Move over, Boygenius, there’s a new super trio in town. Lemuria’s Sheena Ozella, Chumped and Katie Ellen’s Anika Pyle, and Cayetana and Gladie’s Augusta Koch make up the group that’s fittingly called Sheena, Anika, And Augusta. Their first foray into music together is a good deal softer than their emo-punk bonafides might suggest. They opt for a folky minimalism here to allow their three impeccable voices to take center stage, they sing in rounds with a bare-faced emotional honesty. “For Billy,” which closes Simple Pleasures, is reminiscent of Mountain Man, all three of them commiserating over a shared pain: “I cry so many tears I could flow down.”
A cappella folk from members of Cayetana, Chumped & Lemuria doing something totally different than what they did before.
I’m trying to find the right words for this release and what it means to me. There’s been a lot of music that has come through this garage label that started earnestly in the mid 90’s and though I love every record I’ve put out, there’s always favorites and then there’s this record by Sheena, Anika and Augusta.
First of all, when asked if I would be interested in putting out this record I said yes without any hesitation and without ever hearing a single note of what this would or could be. My thought was it would be some kind of indie punk project with hints of influences from all three participants.
What I received was so much more. I found myself putting on my head phones late at night when my family was asleep, listening over and over again for hours(this is only 8 minutes long) and hearing the power that music has on not just the musicians, but those who listen to it.
I don’t often get teary eyed when hearing songs, but this record really was a gut punch to my emotions. My love for doing this is unconditional, but sometimes seems fruitless. What are my motives, what are the artists motives?
This was 3 friends, healing together, embracing what they do best, and giving it everything they have. I’m in love with these songs and I can’t wait for everyone to hear them. I could care less if I made a penny on this record. I’m just so happy this exists for people to hear and I feel blessed today. Cheers to my friends SHEENA, ANIKA and AUGUSTA.
Taking inspiration from losing inspiration is almost its own songwriting genre. Angie McMahon can relate. The Melbourne-based singer-songwriter first made headlines in 2013 after winning a Telstra competition to support Bon Jovi, but having done the shows, she halted the momentum to evaluate the quality of her material and start again from scratch.
Pressure. It’s the uneasy bedfellow of perfectionism. And McMahon finds herself thinking about pressure a lot – its effect on her, and its effect on others.
“In the paper the other day I was reading about growing rates of depression in children and how looking after mental health has to become part of the school curriculum. I was like, ‘Yes!’” she tells Guardian Australia. Sitting in a Melbourne bar, she cups her face and doesn’t so much lean on the table as slump cooperatively towards the recorder.
“Without getting too personal, I’ve heard of two men I knew, who were really successful, and who were loved, who died from their depression. You just can’t imagine how different it might have been if they had known a culture from birth where you get to talk about that. It makes me so sad there’s that attitude of having to be closed off. I feel like the only way to help cure that is for me to be the opposite.”
Six years since she took time out, McMahon has just been awarded the Grulke prize for developing non-US act at the SXSW music festival and conference (an award previously won by Courtney Barnett, Haim and Chvrches) and is releasing her debut album “Salt”, which almost feels like a greatest hits, compiled as it is of her contenders for Australia’s largest national music poll, the Triple J Hottest 100, and the single Slow Mover, which was certified gold on the Australian music charts.
And yet, the lyrics of one single, Pasta, reveal the paralysis that still blights her. “I just sit in my house making noise for fun / And I’m not moving much / Or proving much to anyone,” she sings, languishing on a couch in the video, kept company by a sympathetic dog.
“I found it really hard coming home from the last tour,” McMahon says. “All I could think of doing was sitting outside in the sun and staring at birds and smoking cigarettes. It’s interesting to write about because it kind of gets you through it. It’s a form of productivity in the feeling of lethargy.”
McMahon doesn’t shy away from discussing the conundrum of the sensitive artist, under pressure to promote themselves while remaining authentically troubled. She recounts a recent conversation between two of her friends. One had remarked on how well McMahon was doing, securing lots of tour dates and international showcases. The other friend was concerned. “Yeah, but Angie is meant to sit in her room in the dark and write songs. She’s not meant for touring,” the friend said.
