World Wars Are Trash

World War 4 is back! That is, Sam from Cobwebbs and Police Force infamy. The hip-hop beats that he does in his spare time float out in the ether without much recognition - and this needs to change. These blasted compositions HDD warped stabs into the unknown, finding abrasion in the ambiance, finding space amongst the rubble, finding static in the dead air, yet always with a lack of sincerity or alacrity. The whole album is throwaway yet hypnotic, a narcotic wormhole, and WW4 dares you to care, the track list from start to finish is 'Bad', 'Worse', 'urgh', 'Who Cares', 'Awful', 'Horrible', 'Trash', 'Turn This Off', 'This Sucks', 'I Hate This', 'No Good', 'Why Are You Listening?', 'Whatever' and 'I Don't Give A Fuck'. Maybe you should.

Ausmuteant Growths

The growth of Ausmuteants continues like a fluid-filling canker. The treble-troubling twerps love courting straight up garage rock, acerbic synth punk, trashy rock tropes and scuzzy flailings of noise, but settle on their own inimitable course, wrapping it all together with a slacker coyness and irreverence that becomes more palatable by the day. And I don't mean they are softening the blows or sweetening the edges - just that their delicacies are becoming addictive. Take Stale White Boys Playing Stale Black Music, the band's latest release. The cover digs into Eric Clapton, blanking out the eyes in a faux attempt to give him is dignity; the vocals for 'Who's The Narc?'are more up front and therefore the serrated lyrics bite deeper; the rollicking nature of the "chorus" is both an addictive melody and a conceited ripoff of 80s chugging stadium rock.



The Ah...What An Ugly Face Every Face Is 7" out through Heinous Ass Records scuzzes up the formula and puts the dancing shoes on, albeit ones with bloodstained steep caps. Each song dives headlong into a different genre and comes up covered in shit and shit eating grins.



I don't know why, but these elements all give Ausmuteants an indelibly unique take on any genre. You have heard all this before - but not quite like this - and that is what makes them one of the biggest bands in Australia right now. Don't believe me? See them one night at the Tote and then try to explain your indifference away. And if you are in the States later this month you might catch them roaming the streets - catch em while you can.

UPDATE: Details for Ausmuteants' new album on Goner Records Order Of Operation and sample track 'Boiling Point' appeared overnight on Stereogum - go see what you think.

Video Vacuum - Multiple Man, Drug Sweat, Whirling Hall Of Knives, Club Sound Witches

I've been waiting for the plumber to come around to the new flat for three hours now. The kitchen is full of water. The washing machine is pretty much dead, hemorrhaging water by the litre. Ive sandbagged it all off with the last of my towels - but how long until the levee breaks? Ah well, let's watch some videos while this domestic race-against-time irons itself out...

Those faux-irascible twins Multiple Man are at it again, this time with decidedly cleaner bass. 'Persuasion' is still a MM black mass, yet with a decidedly New Wave production style. I felt like I was watching archival footage here, although the lack of makeup perturbed me... And that little synth fart noise. Incredible. Then at the three minute mark we get serious. Alex Dunlop (Roku Music, Cobwebbs, HITS, et al) has done a killer job on this clip - the best one yet.

On to the next Aussie dirge sensation then. Drug Sweat formed in Melbourne earlier this year in response to Primitive Calculators curating the "comeback" of Little Bands, where bands are created for this one-off event and just go for it. Formed of Jake Robertson (Ausmuteants, The Frowning Clouds, Leather Towel), Richard Stanley (Aarght! Records), Angus Bell (Pageants, The Galaxy Folk), Marc Dean (Ausmuteants) and Roland Hlavka (Cobwebbs, Barbiturates, Gold Shade), Drug Sweat was too good a name to give up, and the band have been playing shows since. This is one of their slapdash efforts. I think it's brilliant, and hope they get around to recording an album's worth of stuff.  Sonic Masala is interested ...



Clubsound Witches "Uprok" from nicola morton on Vimeo.

