Friday Cover Up - Rats Ride Over This Velvet Morning

Dutch post punks Rats On Rafts brought out an excellent record last year in the form of Tape Hiss. They blew me away in their support slot for Blank Realm at Shacklewell Arms, and continue to impress on new 7" Some Velvet Morning/Last Day On Earth. Their cover of Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra is pretty much a ROR special - a chugging, squalling psych purge with added distorted and haunted vocals. It's absurd and disturbing, and pretty brilliant. They play the Moth Club in Hackney this Sunday, as part of a supergroup that includes the mighty Pere Ubu, before returning in their usual guise supporting PU at Tufnell Park Dome, March 24 and a straight-up set on their own at Lock Tavern on the 26th. Get on board, and while you're at it get your copy of the 7" through Fire Records here.

See The Fortress?

Not that you need to hear it from me - but Thee Oh Sees is still one of the most consistently breathtaking live acts on the planet. Not only carving a sweaty swathe across the globe at regular intervals, but John Dwyer and co are continually bringing out new material. Now 'Fortress' has been out since before Xmas, but I need to melt my face off to keep warm this Friday night, and knowing that pals Blank Realm and Kitchens Floor played with them in Brisbane last night (this afternoon for us UKens), the start of their Australian tour as over the course the month they traipse across the Great Southern Land doing show with mates White Lodge and Straight Arrows as well as UV Race, Terrible Truths, Power and Tyrannamen - so bummed! So I'm building a fortress with endless TOS records and beers - it should see me through, right? 'Fortress' will feature on a 7" out on Dwyer's Castle Face Records next month.

Bastard Boys Are Giggling Through Their Teeth

NY crooked losers loose in the Big Apple Giggly Boys have launched their debut album Bastards Of Young, and it is great - weird, beguiling, cracked. I was a big fan of their EP . (the cover my fiancee claims looks like me - she's on fire tonight, gloves are off), and the album veers into Spray Paint territory on opener 'The Hall', a track seemingly equally indebted to Ranaldo's Sonic Youth left-field takes on straighter rock. 'Crazy From The Heat' continues the cavernous production and Mike Zorman's moaned, quasi-barked and clipped vocals, yet there is a coldness here that evokes Scandi goth punk (the juxtaposition is in the name...) 'Butter Banquet' is more diseased, a (C)ramped sense of humour infiltrating these darker riffs and claustrophobic rolls, albeit with some slowed art-rock interludes and a glammed up lead back to the fever. 'Weird Lie' and 'Tiny Taste' again take a Ranaldo hue, but also evoke mid-career Blank Realm (possibly in the Daniel Spencer-esque vocal delivery). You can tell that I haven't made any Protomartyr references here, although you can hear echoes in 'Midnight Ones' or the similarly-named 'Darker Shade Of Pale'. Maybe because Bastards Of Young is so kaleidoscopic in sonic range that the references are spread far and wide. 'Country Lee' is something I wish Brisbane band-in-hiatus Nova Scotia had written. Now I doubt that Giggly Boys are into those guys - but the connections to Australian and American bands that flirt with mainstream composition before dragging them on wider, weirder slipstreams is clear. The throwback closer 'Whatever' is great too. Let's hope that these Bastards Of Young never get old - this is great stuff.

Grab the record through This Ain't Heaven Recordings here. If you are in New York tonight, head to The Gateway where Giggly Boys play alongside another new SM fave, Frog.

