Danger Beach

As I make my way down out of the clouds after last night's stellar Shitwife/Nitkowski/Girl Sweat show, I need something to bring me down gently - and 'Mirage', the new track from Canberra's Danger Beach, is just right. Always interested in creating somnambulist cityscape soundtracks of a retrofuturist world (see his excellent record Pacific), 'Mirage' is part of a "score" for an album called Contact, out at April 5 through Dream Damage. With the little "trailers" put out to precede it, it certainly sounds cinematic. Really looking forward to this one.

Hits From The Box #118 - Eat, Box, Dead

Another Sunday, another killer hangover. This one also included fireworks, but of a decidedly different nature - I attended a black-tie charity function where the main event was boxing. There was a ring in the middle of the function room, with tables set around it. Now I don't know about you, but regardless of whether you like the sport or not (me = not), there is something disconcerting about adults drinking wine and eating raspberry cheesecake in suits and gowns while white girls with cornrows beat the living shit out of each other. Suffice to say I drank my way through it. Now I am in a dark room, looking for sustenance for my soul. These bands are doing it for me today.

Starting off with Mia La Metta, the solo project for Beards drummer Kathy Gray. Beards is a frenetic left-field post-punk fever dream, a darker, trashier Trash Kit; Mia La Metta then is more exploratory, offering measured takes on the "day job" ('Black Sand') but just as concerned with finding motorik plateaus to air her wonked-pop wares ('White Ship'). The basic drum machine and synth lines are quirky yet effective, and Gray finds melody in the madness. 'Cut The Eye' could be a Peaches composition played by Ladytron, produced by Gary Numan and Wayne Coyne. Weirdness begets excellence. Grab the cassette through Crumb Cabin here.

Vancouver's Cult Babies describe themselves as Rosemary's Baby meets Baby Muppets. Silly, I know, and they know it too - look at the pic above. But one thing that isn't silly is Off To See The Lizard, the five-piece's new EP. Starting with the woozy, lethargic yet massive psych warble 'Garbage People', I felt like I was listening to Kurt Vile doing The Beatles covering Bobby 'Boris' Pickett at his most monster-mashing. 'On A Roll' is more straightforward in is cosmic tripping, but that organ and Theremin sound is so killer that you will go with it. The title track really hits the Black Angels dirge hard, and the live recording makes total sense here. 'Fuck Money' is a lot of fun, a wall of altered states; 'Conspiracy Dog' is gangly yet tightly-wound and deranged; and 'Yes We Cannibal' marches out, a hallucinogenic funeral procession into the mind. Great stuff.

I can't believe I haven't written about NZ champs Street Chant before! Newish track 'Pedestrain Support League' contains everything I love about them - irreverence, a strong sense of the sublime and the ridiculous, jaded jangle and melody to burn. Share-house living, the highs and lows, but mainly the lows. Huora is the band's second album, should be out this month, and I for one cannot wait to actually hear it. Keep up the sardonic sighs in technicolour tracks, guys.

Native Eloquence is three guys outta Oakland who craft what they call "water pop" - the percolating rhythms permeating Big Blue Nowhere tends to back such ideas up. The looped, layered instrumentation, playful grooves that settle like a hypnotic skipping record, and lilting, reverbing vocals evoke Animal Collective or Ducktails with their more spatially meditative mantras. Opener 'Doldrum' is the clear highlight, although the skronking saxophone in 'Habits' and the marimba in 'Wash' shows the breadth of magical talent on display. This album plays lightly on your consciousness, and haunts for days. Really impressed with this one.

Plum is Caleb from Sydney band the Cathys, and his EP Black Doris is four tracks of meandering, gauzy bedroom pop with inflections of shoegaze and somnambulist chill. Dream pop when done right has the audacity to lift spirits as it drifts along - extremely focused even as it seems to shift in the mist. Black Doris captures that elusive spirit.

Finishing up with Bad Lifers. a punk band from Canberra that are no more. That said, Dream Damage are releasing Shelf Life to alert the world on what has been missed. Originally recorded in 2012, the ten tracks on Shelf Life are short and loose, pub and BBQ punk for the urban fringe dwellers. The members went on to join bands like Ausmuteants and Danger Beach, and they were loose units who played alongside The Fighting League. Shelf Life is never going to capture what the handful of Canberrans who caught Bad Lifers live were able to experience, but it'll do...it'll do.


