PREMIERE - Winternationale Announce New LP With Eulogies

Sounds like a pun, but it isn't - it's 'Eulogies', the first track to be heard from Melbourne bass and drums post-punks Winternationale's upcoming album, out in the new year (it will also be out in 7" form on Almanac Recordings, with older track 'Shadows' taking up the back end). 'Eulogies' starts out slow and elegiac, a monochrome icebound soundscape, before the incessant, insistent drumbeat and bassline kicks into the fray. It becomes an altogether different beast, a metronomic purging of the soul, and bodes well for the future.

The band have quietly hewn their trade, offering a distilled ball of lightning to all those lucky enough to have caught their sets. They have laid low this year though, writing and recording (some of which was done in Brisbane at Incremental Studios - Cam actually introduced me to these guys' sound a few years back). The single will be available via datacard which will also include a mixtape, video clip and the first edition of the duo's bandzine Storm & Stress - all of which you can pick up at the Grace Darling Hotel November 11 when they launch it with support from the excellent Great Earthquake and Mares.

7/4 Days with St Augustus

Throughout the long Easter weekend here in London, we had some wild, predictably unpredictable weather. Friday was amazing and sunny; Saturday cool with rolling, sharp stabs of rain deluge; Sunday threatened to storm but gave a fine afternoon, before the heavens broke in killer winds; and Monday was a shapeshifter, taking in all shades, albeit at mildly more accessible climes. Which means I spent a lot of it inside. And the vast majority of that time was spent listening to Seven Days, the debut album of St Augustus, the solo guise of Brisbane entity Cameron Smith (Ghost Notes, Tape/Off, Tiny Spiders, Spirit Bunny).

And it is a true triumph years in the making.

He breaks the mould with the loose and raucous 'Always Ends', taking a GVB via Nova Scotia (one of the best little Brisbane bands to come out of the place in the past decade IMHO) fuzzed-out blast. But it is the still, sparse moments that have always resonated. Trouble outlasts with the devil in the chest on 'Limit, Limitless', a brilliant song that haunts as it stills the breath, shadows of Jason Molina in its shake-you-to-the-core mourn; 'Run Away' a folk-drunk dream about finding the special moments among the mundane of daily life which is draining as it is still grasping for the last gasp for something great with a capital G.

I don't know if I am supposed to find 'Candy' funny - its quintessential Cam, the maudlin realisations of past activities now being beyond/beneath you, a curmudgeon kicking out against the former self, with broken, sloppy elements that are almost grandiose in their Big Song longings and shaggy singalongs. It's a theme that echoes through another rollicking pop song, 'Afterthoughts'. Then there are small moments littered throughout that continue to resonate and haunt - the cascading effect in 'Walk Right Through' a synthetic comedown (that - dare I say it - reminds me of my childhood love of Richard Marx's 'Hazard'); the echoed backing vocals on 'The Goldilocks Zone'; the flatness of the recording and the musical saw permeating the Nick Drake-esque 'Song For A Windy Day', about being too young to know how to connect with mortality so close to home; the glockenspiel-like chimes underneath the Sparhawk evoking miniature 'Descending'.

By the time the heart-rendingly magisterial closer 'I Didn't Come Calling' comes to rest, I am in tears. Literally, tears. It's hard to explain - Cam is a dear friend, and knowing how much he has touched my and many other people's lives, both through his work and his quiet friendship, I know hearing this evokes a lot of personal emotions. But also knowing that someone I know so well put together such a awesome (in its truest meaning) suite of songs, with every timbre, note and emotion front and centre - I feel blessed to be able to be a part of it, just as a listener. I'll see you on the other side of the night. Please go pick Seven Days up - and pay for it.

St Augustus Never Ends...

Good friend Cam Smith has many guises - recording maestro with his Incremental Records studio, his stint as owner of the brilliant (and sadly defunct) The Waiting Room in Brisbane, and playing in a million bands, such as Ghost Notes, Tape/Off, Tiny Spiders and Spirit Bunny. He has his own stuff of course in the form of St Augustus - he is FINALLY releasing an album. First up is 'Always Ends', an uncharacteristically loud and boisterous, scuzzed guitar pop tune that is easy to get sucked up into. That crusty feedback at the end too - you can tell that Cam is loving strangling the shit out of that. A new album means some live performances - and St Augustus has some lined up for next month. Stay tuned...

