart. Like the way the stuttering piano of (my favourite) ‘Useless Loop’ makes way rhythms that start muted but soon take center stage, or the clattering, droning build of ‘Trumpet Interchange’ (…yeah, I don’t know why I thought this was gonna be easy-listening).

A current of sweetness and optimism runs through this record – starting a couple of tracks in with more opening pop track ‘Complete’. This feeling sets Leafy Suburbs apart from a lot of what’s happening in local electronic music lately. Maybe it’s cuz they’re originally from Perth – who knows what the hell is going on over there. A few years ago we could have happily plonked it into the ‘glitchy’ category to waste away with all the other bedroom producers. But there’s definitely more dancefloor influence here – you get the feeling it was made by someone who’s been out of their house in the last few months. The jazz elements are central to the sound and never gimmicky; saxophone provides a melancholy wondering kind of melody behind the sharp drum machine of ‘Battery Acid’ – the album’s danciest track.

Honda Jazz is out now with a limited run of tapes through Moontown Records. Moontown is a label that releases music they like infrequently, and without to much shallow self-promotion. That’s a vibe we can get behind, especially when it gives us odd little gems like this one

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LISTEN: Ferla – ‘Guilt Pop/Stay Posi’

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Melbourne’s Giuliano Ferla (or just Ferla) has dropped a double EP of break up tracks, the first half a re-release of his 2015 debut ‘Guilt Pop’ and the second half the more optimistic sounding ‘Stay Posi’, as if by projecting positivity Ferla can shake the heartbreak hangover. All tracks could be sung to an empty hall littered with party detritus, glittering streamers reflecting disco lights across the room as Ferla sings his sadness to no one in particular. It’s unequivocally a tale of heartache coloured by dystopian glamour, sometimes personal but also on a bigger scale like the vague fear that comes with living in a world a that’s about to take you down with it. The release isn’t short on ideas in the way that some “break up” records are overly indulgent (even with the self-reflectiveness in the title ‘Guilt Pop’). 

The pop I hear is Australian Crawl and Simple Minds rounded out with the darker layers of Lost Animal. Ferla’s croon booms across the entire release like a more elastic Jack Ladder, from the deep resonance on ‘In the Night’ to the falsetto in ‘I Can’t Let You Down’. Although it’s one of the older tracks ‘In the Night’ is still my favourite, it has this stalking pace that makes Ferla’s melodies that little bit more cathartic.

The opener ‘Breakups are Hard for Everybody’ is one I’ve seen a few interpretations of, a personal narration of intimate frustration against the backdrop of a world falling apart: “Bitch leave me alone / I said as I slam down the telephone.” After abruptly ending the call our hero continues watching news of suicide bombers and ebola. Everyones got their own problems, and perhaps this is a case of trying to get perspective on a personal situation by putting it in a larger context or having so little feeling left that you’re as numb to your immediate surroundings as you are to distant sufferings. 

From here the record moves through the motions, confused but determined to commit to the breakup on ‘I’m Nobody’s Baby Now’ (replete with a shred-the tears-away outro), the romanticised revisionism of ‘In the Night’, dealing with the consequences and reality of separation on ‘I Can’t Let You Down’, through to the fuck you finality and bouncy synth lines on ‘Wasted on You’. It was definitely the slow-burners that hooked me on Ferla, but he’s also adept at high energy synth rock even when tearing down a future he’d previously envisioned on ‘Children are Our Future’.

There are so many entry points to connect with Ferla emotionally across Guilt Pop and Stay Posi that the fact it’s also an incredibly compelling listen is almost a moot point. That is, if it weren’t for that combination making this the perfect soundtrack to purging someone from your life.

If you’re in Melbourne, you can purge head to Ferla’s EP launch at The Tote on Friday June 16.

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LISTEN: Angie – ‘Shyness’ LP

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shyness

When I wrote about Angie Garrick’s first solo album Turning in 2013, it was a very different time. You could say you liked ‘garage rock’ without being heavily side-eyed at a house show (and I was writing shit like ‘soul crunching riffs’ seemingly without wincing myself to death). I don’t stand by much of what I said back then, but even that me was smart enough to see the power of that brave and brutal album. Then on Free Agent she went a bit rock dog, putting herself front and centre. Braver still maybe for a woman in Australia.

Shyness is the best thing she’s done by far. It is absolutely grim. It’s crushingly beautiful. Garrick’s monotone vocals resigned; ‘Nothing in Store’s singalong chorus of ‘nothing to count on / nothing in store’, followed by tracks based around rich and heavy sounding piano. Everything echoes for a thousand miles in each direction, like Garrick reaching out – but then it’s so insular as well. How can something with so few parts do so much damage, how can a record that often sounds restless leave you with a feeling of contentment? I don’t know, but Shyness does it.