Delving into the deepest currents of Brisbane's electronic experimentation you will find Club Sound Witches, the amalgamation of noise wizards Nicola Morton and Matt Earle (the lifeblood of Real Bad Music). This ten minute exploration is excellent, a mind burner that melds with Nicola's footage of a paper boat at a lake in Jakarta on a sunny day to disorienting effect. There is word that more recordings are on their way - on the strength of 'Uprok' we can only hope.


Whirling Hall Of Knives - Comminute from Trensmat Records on Vimeo.

And finally we are travelling back to Ireland for the second Whirling Hall Of Knives video in a month. This dystopian duo are bringing out a 12" EP and this is the title track, 'Comminute'. The kind of techno noise that swallows you whole - nightmarish beats and squalls that nonetheless draw you inexorably to your oblivion. It's songs like this that blur the lines between fear and sexuality to a scarily indiscernible degree. Long live the new flesh.

NOW GET BACK TO WORK!!

Throwing Gold Shade On World War 4

Sam Wightman and Roland Hlavka have a lot of time on their hands. Not content to have second LP WORLD WIDE WEBBS out (through Sonic Masala Records no less - get at it here), the duo are involved in a myriad other projects. The most prolific of those is Hlavka's solo outfit Barbiturates (often with Cobwebbs drummer Elliot D'Arcy at his beck and call), whilst Wightman's Police Force continues to get better and more malignant. Yet there are other, more festered outlets for these boys to let the demons out (these guys have a hard drive of material that may never see the light of day), and Canberra-based label Moontown Tapes has seen fit to give undead life to two of them. A split that is fused through communal spit and unease, the cassette opens with Wightman's World War 4 - and first track 'X-Ray Visitor' is the cleanest thing I think he has ever committed himself to. Drone crawl from the bottom floor, invading the senses, hip hop beats and lysergic treats for the narcoleptic dranker in us all. Then there is Hlavka's Gold Shade, a even more twisted chemtrail of an excursion, burning across the ozone like a VHS nightmare in neon chrome. 'Super Survivor' could be a Not Not Fun banger hit of the apocalyptic summer. Yes, these guys are in too many bands. Yes, they are all varying levels of awesome. Get this now - it's too good to ignore.

On Barbiturates Like A Boss

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sad that Barbiturates aren't based in Brisbane anymore. Roland Hlavka, guitarist of another great local band Cobwebbs, has manhandled his bedroom project from a warped space noodling odyssey into an even more warped benzo trip to the dark side of the adenoidal from the bottom of the ocean. With each release Barbiturates becomes a more fitting moniker. Case in point: Boss, his latest cassette through Long Gone Records. Hlavka hides his drawl under enough reverb and distortion to shred all words from his lips, and the insidious insistence that opener 'Weight To Touch' emanates makes it sound like disturbed black-clad synth mavens Multiple Man are strapping guitars. But Boss is decidedly weirder than that - take the warbling, plodding leviathan that is 'Oxygen Free', or the turbulent nightmare that is 'Beware'. Barbiturates takes an idea and seeps into the earth with it; a parallel universe beyond the snow of the dead television, happily trapped within lysergic coffins, a boss of his own domain.

You can get Boss here. If you live in Melbourne you can catch Barbiturates play with Spermaids at the Catfish in Fitzroy on Monday. I walked past there on Sunday. That's all I know about the place.

Brendan Masala's Top 7s/10s/EPs of 2013

I'm racing for a train that is taking me into Shropshire for the New Year - village eating, drinking and debauchery awaits. So here is a list of the short form releases that floated my boat this year...

7"s

Bad Vision - 112/Favours



Harmony - Do Me A Favour



Occults - Occults



Ex Con - Ex Con



White Reaper - Conspirator/The Cut




Ttotals - Spectrums Of Light




Neon Windbreaker - New Sky

THIS CANNOT BE PLAYED AT THIS TIME.

