New Music

LISTEN: Tangents – New Bodies

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new bodies

Tangents continue their winning streak on new full-length, New Bodies. The album lands on the heels of the Stents + Arteries EP from earlier this year, which found the group introducing new elements into their already expansive sound. New Bodies continues this exploration while further refining the distinct amalgamation of styles on their 2016 breakout, Stateless. As with Stents + Arteries, the new album shifts the balance between processed sounds and live elements, the latter now becoming the more prominent feature. There is a looseness within their sound that brims with confidence as the players explore beyond the gridded confines of electronic music.

Opener ‘Lake George’ picks up where ‘Stents’ left off; gentle, meandering post rock underpinned by delicate electronic flutters gradually give way to processed drum and bass rhythms and swirling ambient textures. ‘Terracotta’ revisits the formula explored on Stateless with renewed vigour as subtle cello and squalling guitar accompany an exquisite and transcendent melody before exploding into a frenzy of drums and organ stabs.

Album centerpiece ‘Gone to Ground’, finds the group channeling a different mood, one which has yet to appear in their previous work. Beginning unassumingly enough the tension slowly eats away at the edges, the throbbing bass and prepared piano clunks foreshadowing a creeping anxiety. This anxiety continues to build until finally conceding to the exhalation of ‘Swells Under Tito’, its whimsical tone accentuated having weathered the storm which preceded it.

There is much to love here, the group embracing their live roots without losing the adventurous studio experimentation sees them eschew the tropes commonly associated with much improvised music.

Tangents are currently embarking on a national tour in support of New Bodies, so be sure to catch them as their live show is an adventure in itself.

new bodies tour

 

New Bodies is available via Temporary Residence now

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LISTEN: Denton & Russack – ‘I’m Right Here’

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Denton and Russack

Lachlan Denton & Emma Russack continue to mine their collaborative vein on ‘I’m Right Here’, the first single from from new album Keep On Trying, which follows their first record from just a…month or two ago, When It Ends.

Denton is predominantly known for his input to The Ocean Party; a Melbourne pop-rock mainstay that seem to deconstruct slightly in-between releases, each member taking five to pursue other things in life. Denton’s approach to songwriting has consistently carried a sort of generational angst; he often seems emotionally rapt, self-reflective to the point of anxiety. He’ll switch between personal confessionals before projecting outward to call out inter-generational wrongs by those that came before.

Russack too is at times a deeply sombre artist, but life has clearly imbued her with a sort of smirking bemusement about everything; a dry wit that surfaces real heart and tenderness within her music.

Nowhere is either’s softer side more exposed than on ‘I’m Right Here’.

“If you need space I’ll give it to you / If you need me near, well, I’m right here”. Deeply sincere and undramatic, a salve for the weakened, the anxious, on the verge of panic. Unselfish love given as needed. The music; with it’s sparkling guitars and melodic piano lines, energises the warmth of the vocals. Denton and Russack are confident but not forceful, calming yet engaged. Sure, it is vague, but the sentiment of unconditional, purely unselfish support is refreshing.

Keep On Trying is out July 18 on Osborne Again.

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LISTEN: Match Fixer – Rubble

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rubble

Melbourne artist Andrew Cowie (aka Angel Eyes) returns with his debut full-length under his Match Fixer guise.

As Match Fixer, Cowie occupies a somewhat similar musical realm as with Angel Eyes but with more focus on rhythm and less on the abstracted pop elements of the aforementioned project. The atmospheric synths remain but the cavernous vocals and processed guitar are replaced with crunching percussion and forensically assembled sonic detritus.

Following his amazing 2014 split with Glass Bricks and more recently, the Attempts EP via Nice Music, the aptly titled Rubble is far more complex each piece layered with a manic intensity. The title itself could easily refer to the harsh percussive elements, which sound as if they have been torn from a metal scrapyard, or to the curious sounds emerging from some vast, smouldering wreckage.

Where the split honed in on an idea and slowly developed it over time, Rubble seems less disciplined instead moving with a restless energy, ideas teased at, sometimes quickly abandoned, other times revisited and fleshed out further. Dynamics are key here, shifting from an anxiety fuelled overload then stripped back to exposed and unassuming rhythms left to stutter away while various other elements drift in and out of the mix.

