Clever Kewdi Nightmares

Brisbane noisy nihilists Clever burst out of the gutter a couple years ago, wiping the floor with blood-and-sweat-stained alacrity. They started littering stages in 2014, after I had left, and I quickly lined them up to last year's Sonic Masala Fest - an amazing set, one of my favourites across the two festivals thus far. Their visceral gurning and flailing felt brutal and new, at least in these parts - aside from the dour disintegration of Kitchens Floor and gnashed madness of Sewers, this is the kind of sound more accustomed to the diseased denizens of Melbourne mainstays like Cuntz, Mutton and others that spill from the feedtime wellspring. But it shouldn't be a surprise that such arced anarchy was born out of the melding of dark-matter minds from members Per Purpose, Psy Ants and The Wrong Man. And now they have locked horns with Homeless Records (Cuntz, Spray Paint, Yes I'm Leaving) for their first LP Kewdi Udi. First cut 'Your Eyesore's Sweat' may not be the deepest, but it is infected with acrid angularity and fevered spit. Pre-order this denigrated gem here - first 100 LPs are piss-yellow, of course they are.

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.

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.