I found this incredible songwriter only about a month ago when at a gig a friend told me how I would love this album because of our love for Springsteen Tom Joad era, but I was too entrenched in the volume of albums for the end of the year to give it a fair listen. When I was compiling my favorite albums for the year, I gave it another listen and immediately made a spot for it. It brought me back to the mission of this blog, to support new artists with incredible talent.
His gravel tested voice plays well with his honest and beautiful songwriting. Tracks like “Billy Burroughs” showcase his tremendous narration while “Time Away” is a straightforward and masterful ballad. There is not a dud on this album and we would be hard-pressed to find a better set of songs within this or any genre. Jeffrey Martinis the real deal and should be on any and every device you play music. I don’t know but in this life I believe we only get one go ’round- get ready to place this in the top 5 of 2017
NC/DC superghouls Bat Fangs pick up where Roky & the Aliens blasted off– cranking acid-soaked 80s hard rock for the living and the dead. Making heady heavy music for third eyes and stiff upper lips, Betsy Wright (Ex Hex) shreds ‘n’ howls over Laura King’s (Flesh Wounds / Speed Stick) deep-thunder drums. Let the Bat Fangs sink in!
Melbourne’s Slum Sociable are Edward Quinn (production, guitars, keys) and Miller Upchurch (vocals, percussion). The duo, currently touring their debut EP TQ nationally, are joined live by drummer Ryan Beasley and bassist Dylan Savage.
Edward Quinn and Miller are old friends, but started working together as Slum Sociable, A long time ago we were introduced by an old drummer in our band, I thought he [Miller] was the best singer I knew so I got him on those tracks.
It was never going to be released but we had someone pass away and we thought we’d honour his memory — he was the first person to hear these tracks, he was the first person we felt comfortable enough sending them to — we thought we’d release this body of work in his honour.
The name It’s a line from the Scorsese movie Gangs of New York, at that time I was obsessed with Daniel Day Lewis still am, I guess — he was going to the butcher at some stage and it’s kind of like an alliteration but it’s not really…it kind of sounded sticky. I just like those two words together, hopefully it doesn’t come back to bite us with “slum” being in it.
Zefereli (aka Alistar Richardson) is a DIY kind of guy. For the better part of four years, he has built his own recording studio just an hour from Brisbane where he has recorded, produced and mixed his own debut album entitled ‘All Players Played Well’, which was released last month.
Today, he premieres the video for newest single ‘We’re Going To Get There Someday’, which was shot completely on a Super 8 camera and features a number of cute dogs.
“We were walking past the op shops near where we live and found an old Super 8 camera,” Alistar says.
“It seemed to work! So we learned all about Super 8, experimented, searched the world for film, lost valuable footage due to our clumsiness and eventually put something together heartwarming and true to us. “We hope you love it. We filmed it all around Brisbane with friends and while on tour. The Super 8 became a little extension of ourselves.”
After separating from his former band and record label, Alistar became briefly disillusioned with music. His musical rebirth began partly due to his creative pairing with fellow musician, Clea who now often collaborates with Zefereli. “I met Clea and lightning struck. I heard her lyrics and her voice and I saw her unburdened by expectation and expressing herself in such a unique way… we have been inseparable ever since.”
“Tight, incisive, post-punk/retro-pop infused with a liberal dose of downcast catharsis, confessional lyrics and down-right infectious hooks.”
The first single from RVG’s debut album ‘A Quality Of Mercy’ released in October 2017 via Our Golden Friend / Island Records. The Melbourne-based band RVG’s latest single is a broadside at the people who leave ignorant and disrespectful comments under online news stories. You already know the type. The ones that leave you despairing for humanity and wondering who hurt them. On “A Quality Of Mercy,” vocalist Romy Vager (the band’s initials stand for Romy Vager Group), puts it simply: “Staring at the ceiling, feeling numb. Thinking of the readers of the Herald Sun.”
Her literate and witty lyrics, teamed with earworm melodies, call to mind both The Fall and Courtney Barnett. Together with her band mates, seen playing to an empty ballroom in the video premiering above, RVG creates a similarly idiosyncratic and knotty mix of hook-filled indie rock.
Vager explained that the song was prompted by a major news story in her home country.
“It was loosely inspired by the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in 2015 and how angry I was that a lot of middle class Australians thought that the death penalty for drug charges was a fair punishment. A lot of people were writing things like ‘Well if you do the time, you do the crime’ in the comments section of news articles. I wanted to challenge those dangerous right wing idioms and stress the need for perspective and empathy in what is very quickly becoming a much meaner world.”