Girls Scrying On Girls Scrying

If there is one thing that is always assured, it's that a Girls Pissing On Girls Pissing release is going to be dark, garish, disturbing, visceral and seductive - something like an Argento film, directed by David Cronenberg circa '79, from a script co-written by Ben Wheatley and the Soska Sisters. The band played one of my favourite ever Sonic Masala shows back a few years ago now (also playing - Orlando Furious, Adam Cadell/Tony Irving and Blank Realm side-project Huge Nudes - truly unhinged night). I love these guys, their stilted, dark goth noise always a multimedia concern, with zines, books and artwork intrinsically entwined with the twisted sonics on display. Scrying In Infirmary Architecture is all of this, and more. There is the haunting sultry strike of 'A Fraud, Abroad', the most "accessible" the band have truly been (you could see this being called post-punk, even), an oddly beautiful track. 'Beyond The 12th House' and the excellent 'Pollen Moon' are more in sync to what GPOGP do best - with guitarist/madman Casey Latimer howling out obtuse and disturbing lyrics over visceral, giallo-esque instrumentation that inevitably pierces the sinister mood with spikes of cantankerous noise. 'Darwinning' is even more brutal, flaying and flagellating, with Steven Huf's trumpet a slow yet somehow seductive boil low down in the mix; while 'Scrying' is an uneasy melding of the two extremes. Catherine Cumming's plodding drumming is inexorable, the inevitable pull into the mouth of madness, aided by Huf's bass that seems at once easy, obvious, uncompromising and off-kilter - and I have no idea how that can be true, but that's how it plays out. Ak Buk's vocals are less screaming here than they were on Eeling, their last album, more intent on enticing us down a Gothic wormhole on the aforementioned 'A Fraud, Abroad' and 'Ceramic Miscarriages' (which sounds a lot like defunct Perth band and one of my faves of the last ten years, Snowman). Then there is the weird pop bliss of 'Rainbow Islands' which I can't help but feel like is a cover - I'm pretty sure it isn't, but it sounds so different from what's come before, and  yet is quintessentially GPOGP in every way (including the yacht-rock sax solo at the end, which to me makes this track all the more otherworldly). Finishing with 'Scissoring', another track that sonically feels like an urban nightmare giallo score, with added vocals by Shaun Ryder, Scrying In Infirmary Architecture is one weird, glorious ride. You will feel unclean after listening, irrevocably changed, possessed. You will feel the internal mark of the devil and will repeat in an endless mantra - "I love Girls Pissing On Girls Pissing." Get Scrying In Infirmary Architecture through Muzai Records here or here.

No Apologies For Circular Keys

Bedroom Suck Records has had a brace of strong releases the past few months (with Blank Realm almost upon us too), one of which is Sorry! from Melbourne duo Circular Keys. It's a nebulous lo-fi electronic fare, Phillipa O'Shea's ethereal yet powerful vocals poured over Dennis Santiago's percolating, rippling guitar, reverb and lysergic beats keeping everything moving at a psychotropic saunter (especially on 'Child (Eurogrand)'). The title track is cut up in lurching syncopation, a dub-centric loop, with O'Shea soaring above it all across the room, booming forth like Tune-Yards' Merrill Garbus, a lusty belting vocal that echoes across genres and eras. There is a shimmering mystery to Sorry!, making the tracks both entrancing and held back behind a synthetic regalia - a track like 'Eyes' becoming a dream flickering out of a 1960s wood panel television into a darkened room, velvet curtains muting the walls... Drugged dreampop from another world, another future. It is all so strange, and oh so beautiful. Grab Sorry! here.

Blank Longing

Brisbane's kaleidoscopic pop mavens Blank Realm are keeping their high strike rate with 'River Of Longing', the new single from their upcoming album Illegals In Heaven (which I will review shortly). 'River Of Longing' continues the glossed psychopomp rollercoaster, sped up and shuddering, Sarah Spencer's synth refracting in all directions like a smashed prism, Dan Spencer's vocal stylings extending from last year's 'Reach You On The Phone' as he powers through giddily psychedelic altruisms such meet you on the other side/ and we’ll make up for stolen time. The track mirrors the band's trajectory to be honest - starting out in the outliers of improv noise, slowly compressing into a whirled psych band, while pop machinations ooze through the cracks as the centrifugal forces rise in speed, intensity and insanity... Cracked genius.



