A Friday Night Cover Up - Butcheretting Depeche Morricone

I love it when bands take compositions and really screw with them. Today's track is a Depeche Mode song, one of their later ones - 'I Feel You' from 1993. Get a load of this...

It's a song that has been much covered by the likes of Placebo, Johnny Marr and Apollo 440 giving it a once-over. Now there has been a three-way collab between Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (busy with that At The Drive In re-reformation) and Terri Gender Bender (Le Butcherettes) and Baltimore's With Lions, who have just released their own record Fast Luck - and it has taken on a decidedly Chelsea Wolfe meets Ennio Morricone vibe, which I am hardwired to love. I won't be able to listen to another version of this, even the original, ever again.

September Girls Love No One

Irish brooders September Girls are back with a new album, Age of Indignation, coming out in April through Fortuna Pop. The first cut from it is 'Love No One', which is expectantly propulsive and gothic, with some nice Morricone undertones, and the film clip evokes Jodorowsky, Argento, Warhol, Polanski's (namely his Playboy-backed Macbeth cut), Strickland, and the pagan rituals of Summerisle, all within the confines of a luxurious art deco building. It's beguiling, darkly beautiful - so great to have the Girls back from the dark, even if they are thrive in the shadows

Steady Teething

The Steady As She Goes continued to roil in the deep dark night, a behemoth breaking the surface in slow motion, the spiked moonlight  sparking off its glistening carapace. The one-man Gothic doomsayer scorches the (E)arth on 'Kindred', the sepulchral opener to new release Teeth Dreams, before the Man In Black saunters through the smoke, a haunted gunslinger looking for his 'Throne Of Want'. I know that Tal will hate me for some of this - but I felt like I was trapped in a vacuum with three speakers spewing forth Tangerine Dream, Ennio Morricone and Pink Floyd in an unholy triumvirate of textured sound. I personally absolutely love it - it has become my soundtrack to my current spate of late-night writings. 'You Don't' is more in the scheduled TSASG vein, a slow-grinding leviathan of heaving waves of expectation and expulsion, before the nightmare crawl of 'Toluca' takes into the delicious darkness. The Steady As She Goes is one of the best things about the Brisbane music scene in my opinion - defiantly dark, dense, idiosyncratic and intense, a solo journey to the centre of the earth with no promise of return. More please - always fucking more.

Frolicking In Field Hymns

I don't talk about them as much as I should, but one of my favourite labels of the last couple of years is the outre electronic bathysphere that is Field Hymns, constantly finding outlier synthetic sonics to stroke the brain and stimulate the soul. This morning I am enamoured by the 8-bit via cerebral ambient malaise that is Three Fourths Tigers' Indoor Voice.

The title track opens up proceedings, and somehow manages to be cavernous and intricate in synapse-frying scope. But its the dial-tone (both regular and irregular) that permeates the nebulous cryogenic lagoon that is 'Line Connector' where we realise something unique is happening here; it is a psychotropic mind melt in the first half, before holding a note like a cut-off tone before surreptitiously dipping into ambient analogue modulation. 'Windows Excel' is a more "traditional" kosmiche undulation, taking tantric synth into wide, spacious realms - an oddly soothing psychedelic suspension. 'Petrifloral' is almost pastoral in its ebullient waves, both synthetic language and organ epiphany. 'Rainbow Russ' is the score to a existential point-and-click emotive adventure, all VGA colours and vivid imaginations. 'Visitor Sphere' takes the bubbling brook motif that a lot of naturalistic sound collagers use as a carpet foundation to build more expansive, mindbending constructions, but here is allowed to complement a somewhat simplistic sonics to energise an otherworldly terrain - both field recording and satellite sound capture. The wonky buzz and hum that opens 'Other Landings' evokes the ascent/descent of extra-dimensional craft, before a bell rings off and silence, other than an oscillating permutation and a ringing presence persists - a fluttering middle-ground, a floating stasis within the mind, everything out of sync, focus, weightless ambiguity. Finishing with the slow-building amalgam of electro-futurist pioneers that is 'Ensphynx', Indoor Voice is a stunning piece of work.

