Aural Australia #4 - Endless Loop

More Australian releases that are killer - some of these have been around for a while, but the never ending cycle continues...

I have been a fan of Perth based artist Lower Spectrum for quite some time, and his latest offering, the EP Inverse, is another slab of pure arctic synthesis. Three remixes (from LUCIANBLOMKAMP, Rioux and Satori) are bookended by two originals. The opener is the longest and most impressive of the two, 'Atlas (Movements I & II)', an ice melody that ebbs and flows with incremental serenity, an ambient soundscape that disappears into the terminal tundra to return, beats race, a night-time hypnotic state. Its groove is invasive, a nebulous being that locks in and doesn't let go. 'Oracle' on the other hand, is an literal riot, a gangs in the street trance lit by homemade flares and disillusioned anguish and rage.

From this we move into a different territory (in fact Lower Spectrum is very much the odd sound out in this post, although it has been what I have been listening to most in the twilight hours). I Heart Hiroshima are back! The mid-00s Brisbane mainstay went into hiatus as the trio did their own things (Martyr Privates, Rick Fights, Sullivan). But 'Fifty Three' is a great return to the fold - a more brooding, solemn take, treated like a resurgence, a renaissance, a rising from the flames of iniquity and anonymity. Not that the single players have stayed in the shadows, but their mastery of the liminal spaces of the musical landscape has left them with weightier crosses to bear. The earnest approach doesn't dull the IHH formula, but hones it. Can't wait for more.

Melbourne dark psychers ORB have followed in King Gizzard's footsteps with latest release Birth having been picked up by Thee Oh See's US label Castle Face. They have the heavier end of psych wrapped up - like Black Sabbath has been run through the kaleidoscopic deep fryer. But there are elements that are in keeping with John Dwyer's cracked gimlet gurning - the whine, whirl and cowbell of 'Reflection', the spaced spazzoid flares and '50s sci-fi trashed outliers in 'Birth Of A New Moon', the crunching groove aligned with paisley psych vocals in 'First & Last Men'. The 16-minute incinerator 'Electric Blanket' is the blasted cherry on this dazed cake.

Witch Hats have been a pretty underrated band in the Australian musical wilderness. They have morphed over time from a gnarled horror anarchy to arbiters of angular anxiety. Third album 'Deliverance' sees a shift again, the desolate cover art mirroring the untethered anguish and dusted dystopia that the quartet pour forth. It fits into a niche collection of Australian Gothic working-class malaise and outlier grotesquery that have become one of the strongest bastions of Antipodean sound for the past decade (others include the likes of The Drones, Harmony, The Spinning Rooms and Nikko) and deserves a far wider appraisal. START NOW.

Solid Effort have released this single 'Too Far Gone' in preparation for a full length release next year. It's a languid, almost blase sojourn into a hazed jangle epitomised by light heads and heavy lids, beers half full and the sun on the shoulder of the horizon. There is so much potential with this band.

The Ocean Party/Osborne St collective just keep spewing forth bands, don't they? Pregnancy is the silly, sultry half-sister of the brood. 'First Kiss' has that 80s in the 21st century gossamer sheen, the female vocals floating in through a Vaseline-smeared soft focus shot of bay windows with billowing white curtains, band members wearing a costume composite of David Byrne, Kenny Loggins and ABC. It's smooth, funky and chockful of hooks that you can imagine the band all looking at each other with grins plastered across their faces, in awe of how really really ridiculously good these sounds are. The fourtrack tape is out now, and the rest of the songs are great too - while I like the seductive yet simplistic New Wave primitivism of 'Society', you can never beat Slim Dusty - I recognised the man's melody before I even twigged that 'Biggest Disappointment' was indeed a cover of one of his classic tracks.

