Caught Outside In The Grey Rain

Hot on the heels of the excellent The World Is Well Lost, the shoegaze gem from Tel Aviv legends Vaadat Charigim, comes another stellar Israeli band with a guitar-heavy, melody-laden elegance. Afor Gashum (Hebrew for grey rain) released the exultant album From The Inside at the beginning of the year, but it deserves some serious attention, not in the least from the emotive core of Michal Sapir's songs which share some of the opaque eloquence of likeminded outsiders Polvo. The marriage of fragility and grace with isolated space and the occasional crushing feedback blows is a tumultuous one, swinging from maudlin ('Likuy Yare'ach'), shoegaze malaise ('Adama Mugenet') and bludgeoning beauty ('Aeroplane') - and on 'Hypnotoxic', all three nestle together in deafening glory.

From The Inside is being re-released next week through UK label Land Speed Records - and visiting these shores couldn't come sooner for this guy, right here. It's a stunning album that came from left of field, buried itself into my olfactories, and refuses to let go. You can also read Sapir's excellent blog Loose Grains of Sonic Dust here.

Stroke The Illegal Squirrel With Invisible Hands

Haha, lewd innuendo, always gets the Interwebz a-goin...

Charlottesville pop transgressives Invisible Hand released a cool little cassette a little while back called Squirrel Jail on Funny/Not Funny Records, and I've heard naught about it. A crying shame, because it is 19 songs - that's right, 19 songs - of awesome sonic flavours. What's more, it isn't an album but a large collection of demos and outtakes, on a cassette, so there is no reason why this should be as great as it is. Instead of lo-fi farts leaking out from the bottom of the funeral pyre of a thousand sacrificed vanity projects, we have infectious hooks ('Eating Out'), raucous energy that echoes of the better side of British paisley rock from the 60s on steroids ('Lowbaude'), warped Beatles-baiting psych melts ('Squatters Rights'), broken GBV spits ('Wounded Eels') and languid space-outs performed in aeronautical hangars ('Everything's Fair Game'). Brandon Flowers wishes he had written 'LIES LIES LIES'; Nathan Williams can't muster the warmth of 'Smile Forever' from a million smouldering alien bongs; and closer 'A Song Called Krautrock' has the gall to run almost eight minutes, play loosely with more 60s paraphernalia (this time pastoral psych pop) and be worth every second of the beautifully elongated outro. Stop it, Invisible Hand - it feels too good to be right - but how can this be wrong?

You can still buy physical copies of Squirrel Jail for $4USD here - far too generous of you!

Faux Discx Comp Tape

Here's a cool little compilation from Faux Discx. It includes tracks from Cold Pumas, Sauna Youth, Teardrop Factory and heaps of other ace UK and Canadian acts. Let it fuel the countdown to a debaucherous weekend.

Friday's Cover Up - Super Chunky Misfits In Heat

It's a week late for Halloween specials, but The Simpsons air their Treehouse of Horrors whenever the hell they want, so why can't I?  Especially when it's as good as this Superchunk cover of the Misfits' 'Children In Heat'. Its thrashy, trashy and so goddamn sweet. Listening to the Misfits in a dingy Goth bar in Collingwood is one thing; hearing Chapel Hill's finest belt it out is something else again - but on a par. Superchunk are playing The Tivoli next Tuesday alongside the inimitable Neutral Milk Hotel - colour me all kinds of excited.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Yeesh!

I wrote about Yeesh first back in 2010 when listening to their debut EP Little Stabs Of Happiness. The Chicago trio have stepped a little away from the schizophrenic angularity-Sparta mold that I saw them in back then, and the new self-titled EP sees them take darker turns, tempering their absurdist lyrical predilections for more forward-running fare. Not that it's fully disappeared if 'Japanese Jabberwocky' is anything to go by... It's out now on cassette on Already Dead Tapes & Records.

Sonic Masala Presents - Perfume Garden/These Guy - TONIGHT

Sonic Masala holds its fourth Campfire Tales solo session at The End tonight at 8pm. Tonight's collaborators are Perfume Garden (Errol from Stress Waves) and These Guy (Joe, formerly from Tabletop Lamps). Perfume Garden has been crafting some insidious looping dark-pop that Im keen to see in the public realm, whilst These Guy's electronic genre leaps are inventive slices of eclecticism (as can be witnessed on his reworking of one of Andrew Tuttle's songs from his Brisbane Rezoned remix album). Come.

