Marooned In A Rangoon Fever Dream

I only heard about A Postcard From Rangoon Island last week - Matt Kennedy (Kitchen's Floor) mentioned The Rangoons' release in passing as one of the Australian offerings he had recently been getting into. And it is great - a four-track cassette of skewed pop weirdness featuring Ela Stiles (Bushwalking, Songs), Emma Ramsay (Holy Balm) and Jay Cruikshank (Home Run). It's his spoken word diatribes that at first seem the odd thing out here - a rambling pastiche of stream-of-consciousness whimsy and laconic barbs that belie a truly dark solipsistic worldview, covering topics such as sharks, shotguns, maniacal restauranteurs and tropical relaxation anxieties...I think. It is all delivered in such a throwaway fashion that it comes off as gleefully apathetic, even borderline sociopathic. Then of course there is the music - flutes, guitars that swing from crystalline chime to blood-encrusted fuzz, tippling drums that threaten to implode in a confusion of poorly-constructed kitware, painful ineptitude and devilish indifference. It all marries up into a exotic Petri dish of sonic equatorial disease, the hallucinations hovering before, or even in, the eyeballs, delirious before death - a deliciously dishevelled way to shuffle away. Grab this incredibly infectious fever dream through Paradise Daily here.

Friday Cover Up WORLD EXCLUSIVE - Kenny Has Billy's Idol Without A Face

It's always nice to open Friday with something special - a present before the gift of the weekend to come. And Liam Kenny doesn't want to disappoint so he is pulling out all the stops with the next track from his upcoming A Kenny For Your Thoughts LP (out soon through it Records). The cover he has chosen? None other than Billy Idol's "classic" 'Eyes Without A Face.' The almost six-minute track is a candy-cane kaleidoscope of confection, featuring some lovely echoing backing vocals from Amy Hill (Constant Mongrel, School of Radiant Living). Kenny does well to sound many things at once here - fragile, vulnerable, confident, sultry, ironic, ardent. You could just about see him belting this out at an RSL near you, all sequin jacket and knock-off Ray-Bans worn indoors, a faux-Stevie Wonder waver of the head in the process. But its the instrumentation that pushes this into the stratosphere - offering the emotional heft that Idol could never achieve. There is something about basic drum machine beats with Kenny Loggins groove and a surreal sonic swirl that plucks one's heartstrings, doesn't one think? Yes, one most definitely does.

  

A Kenny For Your Thoughts is Kenny's first solo album, and it promises to be something incredibly unique, on a par with the other outre projects he has on the burn. Jack Farley's production here can be seen as a collaboration of sorts, whilst Kenny is helped out by the cream of Melbourne music's crop - alongside Hill, Martin Frawley (Twerps), Ela Stiles (Songs/Bushwalking), Joel Carey (Peak Twins), Justin Fuller (Zond), Al Montfort (Dick Diver/Total Control/UV Race/Lower Plenty/Eastlink), Pat Telfer (Bitch Prefect), Amy Franz (Super Wild Horses) and Jack Mannix (Circle Pit). Can't bloody wait.

Drowning Under Bird Blobs

This is an album I haven’t been able to stop listening to since stumbling over it again a few months back. It’s not like I never got into Aussie gutter gurus Bird Blobs in the past, but possibly because the re-emergence (or reawakening) of the nastier nihilistic sewer rock here in Australia over the past few years it’s resonating all the more. The band split in 2006 to form other bands (Minimum Chips and Degreaser are the two most prevalent of these future projects, but also includes Coconuts, Bushwalking, St Helens, Mum Smokes and Mad Nanna amongst others) but it’s hard to pass up their 2004 self-titled LP for lightning-in-a-bottle feral ferocity. Seriously, with Tim Evans' guttural spew of a vocal delivery and songs that covered the detritus of the debauched masses (‘If I Could Kill’, ‘Stealing Again’, ‘Settle Down + Breed’, ‘Drunk At The Mill’), the guitars rolling drunkenly and wilfully into every sensitive corner of your inner ear, the drums pounding rabidly until they break the bedrock beneath – it was a fetid mess, but this four-piece had tapped the open vein with gleeful aggression. I always return to the bookends of Bird Blobs, ‘Billy’ and the aforementioned ‘Drunk At The Mill’ – the former is squalling, spewing venom at its most freebased; the latter for its dessicated rhythmic roll through the scorched undergrowth and throat-tearing screams puncturing the senses. In fact the opening drumming gambits for most of these tracks are killer - Steve Masterson proves to be a hedonistic animal on the skins, and his subsequent efforts with New War exemplify this.

