Within each of their records, the Australian duo creates a universe of its own. It has always been hard to pinpoint a word that describes the sound of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang without losing their mysterious charm. Their fourth album “Venus in Leo” was inspired by the Melbourne indie scene and shows the duo in a better state of mind than 2014’s Psychic 9-5 Club, which was heavily marked by the suicide of original band member Sean Stewart. On Venus in Leo, HTRK approach the topics of our digitalized society. The lyrics focus on longing, intimacy and failed love within the age of social media. Similar to its predecessor, the interplay between Standish’s unique vocals and Yang’s guitar play is unlike any other electronic/ indie duo.
There’s a certain level of intimacy and warmth delivered in both lyrics and melody, that will draw the listener into the world of this album immediately. The duo discovers its underground rock past on the nine tracks of the album, delicately mixing electronic productions with post-punk references.
Even though you can sense a certain degree of romantic denial and shattered hopes, there’s a bit of hope peeping out of the overall melancholic atmosphere that lies within the tracks. In a wonderful and decelerated manner, Venus In Leo explores the abysses of desire, obsession and intimacy.
Album #2 from Melbourne surf, soul, garage punk rock band Money For Rope is called “Picture Us” and was recorded, produced, mixed and mastered by the band themselves in a house by the sea in Victoria, Australia over the summer of 2016. Spawned from the same fertile Melbourne music scene which has fostered not only Courtney Barnett, but also other friends including King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, The Goon Sax and Rolling Coastal Blackouts Fever, Money For Rope released ‘Picture Us’ off the back of a dogged touring habit which has kept them on the road near constantly for the last four years.
The psych-tinged garage rock of Money For Rope is right up my alley and not only because the opening track of Picture Us sounds like the younger sibling of The Doors’ epic ‘The End’.
Hold’ might not be the song I would have chosen to open the LP because it feels more like a noisily melancholic show-closing track, however the ‘Actually’ seems the perfect single to set the tone for the following journey. ‘Have you ever slept this close to a killer?’ lead singer Jules McKenzie snarls with a mean grin before the untamed guitars crash down. It conveys the band’s signature wild and careless attitude towards songwriting (and their listener’s eardrums). This track, “Actually”, was the first track written for this record. We started it staying in a small Air BnB flat in Berlin owned by someone who worked for a music products company; there was an upright piano in a beautiful first floor apartment in an old building. We could spend our evenings in the middle of a hot summer heat wave playing battery amps and piano with the windows wide open listening to the sounds of Kruezberg below. We would wander around the city late at night, wondering how we became fortunate enough to be here, when the secret to ourselves was, just that we had always wanted to.”
‘Earl Grey’ is built on the mellower side of the river, while ‘Stretched my Neck’ beats down with more heavy guitar riffs.‘Trashtown ironically light mood and groovy riff reminds like something born by the Californian Coast line mid-sixties.
The fuzzy haze that draws itself through Picture Us should come as no surprise considering the band’s base in seaside town, Melbourne. While the instrumentation is beautifully noisy and untamed, the vocals form the epicenter of the compositions. Punchy lyrics and punky snarls remind of The Talking Head’s David Bryne and we all know they go just too well with groovy instrumentation.
The closing track might come as a surprise to many. Only voice and guitar it almost sounds like an intimate campfire setting with friends. Somewhere strolling along the beach that connects the present with the past are where Money For Rope’s winds blow from.
Band Members
Julian Mckenzie – Vox/Guitar/Sax
Rick Parnaby – Keys/Telephone
Erik Scerba – Drums/Tambourine
Chris Loftis – Kazoo/Drums
Ted Dempsey – Bass/Laser Printing
“Picture Us” is set to be released March 2019 on German label Haldern Pop Recordings and Australian label Cheersquad Records & Tapes, with distribution in the UK by Forte & in the US by Cobraside.
Elizabeth’s debut solo album, “The Wonderful World Of Nature”, is everything. It. Is. Everything. She sings of desire, infatuation, and heartache with unnerving honesty and openness. The language Elizabeth uses is straight-forward and unembellished, and it’s exactly this which makes her songs so poetic and affecting.
The first time I heard Elizabeth sing “I want you in every way. You don’t treat me nicely and I’m scared I’m gonna stay,” on “I Want You,” I doubled over, both physically and emotionally. In 2018, the frontwoman of Australian rock outlet Totally Mild released Her, an album that brilliantly unpacks the bittersweet, socially convoluted journey of domesticity and the lack of a blueprint for it within the context of queerness.