Beloved New Gods In The Caravan Park

One of my favourite all-time novels is Neil Gaiman's American Gods. I only read it for the first time last year (thanks A-Rey). The idea of the gods of ancient civilisations being brought to America, only to be lost as their followers turned away from them and focused on other democratic forms such as money, media and celebrity - and this devotion has in turn created new gods. It's an incredibly evocative alternate world that Gaiman creates (anyone interested in his fantasy creations, especially The Sandman brace of comics, will know what to expect) and I implore anyone and everyone to read it.

New Gods has formed out of the ashes of Little Red (remember them? no?) with other members from Eagle & the Worm and the Ground Components, and the new guise has galvanised their efforts tenfold. The debut album Beloved (which you can download for free) contains enough references to older rock gods of the 90s before turning their backs on them to focus on other, as-yet-unnameable entities, yet coalescing it all around base Australian experiences and emotions. It has this discombobulating effect where the songs languish in dappled light and half-shadows, yet a warmth emanates that makes them imminently entrancing.  Dom Byrne's esoteric-yet-obtuse lyricism accentuates this effusive realm that the instrumentation builds, yet it is all in the epic central song 'Caravan Park' that we see the band effectively take all they know dear from the old gods - the quiet/loud dynamism, heartfelt aesthetics, ruminative slacker pop - and throw it into a opaque blender, pouring the contents all over working-class suburbia and the outer fringe. The Gothic detritus that infiltrates this track - essentially a spotlight on the aimless, destructive, ultimately inescapable ennui of a lost youth in the titular park - is so palpable that it plays out like a darkly skewed reinterpretation of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The Caravan Park of Bogan Delights, if you will. It's an incredible song (with a nice rhyming couplet with Fruity Lexia, "heaven in a cask"), the beacon on what is a surprisingly hypnotic album with the power to capture the senses. Like the "true" gods, then.

You can buy Beloved here, and you can stream/download it with a interactive photographic slideshow here.

Peaking through double-vision

There is something here amongst all this squelch. Once when I was having a bad time I listened to a lot of Roy Orbinson, BRMC and The Smiths. 'Well done, great creative choices, you really went out on a limb there, didn't you?' I hear you say... Well, fuck you, I didn't have time to go searching far and wide while I was balling my eyes out wondering why nobody thought about me before they went off and did what they did. But, man, I wish I had've had this then. At least then I would have been able to carry off besieged Romeo with a little more aplomb.

Peak Twins new self-titled album oozes cool - slowly. It comes from a big empty room next door where there are people who have 'been there too, man'. They just handled it way better than you did.



You can nuzzle up to your very own copy here. Out now through the infallible Bedroom Suck.

Brutally Populating Narrow Lands

Fresh out of the hellwaters that fork from the fiery rivers of Tenzenmen Records and Octopus Pi comes Sydney band Narrow Lands' Popular Music That Will Live Forever. It may surprise some to introduce the four-piece as such, seeing as their self-titled EP, whilst a decidedly dark affair, was a moody crawler with whiffs of post-punk inebriation; this record is much more bottom-end brutality. Heaviness pervades, the feedback much more condensed and foreboding, and whilst the tongue-in-check acerbic barbs still litter the record, this is more than cajoling the masses into the pit - this is lunging out of the shadows with a sledgehammer stuff. I mean, listen to the doom dirge that opens up awesomely-titled first track 'Triple J Drive Time Hit' - it's disturbing in all the right ways, ratcheting up the tension in a way that listeners instinctively know must burst in an avalanche of throat-tearing vitriol. It's electrifying stuff - you can see why they have shared stages with Yes I'm Leaving, for example - and a welcome addition to the burgeoning pantheons of modern Australian noise rock gems.

You can pre-order Popular Music That Will Live Forever here - it doesn't come out until Nov 20 - hopefully Sonic Masala or someone equally as rad can bring these guys kicking and screaming into the Queensland sunlight soon.