Figures Taekare Of Themselves

Figures is a band from Brisbane that like their 90s guitar rock to be sparse yet dark, ruminative but destructive, maudlin yet cleansing. There are checkpoints across their three tracks on their Taekare EP (recorded at Incremental Records) that evokes Dinosaur Jr, Pedro The Lion (especially in the quieter moments of 'Figure Eight'), Sonic Youth...and another band enamoured with the blanket-bomb noise of shoegaze, Melbourne legends White Walls. I seem hardwired to dig bands that take the shoegaze noise aesthetic and give it a brittle edge, stripping away the dreaminess, even the dreariness, to lend it fire. Swervedriver had moments like this, to be far, but it seems like it's the younger bands that have found that serrating the fuzz and distortion gives new shadows to lurk in and burst out of. It's early days to be sure, but Figures look the goods.

The Eclectic Collection Of Currawongs

I can't suppose to know much about Brisbane band The Currawongs, other than Chris from Dollar Bar knows them. Their album Cracticidae came out late last year, and it's a shame I hadn't heard about this before setting the lineup for this year's Sonic Masala Fest - because I really really like this. The soft sepulchral instrumental 'The Return' is a wondrous opener, that bleeds into the atmospheric 'Lessons In Avoidance' with the crashing cymbals an exercise in foreboding. 'Having Fun Harms No One' is a thrashy bit of in-the-red noise, before the contemplative title track bleeds in, a lo(wer) fi Gaslight Radio with added debilitating distortion drowning out the subtleties - it's these deliberate acts of sabotage that bizarrely lends an further layer of intimacy. The accordion is broken out for the quirky Teutonic melancholia of ten-minute 'The Ghosts of Menin Gate' while the found-sound juxtaposition of a kookaburra and an aeroplane gives the right amount of bucolic apprehension to 'Off The Grid.' The dirge rock returns for 'The Elephant In The Room'; the shuffling gait of 'Hold You Back' is surreptitious in its atmospheric beauty and precarious balancing act, teetering magnificently in the last moments; a nihilistic drone fills out 'Department of Human Resources'; and then stumps are pulled with 'Duck Egg Blue', a rustic folksy outro that is as haunted by half-truths as the rest of the album. The drums are incidentally provided on the album by Cam Smith (Ghost Notes, Tape/Off, Spirit Bunny, Tiny Spiders, et al) who also recorded, mixed and mastered the album at Incremental Studios, while Adam Cadell (The Scrapes) lends his violin to 'Off The Grid'. It's eclectic, to be sure, but Cracticidae is a wonderful album that is in places quite stunning. The imperfections make it all the more endearing. Apparently The Currawongs have a second album in the wings - I cannot wait to hear it. Buy Cracticidae here.

Nothing Cult Of Death

Deafcult is a new band out of Brisbane who I hadn't even heard of before the other day - but considering it's a new project from Innez (Roku Music, Tiny Spiders, Feathers) and Matt Bach (The Quickening, El Motel, The Gifthorse), it shouldn't surprise me how bloody great it is. Taking the shoegaze shine of Roku and adhering it to the Nothing mould of post-hardcore ferocity, the tracks on the Deafcult EP (recorded at Incremental Studios) are incredible intense, sonorous, intricate and cathartic in their sonic expulsions. I'm blown away by how complete this six-piece already sounds - expect massive things from these guys this year.

Deafcult have a few good gigs coming up - they are supporting Pale Heads (alongside Deadshred and a rare show from the excellent Tiny Migrants!) June 20 at Trainspotters, as well as an earlier show at the Sewers fundraiser as that band prepares to assault the US with their excellent second album on the cusp of hitting the shelves (it's bloody killer) June 6 at The Underdog.

Getting Grieg On The Humpday

(Photo by Steven Schnorrer)

It's the middle of the week, and I'm keeping things decidedly Australian and heavy in this humpday. New band on the Brisbane block Grieg is ripe with hardcore knowledge and noisy neglect, and they have just announced that they finally have an album in the wings, recorded by Cameron Smith at Incremental Records and coming out in March. Named after the composer Edvard Grieg (but more likely named after the Grieg Funeral Home in seminal thriller Silence Of The Lambs, if I know Alex Gillies at all), the trio are taking all comers and ripping them new breathing holes - politely of course. And the acerbic wordsmithery of John Mercer shows no signs of slowing down if the name of the first taste of the album is anything to go by. Bring the filth and the fury - this sounds excellent.