Is this still available? Worth finding out. In fact, maybe Sonic Masala should reissue it? It’s an awesome idea, because Bird Blobs has now fused with my DNA. You see, once you taste Bird Blobs, it infiltrates and desiccates; it mesmerises and maims; it hypnotises and horrifies. And for me, that is some of the most viscerally exciting things music can do.

Circular Songs

(Song by Dave Kan)

This time last week Sonic Masala combined with Bedroom Suck Records to present the first solo show in Brisbane for Ela Stiles (Songs, Bushwalking) - the above photo is from that performance. Stiles has an incredible presence which comes down to her haunting, commanding voice. It filled out the venue (formerly The Healer, currently Electric Playground, soon to be The Brightside) and, although she was accompanied with her guitar for most songs, it was this that marked the performance as something special.

This is ever more evident from the genetics of her debut solo record, out soon on Bedroom Suck. The album is an a cappela tour de force, drawing together her looped voice to become a haunting choral mantra, taking in Eastern stylings and drone aesthetics to form a soundscape of undulating melodicism, the soundtrack of a atmospheric meditation into the Self, channelling the losses of the world. The first half of the record is filled with songs that barely reach one minute in length (in fact only two, 'kumbh Mela' and 'Untitled Man', of the six tracks on the A side reach that milestone); whilst the B side is a ten minute drone transition based solely, again, on Stiles' voice, the sound of howling wind nearby immediately evoking a frozen arctic tundra, lost in the whiteout. It's a bewitching release from a woman who continue to beguile with each successive musical experimentation.

Pre-order Ela Stiles here.

Ela Falls Apart To Come Back Together

You might be familiar with Ela Stiles from her work alongside Max Doyle in Songs; you may be familiar with Ela Stiles from her Bushwalking sojourns. Well soon you will be familiar with Ela Stiles for being Ela Stiles, as she prepares to release her debut solo album on Bedroom Suck Records in May. If 'Kumbh Mela' is anything to go by, expect a album that's a rich tapestry of cavernous harmonics, the melodies weaving in and out of consciousness, Stiles' voice warbling like a spinning top, strong within its centrifugal force yet slightly quivering, wavering, threatening to topple over - yet the longer it hovers, the stronger it intrinsically becomes. Think Grouper without the sonic squalls or even the latter day electronic maladies - in fact, with no instrumentation at all. If you ever read Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist, then you might be with me when I picture the protagonist Theres, her voice pure yet spectral, hypnotic, dangerous.

Intriguing stuff - especially as most of the record will be in the same vein albeit for one voice-based drone composition that'll comprise one whole side of the album. I cannot wait to hear that track.

VIDEO VACUUM - Bushwalking, Violent Soho, Chicks Who Love Guns, Naked Maja

No preamble today, straight into the (full Oz) audio visual goodness...



Let's take a boat out on the bay with Bushwalking. The Melbourne trio can't walk on water (as far as I'm aware) but they can head out into Sydney Harbour and serenade you, topping it all off with a gourmet picnic and sun amongst the trees. 'In My Hair' comes fresh off their No Enter release. Definitely an exciting proposition - now about that show in Brisbane...



Speaking of Brisbane, Violent Soho just keep kicking goals don't they? Here is the video for latest single off their Hungry Ghost LP, 'Covered In Chrome.' All filmed at bassist Luke Henery's place, with some bite-sized cameos from the likes of Simon from DZ Deathrays, its a frenetic, cathartic one-take headbanger for the whole family. Really takes me back to my teenage angst-ridden days, hunkered in the darkness of my room, a green light bulb and my broiling thoughts...ha. Just don't go burning down that Hills Hoist just yet - it IS bushfire season after all...



Another band delving elbow deep into the grunge is Chicks Who Loves Guns, and their clip for 'Pencil Neck' is an oft-explored one - pour liquids and foods all over people. Yet as with most videos of its kind, it's a hell of a lot of fun, there is a lot of multicolours and love being spread around, and the song really goes for it, no holds barred. Bonus - these types of videos always remind me of You Can't Do That On Television. Please tell me there are people reading this who remember this...





Finally we come back home to Brisbane and Naked Maja. I spoke about their new single '#59' on Wednesday, and here is the video for their last single 'Take'. Filled with lustrous waifs lounging around in ethereal, gauche or suburban surroundings, it's all ambiguous, mysterious stuff - like Picnic At Hanging Rock remade by Sofia Coppola. Not that I'd want to see that - I'm much happier that we have this in our lives. This debut album from the band is looking to be an absolute corker...