It seems obvious to draw parallels with outer space or science fiction, but to me there is an undeniable link. A link further reinforced by the cover image, which at first glance could be the remains of a destroyed spacecraft. Taken from Restricted Areas, a series of photographs by Russian visual artist Danila Tkachenko’s, the images depict abandoned structures and harsh frozen landscapes which could provide the cinematic backdrop to some stark, future dystopia. A scene that could very well be soundtracked by Match Fixer.

Rubble feels epic in scope, each piece intent on travelling its own path while remaining part of a greater whole, like some amorphous organism with its expansive colonial networks. The album is available digitally and as a limited edition cassette via the Match Fixer bandcamp page here.

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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: Reuben Ingall – ‘Thread’

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thread

Reuben Ingall has many faces, somber avant-pop mangler, drone experimentalist, abstract beat maker, jocular mashup artist, and although his oeuvre is far-reaching there are distinct elements that join the dots, one of which is his guitar. His homemade effects can change the sound of his guitar from spacious reverberation to complete audio destruction, the instrument used to generate noise rather than melody and in some cases pushing the sound as far from the original source as possible.

Thread, his latest collection released via Canberra label hellosQuare recordings was recorded between 2015-2018 and spans pastoral acoustic pieces, reminiscent of Richard Youngs’ folk dabbling’s, meditative ambience, and sprawling, barren post-rock. And while Reuben did not set out to make a guitar-based album, in fact he states he “shied away from the guitar as an obvious source”, once he had 3-4 arrangements he was happy with he decided guitar would become the focus for the album.

Field recordings also play an important role, at times sounding like an extension of the guitars organic, earthy tone, other times placing the music in a context that is uniquely Australian. As to his approach, Reuben says “the writing of melodic and harmonic material mostly comes after my initial ideas around a way of recording and arranging and treating a sound.” This concentration on sound is another common element that runs through much of his work, but for those familiar with Ingall’s music you can’t help but expect to hear his melancholy vocals, fortunately the unfolding arrangements need no help keeping the listener engaged.

In addition to the music, Ingall has also created accompanying visuals for two of the pieces, each perfectly capturing the respective mood. The perpetually rolling topography of ‘Sediment’ simulates the vastness of the music, while the dizzying kaleidoscope of ‘Floriade’ mimics the flickering arpeggios. Always true to form the visuals provide another outlet for Ingall’s experimentation, the latter clip composed of footage taken with a phone camera attached to a cordless drill, the YouTube description claiming “no processing, only a dozen edits”.

Thread adds another notch to Ingall’s ever-expanding belt, an artist consistently pushing boundaries and continually innovating.

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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: Tangents – Stents + Arteries EP

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Stents and Arteries 600

In anticipation of their forthcoming album New Bodies, instrumental quintet Tangents deliver a new EP featuring album cut ‘Arteries’ along with two more new tracks.

On opener, ‘Stents’, the processing and production of Oliver Bown isn’t as immediately apparent, the band instead opting for a sound more akin to their live form. The flittering thrum of the electronics still provides the pulse, while the piano and cello parts gently inhale and exhale giving the controlled frenzy of Evan Dorrian’s drumming freedom to explore. As the track approaches a mid-point this balance soon shifts as Bown takes control, the drums swallowed up and spat back out in pummelling drum n bass rhythms, while the band paints in wild brush strokes across the musical canvas before a sputtering dissolve.

‘In the Beginning’ has a far more spacious feel, at times recalling the sparse post-rock landscapes of Talk Talk. As with ‘Stents’ the piece gradually morphs into something altogether different, in this case slowly building to a blissful, hypnotic crescendo as a perpetual drum loop and floating piano collide until neither is recognisable against the enveloping milieu.

Final track, ‘Arteries’ feels similarly sparse to begin, the undulating piano, subtly affecting guitar, and almost celestial atmospherics giving an air of euphoria, a mood that suits the bands sound perfectly. Flickers of this could be heard on their previous album – the final act of 12-minute opus ‘Oberon’ springs to mind – but this feels more fully realised here, an exciting preview of how the group has evolved since we last heard from them.

As with their previous effort, Stents + Arteries is released via U.S. label Temporary Residence who will also release the new album due out later this year.

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