Digging Shovels

I lied - here's ANOTHER post for the day. Melbourne ex-pat in San Fran Michael Beach has landed in the land of Oz for Sound Summit, and is playing a bunch of solo shows as well as a great number with his newish band Shovels. I feel it would be remiss of me, seeing as I'm hosting his solo show in Brisbane on Thursday November 14 (supported by Tape/Off, Tiny Migrants and Soda Eaves), to not list his other shows. And Shovels themselves? Have a listen below. Ill leave it at this - they played at Maggot Mess at Northcote Social Club today alongside Sewers, Gentlemen, Terrible Truths - and Cuntz. And you know by now how much we love Cuntz. If you're from Brisbane - this is like old Turnpike, if they were a little more in check with their flailing feelings, and a little more about deliberately bludgeoning you to death. So yeah - fucking awesome then.

NEWCASTLE – NOVEMBER 7 – WHITE’S RECORDS

SYDNEY – NOVEMBER 10 – SOUND SUMMIT 

BRISBANE – NOVEMBER 15 – GREENSLOPES BOWLS CLUB w/ TYVEK (USA) + BLANK REALM + THE REAL NUMBERS + HYDROMEDUSA + GERALD KEANEY & THE GERALD KEANEYS + EGGVEIN + DAG + THE ADULTS (put on by 4ZZZ A Guilt Retreat - this is going to be fucking amazing...)

HOBART – NOVEMBER 23 – GRAND POOBAH w/ NATIVE CATS + MESS O REDS

X-Rays On Cassie's Freaky Eyeballs In Europe

A very quick post before I duck out of life for a great number of hours (man today was shit!). Received this groovy lil 7" from Cassie Ramone. It's a split between her and the equally cool Xray Eyeballs. It's coming out through Siluh Records - you can get it here. Cassie's song is about being a loser and a freak - hence the title 'I'm A Freak', I guess. It ain't no The Babies - it's like a Mouldy Peaches song but with Best Coast sepia simplicity, an acoustic reverb adding the requisite perceived innocence - a somewhat throwaway song that is still imbued with veritable shitloads of charm. The Xray flipside, 'Only You', is a moody 80s grinder, with amazing Gothic bass and warbled vocals, that I could easily get seduced in a dingy bar in Vienna by. So a worthy release, then. They are touring Europe now as we speak - below are the dates - they play in Dresden tonight!

05 Nov., GER - Dresden, Ostpol
06 Nov., GER - Berlin, Monarch (DJ-Set)
07 Nov., GER - Berlin, Volksbühne, Grüner Salon (Siluh Rec Label Night w/ M185 & Gary)
08 Nov., NED - Harlem, Patronaat
09 Nov., NED - Groningen, Vera
10 Nov., UK - St. Leonards-on-Sea, The Kave Gallery
11 Nov., UK - Manchester, The Castle Hotel
12 Nov., UK - Glasgow, Stereo
13 Nov., UK - London, Old Blue Last
14 Nov., NED - Amsterdam, Paradiso
15 Nov., NED - Nijmegen, Extrapool
16 Nov., FRA - Paris, Espace B
17 Nov., FRA - Dijon, House Show
18 Nov., FRA - Lyon, Trokson
20 Nov., FRA - Toulouse, Lieu Commun (art gallery)
21 Nov., FRA - Peripgnan, L'Ubu
22 Nov., ESP - Barcelona, Apolo (DJ-Set)
23 Nov., ESP - Barcelona, Heliogabal
24 Nov., ESP - Vic, Jazz Cava
26 Nov., FRA - Rennes, Mondo Bizarro

The School of Hard Liquor and High Spirits

The Spook School will teach you how to have fun and how not to pour beer.

After a week spent hopped up on cold and flu tablets, trying to write an assignment on the epistemology of time, I found that I was wasting quite a lot of it (time, that is. No pseudoephedrine was wasted in the passing of it). See though, what I should have been doing instead of reading about the Scottish enlightenment was getting a ticket to Scotland to get some real-time enlightenment. I'll be honest, I'll tell the Spook School what I really think of them, hopped up or not; they are a freaking awesome collection of properties.

And while my bank account probably won't support the whole Scotland idea, at least I can rest assured that us Aussies, thanks to 'Niall's Sexy Calendar 2014', we'll always have our very own little bit of The Spook School love to have and to hold.

Oh yeah, and what's more, there's now a whole album worth of this goodness out for your enjoyment - on cherry cola coloured vinyl, no less! Get your copy of Dress Up (out now through Fortuna Pop!) from their bandcamp, pour yourself an enormously frothy beer and get prepared for your crush to continue!