I won’t pretend to know much about the piano or instrumental music in general, but ‘On Being Blue’ is something so special to me. There’s the stunning way the piano chases itself around in circles, pausing hesitant then striding on with confidence. In other places it’s joined by fractured guitar catching up then falling behind, then catching up again, both instruments woven together loosely but with purpose. Even when the music is beautiful, Garrick’s vocals bring a sense of foreboding. She’s living in a world of whispers and shadows, keeping you at arm’s length even when you desperately want to be let in. A lot of musicians will say stuff like ‘I don’t really think about how other people are gonna feel listening to my music when I make it’, which is mostly bullshit, but Angie I’d believe it. Shyness is a graceful, poised record captures the precious weight of isolation.

Angie is on tour later this month. She’s also playing the Repressed Records show at Vivid on June 1. Total Control are playing. See you there.

FRI MAY 26 – 107 PROJECTS, SYDNEY
w/ KNITTED ABYSS, SPIKE VINCENT & TABLE
TICKETS | MORE INFO

SAT MAY 27 – AINSLIE ARTS CENTRE, CANBERRA
w/ THUNDERBOLT CITY + MORE TBA
TICKETS | MORE INFO

SAT JUNE 3 – SOME VELVET MORNING, MELBOURNE
w/ SUPPORTS TBA
TICKETS ON THE DOOR | MORE INFO

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LISTEN: No Sister and Bitumen – Split Cassette

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No Sister

You know when someone is talking to you with extreme passion about something you’ve not previously been that interested in, and you can’t help but get sucked in to their argument, even though you’ve got no idea what it is? That’s how I often feel about No Sister. Everything they do is so intentional, so serious that I forget to roll my eyes at their use of the kind of art-rock, playing-guitar-with-a-screwdriver business that would usually be Not My Vibe.

So No Sister make kind of pretentious music, but at least they’re not pretending to be on the dole or like they didn’t go to uni. They don’t pretend to be approachable, #relateable fuckups – they’ve talk to you from a place of knowledge and foresight. Like lookout motherfuckers cuz it’s time to get mad. And there’s nothing wrong with being a bit pretentious if it’s for a good cause – like for some of the most vicious, vital music you’ll hear this hear. Its pretentious music that rules, seethes and gnashes its teeth, scowling in righteous anger. The were like this even before they moved from Bris to Melbourne.

‘Perpetrate’ is absolutely ferocious. I want that bassline isolated in its own track, so I can discover the secret to its absolute genius. Don’t listen to this at work if you don’t wanna be making wild-eyes at your co-workers for the next half hour, Siahn Davis and Tiarney Miekus’s vocals dueling like a devil on each shoulder. The lyrics are snippets of violent imagery ‘Like a hot fist thrown first!’ / ‘blazing through the noise’

Bitumen’s side starts with drum machine, and immediately it’s more obviously influenced by Melbourne goth post punk, um, coldwave, with Kate Binning’s drawling vocals swirling out of your speakers like black smoke. Their stuff is mushier, and noisier, using repetition and emotion rather than appealing to any kind of rationality

The lyrics seem lean on more personal stuff – there’s more yous and mes and hims and hers in these songs, less burning cities and shards of glass. ‘Honey Hunter’ sounds like someone very sinister, the snippets of ominous detail repeated; ‘indefensible, heavy breathing’ ‘in a pure world, he found her’.

The No Sister side stays restrained – held in by the tightness of the sound, the dry brittleness, There’s a calculated feeling even when the guitar devolves into noise, but Bitumen are absolutely balls to the wall, especially on ‘Winter Swimmer’, with that crunchy metal rhythm guitar under all the shredding, deep and dark with rumbling bitterness, a kind of fucked-up desperate devotion ‘I’ll do what needs to be done / I’ll do what needs to be done/ for you’.

It’s kind of a head/heart divide, except both are working together in violent revolt against outside forces. And, if making a good as tape counts as any kind of victory, absolutely kicking their arse.

Get this tape via always rock solid Vacant Valley.

See Bitumen and No Sister in Brisbane tonight at The Bearded lady with formidable support from Pleasure Symbols and Clever and on Sunday at The Time Machine in Nambour supported by the nice guys of hard rock Sewers, or next Saturday April 22nd in Melbourne at the Tote with Stationary Suns and Synthetics (who I hear are very good).

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LISTEN: Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing – Songs of Sodomy and the Compost of Aethyr LP

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GPOGP

If I told you that you could get a special edition of Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing‘s latest record with a wooden box of tarot cards, would you think that was lame or cool? Or be completely unsurprised, considering the name? What if I told you this record heavily featured flutes, some of the least sexy sexual lyrics AND the most terrifying vocal performances in recent memory? Well good news, it doesn’t matter! Genre is nothing, all your ideas about what makes something good or bad or cool or lame are arbitrary – and this album will blow your brain out if you let it.