You can pre-order Illegals In Heaven from Bedroom Suck and Fire Records. Blank Realm are coming to the UK in September/October:

                                                             14 Sep - Paris - Espace B

15 Sep - Antwerp - Het Bos

16 Sep - Hamburg - Hafenklang

17 Sep - Berlin - Monarch

18 Sep - Offenbach - Hafen 2

19 Sep - Tilburg - Incubate Festival

20 Sep - Rotterdam - Roodkapje

22 Sep - Amsterdam - Sugarfactory

23 Sep - Barcelona - BAM Festival

27 Sep - Dublin - Workmans Club

28 Sep - Glasgow - The Hug and Pint

29 Sep - Brighton - The Prince Albert

30 Sep - Bristol - Start The Bus

01 Oct - London - The Shacklewell Arms

An Excessive Escape From Brisbane

Matt Kennedy has stepped away from the downer pop dirges for a brief time to slave over a cheap keyboard in his bedroom for the better half of last year, come out digitised as Excess. His self-titled and Sciatic Dance Party EPs were impressive, but now he has a proper release on his hands - Escape From Brisbane, out on Virtual Cool. Kennedy's voice is decidedly absent here, in its place a plethora of Brisbane musicians step up to the mike. Members of Blank Realm, Multiple Man, Gravel Samwidge, Clag, Primitive Motion, Wonderfuls, Cured Pink - the list goes on. The concept is to create warped narratives of a dystopian Brisbane, a retro-futurist time capsule of a world not that far removed from our own. Kennedy has made his appreciation for John Carpenter scores known in the past, and this is a clear touchstone with Excess (the title Escape From Brisbane alone aping the Snake Plissken classic), but these one-off collaborations provide for compelling ingenuity on their own. Personal favourites include the loquacious yet edgily paranoid ramblings of Gravel Samwidge's Mark Spinks on 'They Have Too Much To Lose' (also showcasing his deft turns of phrase), the forlorn romance of the cyberpunk trudge of the Campion bros' 'Home', and the typically dour Bobby Bot (Wonderfuls) brings us a wistful future in 'Tunnel Vision'. As most concept albums are wont to do, some tracks don't necessarily go anywhere, but again that is sometimes the greatest fear of a dystopian future - the futility and serrated harshness of inescapable banality.

Rise On The Stressed Waves Of Ruin

It's amazing to think of the bands that I tried on numerous occasions to get on a Sonic Masala bill to no avail. Blank Realm has probably been the biggest one to date to slip through the fingers (although both Dan Spencer and Luke Walsh have played shows in weirder forms), whilst Per Purpose was meant to play the first ever Sonic Masala showcase - the honour went to Glen Schenau's then other project Psy Ants. A much smaller band that I tried a couple of times to get on a lineup was Stress Waves. The lurking synth broiling brilliance comes from the mind of Errol Hoffman (To The North, Make More) with Nick Williams (Throes) on discombobulated vocals. Whilst Errol graced a Campfire Tales show as his solo guise Perfume Garden (which was great by the way), the Stress Waves shows have been few and far between, with Josh Strange (To The North, Quiet Steps) playing bass to beef these wrapped-in-plastic warbles to arrhythmic life. Lost Lustre, their three-song introduction to the world, floored me and made it onto the excellent Wood & Wire roster, whilst another EP in the shape of Lurid Abyss surfaced briefly like a bloated cadaver wrapped in black rose petals last year.

But now we have Orphic Ruin, their first proper album, out on cassette through Second Empire Media (You Beauty, the aforementioned Perfume Garden). This kind of coldwave regression doesn't come from Brisbane, the city of sweaty squats and necessarily bared flesh. Tracks like 'Selenic Visions' and 'Elemental Decline' feel much more suited to the nocturnal black-on-white netherscapes of northern Europe, complete with dark apparel and glazed, disdainful stares into the middle spaces, hair combed vehemently to one side, efficient fetishism. The fact that is is so effortless gives Orphic Ruin a sense of realism that defies the geography of its conception - an anguished gnashing of emotions, deliberately throwing back at expectations. Toneless moaning, distant laconic beats, all switched into other unexpected gears by the synth lines that can suddenly tear rays of light into the moping mix.

Maybe Stress Waves could play a certain festival in 2015, what do you say guys?

The Moles/Blank Realm

Before we post the chat I had with the Spencer siblings from Brisbane musical excellence du jour Blank Realm in a couple days' time (after they are hopefully basking in the spotlight granted them after their stints at Glastonbury this weekend), I thought I would shine a light on the London show they will be playing this Wednesday. They play an instore at Flashback Records which you would be stupid to miss, then they trundle up the road to smash up The Lexington. They will be joined by The Moles.