Happy Sunday everyone!

Colouring Beverly For The TV

From Canberra's Dream Damage stable comes TV Colours. A rather basic nom de plume, to be sure. But with members of The Fighting League, Assassins 88 and Danger Beach involved (all bands Sonic Masala would kill for), the title actually makes sense. Then the crunch of 'Beverly' bursts forth, a morass of speaker-shredding distortion, tight drumming and warehouse yelling, sounding like the 80s guitar thrown through an electronic woodchipper sound that compatriots Civil Civic or DZ Deathrays utilise, and just as much as a raucous, jubilant mantra in the chorus to allow for flailing hair and limbs, beers thrown in to the air, jubilance fuelled by devil-may-care attitude and a flagrant devotion to having fun with substances. Intoxicants for teetotallers; justification for junkies.

'Beverly' comes out on TV Colours' loooooooong-awaited debut LP Purple Skies, Toxic River - more about it as it comes to light, and these suckers tour north of the border.

Three Ominous Beaches

 

Its been a very hot summer. Best time to be in a country that loves its pools - and even better, that has incredible beaches. It hasn't been the best for me though - in the UK for most of it, then in hospital, then banned from water like a Mogwai. Sigh. The beach holds so many great memories. Here are three beaches though that you should be wary of though - don't go burying your stash in the sand or off into the dunes with a handsome stranger here. Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water etc etc.

  

This first Beach band (and the impetus for this post) had a release out in the dying light of last year, Pacific. Canberra's Danger Beach is the solo project of Lachlan Thomas (formerly of sadly now defunct Assassins 88). His debut record Milky Way was somewhat a hit out there in the global internet ether, whilst the video for the track 'Apache' was nominated as a finalist for the 2012 Vimeo Music Video Awards. Those lo-fi meanderings aren't entirely gone, yet there is a slicker, darker perspective to these tunes that, if the glossy cover art is anything to go by, lurks in that in-between state between dark and light in the city - where the darkness never truly invades, but never truly leaves either. Think of Michael Mann's Collateral. There are sunny moments like 'Bee' or great track 'Idle Hands', but above all the devil is in the twilit details - especially the sirens that light up the stone-cold classic that is the closer 'Dark Blue' - fucking rad. A great album from a great up and coming band, you can get Pacific through Dream Damage here.

 

Whilst Canberra isn't that far from the golden sands of a quintessential beach, there aren't places much further from such a destination as Scandinavia. Yet this is where we find Cannon Beach, and befittingly the Danish/Norwegian duo aren't likely to break out the Shangri-La leads anytime soon. Having met in the countryside of Denmark, the tracks on Concrete, People And Things stem from approaching music from different perspectives (from folk-oriented Americana to ambient compositions and tape manipulations, with a common neutral ground in shoegaze noise). The result is sparse, eclectic, but oft-times electric. Example in point is ‘Sacred Harp’, an instrumental made up essentially of an autoharp connected to a Leslie amplifier, one guitar-amplifier and one bass-amplifer, a drone experiment that bleeds into the moody atmospherics of 'Loki'. Out through Ikenai! Records, you can grab Concrete, People And Things here.

 

Out of these three beaches, Menace Beach probably has the most recognition, at least potentially. A Leeds-based quasi-"supergroup" featuring members of Pulled Apart By Horses, Sky Larkin and Hookworms, I was immediately enamoured by their scuzzy nature, although they are also the closest to beach guitar pop of the three - their PR even pushes references of Wavves and Ganglians onto us. They are not bereft of ideas though, already rolling out a couple of tracks for Too Pure Records' Singles Club to back up their self-titled debut EP. 'Dropouts' sounds as much Breeders territory as anything else, or mid 90s Britpop that flirted with noisier, more whacked-out guitar settings, whilst 'Tastes Like Medicine' comes from the Williams/Cosentino school of shimmering lightweights that still somehow manage to remain fun and relevant. Pre-order this sucker here.