Finishing off with Church of Christ, a decidedly different taste from Lachlan Malone (Danyl Jesu, O). The loose garage punk distortion and broad as fuck Australian drawl echoes from the likes of Coloured Balls and Feedtimes of yore to the Drunk Mums and Straight Arrows of now, although more guttural and weird, and is added serious weight by Donovan Miller in the recording studio (Audio Nowhere, No Anchor). But it's the blood spatter guitar strum and flayed chord howl within the laconic beer chewing braggadocio that puts these songs right up there - and with titles like 'Song of the Year' and 'Greatest Song Alive', they sure know it.

PREMIERE - Soda Eaves Announces 2nd Album Murray, Darling

Like Drapes Either Side, Melbourne songwriter Soda Eaves' debut album, was one of my favourite records of 2013. It's the kind of experimental lo-fi  introspection that echoes well after its finished, plucking at the mind, an eloquent thinkpiece on 21st century urban existentialism, rooted in Australian Gothic ruminations. Soda Eaves (AKA Jake Core) is a restless rambler - when I first met him, he was travelling up and down the East Coast of Australia playing songs, working and playing shows where he needed cash. His lyrical complexities extend to poetry - he has a few books kicking around the place, all of which take skewed looks at the mundane and the sublime happenstances of life.

Murray, Darling is the follow up LP. It was recorded in the beautifully stark environment of the Atherton Tablelands; again feeding into the melancholy state that SE finds so evocative. His hushed vocals on tracks like 'Benny & the Jets', the stuttering, muffled percussion, the crackling-AM-radio guitar, all combine to create a flickering pastiche of pockets of life - writing songs about writing songs, about the sunset's hue as it hovers above the searing bitumen, about how a song hits the ear and transports to another place, someplace clearer, greener, before dropping you back into the banality of it all. There is a hushed fragility throughout Murray, Darling that is nonetheless imbued with a steely resolve, an intelligence that locks onto these nuggets of ingenuity and beauty amid the daily malaise and minutiae of life and makes it his own. Everyone needs to wade into these waters and be made clean.

You can pick up Murray, Darling on limited edition vinyl through Brierfield Flood Press in Australia, and Fluff here in the UK. Soda Eaves embarks on a national tour of the album later this month - the dates are below.

17th Brisbane - The Junk Bar w/ Feeding Fauna & Mark Zian

21st Melbourne - Polyester Records w/ Tayutau

22nd Melbourne - 471 Brunswick St w/ PiO, Yffer & Truly Holy

23rd Hobart - The Grand Poobah w/ Walt & Mess o’ Reds

24th Hobart - MONA

28th Canberra - The Front w/ Dog Name & Alphamale

29th Sydney - The Record Crate w/ Joseph Liddy & T.S.H, Betony Dircks & Adam Gibson

30th Thirroul - Franks Wild Years w/ Alan Wearne & Solid Effort

Opening Up The Milkk

Sydney instru-mentalists Milkk have blown me away with new EP Open Signals Cast. Why? Because I haven't seen them play bar a show in Sydney in some bar in Surrey Hills in late 2013, and their fare was intoxicating in a more homogeneous, nebulous way - there was a warmth in their oddness that I embraced. That has been dissolved over the past couple years, replaced with a serrated fecundity that is just as intoxicating, just a far more jagged a pill to swallow. Take double edged bookends ' - 'Dadadada' and 'Hear The Toad' - the former a Don Caballero-shadowing sense of deconstructed turbulence, the latter a rambunctious and euphoric rouser that ebbs and flows in intensity to a tetchy frisson imbued with American Football-esque parallels of warm meditations. There are elements of the contemplative mists permeating from 'Garden of Earthly Delights', a beautiful elegiac meander that frees up the freneticism, and is all the more breathtaking because of it. Out through No Safe Place (Beast & Flood, Solid Effort), Open Signals Cast is bloody great. Too much Milkk is never enough. Get it here.

Hits From The Box #117 - Baby Matches

I started writing this edition of Hits From The Box months ago - yeah, most Sundays I'm pretty hungover. I had a few drinks last night too, but started earlier so got home earlier. It's about time I toughened up, ay? It was a baby shower I attended, so you know, not the toughest of events to be espousing a hangover for. Still, who cares, let's get onto the bands...