It’s hard to believe that the band who came flailing headlong out of the gate with Golem just two short years ago is the same band behind Plum, one of the most thoughtfully dynamic albums to come out in 2017. The creative arch of the Los Angeles band is rooted in the grime-y sonic sludge of the Ty Segall/Meatbodies/Mikal Cronin set. It would have been fine to have regarded Wand as yet another good band living under the punk-y parasol of the neo-psych-garage revolution. But Plum has separated them completely from the fray. Plum runs like a playlist of rock ‘n’ roll offshoots, with experimentations in Led Zep riffage and Spoon-like piano-rock only the tip of the iceberg
Wand is a band from Los Angeles, California. Recordings available from Drag City Records.
This new one by Melbourne’s Ali Barter is only just the first glimpse of her just-announced debut album.
Having just premiered the track ‘Cigarette’ revealed details of a debut LP titled A Suitable Girl.
“It’s the beginning, it’s like the frustration,” she said of the new single. “There’s a [couple] and they’re having this relationship and in love. Then the first thing happens and someone gets pissed off and then it leads to the big fight. So it’s kind of like a third of the way in, it’s when trouble’s brewing.”
Having released several shorter EP records to date, but no full-length record, the longer format has allowed her to open up a little more – or perhaps it’s the opening up that allowed for more songs?
“I just wanted to be really honest about my feelings,” she told the hosts of the record, produced by Holy Holy’s OscarDawson. “I’ve done three EPs and I found the more that I did – produced things, explained things, covered things in metaphor – I didn’t feel I was saying things that are true to me. So with this album… I wanted it to be really natural and authentic.”
Ali detailed more of the record’s inspirations and writing process and you can check out the new lyric video below. If you’d like to hear this one live, and maybe a few glimpses of the rest of the record, Grab my debut album “A Suitable Girl”.
Cigarette
This song is about being overlooked. It’s about feeling frustrated for being treated like a piece of meat. I had been doing some writing with a producer in LA called Harlan Silverman. We wrote another song of mine, Far Away, together and I knew I wanted to work with him again. He sent me a demo of this song and I just loved it. I wrote some new lyrics and played around with the chords and it sounded great. I love collaborating with other writers. In a studio, in a living room, via email. It’s so fun.
One Foot In
This song is about someone who I thought was being a flake. I wrote it with Bertie Blackman and Thom Macken on the central coast of NSW. We made a demo in Thom’s living room. Bertie played the drums. I wrote the words. Thom was the producer. It was fun. This song is one of my favourites to play live.
Girlie Bits
I wrote Girlie Bits song in a beach hut in Goa. It was really hot. So hot that we had to stay inside most of the day. I went a bit stir crazy so thank God I had a guitar. I felt trapped on that holiday and I think that helped in the feeling of the song. I wrote the song in 10 minutes and made a demo of it on my iPhone. I still can’t believe it was in the Hottest 100.
Tokyo
This song is about a holiday I took with an old boyfriend. When I look back at this trip I see it’s kinda the moment it all started to fall apart. Tokyo is a really beautiful place but I found it so desperately lonely while I was there. I couldn’t find the words to tell this person how I felt and there was this sadness because I think we both knew the relationship wasn’t going to work.
The Captain
The Captain is about someone that I used to be really close to who I felt was losing his way. This person I had loved was becoming someone I didn’t understand and it hurt like hell. This song almost didn’t make it on to the album. We had demoed it up and I felt like it didn’t quite fit, but during The Jezabels tour last year we started paying it and it came together perfectly.
Light Them On Fire
I did some writing in LA with a wonderful songwriter called Sydney Wayser. We sat in her living room with her cats and talked about boys and wrote this song. We both felt like we had been screwed around by a boy in our life and this song just poured out of us. It was like therapy.
Please Stay
This song is an apology. I was being a bitch to my boy while he was on tour with his band. I was ignoring his texts and being passive aggressive and immature. It happens. Sometime you just need to remember to say sorry and try not to be an arsehole. I think that’s a good life motto.
Live With You
This song is about something that happened in my life where a person came into my world and disrupted my plans. I was so angry. It used to stop me sleeping at night and it really tore me up inside. I felt powerless. This one is fun to play live because we really get to thrash it out.