There’s a lot here – 18 songs, a double album by anyone’s standards. It takes patience to get into – I’ve been trying to write about it for weeks but for a while I was getting confused and turned around more and more every time I listened to it. It’s slow and fast, messy and clean, unfolding with marching ominous repetition, tap tapping on the inside of your skull, building pressure over 6 minutes tracks as well as over the whole 90 minute-ish thing. Horns and strings see-saw wildly over and through these songs. Some feel like baroque and serious almost-folk-metal, some almost straight hardcore, when the crunch of distorted guitar gives a conventional rock dog like me something to hold on to.

There’s also a strident kind of post-punk at its heart. Something like ‘Pacific Hygiene’ could be a Mere Women song, half drowned in oil and set on fire. ‘Out of Zone’ is formidably good, low rumbling guitars jostling around a desperately spiteful rasping shout that could break bones; ‘LVX’ is brutally cynical, teasing and hectoring vocals that explode into screeching hysteria, while ‘Lustration’ shows the hopelessness lurking underneath the surface of all rage – droning slow and dangerous. There’s a real ‘last chance to save your soul’ feeling to all the performances on this record. Despite its length, it stays brutal all the way through

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It’s not that the lyrics are inaudible or distorted, they’re just drawn-out and obtuse, slipping through your fingers in abstraction and long words. By sound they’re all rooted in plague, degradation, puritanism, lost faith and clung-to hatred.

Information that I should have introduced earlier: Girls Pissing on Girls Pissing are from Auckland. From the little I know of New Zealand (though, like everyone in Australia, I idealise it as a chill paradise and plan to move there ‘sometime’), Auckland is considered less cool and culturally vibrant than Wellington, but those kind of places tend to produce the weirdest art – when you’ve got something to be outside, when you’re not constantly supported by a scene of creatives. Maybe you’d be more pissed off, more likely to make something as fucked up as this grim, great album.

You can buy Songs of Sodomy and the Compost of Aethyr, with tarot or without, via bandcamp here

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LISTEN: Dag – Benefits of Solitude LP

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Dag

It’s interesting to me the way this record has been promoted as being Australian rock and roll, in the vein of The Go-Betweens and The Triffids – not cuz that’s inaccurate, but because of how those bands often seemed uncomfortable in their Australian-ness. They lived in England, they wanted to be English art-college post-punk, but the frustration of being outsiders on a far-off island prompted the melancholy isolation that became so much a part of what we think of the Australian sound.

And a couple of decades later middle-class uni dropouts broaden their accents and keep year ten English extension prizes hidden. Well, that’s the story for a lot of us. But not Dusty Mc-Cord Anastassiou, Dag‘s front man and songwriter. His takes in growing up amidst the struggle of cattle farming, moving to Brisbane and finding a new way to be lonely.

The kind of Australian young adulthood this record captures has the same isolation as those private school boys longing for fashionable Manchester squats. But in a way that seems to understand that it’s not always about the place – you can be alone and misunderstood anywhere. (Though Anastassiou has moved to Melbourne since recording this record – does that make that whole preamble moot? We’ll see).

Something I’ve noticed about when I write about records: I love moments. I love to quote poignant lines like, ‘Hey, isn’t this REAL’ or draw attention to the way a little drum fill or riff grabs your attention and makes a song special.

And there’s plenty of those in this record – like the off-kilter heartbreak of ‘Not Fine Mind’ perfectly signaled by its opening discordant brass, leading into the casual cruelty of lines like ‘I know at times I can be unkind / it doesn’t help hearing you move at the back of the house in a close friend’s room’.

Or the beautiful classical guitar bits in ‘Exercise’. I wonder why they didn’t make this a single – the mix of sinister imagery, hopelessness and relentless, jaunty beauty in the swing of the guitars and the ooooh oooohs seems like the perfect teaser to hook people in. I guess they kept it to start the record how they intended to go on – sadly lovely, full of surprises.

Or, the catches in the throat and the fingers moving on strings that bring such and intimate human physicality to ‘Company’. Maudlin violin and unsettling sounds mixed in to tighten the vice on your heart.

Then, the naivete of ‘Guards Down’; sweet and easy like love should be, sung with a smile – just the thing to break up ‘Age of Anxiety’s furious fear and the grim, classic country death storytelling of ‘JB’. ‘Endless, Aching Dance’ is a stark picture of a drought-stricken cattle farm, the demons that breed in an atmosphere as leaden with death as that one. Death is all over this record. And not in that ‘I’m a nihilist so I don’t have to care about anyone’ way, but like it’s something real, something you have to fight off tooth and nail at any moment.

But it feels like a disservice to just pull apart this record without talking about how, for all these beautiful pieces, it works even better as a whole. It’s less of a story more of a picture, when you listen to the whole thing you get a nuanced understanding of time and place where there was boredom and anxiety and depression and love and fun and a fuck load of nothing. It’s an album of beautifully written songs about strangeness and ugliness, an album about isolation that draws the listener in close. It exists, it struggles on, it says you can too.

Benefits of Solitude is out on Bedroom Suck right now

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