Caught At Sea With Courtney

Man, this is becoming a habit. Here I am writing about Courtney Barnett - again. But it seems that she is everywhere right now - and rightly so. She is back after shuffling through CMJ, taking it all in her laconic stride. And the more acolytes that champion the cause, the better.

We've spoken about Barnett's EPs before, but it's worth mentioning that Milk! Records, alongside House Anxiety and Marathon Artists, have released the two together as a singular LP - The Double EP: A Sea Of Split Peas. Seeing as these songs started with an experiment to see how songs could hang on just one progression, it's amazing to find so many gems to hang onto. Most of this has to do with Barnett's incredible songwriting and blindsiding lyricism (not that the words are hard to pick up, but you can read most of them here on her website), but she also cuts a mean axe, and now has a good bunch backing her (aptly titled The Courtney Barnetts). Every song on here has moments of stark genius, which is hard to fathom and feels embarrassing to say, lathering on such platitudes without coming off like an infatuated Luddite with a laptop and a prayer. So Ill leave it at this - just buy the bloody thing and go to her shows, you will not be disappointed.

Barnett has been up to Brisbane a couple times in the past year - I managed to catch her play at last year's Big Sound, whilst her show at Southside Tea Room has caused a few people to label it gig of the year. Hopefully we will see these songs in their glory soon.

Beautiful Days' End For Hall

Australian noise specialist Tom Hall has come a long way from his AXXONN project. Not that that was a musical definition - Hall has traversed the gamut of sonic manipulation, whether it be a study in field recordings, electronic improvisation, atonal drone, rhythmic pulse or scorched-earth doom. Since moving to LA, he has continued to expand on this amorphous creative world, and the imminent release of his LP Many Days End is something to celebrate. A considered reflection on his time in LA, specifically the places he goes to to clear his head - the Santa Monica Mountains, San Fernando Valley and the South Bay - these tracks bubble and percolate, am organic suite of soundscapes that simultaneously display external environments (helped in part by field recordings taken from these same geographical areas) and internal ruminations and conflict. Thus Many Days End is not only an incredibly personal document for Hall, but is extremely immersive and relatable - the meshing of the natural and the electronic, the bursts of static with the languorous stretch of subtle feedback, mesh together into a cool, calming platform for reflection. Let it wash over you.

You can buy Many Days End through Hall's Sonoptik label here.

VIDEO VACUUM - Kirin J Callinan, Bleached, Charles Howl, Evening Hiss

It's November already?? Wow. No wonder I'm so tired. And lazy. I'm going to stop doing work now (it's 10am) and watch some music videos. You can too if you want, I'm not the boss of you.



Kirin J Callinan certainly ruffled a lot of feathers and beguiled many others with his debut album Embracism. I personally find his music far better in person, with visuals. That's why I tend to look forward to his film clips more than sitting down for just an aural taste. He hasn't disappointed thus far, and this incredible video for that album's 'Landslide' is incredible. Whilst it certainly helps that the song is probably my favourite from the album, the sight of Callinan hanging upside down above an ocean - that's in the sky - is incredible. And for whatever reason, I always get a kick out of seeing a dog swim. So win win, really.



Lots of bands get a kick out of having Halloween-themed songs for this bizarre commercialised holiday in America, whether it be kitschy tweaked originals or covers. Bleached have taken the former with 'Love Spells', a song that isn't really any different from what they do in the daytime, but have a decidedly ghoulish 80s VHS-era video to go with it. It's all incredibly fun, even if there are some evocative images held within (the woman with the severed hand and bloody crucifix in particular stick in the mind...)



Charles Howl is on the prowl, but he promises he will do you no harm. That doesn't appease me though, what with his extensive usage of white and the sleeping girl. He kicks off with his crotch in our face as he does up his fly! There's a glowing orb and smoke! Wait - he's going to smother her! Or is he? What a creep...or is he actually hugely misunderstood? Meh. He plays a mean garage line, and seeing as he has aligned himself to PNKSLM, he can't be all bad... Really looking forward to hearing more of this.


Evening Hiss - Melt from Daniel Ford on Vimeo.