But I feel remiss if I don't mention some of the other recent releases the label has pushed, especially after my post on Brisbane fringe dwellers FEET TEETH yesterday. There is Murmurs and Echoes from Norway's Andreas Brandal, which somehow manages to inhabit the iconic realm of the Spaghetti Western score made famous by Ennio Morricone, and make it a mechanised Other, with flourishes from introspective, ancient Japanese folk, immolating tape, scraping metal on deserted concrete floors, and latter-day Earth-esque meandering sunburnt instrumentals. I actually love this release more than Indoor Voice - but came to it later. Seriously though, it is bloody breathtaking.


Then there are these two - the Krautrock-via-Pink Floyd dream that is The Snowfields' new album How To Get Good Sound From A Dead Ear; and The Man Who Drank God, the truly warped parallel universe lost recordings of a death cult that is Ak'chamel The Giver Of Illness.



Field Hymns are always pushing the boundaries, confronting and consuming, and will always be worth your time.

Caught In The Desert

Another week, another release out of the it Records stable to get excited about. This time it's Little Desert, featuring a new lineup (the band now has Ema Dunstan (Jouissance) and the irrepressible Bonnie Mercer (Grey Daturas) on guitar) and a captivating (sorry) single in 'Captive'. It's the first taste of their upcoming debut album Saeva. I wasn't sure at first - the swooning theatrics had me at arm's length. But the ace in the hole is the musicianship - the rattling bass, a tenacious grip with sharp jabs of guitar and organ (an iconic turn from Rocket Science madman Roman Tucker), a tight rhythm pinning everything down - and then the breakdown halfway through where everything becomes ominous. Drums sounding out from a cavernous prog-rock wasteland, that turns into a flat flap, like hitting a snare with a thong; wistful keys that move between ritualistic altar worship and schmaltzy Morricone...and it is here that Esther Rivers' vocals burst forth, and the whole thing makes sense. When she belts out 'Diana!', you will be screaming it too (in fact, the only thing missing is a bloodcurdling death howl in the dying moments).

Steady As She Covers

Tal Wallace, one man Man In Black as pastoral soothsayer of doom The Steady As She Goes, released a great album last year in the form of Dead & Dangerous, meticulously crafting a plodding, mellotron-heavy march through the seven levels of Lovecraftian hell, as scored by a Machiavellian Ennio Morricone. This year he has produced another album in the form of Folklord, a free download on his Bandcamp. It is a idiosyncratic rendition of a bunch of 16 Horsepower songs, and plays out how you might expect – dark and desolate, with Wallace’s baritone front and centre. The forays into, and unabashed embrace of, doo-wop (haha) and country tropes on the likes of ‘Sinnerman’, ‘Beyond The Pale’ and especially ‘Single Girl’ are a delight – imagine Johnny Cash if he played his classics with Neil Young’s Ol’ Black distorted guitar – but its where the songs naturally roll into TSASG staples that are the most impressive. The one two Western Armageddon of ‘Hutterite Mile’ and ‘Outlaw Song’, and the spectral crawl and Ennio haunt of ‘Horse Head Fiddle’, are excellent. My favourite track though is the closer ‘La Rope A Parasol’ – it’s haunting as you would expect, but there is a euphoria imbued within that hints that Wallace might actually be having…fun? God forbid.

It is a download only release, and even so in this squirrelled away corner of the world - have at it. Their second album is on its way...

SONIC MASALA RECORDS PRESENTS: GHOST NOTES' MOONLIGHT STATE

Today is a special day, as we unearth Moonlight State, the sublime new album from Brisbane instrumental ensemble Ghost Notes.

Oppression takes many forms. Drudgery and alienation seem an ever-present. Sometimes overt, but mostly subtle; we bury ourselves under our daily practices.

Moonlight State is Brisbane instrumentalists Ghost Notes’ third album. Largely written and recorded during the same period as the band’s previous release, Hidden Horizons, the new album occupies an altogether different space to its twin. Where that record wandered through bright and distant open lands, Moonlight State is firmly set amidst the dim claustrophobia of our own backyard, while still reaching for an inherent beauty.

Littered with references to the humid, hazy shadows of their hometown’s recent past - none more deliberate than the title track - Moonlight State is an album for present history; for the return of ‘Pig City’, the soundtrack to the G20 and VLAD and unchecked political power. The single ‘Freedom Scouts’ furthers the theme, taking its name from a local survivalist militia, while ‘Split Solitary’ harkens back to the darkness behind youth spent in idyllic rural areas. Here are the murmurs from sun-beaten sheds looking out through rust spots in corrugated iron.