Delilah
This song is about my other self. The part of me that doesn’t give a fuck. She isn’t jealous or scared or threatened. I was channeling Bette Davis Eyes and Fleetwood Mac’s Rhiannon.
Far Away
I wrote this song in LA. I had been there for two weeks driving the freeway from one end of LA to the other writing songs with different people everyday. It was my last session and I was completely brain dead. I was at producer Harlan Silverman’s studio for two hours and we wrote the first verse and chorus. Then I had to leave because I was totally spent. I really had smoked too many cigarettes and drunk too much coffee. It’s a very literal song.
Walk/Talk
I demoed this song up with a musician called Jono Boulet. We were at a songwriting camp and had a studio to muck around in so I played him this song and we recorded it. I had also worked on this song in a session with Adalita. She came to my studio, I played her some stuff and we had a jam. She is a hero of mine from when I was in high school. I was a big Magic Dirt fan. I was pretty excited to write with her. I had to have a little lie down after she left.
On their second album, Toronto art-rockers Weaves tightened up the formula of their debut, adding pop-informed melodies to their fuzzy guitars and barbed observations. The jangly perfection of “Walkaway” and acoustic inoffensiveness of “Grass” beautifully signal this new direction, while the T. Rex-infused, oddball glam of “Slicked”—imbued with a heavy dose of bubblegum-snapping attitude from vocalist and songwriter Jasmyn Burke , She polishes up the best moments from their previous effort.
Weaves – Slicked Recorded Live: 10/17/2017 – Paste Studios – New York, NY
Taking a spiritual cue from the socially-conscious but introspective approach of Bruce Springsteen, Burke, Waters and company have plenty of vitriol to counter the step or two toward the mainstream. “We are living in a time where misery is just a comm on circumstance,” she sings on “Scream,” a fiery collaboration with Tanya Tagaq that takes on everything from body-image to reproductive rights—the stick beat and freak-out grunts reminding us that Weaves can still get wonderfully weird.
Weaves – Walkaway – 10/17/2017 – Paste Studios, New York, NY
Weaves – La La Recorded Live: 10/17/2017 – Paste Studios – New York, NY
Mysterium is the eighth album from Nashville’s ambient guitar duo, Hammock. While each of the group’s albums has been defined by a specific sound—minimal and uncluttered on Maybe They Will Sing for UsTomorrow, and nearly approaching conventional dreampop on Chasing After Shadows…Living with the Ghosts—on Mysterium, the band’s members Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson are just as focused on thematic unity in their lyrics. Grief and tension abound on Mysterium and, unlike the band’s previous offering, Everything and Nothing, the song structures and arrangements feel a little less straightforward. Instead, the new record plays like a requiem in both its tone and its sweeping scope.
That change is intentional. The album is dedicated to Marc Byrd’s sister, whose son died in 2016 from NF2, an aggressive tumor. Because facing tremendous loss can evoke silence, the album’s title, Mysterium, indicates the lack of resolution—a mystery. The album was created both in the midst of, and as a response to, Byrd’s grief; it’s in no hurry to arrive at any kind of well-meaning platitudes. “Silence is reverence, and space is reverence,” Byrd says. “And if there’s nothing else, there’s a sense of reverence in this record for life and death. The thing that captures that reverence is the moments between the notes.”
That’s not necessarily what the band envisioned when they started recording. Initially, they intended to make an electronic album that Byrd describes as “more in the vein of [debut album] Kenotic.” With the assistance of MattKidd (whose own project, Slow Meadow, records for Hammock Music), ambient electronic sounds open “Things of Beauty Burn,” the first song Byrd and Thompson recorded for Mysterium. But after the passing of Byrd’s nephew, the band felt it was inappropriate to continue in the same direction.
Multi-Task couldn’t be a more perfect name for Omni’s sophomore LP and follow-up to 2016 debut Deluxe. It’s the musical and lyrical equivalent of everything happening at once. With newly sharp production and even jerkier guitars than before, guitarist (and former Deerhunter member) Frankie Broyles, bassist/vocalist Philip Frobos and drummer Doug Bleichner create hectic but contained collages of young, restless, lonely, and broke twentysomethings overextending their way through life. Of special note is how much anxiety Omni can impart with so few elements. “Date Night” which chronicles the worries over an expensive romantic encounter, uses one guitar, bass, and a drum kit to successfully convey his mental state. “Tuxedo Blues” gets by on a pounding drum line and the album’s shrillest guitar work, Frobos’s bass again taking a backseat as he recounts a fairly eventful and stressful evening.