WHO?

The Moles is an Aussie band that were around in the early 90s, obviously indebted to The Clean, The Bats and other Flying Nun alumni, with more than a leaning towards contemporaries The Go-Betweens and Underground Lovers. This is the project of Richard Davies who has gone on to other things. But with Fire Records reissuing the two records they put out in their own right, the wider world can finally revel in the beauty of this undervalued songsmith's penmanship. Listen below, head over and buy the record here, and get along to Wednesday's show - you won't regret it.

Living In Electric Scraps

Laura Hill continues to impress. For those who have seen her myriad shows around Brisbane as Scraps, you are already on the bandwagon - but for most of you, her knowing-naive-synth-pop knows no bounds. In fact Hill has gotten so attuned to finding the infectious groove in the dirtiest, tinniest, trapped-in-a-metal-bin beat that it becomes a surreptitious delight, sneaking up on you in usually inopportune moments, hooks bearing fruit in your mind days or even weeks after the song last rang in your ears. Her plaintive disco wraith stylings may seem simplistic but are anything but - Scraps is a dark electro-pop force to be reckoned with.

And as is the way with a bunch of great Brisbane bands (Blank Realm being the most obvious), UK label Fire Records has latched on Scraps' inimitable wasted disco jams, putting out her Electric Ocean record (it's due in March). The brilliance of this album is what makes Australia, and indeed Brisbane, such a beguiling and creative dustbowl of musical innovation - Electric Ocean comes solely from Hill's viewpoint, living by the day, scraping together vignettes of sullen ennui that occasionally spikes in a glorious winning moment, but can just as inexorably spiral into sweat-stained exasperation. And its through the music, a pastiche of childhood rememberings and upbeat anthems shone through a prism of close-at-hand instrumentation and world-weary battles, that Scraps overcomes. What I'm saying is, Scraps is the real deal, a triumph in belief over matter. It's there in every fiber. Dancing in pain; dancing for pleasure.

You can pre-order Electric Ocean here.

Stephen Malkmus Still Wigging Out With His Jicks

I'm not the best person to be writing about Stephen Malkmus. I love just about everything he has committed to tape - even deemed weaker titles, such as his self-titled 2001 album, still has many killer hooks and turns of phrase. And it must be said that latest album with his Jicks, Wig Out At Jagbags, is a tighter affair, more loose in relaxed delivery than musicianship, with spaced jams kept to a minimum (which I always find a shame). But I at first found this album a little too quiet, self-assured in its faux-modesty. Of course, I'd been listening to Blank Realm all week, so the juxtaposition there is always going to be jarring. So today I have kept an open mind, thrown Jagbags on - and guess what? Yep, I'm a fan.

It's nothing overtly new - it's just another Malkmus gem. Im finding more and more that he is something of a Turkish delight amongst music lovers - a sweetly acquired taste. But when you can be so steadfast in your own unique vision, becoming a musical auteur with your skewed euphemisms and wayward approaches to life (I've been tripping my face off since breakfast/Taking in this windswept afternoon as on 'Cinnamon & Lesbians' or referencing ELO in the crooner 'J Smoov'). Malkmus is an icon - one of the greats - and Wig Outs At Jagbags only helps to affirm this. Just listen to the man play guitar, drawl weary rejoinders and witty rambles, and enjoy.

Wig Out At Jagbags is out through Matador and Spunk Records - get it here or here.

Never Grassed In(n) In A Blank Realm

I don't think there are many bands who have had such a bell curve evolution that I personally know than Brisbane's Blank Realm. The Spencer siblings (and Luke Walsh a sibling by proxy) started out making dirty, decidedly weird motorik psych, relying on mantras, improvisational hiccups and repetition all whilst hiding behind the cacophonous noise that bled forth. They were great, released some solid small releases, and cemented this with the dingy album Deja What. But as their confidence grew, Blank Realm's parameters shifted. They got tighter, more charismatic, and to an extent more flamboyant. Dan Spencer's ventures out from behind the kit resembled the barely contained energy the likes of Future Islands' Sam T Herring harnesses; Luke Spencer began to really lock down the spine of their sets; Sarah Spencer's headshaking shimmies and keyboard flourishes became an integral element to the song's construction, not just the presentation; and Walsh's guitar lines shirked masking distortions to find sinuous portals to other, incandescent worlds. In other words - Blank Realm discovered pop.