Daniel Ford know no limits. I could be referencing seminal 90s act 2 Unlimited there. Maybe Ford should cover it? Probably not. He is in a gazillion local bands that would do a good job of it though - Black Vacation, Thigh Master, Kids Cryptic, just to name a few. Here is a song from solo project Evening Hiss, that started as a complement to an art exhibition he has coming up. This effort will be put out on limited release, and based on this track you will be sorry if you miss out. Or just pissed that someone has so much bloody talent to burn.

NOW GET BACK TO WORK!

Everybody's Droning On The Weekend #2

This weekend, pull the curtains over the windows, shut everything intrusive about the world out, and come on a journey as Sonic Masala and eight global artists take you into the wonderful world of experiental noise, clatter and drone... If like me you've burnt the candle at both ends this week/weekend, you may need it.

I'm going to tee off with what could argued to be the most rock-oriented group on this list. Locust Of The Dead Earth is Marcio da Cunha, a Portuguese artist more known for folk/blues transgressions than dronework. Mithridate is nine exquisite songs of dense noise, sun-scorched Morricone-on-acid squalls, languid psyched-out jams and electronic space-highway meanderings with the occasional vocal whispering over the top. It's a fantastic release, and you can get it through Nostril Records now. The perfect high point of terra firma before we let go and spiral into the abyss of the unknown.

I was a fan of Portland artist Charlie Salas-Humara AKA Grapefruit's self titled release on Field Hymns Records last year, and it seems they have continued to ramp up the seductive synth/guitar madness on new release Stolen Highway (out on cassette through Constellation Tatsu - you can grab it here). There is a motorik pulse beating at the core of these songs (especially on the coalescing title track and 'King Felix II') that reads like a beating heart, albeit one encase in metal and electrodes. It's an intense listen that transports into a prism of refracted disco and classroom mainframes, crushing down from above until a sonic black hole leaves nothing left but heady ruminations and dilated pupils.

Greenhouse is Canadian artist Curran Faris. Tired Forever (out on Prairie Fire Tapes) is eighty minutes of guitar drone, feedback and manipulation stretched to the outer limits. It requires more patience than most artists of its kind - but therein lies the genius. On twenty-minute track 'Early Mornings & Late Nights' alone, Faris keeps things sparse and incredibly foreboding without any true catharsis - such a level of composure lures you in, then when the slightest shift in effect or tone comes about it's like striking gold. 'Glissed' harnesses looped feedback into a glorious orchestral orgasm in the synthetic light of an artificial sun; 'Accept This' takes a more guitar-obvious route, something akin to Black Eagle Child or Mark McGuire; then reaches back into the dronal hole for the apt 'Drop-Off'. Such a great release - get it here. You'll thank me later.

It feels unfair to have anything follow that up, but Perth's Cycle ~440 is just the band for the job. The duo's 17843+ release (out on the inimitable Wood & Wire) is semi-improvised crystalline sound sculptures of fragility and sepulchral grace, building gently on piano flutters and moments of stasis, a staccato pulse always emanating from somewhere in the ether... It all adds up to a haunting, expansive experience that is as frightening as it strikes awe into the soul. These guys won this year's WAM Song of the Year (Experimental) award, which is amazing news. Come to Brisbane soon, yeah?

Another release to come out of the Constellation Tatsu stable, Panabrite's Cortex Meridian is a fun, frenetic synapse burner that somehow manages to get atmospheres, emotions and places out of synthesised manipulations that you would think would be nigh on impossible. The undulating pulses and kosmiche rhythms are made for headphones, moreso than any other release on this list - listen to 'Night Sweat' and you will know what I mean. Panabrite (AKA Seattle's Norm Chambers) has crafted a suite of sounds that are synonymous with nocturnal reflexes, atonal weightlessness and fried 8-bit hypnosis. In short, it's a enthralling piece worthy of your time. Grab it here.

UK artist Sunset Graves describes his musical tangents as his life as a ghost. Listening to Variants, artist Andy Fosberry's debut isn't as drone-centric as most others on this list, incorporating trip-hop seduction ('Safe & Empty') and post rock nihilism ('Sixty Minutes Sixty Seconds') into his productions. He even endeavours to merge the two together on 'Cala Fia' - Variants is the right word for it. Much more likely to make you dance than anything else on this list - even if it's in a somewhat sunkissed, drugged state - but also to rock out to.