Celebrate The End With Danyl Jesu

Here is a band that will be huge. I guarantee it. Danyl Jesu is an electronic metal outfit comprised of members of Brisbane acts O, Roku Music and The Rational Academy, and whilst it marries some of the dire spirals of darkness that the former band reside in, the four track EP Celebration is a new, blackened beast of a creation altogether. The brutality of 'Abandon' is the epoch of fury, and the synthetic whirr that winds things up to a coiled tension is a bubble that refuses to burst. The tension continues in 'Gathering' where the drums hold a metronomic death-call akin to My Disco's relentless meticulousness, and whilst the sonic squall at the halfway mark lets the air seep into the void for some much need catharsis, the vocals remain tortured and stressed. There are no guitars here - I repeat, no guitars. The distorted wave of noise is an electronic maelstrom, a melange of tapes and effects that inexorably bleed and bash into and through one another, becoming a transmogrified black mess of unadulterated id. Aptly titled closer 'Exhaustion' is a slow grind into the cracked earth, all efforts rendered useless. There is definitely a sense that the duo are still at the fledgling stages of their powers; still toying with the capabilities of the destruction at their disposal. They travel to the US in 2015 to record their album with Phil Elverum (Mt Eerie, The Microphones), a master at sonic tape manipulation - expect Danyl Jesu to fuse solid, liquid and vapour into one after that collaboration bears brutal fruit.

Pining For The Harshest Of Blackouts

Remember No Anchor? The brutalist Brisbane trio who reckon they aren't together much anymore? Donnie Miller records music and is in Sonic Masala-affiliated shoegaze band Roku Music; Alex Gillies cuts wood and is in metal throwbacks Greig; and Ian Rogers elocutes about music and plays in Shaking Hell. But Ian isn't done with flaying his vocal chords or our eardrums, as new side project Black Pines (joined by Rational Academy alum and the Pale Earth duke himself, Ben Thompson) attests. In the most obvious move yet from excellent outre outsider label Wood & Wire will take any risk, they have put out Harsh Out, six tracks of psych - but not as you know it. The duo want to scrape the underbelly of the 60s psychedelic dream with rusty knives, before diving straight in and letting the intestinal truth shower down. With comparisons of Bardo Pond, Boris, Swans and Unsane (circa 89-92) bandied about, you know that this is atonal obliteration of the most delicious kind. The red-eyed tint of a man driven insane by demons both without and within; swastikas etched through the skin, through sinew, through bone; nightmares real in Giallo Technicolour, an ecstatic mess, before spiralling into a pastiche of Korine-helmed dirt and Noe-driven madness. All done without preamble, without compromise, without apology. If you thought The Golden Bridge saw an upswing in Ian's temperament, with tongue embedded in cheek, then Black Pines is here to irradiate those memories beyond reproach.

As always, Wood & Wire are offering Harsh Out as a free download here. Let's hope there is some sort of physical release of this soon, yeah?

No Hidden Ghost Notes

It's been a little while coming - the majority of recording was cleaned up over a year ago - but local instrumental rock band Ghost Notes have hit us with their sophomore release, Hidden Horizons. Straight off the bat it's obvious that the five-piece have taken great pains to avoid the quiet/loud pitfalls of the genre, and how. Adopting other tropes - the dirge-doom riff emanating throughout the second half of 'Pinnacles'; the jazz strokes of 'Go Where It Takes You'; the organ that underscores 'Contrails Over Plains'  - Hidden Horizons is multilayered, multifaceted, multilingual. The beauty of music such as this is to indeed transcend language in its most basic form, taking us on journeys undefined, so that we are guided and offered solutions rather than bludgeoned, a square peg in a round hole. Luke McCallum's trumpet takes centre stage here, yet unlike the theatrical histrionics of a Warren Ellis he remains muted - aloof yet engaged, a regal presence at the centre of an unfurling evolution. Owen Dengate's guitar in these tracks has become more prominent too, yet not through sheer force or distortion, but through restraint. Jamie Curran's keys hold even more prominence here than they once did, and Cameron Smith and Simon James pin down the rhythm with a more natural rapport than on By Cover Of Night. That isn't to say that Ghost Notes' debut record isn't successful - it's bloody great - but the refinement and pure emotional heft that has been imbued into these tracks is frankly awe striking. Like Dirty Three at their most introspective or Crow with Fenton fading into the background, Hidden Horizons is able to strike at the heart with a feather just as devastatingly as when it all comes down a la the cathartic crash of 'King Wave'. All of these influences meld together for ten minute track 'Esperence', but despite its length it remains a regal statement, as rigidly restrained as it is warmly immersive. Only when the urgency of 'Melt, Bloom' hits do we get anything close to a true release - and yet it's here you realise that all of this meticulousness, all of this elegance, is only part of the whole - these guys are capable of having fun too! The temptation to topple into noisy cliche avoided, it's time to end on a effortless jam, soaring towards the sun - and this time Ghost Notes plan to learn from Icarus' mistakes.