Go Easy easily exemplified this shift in dynamic - from the New Romantic/neon decadence of the cover art, to the tighter melodies and song construction. It wasn't a blast into the mainstream by any stretch of the imagination - there were enough jagged edges in songs like 'Growing Inside' and 'Acting Strange' to be cerebral and abrasive; 'Pendulum Swing' pinned down the histrionics evident from those early psych days. But the elongated amble of 'Cleaning Up My Mess' is an unmitigated delight, whilst the closing title track was by far the best thing they had ever written, a song wrapped up in tired apprehension, a wasted drift down a sun-drenched highway in a car without air-con.



So it goes to show that new album Grassed Inn continues to follow in this stead - in many ways a far poppier proposition from its forebears, but also promising more left-turns, sidesteps and leaps of fantasy. It's great to finally have 'Falling Down The Stairs' on record, an insistent gem that is a crooked sideways glance into the rearview mirror, a heady pop hiccup that promises a dancefloor stagger, eyes glazed, lost in the trance of the insistent rhythms. 'Bell Tower' is a languid creeper, the notes slightly askew as to denote unease, Dan Spencer's vocals ramping the tension. 'Bulldozer Love' holds the jangle, Walsh's guitar holding down the rhythm, Sarah's synth lines bubbling underneath before cascading and washing away halfway through this sinuous long play, before the heightened release that becomes a busy squall by song's end. It's these all-encompassing sepulchral moments that exemplify Grassed Inn as such a wonderfully elliptical release - within the majesty and fluorescence lies kernels of darkness, of abject truths, of nighttime confessions, of fear. The B-side shows more restraint - 'Violet Delivery' is a buoyant travail into the backwaters of 80s lipstick chic synth-lite musak; the orca warble that injects 'Baby Close The Door' wans to become a subterranean shanty electrified by retrovision and languid verses, a Bauhaus warehouse populated by Eric Burdon and JJ Burnel's strangled backing band; closer 'Reach You On The Phone' is possibly the closest musically to combining Joy Division and New Order into an organic entity, with Dan's best use of vocals juxtaposing amusing ripostes with maudlin reveries, all delivered with that off-kilter, crooked pitch.

Grassed Inn (out through Bedroom Suck and Fire Records) - frontrunner for album of the year. Pre-order it here and here.

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

Foreign Thieves

I thought I'd end off  Chicago's Daylight Robbery, who I caught playing a no-frills rocking set at The Waiting Room on Friday night (alongside others such as Roku Music and Screaming Match). The trio are no nonsense, clearly doing it for the love of it, and there was something disarming about their throwback garage punk that is often missing from others of their ilk.

I'm closing down for the weekend. I'm a little bit sore from last night's stellar Trainspotters gig (thanks for coming out, by the way), I'm dreading my first day at two of my jobs in three weeks tomorrow, I've done a mountain of washing, and I'm looking at the final day of the Ashes Test with a queasy sense of trepidation. I need to medicate. And their latest release, the EP Distant Shores, is the ticket. Apparently created specifically with this tour in mind (they only released their Ecstatic Vision LP last year, but wanted something "new" to bring with them), the three tracks electrify; fast paced and urgent, with a mirthful glint in the eye, feeling more in sync with MC5, the Jam and X than more recent punk luminaries (which also speaks to their final show being a support of Straitjacket Nation).

You can pick up Distant Shores (in white 7" vinyl), and indeed any of Daylight Robbery's back catalogue, from here. They are halfway through an extensive Australian tour, have been playing with the likes of Deep Heat, White Walls, Cuntz and Native Cats of recent times, and they have tapped another show tonight at the Crowbar alongside the ever-excellent Blank Realm (Yoghurt Blood are also playing a rare set).