And you thought Sunset Graves took us off course? Francesco Giannico & Zac Nelson's intriguing collaboration Les Nomades Paysages is an exercise in marrying improv drumming with ambient soundscapes, which leaves the effect of being on a tumultuous expedition across unfettered environments, whipped by the elements at their most beautiful and dangerous. You can almost smell the rain and burnt ozone on the title track. The field recordings enmeshed in these meditative studies are perfect also. Buy it here.

Finally we have Geometrie Variabili, an Italian free jazz improve band and their album The Breath. The quartet take a minute element and tinker with it, play with it, dissect and reassemble in various forms, in a fragmented staccato style that often takes my breath away. This type of music isn't always my thing, but The Breath really rewards, its technical intricacies not just marvels but hugely rewarding listens. You can buy it through Netlabel here.

Dollar Bar (NOT At Paddington Workers Club...)

Brisbane's premier purveyors of sardonic yet whimsical guitar pop Dollar Bar have returned like the fabled phoenix. It seemed that you couldn't step out your front door in the early 2000's without falling over the band. Yet after a series of slick releases and a debut eponymous album, the boys left us in 2004. But the last three years has seen the fire back in the bellies of the four-piece - there is no sense of purpose here other than for the band to get back together again, hang out as mates, just like you're supposed to. Why be in a band if you hate everyone unless you are 90s Lou Barlow, amirite?

Dollar Bar are launching 2nd album ten years on from the debut, and it's called Paddington Workers Club after the now sadly defunct establishment that many a Brisbane band of the 90s and early 00s cut their teeth and drank their weight in the amber stuff. Its fitting that as their "comeback" record, unlike Farnesy, actually means something - its self referential as always, but is looking forward as well as looking back, and what made things tick. The boys are older, worldlier and (assumedly) wiser, yet the cheek, wit and cagey shambolism remains intact. Tattooed hipster Canadian girls on bikes, sterilised currency, overdue bills, people from Brisbane moving to Melbourne to hang with people from Brisbane, Pollard and Salter references - these things only skim the surface of why this album is the shit. And it's short, so it's a bliss bomb as well.



Dollar Bar launch Paddington Workers Club tonight in Brisbane at the Beetle Bar. The supports - Roku Music, Tape/Off and Undead Apes - is outta this world too. This is seriously going to be one of the most fun music nights of the year, so you better be there, fools. Here's their great new video too. It's good to have you back, lads.

The Primitive Calculators Are Wonderfully Fucked

There isn't much that you can say about Melbourne Cenobites Primitive Calculators that doesn't have the word fuck or some derivative of the word fuck in it. This is the band that were only around for a few years on the cusp of the '80s, making industrial synth punk dystopias that many have tried to emulate but never truly captured. That's because not only do you need to be a diseased harbinger of grime, saliva and despair, but such a concoction is far too brutal and volatile to remain a sustainable force, especially spawning from the supposedly febrile minds of ones so young. So whilst they left indelible marks on contemporaries The Birthday Party and The Boys Next Door, they left this mortal coil with very little archaeological evidence of their existence other than some dire (in the best sense) small releases and scorched earth (and this incredible video...).



But this kind of monosyllabic, single-minded fury can't stay in the bottle forever. Primitive Calculators resurfaced at the behest of acolyte Nick Cave when he curated the first Australian-based ATP in 2009. They may have been the reason the festival took four years to come back...but also the reason that Chapter Music is finally putting out the band's first album EVER in The World Is Fucked. And it is - if you look at it through Primitive Calculators' eyes. And you have no choice not to - these songs grab you and waterboard you with white noise, a endless montage of VHS nastiness, and viscous lyrical bile. Even the barked chant of Stuart Grant of the word 'dead' in the aptly titled 'Dead' comes with a miasma of variant outcomes - and all of them do not bode well for your humanity, or indeed all humankind. Because The World Is Fucked is a manifesto of abject truth - the song titles sharp stabs of declining morality (even a song called 'Love' is more about the soul-destroying absence of it). Closer 'Nothing' tells you that the world is fucked, but in a nihilistic, amoral sense - you know the end is nigh, so you may as well actively bring it about.



Also, it proves that Primitive Calculators could be one of the most ahead-of-their-time bands ever created. Not that that makes them accessible, or even likable. They are the harbingers of anarchic futility after all. But we should all be glad that something exists in the world as corrupted as this. I implore every record store to put this release next to all the vapid indie-folk, pop trash and Darwin Deez releases that you have in your shop. They will be wiped clean before the album hits the shelf.