An obvious kickstarter then is Exeter gloss pop punks Shit Present. Although my present for the baby was a Fisher-Price old-school telephone, so I think I get the benefit of the doubt there... Anyway, their self-titled EP is a buoyant set of tracks, but the one that grabbed my attention was 'Melbourne' - a self-deprecating, barbed and cruisey slowburner at odds with the harder-edged songs bookending it. Turns out that Shit Present features an ex-Smith Street Band member. Small world, ey? They head down to London December 7 to play Power Lunches with a bunch o new bands - worth checking out.

To Sydney now, and another apt band name appears in Solid Effort. The boys love their Australian roots and the idiosyncrasies that lie therein, and have crafted a sound that holds the warm insistent charm of the likes of The Cannanes and Tasman brethren The Clean (especially on 'Bloodstream Corrosion'), while embracing more menacing shades of chagrin as noted on 'One Loose Wire', which struck me as Paul Kelly covering Mere Women. Such opposition comes to its truest fruition with the razor-wire implosion 'Automatic Wives', a tetchy, twitching punk spew. The Woody Guthrie cover is fun and eloquent, while closer 'Wrong Answer McFly!' is prescient due to Back To The Future II's anniversary, but also becomes a parallel universe jam, Protomartyr paring things back to trawl last year's King Gizzard output and pass off the skewed results for Mikey Young to give it his special tweak down the seam. All in all? A bloody exciting opening gambit. See them play in Sydney at the Union Hotel this Thursday alongside another exciting band, Nun of the Tongue.

Musical chameleon Spencer Radcliffe embarks on his own with Looking In, an album rife with pastoral, starry-sky-at-twilight introspection coloured at the edge with quirks and quarks, taking left-field instrumentation and field recordings and meshing them with these softly-woven compositions to create something mesmerising and ebullient. Formally/also known as Blithe Field, Radcliffe offers a restrained and strange antidote to those still mourning the yawning gap that Elliott Smith has left, while imbuing his tunes with Doug Martsch pop subterfuge and David Bazan level lyrical weariness. You can buy the sexy Looking In LP (in either sea blue or burnt orange vinyl) here.

How New Yorkers Cold Sweats aren't huge yet is beyond me. Admittedly the trio have only been around for a few months, but the brutal downward spiral of their debut LP Social Coma is a mash of Pissed Jeans devilish contempt, Black Flag punk nihilism and Protomartyr lurching self-loathing. This kind of noise is always going to pique my attention, yet a band that can thrash and howl with the rest of them can then launch into a disturbed soulful crawl in 'Mock Me Gently' that early Merchandise made their own before they disappeared up their own arses, puts them at the top of the damaged pile.

As if I could go past a band called Weddings. Like the similarly singularly-monikered Shopping, the London quintet are deft at punching out sharp, angular and fun post-punk morsels. Having previously graces stages alongside Protomartyr (third time they've been mentioned this post, weird...), Ought and Free Throw, Weddings are likely to be gracing more than nuptial dancefloors in the near future...

Polyon is a fuzzed-out rock trio that like to build their sonic waves in brooding increments. They have just released Blue, a four-track EP on Funny/Not Funny Records that evokes Hum, Unwound, and Built To Spill in its best moments, and is over far too soon. Don't worry, if you are Stateside you can catch the Washington band smashing out this and more as they launch Blue around the traps - they play Brooklyn's Shea Stadium tonight.

Toronto's The Tailbreakers can see us off today. The garage psych rockers have just brought out their self-titled album through Ongakubaka Records, and coming from this stable you can be rest assured its a reliable, unabashed slab of throwback, wah-heavy, woozy groove goodness - a time capsule of 60s guitar rock and pop frenzy. They don't make em like they used to - unless you're like this, of course.



Happy Sunday everyone!