Her debut solo album, The Wonderful World of Nature, is its crushingly honest divorce counterpart. In a world that’s lacking many queer divorce albums at all, to hear one as honest and mind-bogglingly raw as this is a transformative treasure everyone should experience.
The Wonderful World Of Nature plays like a 11-stage gauntlet of post-breakup emotional grief; the path to moving on isn’t a straight line and might never end. Song-to-song, and often verse to verse, the winding line of grief makes its presence felt. “If not with you, then with who?” Elizabeth nearly howls on “Beautiful Baby,” the gently rocking first track, which gives way to “Parties,” a song about how distracting yourself with partying leads you to wondering if your ex is out doing the same, which, in turn, makes you miss them more. “Death Toll” is a slow march about the ways a break-up can leave you devastated, but also finds Elizabeth lamenting, “I will never be the same happy” after saying “It’s over baby, there’s nothing more to say.” The next track, “I Want You,” has Elizabeth softly singing over a piano, “You don’t treat me nicely, and I’m scared I’m gonna stay,” capturing layers of self-loathing, lust, and regret in a single line. The Wonderful World isn’t a bible for how to get over a breakup, but it feels more honest than breakup albums usually are; it’s never just a “fuck you” and it’s never just an “I wish we were still together.” When two people collide, they break up in unpredictable, awful, restorative ways.
The Wonderful World of Nature released Universal Music Australia
Melbourne garage punk greats just released their first album in nearly a decade. It’s finest moment is “Like a Comet” featuring its nagging descending main guitar riff that then rips open like Love’s version of “7 and 7 Is” when it’s too late to brace for impact. Like that space snowball crashing into our atmosphere, Eddy Current Suppression Ring are back, right when we need them most. While its members have been busy playing in other bands, Australian garage rock greats Eddy Current Suppression Ring have been largely inactive for years now. Their last album was 2010’s Rush to Relax, and their last single arrived in 2011. Today, the band quietly announced that a new album is out before the year is through. It’s called All in Good Time and it’s out on December 13th.
“Like a Comet” · Eddy Current Suppression Ring from the album “All in Good Time”Castle Face Records Released on: 2019-12-13
New Zealand’s Sarah Mary Chadwick first made a name for herself as the singer/guitarist of the grungy band Batrider, but she’s been pursuing a solo career since 2012 and her fifth solo album, “The Queen Who Stole The Sky”, is a triumph like few others. Sarah, who normally plays guitar or keyboard, was commissioned by the City of Melbourne to perform an original piece on the Melbourne Town Hall’s 147-year-old pipe organ, the largest Grand Romantic organ in the Southern Hemisphere. Sarah Mary Chadwick has always been an artist who goes ‘all-in’ emotionally, and on this album, she’s playing the hand of her life.
The first time we heard some of the songs from Please Daddy was in St Paul’s Cathedral. Chadwick was on the organ, solo, hidden away behind the pulpit while her howls echoed off the arches. Listening from the pews these tracks sounded like a natural extension of her last album, The Queen Who Stole The Sky, which was written on Melbourne Town Hall’s 147-year-old grand organ. The sparseness and the weight of it all was overwhelming, in a way.
On record, Chadwick feels closer. Her backing band have returned – Geoff O’Connor and Tim Deane-Freeman on bass and drums, Hank Clifton-Williamson and Joel Robertson on flute and trumpet – and the snare-heavy percussion and lilting flute especially add a lightness that makes you remember that Chadwick’s explorations into mortality and grief aren’t meant to be cold. Life’s a bitch and you die every day. You can’t ignore it, but you can’t let it crush you either.
The organ sound is ENORMOUS, and the songs are just superb. Her voice arches with the aching power of Bjork and the frail grace of Neil Young. It’s an overwhelming listen, with the emotional heft of of a Gorecki symphony. It’s an albums that renders pain, beauty, grief and joy into a singular, rolling wave.
Let it wash over you and take you where it will.
That piece became The Queen Who Stole The Sky, which was recorded live and then turned into Sarah’s new album. It’s a concept that would be interesting even if the album wasn’t that fun to listen to, but it is fun to listen to. It manages to have both the accessibility of her earlier work and the pure uniqueness you would expect from a project like this.
On this album, I keep coming back to thinking she sounds like Amanda Palmer meets Bjork, and it’s rare to even hear someone attempt sounding like that, let alone pull it off as masterfully as Sarah Mary Chadwick does. I’d like to think that comparison is at least enough to make you curious enough to listen (if you haven’t already), but this is not really the kind of album you can compare to other artists anyway. Like Amanda and Bjork, Sarah Mary Chadwick is a true original on The Queen Who Stole The Sky. Not only did she have the technical skills to pull off this task, she was able to come out with a personal, emotional album in the process. The pipe organ is a grand, majestic instrument, but The Queen Who Stole The Sky still sounds intimate.