The World Is Fucked comes out today - you can grab it here.

Video Vacuum - Yes I'm Leaving, Surf City, The Fauns, Batpiss (NSFW)

I wanted to do a thousand different posts today - and I started about twelve - but standing on top of Brian Chippendale's drumkit with lots of Coopers Pale Ale but no earplugs as he loses his mind for an hour as meant my attention span is minuscule. My brain has been burnt to a crisp! I did get to speak to him about the band Human Beast before the show, and something afterwards but I could barely hear the Fugazi/Fu Manchu playlist that was booming over the PA...So let's watch some videos!



Yes I'm Leaving are pushing their excellent record of this year Mission Bulb into the States thanks to Drunken Piano, and this has seen their newest video for album track 'Four Chorder,' a threadbare set letting the trio tear the place apart, hit the Spin website. Nice work guys! Helps that the song is a ball tearer worthy of so much more. This album is still killing at the business end of 2013 - a sure-fire sense of electric these boys are. And they are re-issuing their first couple of criminally under-heard releases too. Expect for the Sydney band's cred to rise - and for Billy and the boys to not even notice nor care (OK, just a little...)



NZ garage/surf/pop/raconteurs Surf City are another band that surreptitiously keep kicking goals. On latest single from album We Knew It Was Not Going To Be Like This, 'NYC' (which feels like a mixture of sunnier Sonic Youth, Women and seminal Aussie band Underground Lovers), the band are running around having a reckless time with skateboards, ice-cream cones and stolen fast food and booze (popped open with a Bic lighter, of course) in what is a subversion to these guys' true demeanour - but also makes you want to just have one mid-summer day in their shows. This song is a dream, and fast approaching one of my favourite tracks of the year.


The Fauns - Seven Hours from Mintonfilm on Vimeo.

Bristol dreamers The Fauns are preparing to launch second album Lights on Invada Records in December. The first taste is 'Seven Hours', a five-minute stretch in a cryogenic tank, ambiance pumped through the speakers, time stretching immeasurably (except for the fact I just said it went for five minutes...), the sun neither rising nor setting, forever caught on the horizon. Such wistful meanderings are in bountiful supply this day and age, and yet when The Fauns hit their stride it elevates them to another celestial plain. I'm looking forward to listening to Lights as I travel the English countryside this December...


Look, to be honest this is the video I think everyone should see. I wanted to put it into a post all on its own, but chickened out. Why? Well, by nestling it here behind three other bands my mother may not find it. The vid is of course Batpiss' 'Loose Screws', a short film about a supermarket trolley-pusher that is pushed over the edge and lets everything out, one skewered screwdriver at a time... It's incredibly NSFW, what with all the blood, shivving, garroting and infanticide (it may be Thomy's face, but that is still a baby being stabbed), before a awesome twist that turns into the bloodiest male-on-male heavy petting I've ever seen. Fucking Batpiss, man - gotta love em.

NOW GET BACK TO WORK!

Stranger Marville Gods

Local grunge-addicted duo Marville may not have hit your radars that often, but that's not because they are a new band. Rather, they have been playing the traps for some time since humble beginnings of a solo outlet for Bottlecock aficionado Ash Kerley under the moniker Strangers. After teaming with Linda Dark, the band have been not-so-quietly chipping away, until Sydney band Strangers threatened to take them to task over "their"name, despite Kerley playing under the moniker for ages before the pipsqueak screamos came onto any semblance of a "scene". Anyway, the duo obeyed the lesser of two evils, and are reborn as Marville.

Which is working out mighty fine, as the duo prepare to launch their debut album (in either incarnation) today, Vayan Con Dios. An album of unabashed tension, atmosphere and slack-jawed nihilism in the Adalita-in-mid-career-Magic Dirt mould, with some smouldering instrumental interludes, the album doesn't push the envelope, instead happily espousing the strengths of their limits, comfortable in their brittle skin. With a Bottlecock LP in the ether, Kerley promises to be a busy presence in Brisbane circles over the next twelve months - and if this album is any indication, the 90s alternative scene is coming along for the ride.


Marville launch the album tonight at the Beetle Bar alongside ol' SM faves El Motel (it's been awhile, padres), You In Reverse and the rising glory of The Steady As She Goes. For a $10, it tees off at 8pm.