You can pre-order Hidden Horizons here (as well as pick up the digi album for a pay-as-you-like endeavour) - easily the best instrumental rock release I've laid ears on this year. They are launching it on Sunday August 25 at Black Bear Lodge, and have rounded up a special group of friends in Turnpike and Roku Music as support. Talk about a special night - Ill see you there.

The Masala Before Time - The 4th Sonic Masala Presents... Show TONIGHT!!!

The Sonic Masala shows roll on, and tonight we delve into slightly more familiar territory. It's funny that I haven't put on a truly psych-entrenched band on until now, but Dreamtime are certainly the best band to open the account with. I was a big fan of their debut self-titled 12" last year, plus their slot in a Gin Club show around May last year was pretty special, so this will be a good show to catch. What's more, they are playing first due to work commitments (damn you Black Bear Lodge! Actually, don't - I like to blow money on White Rabbits when Im feeling like a Waylon Jennings vinyl fix...)!



Next up is The Maryettas, an outlet for Ryan Potter to present some of his sunnier tracks that don't fit the doom-laden goth noir stomp of Nikko or the elegaic instrumentals of The Scrapes. Normally in solo form, Potter tonight is joined by fello Nikko member Jackson Briggs and Brock (all the way from Goondiwindi no less! We drag in the big guns!) in what will be the world first electric performance! Special times indeed!



Then we have special guests Dingo's Baby (what a name), the "new" project from Dreamtime's Zac Anderson. Backing up from the earlier slot, Anderson and his cronies promise psych-punk-vomit-enlightenment (my words...). I have no real idea, other than to expect something special, regardless of what quarter of shambolism this one stumbles into. Could be the show of the night.

Closing us out is Ghost Notes, the eloquent instrumentalists that wowed all and sundry with last year's By Cover Of Night. They are playing witha truncated lineup, therefore offering yet another unique set. One of the members is The Waiting Room's very own Cam Smith, who knows this enue inside out, so expect the sound to be silky to the point of being invasive. Golden.




So come down. Once again it's at The Waiting Room, it's $10 and it's BYO. And hopefully it will be brilliant as the above artwork, done once more by the delectable Joanne Thies. This will be a great night!

PS The next night on March 23rd is yet another show on a very crowded Friday night, so we are going to strive for some special inclusions to drag you away from the other shows. Expect prizes, giveaways, maybe even a karaoke machine. Ill do what it takes to make you love me...

These Tiny Spiders Have Bite

Tying off the first day back in the saddle we have Brisbane sludge pop duo Tiny Spiders. Consisting of Cam Smith (Ghost Notes, Mount/St Augustus, runs Incremental Records and West End venue The Waiting Room) and Innez Tulloch (Feathers, Pastel Blaze, co-runs Nowhere Records and West End venue The Waiting Room), Tiny Spiders are simple, yet complex. Simple, because they play scuzzy as fuck guitar and rickety drums. Complex, because they are inherently pop. Result? Some of the rustiest, dirtiest pop sounds you are ever likely to hear. Which is something I inherently love.


Tiny Spiders have just released new single 'Shoot The Rainbow Rays Out' which is their tastiest slice yet, and have put it on record with three live cuts in what then becomes the Shoot The Rainbow Rays Out EP. The three tracks were recorded when they supported other local behemoths No Anchor during their 7-day squat at The Waiting Room, and the recordings are as close you will get to being at that performance without a revamped Delorean. Its great stuff. Get the EP here.

The terrible twosome are also launching said EP at the Alhambra Lounge in the Valley tonight for a tenner, and have roped in some stellar names for support, including Happy New Year (also spreading the love for her recent split with Nite Fields, that you can read about and hear in the previous post!!), Go Violets and Tangle.

Tiny Spiders - Shoot The Rainbow Rays Out

Brisbane Outfit Give Off Nihilistic Spirit

I posted a few months ago about an instrumental act from Australia, The Scrapes. We have seen some amazing acts come from their that really push the boundaries of sound (Dirty Three, Love of Diagrams, Because Of Ghosts), and it seems in my absence that this trend has continued. Another Brisbane band to stretch the sonic climes are Ghost Notes, a four piece intent on infusing jazz and folk compositions with post-rock melodrama. I don''t know much about them, other than they released an EP a while back at Incremental Records (which cane be found here), and are recording a debut LP - if the end result is anything like 'The Nihilist' though, consider me hooked.

Ghost Notes - The Nihilist