A new patron saint of sad girls, Elizabeth is a glamorous tragic, a queer pop anti-heroine holding a curtain of glittering melodies and catchy veneers over ugly truths. “Parties” is a sparkling, slowburn sad-banger, an exorcism in excess, and an awakening. Channelling the energy of Marissa Cooper dumping her banana lounge into the pool, ‘Parties‘ is messy, glamorous, and demands your attention. The Wonderful World of Nature is made up of pop songs that leave a lasting mark; they bruise and linger. Tasked with building out the world in Elizabeth’s deepest imagination was producer John Castle, who now adds Elizabeth to his roster of collaborators alongside Hatchie, Cub Sport, Jack River and Vance Joy. Operating with an absolute absence of ego, together Castle and Elizabeth succumbed to their purest pop whims.
Cable Ties are frenetic lead lines tethered to a hypnotic rhythm section. They take the 3 minute punk burner and stretch itpast breaking point. Suddenly the garage rock gives way as primitive boogie, kraut and post-punk take things way out to the horizon.
We are all over the moon to let you know that we’ve joined the family at the remarkable Merge Records. We have long admired their journey from bedroom cassette-dubbing syndicate to beloved independent icons. We made a little playlist of our fave Merge bands to celebrate – https://www.mergerecords.com/cable-ties-sign-to-merge Couldn’t ask for a dreamier bunch to work with on our future releases to the big wide world.
Our first love – Fitzroy filth-rock factory poison city records – is still our home here in Oz & NZ.
Fusing riot-grrrl energy with an unmistakable garage-rock urgency, Cable Tieshave gone far beyond a well-kept Melbourne secret and have long since evolved into a national treasure. The power trio deliver brisk drums, churning bass and piercing post-punk guitar to meld with vocalist Jenny McKechnie’s defiant, resonant vocals and lyricism. Describing the end result as “smouldering feminist anthems,” the band’s must-see live show has endeared them to audiences both nationally and internationally.
The single, “Tell Them Where to Go” is out now on Merge Records
2019 has unequivocally been something special for Daddies, wheather for better or mostly worse. Arguably the least Freudian of the bunch came from Melbourne’s Sarah Mary Chadwick (whose full-on “Daddy” album arrives early next year), which is preceded by the release of a title track written at first as a letter to both mama and daddy about the songwriter’s struggle with depression and the prospect of suicide, and later, yeah, as a bit of an Elektral complex deal. As always, Chadwick’s commanding voice takes center stage, with a rich orchestral backdrop supporting her booming vocals before they’re reduced to smoldered submission at the hands of yet another big and strong Dad.
First single from Sarah Mary Chadwick’s new album, ‘Please Daddy’. Out January 24 on Sinderlyn Records.
Charm of Finches are sister “dream folk”duo Mabel and Ivy, from Melbourne, Australia, They create angelic harmony-laden chamber-tinged folk for the famished soul. Influences include First Aid Kit, Agnes Obel and Sufjan Stevens.
Charm of Finches are Mabel and Ivy Windred-Wornes
All songs written and arranged by Charm of Finches
except track 10 written/arranged by Charm of Finches & Cian Bennet
Mabel: vocals, acoustic guitar, cello, piano, electric guitar, ukulele
Ivy: vocals, violin, banjo, glockenspiel, piano, guitar, ukulele
Cian Bennet: vocals & trumpet on track 10
Dan Witton: double bass on track 7
Nick Huggins: electric guitar on track 8 & tinkly piano on track 10
Don Walker is one of the greatest chroniclers of the Australian music experience. His vast catalogue of lyrics was recently set out in book form like the poetry it always was, while his tales of complicated love and downtrodden battlers still ring out from every RSL jukebox and bad covers act. But every few laps of the sun, Walker decides he just wants to write a fun song, tongue firmly in cheek, metaphors left on the shelf. Getting the Band Back Together is one such song. With a chugging rhythm section, plonking bar piano, and Mossy and Barnesy trading lead vocals, this is vintage Cold Chisel, just without the urban decay or wide expanse of the country. Walker has promised a lot more depth on the forthcoming album – dark songs and ballads aplenty. With Cold Chisel recently announcing a huge run of 2020 dates, this playful slab of rock is a perfect first single, and marks a very welcome return.
Touring nationally in 2020. Cold Chisel Blood Moon Tour ‘Getting The Band Back Together’ is the first single from Cold Chisel’s new album Blood Moon.
The Fat Angel Sings 