Moonlight State represents a musical end point for Ghost Notes. Designed from inception to be a long-term project, the band have reached their most dynamic and bombastic with this album. The music demands to explode and destroy, and yet even at its most unhinged Ghost Notes repeatedly turn inward. The band’s signature musical spaciousness remains, but their Morricone-meets-Bitches Brew instrumental rock moves in darker territories on this album, from melancholy folk eulogies to noise-rock freak-outs. Nowhere is this breadth of sound more evident than on the album opening ‘Vanishing Point’, a 13-minute epic that travels through starkness, Steve Reich-esque polyrhythms, Kraut-rock freakouts and Sabbath grooves before finding itself back where it began only with a newfound sense of triumph.


You can buy it now!!! Ghost Notes will launch the album in Brisbane on Friday December 5 at The Bearded Lady, with support from other excellent acts Danyl Jesu and Pleasure Symbols.

Chroming The Young

I am a massive fan of Austin reprobates The Young’s Voyagers Of Legend LP, which tore my face off in 2010 (it was one of our top albums of that year). That album was surprisingly on Mexican Summer - not a label that keeps tabs on this kind of viscerality - and was also their last one on there. Then my knowledge of their existence pretty much stopped right there. The quartet apparently brought out a follow-up album called Dub Egg, which I somehow missed. I'm scurrying around looking for it now...

But onward and upward. The Texans have a new album on Matador Records, and it's a balltearer. Chrome Cactus is sharper; harsher; leaner; sinister. There is a dropped-down drive that underscores this songs, which are then superseded by fuzzed out guitar solos a la Fu Manchu’s Scott Hill albeit with some deliberate restraint, and other abrasive effects like the squalling feedback stab on ‘Metal Flake’ or the the soaring synth that accompanies the “ballad” ‘Apache Throat’. The excellently-named Hans Zimmerman takes front and centre with his vocals this time around, and it lends an interesting counterpoint that is often overlooked in 21st century rock production – his voice is uninhibited by pedals, effects and nonsense distortion and delay, and as such stands somewhere between the monotone snarl of Girls Against Boys’ Eli Janney and the growl of Young Widows’ Evan Patterson. It helps the the sound has been tweaked by Tim Green (Nation of Ulysses/The Fucking Champs) in the blasted surrounds of the Sierra Nevada – definitely perfect environs for what transpires here - but you get a sense that Chrome Cactus may have landed at his feet fully formed. ‘Chrome Jamb’ has a narcoleptic undertone to its dry crawl, bent strings belying a Morricone hangover before bringing the doom; ‘Moondog First Quarter’ maintains the vitriol that has been missing from Black Mountain for some time. I still miss the darkness sewn into the Pixies-lite that littered their debut, but when the raucous drown-out that is the aptly-titled ‘Slow Death’ kicks in, closely followed by the feedback squall of closer ‘Blow The Scum Away’, the new Young is all that matters.

You can grab Chrome Cactus here. The Young play in NY tonight alongside SM faves Degreaser - get along.

Into The Plantagenet 3's Dark Ages

I salute to the dusty night with a desert-fried ode to the blistering heat and smoldering sense of retribution that is the tale of the dark Western. Plantagenet 3 has joined forces with A Little Orchestra to bring forth 7" The Dark Ages - Morricone would be proud. You can preorder it here.

Frozen Cymbls Rising

CYMBLS is a duo from Rome, Italy, and their release Farewell Said I Rising (out now through Upside Down Recordings) has absolutely floored me today. Reviews from the likes of Norman Records, Drowned In Sound and Rough Trade have been using liberal comparisons to the likes of Hype Williams, Ennio Morricone and Broadcast in their effusive adulation of the band, and I can especially see Broadcast in the hushed mantras that coalesce around the fifteen minutes here. I have to say though that the cover art perfectly encapsulates the frozen alienness of the soundscapes on offer here, the organ and disembodied vocals the only true anchors as the bass and percussion push further and further to the drop-off at the end of the world. Buy it here.