McMahon had long experienced elements of depression and anxiety, but as long as she stayed in her comfort zone, they didn’t flare up too dramatically. Then came the success and the touring, include much-coveted support slots with the Pixies, Father John Misty, the Shins, Mumford & Sons and Alanis Morissette. “I’ve probably had more life experience in the last year or two than I had in my whole teens. I was super-reclusive then, and now I’m out in the world. Welcome to my anxiety,” she laughs.
While McMahon’s guitar playing is accomplished, it’s her richly reverberating voice that is the obvious drawcard, whether in the more intimate folk numbers or a soaring track such as Keeping Time. It sometimes draws comparisons to Florence and the Machine, though she was reared on kd lang.
“I don’t know if the way I sing is technically very good,” she says. “In fact, one time I was talking to my friend Ainslie Wills about it. She’s a wonderful singer and she watched me sing, saying, ‘You put your tongue really far back in your mouth.’ Apparently that’s not normal, but I think originally I was trying to emulate kd lang and Tom Waits, and even Missy Higgins – there’s a low register to her voice that made her stories connect with me.”
Growing up in Fairfield in inner Melbourne (the kind of place commonly described as “leafy”) with her three more rambunctious siblings, music became McMahon’s particular corner. These days, people are uploading their own covers of McMahon’s songs to Instagram and tagging her. She feels awkward enough trying to represent herself on Instagram as it is. “I don’t really know what to do,” she squirms. “I just ‘like’ them. I’m just like, ‘Good’.”
Themes of anxiety, identity, mental health, and the human condition run throughout. The album’s 11 songs – which include singles “Mirror, You’ve Got Your Whole Life Ahead of You Baby” and “Brown Sugar”– are consistently intricate and intimate, but draw from a multitude of influences, reflecting the multi-instrumentalists’ diverse tastes.
To understand the symbiosis that exists between IDER, you need only learn how the London duo’s debut album got its name. “It came from a song that I had written,” says Megan Markwick, referring to the raw electro-pop anthem ‘Saddest Generation’, a beautiful examination of millennial malaise. “But then Lily had put in that lyric – ‘Where’s the emotional education we’re all looking for?’ And it was a penny drop moment. It’s such a perfect example of the way we work, this partnership that is all entangled.” “Emotional Education is what we give each other,” adds Lily Somerville, “and what we’re going to give you with this album.”
Alt pop duo Ider released a stunning debut album in 2019. Lily Somerville and Megan Markwick know how to stop you in your soul-searching tracks. By the opening song, you know Ider just gets it. They get every little thing you can’t quite put your finger on, and they put their whole hand on it with each lyric lifted by every beautifully placed alt-pop beat.
In April, Jade Bird released her self-titled debut album. This album is the perfect example of Jade Bird’s astonishing talent and unique perspective. She proves that stripped down can be powerful, and genre is not the law. Pair it with a shot of whiskey and an ex-lover on any night of the week.
Jade Bird is fast becoming one of the most exciting new British voices. With her debut release the ‘Somewhere American’ EP and 2018’s follow-up breakthrough single ‘Lottery’, Jade has won the hearts of people across the globe. She has already preformed on ‘Later with Jools Holland’, ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ and ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’
One of this year’s highlights arrived early in 2019 in the form of Sundara Karma’s sophomore album “Ulfilas’ Alphabet”. The structure of this album fully grasps the listener and takes their hand to take you on an adventure, where Oscar Pollock talks you through his thoughts and feelings on the world we live in.
‘One Last Night On This Earth’ is taken from the upcoming album “Ulfilas’ Alphabet”.
Tash Parker is a visual artist, songwriter and musician from Tasmania. Her artistic practice is centred around collaboration with musicians, visual artists and technology artists to curate multi-sensory experiences for her audience.
I’ve become so accustomed to viewing Tash Parker as a folk artist that I was completely blindsided by ‘Can’t Keep Waiting’, the debut single from her new electronic art-pop project Parker.
A delicate and airy intro gives way to heavy percussion and nuanced synth layers that swell and retreat with remarkable precision around Parker’s tender vocals.
Not good enough for you? Well, turns out Parker also a gun at video art, and the accompanying clip, co-directed with Jaymis Loveday, has been cleaning up on the international awards circuit. Leave some talent for the rest of us.