Daylight Robbery - Distant Shores

It's A Common Life In Surf City

We here at Sonic Masala quite enjoyed New Zealand band Surf City's last album, Kudos. They have another on the way called We Knew It Was Not Going To Be Like This (genesis for title - a snippet of conversation overheard in a crowded South Korean bar - brilliant). The excellent and Antipodal guardian Fire Records (Blank Realm, Scott & Charlene's Wedding, Lower Plenty) are pushing it, which can only be a very good thing. The first track released off it is 'It's A Common Life'. Now, it's pretty grim today here in Brisbane. I work next to an army barracks, and today they have had army choppers going back and forth over my head, probably innocuous, yet still foreboding. Yet the warm fuzz of 'It's A Common Life' helps to shut the shit out, a swirling guitar pop gem that glimmers defiantly amidst the murk and the muck.

Leader Davin Stoddard has been around the traps since Kudos - holed up in a basement in NYC, teaching English in South Korea, lots of isolated moments both without and within. It really sounds like it's paid off in spades - I'm really looking forward to this one... We Knew It Was Not Going To Be Like This is due out in August.

$10 Trip To Scandinavia!!!

So Melbourne-based ambient tricksters No-Way Sweden would have you believe. The duo (playing as a trio tonight) are headlining tonight's Sonic Masala Presents at The Waiting Room after the release of their excellent Iceland/England LP. They are being supported by FEET TEETH (who have a new record under their belt also), and the first show ever from Blank Realm offshoot Financiers. It all kicks off at 8pm, check out more here. Come and be wigged out for a tenner, bring your own liquor.

Jazz = Eating With Your Feet Teeth

It's great to see such a vibrant experimental scene in Brisbane, and one of the bands that rove on the farther uncharted plains is FEET TEETH. The trio - Joel Saunders on trumpet, electronics; Paul Young on drums and "objects"; Kate Thomas on marimba and Commodore 64 (for real) - take free form jazz "structure" to a different, stop-motion-as-noise level, especially as one of their premiere instruments is a reconfigured Commodore 64. Their shows are understandably heavy on the improvisation, which makes for continual cerebral discoveries.

The band have an album in the wings called Aphtae Epizooticae (out through HelloSquare), and you can sample the single 'Hinschu' below, and you can pick it up, alongside remixes by Sydney's Brain Drain and Subsea and a non-album recording, right here. FEET TEETH are also playing a Sonic Masala show on Friday May 3 at The Waiting Room alongside Melbourne's No-Way Sweden and the first-ever airing of Financiers, a side project for Dan Spencer and Luke Walsh of the ever-excellent Blank Realm. Head here to check out more about that show.

FEET TEETH - Hinschu

Friday (Night) Cover Up - Zoo Fallout Leaves Me Joed Out

Late in the night. Just went and saw Deerhoof tear the Zoo apart, supported by the elegantly eclectic Primitive Motion (bought their cassette to boot) and one of the best young bands in Australia, Blank Realm (inexplicably short set, yet was pretty damn great nonetheless). After many beers, found it hard to fight the urge to smoke - but I did it. Seriously, quitting anything is hard and pretty bogus, health risk or no. Anyway, I forgot a Friday Cover Up, and in lieu of missing out on Veronica Falls' current covers EP (at only 300 copies it was going to be hard to get it, yet Rough Trade's website did me an injustice by telling me there were copies, to go through to checkout, put my details in, then be told it was sold out - grrrr...) I'm listening to the equally rare Veronica Falls covers EP from last year. Especially their Verlaines cover - 'Joed Out' is a great song anyway, so it's a great way to wind down the wee hours. Good night kids.

  Veronica Falls - Joed Out (Verlaines cover)

Plenty of Hard Rubbish on the Lower End of Things

Good morning sleepyheads! So I thought Id give you something Ive been mulling over for the past few weeks. Melbourne quartet Lower Plenty seemed to get some really street cred last year with the release of Hard Rubbish in April last year (through Special Award Records and Easter Bilby). Hell, Mess+Noise gave it their Album of the Year. Named after a Melbourne suburb (really), the band specialise in woozy, mournful lo-fi pop, and their pedigree (Dick Diver, UV Race, Total Control, Deaf Wish, insert other million band names here) ensured that their name was shouted across most boozy dives in the Victorian capital.