Pale Earth - Prelude To Debut



Big Richard Insect - Big Richard Insect



Charles Buddy Daaboul - Three Colours Green



EPs

Multiple Man - Multiple Man
(one of my favourite releases, regardless of format)



Andrew Tuttle - 4064



Death Cassettes - Ghost Party



Young Adults - Born in '91 EP



WTCHS - Wet Weapons



Parquet Courts - Tally All The Things You Broke



Deep Heat - New Design


A Savage God - A Savage God


Barbiturates - Shades


Angry Seas - Angry Seas


What do you think?

Naked Maja Soaring At #59

On the same night that Sonic Masala was showcasing Beef Jerk's Schooners 7" launch, another SM fave was launching their latest single down the road. Local architects of the atmospheric slowburn Naked Maja continue to evolve, and with '#59' we see the whispier elements of their musical genetics burn away to reveal a muscular solar flare drift, coalescing into a sonorous squall that belies the delicate, disembodied vocals. The darkness emanating from within this track pulses like a transcendental, viscous fugue state (have you seen John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness? Ok, never mind...) The download also includes a remix of the track by psychbeat weirdniks Barbiturates - and it's a broken siren of yearning that is all kinds of amazing.

The Shady Ways of Barbiturates

There is something Gerling-y about Barbiturates. That's a big compliment. The dreamy nature of the production and the wobbly nonacceptance of the norm hark to that same backpack-wearing spirit. What they have in those backpacks is another question....

The concentric circles on the cover of Shades set the tone for the album. Delayed and looped against a background of metallic silver; alien colours for alien sounds. There's also something playful here, giddy even - a kind of nod to the absurdity of a life where we know more trivial details then we were ever designed to know. What happens when, for whatever reason, they all burst out of your head? Barbiturates' Shades is one answer.
  

Beam yourself up a copy (limited to 50 10-inches) from Lost Race here.

The Vice Of Clearing Out The Cobwebbs

I have been intending to write about Brisbane psych/garage rabid hybrid Cobwebbs' debut LP All Around for quite some time now. Its official launch came back in November at label Lost Race's inaugural festival (which was killer, and rumours afoot that it will back up for another shot at the title this year), and the vinyl version has been selling steadily. But now is a good time to shine a light on this record for two reasons - rumours also persist that the record has sold out therefore are as rare as hen's teeth (which is kinda true - there were only 100 initially pressed), which was purported by the second reason this article exists - the abortion that is this review by Vice.

I don't want to get into a slanging match about the shortcomings of this kind of "journalism", or indeed Vice itself - the magazine has come up with some amazing articles and ideas over the years, and as Black Lips is its "house band", it surely has its fair share of kudos coming to it. But offering a review that tells you nothing other than an album is cool because its hard to get and hard to understand (possibly - I'm not sure the reviewer even got that much across) is poor. I'm probably adding to the fire by wasting oxygen and energy writing about it, which then fuels Vice's stance as a hipster bible - but fuck em.

So, money/mouth time - how is this album? All Around is certainly murky, a racket that revels in its chimera-like interchangeability.  I have the luxury of having seen these guys live many times since their inception - I started out thinking they were a fresh counterpoint to the garage rock that seemed to flow out of every corner of Brisbane in 2011, infusing something a little more sinister into the mix; but now they are an entity unto themselves, spawning their own harem of likeminded collectives (Barbiturates, Occults, Caterpillar Hood) whilst growing in stature and confidence. And those live performances flesh out the very lo-fi production here. But newcomers should still revel in this bottom of a metal barrel aesthetic, because the eight tracks on offer are drenched in the kind of fetid, lurching swamps of feedback and bile that nevertheless  is steeped in classic rock and roll tropes a la The Animals, The Troggs and The Kinks. Acid tones to melt your bones, All Around is the kind of album that deserves cult status because of what it is, not what some fey douchebag says it is.

You can still get All Around too - right here. Or click below. Can't get much easier than that.

Cobwebbs - Ice Melter