Post Pink embrace the doom-and-gloom. Across eight tracks, the Baltimore band is concerned with empty spaces and how to fill them adequately, but it’s like trying to hold water in your hands. Or as they put it on the opening track: “Eating air to feel full/ Breathe your air back into me, but there’s a hole in my lungs that won’t contain it.” The songs are wiry and tense, but they leave equal space for cutting barbs and warm melodies, delivered with a razor-sharp sincerity.
Two years ago, Guerilla Toss leader Kassie Carlson underwent open-heart surgery to remove a blood clot that had formed as a result of opiate addiction. “What Would The Odd Do?” is where Carlson and the rest of the band confront that near-brush with death. It’s one of the most concise and overpowering examples of the chaotically beautiful psych-dance sound that Guerilla Toss have been perfecting over the last few years, expertly constructed songs about the struggle to get clean and the wonder of seeing every day life through sober eyes.
Guerilla Toss returns to NNA Tapes with a brand new EP, ‘What Would The Odd Do?’, an exploration into new territories and an expansion on their recipe for twisted, addictive rock & roll mania: fried funk, damaged dance, and cosmic cacophony. Fans of 70’s prog and rock greats like King Crimson and Todd Rundgren as well as modern torchbearers like Sheer Mag and Deerhoof will be joyfully united by GT’s uniquely familiar world of wonder and excitement.
For Kassie Carlson — singer, songwriter, and bandleader of Guerilla Toss — What Would The Odd Do? is unarguably the group’s most personal release in their impressive history as a music-making collective. Carlson has found a new joy in life. She has since cleaned up for good, moved to Upstate New York with her partner and GuerillaToss drummer, Peter Negroponte, and has never felt more inspired.
Kassie Carlson is a true poet of punk, the voice of an unheard generation, the leader of The Odd. Few people have been through what she has, and making it out alive is just the beginning. With her band of musical misfits, Guerilla Toss is an unstoppable force of nature.
Dry Cleaning came together in a somewhat atypical way — three musicians who’d already been through the ringer with failed projects, finding their spark with a front woman who had no musical experience. That’s also what makes them special, with Florence Shaw’s deadpan-then-vicious spoken word delivery adding a new twist on Dry Cleaning’s gritty post-punk. Her lyrics come from stray details and overheard conversations and YouTube detritus — the jumble of a mind in an era of too much information and too many stimuli, the outpouring of it all ultimately making Dry Cleaning somehow therapeutic.
For anyone looking to get a quick sense of the vibe of the bracing debut EP from the London group Dry Cleaning, vocalist Florence Shaw provides a tip right out of the gate: “During what was probably the longest two-and-a-half months of my life after a near death experience, I could not sleep/…The only thing that kept me going was Saw 2.” Dry Cleaning—emphasis on “dry”—use bleak humor and acid sarcasm as a way to cut life’s thousand tiny indignities down to size. You have to be a sharp writer to make this kind of withering wit work, but fortunately, Shaw is one of the sharpest. When a date goes south and Shaw returns from the bathroom to discover her would-be partner has ghosted, she offers, “I thought you liked me, but maybe I was just a captive audience. You did seem a bit bored when I was talking.” In “The Magic of Meghan” (which certainly appears to be about a member of the Royal Family, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions), Shaw tartly observes, “Never has one outfit been designed to send so many messages/ Earrings to empower women/ Bag that helps charity/ jeans made in Wales/ Cruelty-free coat.” Come to think of it, that line may be appreciative rather than cutting, but that’s one of the things that makes Shaw’s writing so good—it’s beguilingly difficult to read.
The band surrounds her verse with the kind of jabbing guitars and lockstep rhythms that defined their home country’s post-punk years, bands like Delta 5 and the Au Pairs. Shaw would probably hate that comparison—but I bet she’d write a killer song about it.
A 4-CD set, “Only After Dark” chronicles Mick Ronson’s peripatetic solo work during the rest of the seventies after his split with Bowie, with his two albums “Slaughter On 10th Avenue” and “Play Don’t Worry” joined by B-sides, alternative versions, outtakes and a plethora of unissued-at-the-time studio recordings (including a handful with Guam, the backing band for Bob Dylan’s legendary 1975 Rolling Thunder tour) and various highlights from his live shows. Featuring some rare photos and a lengthy new essay on his Seventies career, Only After Dark is the most comprehensive anthology to date of a major talent.