Now Hard Rubbish is preparing for an European assault after the US got a taste thanks to Goner Records (and have a split single 7” coming out through Matador). Fire Records, who over the past couple years have been loving the hell out of great Aussie music (Blank Realm, Scott & Charlene’s Wedding, Opposum, HTRK, Greg Boring, insert other thousand band names here), are adding Lower Plenty to the bill, and it seems a no brainer.

But…

I’ve found it difficult to fully embrace Hard Rubbish. Not that I don’t want to. I’ve tried, and still am. The fact that Lower Plenty works as an outlet for the various band members to ease back on the grimy throttle of their other outfits is worthy in and of itself; whilst tracks like ‘White Walls’ emanate with the kind of drawling inert and off-kilter Australiana guitar pop that I usually lap up. But there is a want to shower after listening to these guys, or at the very least take some happy pills. The term “downer country” has been coined, possibly to play on the downer pop that the likes of Craig Dermody and Matt Kennedy revel in – but isn’t most country downer? Certainly the best C&W exists when the narrative comes from the gutter. And Lower Plenty definitely dwell there, and at times it feels TOO relatable, too world-weary.

   

But there are moments on Hard Rubbish that burrow like a sonic termite into your cerebral vortex, gnawing away at you until you have no recourse but to tumble under the weight (or the lack thereof) of your resistance. ‘Nullabor’ is the kind of Badlands-style romance that anyone can believe in, let alone Australians with an itch for the quixotic unknown; ‘Close Enough’ is heartrending in its wistful acknowledgement that a relationship slipped through the fingers (“I was close enough away to see the fading of the dark”). 

Once this happens, you really take on board the lyrics – the mumbled, half-asleep, foggy from slumber and alcohol phone conversations, sinking lower into the moth-eaten couch, sweating in a tongue-and-groove house, lamenting a place and state of mind that you can’t (or won’t) leave. With the vocals interspersed between Sarah Heyward, Al Montfort and Jensen Tjhung, there is enough variations on the tired intonation to offer fresh counterpoints – but only when you let the songs inside. At the end of the day, Hard Rubbish will tear you up, wring you dry, and leave you on the edge of the bed crying. But if ever there was a beatific wonder in being resigned to emotional failure and heartbreak, then Lower Plenty have nailed it. 

 Sorry everyone, I just got some dust in my eyes…

   

Hard Rubbish is available for pre-order here. You can still get some through Goner here. Expect to hear more about Lower Plenty in 2013. 

Lower Plenty – Strange Beast 

Lower Plenty – Close Enough

All Day Breakfast comp

 

Midday Music is a compilation showcasing much of Brisbane’s underground music scene was put out last year on cassette. Handcrafted (featuring tactile “fried eggs” – white and yellow Blu-tac, on the outer sleeve) and collated by 4ZZZ presenter Makeda Zucco and her project All Day Breakfast, outlet for the documentation and exploration of music and that which pertains to it, the 25-track compilations covers the gamut, from experimental synth pop (Shooga, Brainbeau, Scraps), nihilist rock aggression (Per Purpose, Sewers, Slug Guts), avante-garde noise (Cured Pink, Sky Needle, Multiple Man), unhinged guitar pop (Blank Realm, Heart Flew, Old Growth Cola), slacker malaise downers (Kitchens Floor, Martyr Privates)… In fact, although there are a few bands on the release (X In O, Fig, Perpetual Nervousness) that I haven’t actually caught or even heard much of, the cross section of bands here is pretty indicative of what I immerse myself in here. It is all lo-fi recordings, as you can imagine, but if ever there was a document detailing much of the diversity of the scene (without going into the Long Gone, Lofly or Lost Race crews), this is a mighty fine one.

 

Unfortunately all the cassettes are sold out, but you can download the compilation for free here. Do so – there are some artists here that never get exposure, either because of their standing, their sound or because they never put out that much music for private consumption – then get out and about, supporting these bands in the live arena.

Knee Chin – Thrall Of It All
Greg Boring - Tomb
Cannon – I Should Be In A Fucking Museum