It’s getting harder to draw a common thread through the music coming from Jack River, with chugging indie tunes, bubblegum pop and crunching grunge all receiving even billing on her debut album, “Sugar Mountain”. But while that record was fixated on the past and dreaming of the future, Later Flight steps into the present, marrying bright, dance-pop production from Styalz Fuego with lyrics that espouse the giddy rush of falling in love. The drums seem to be shamelessly nicked from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs indie classic Gold Lion, but that only makes Later Flight all that much better.
The best songs exist as their own self-contained worlds, planets that seem out of orbit with everything else. “Finally” is one of these rare tracks, a slow-burning mood piece that evokes hazy, half-remembered dreams, snippets of memory, thoughts that pass by and disappear like clouds. Tom Snowdon’s voice is a singular, haunting instrument that holds focus as the instrumentation washes in like a slow-motion wave. Finally is the connective tissue that binds their two-part Islands project, and fittingly for its title, has been announced as the last song No Mono will release for a while.
Recorded at Pieater’s BellBird studio in Melbourne, the album came together over a three-year period, mostly in Melbourne, but pieces sketched all over. It was entirely written, recorded, produced and mixed by Tom Snowdon and Tom Iansek.
“Islands” brings the previously separated “Islands part 1” and “part 2” together in a whole state, and includes the previously unreleased track ‘Finally’, which helps close the “Islands” chapter.
“Islands” the culmination of years of songwriting and performance, and draws from broad influences including Snowdon’s upbringing in the remote desert town of Alice Springs and his relationship to central Australia. It also oozes Tom Iansek’s boundary-pushing production.
No Mono’s music explores and is inspired by the emotional and other-worldly. “Islands” is a record about transition through crisis and sanctuary.
The back half of “Islands”(originally released as “part 2”) serves to complement and expand on the haunting first half. The BPMs are increased, and the energy at times borders on frantic, but there’s also a swagger. Percussion is used to bewilder – at times frantic, scattered or glitchy. Snowdon’s vocals are less tender, as he battles to find connection and empathy. Yet despite the eerie energy, there is always an alien beauty to the whole, and ultimately a faith in keeping hope.
Deluxe Islands vinyl is now available – it includes all songs on parts 1 and 2 and bonus track ‘Finally’, which we released this week. Our “Islands” records were always meant to be two parts of a whole. They’re together here with some new art by Tom Iansek.
“I have to feel kind of worthless again to want to make music,” Kevin Parker said of the long gestation time between the forthcoming Tame Impala album “The Slow Rush” and 2015’s world-beating “Currents”. While the dreamy introspection of Parker’s past music treats the passing of time as a man-made construct, recent Tame Impala output suggests he has been thinking a lot about the subject of late. Patience, the first of his three 2019 singles, extolled the virtues of waiting around, but It Might Be Time flips the script, seeing him obsess over friends growing up and moving on, realising he isn’t as young as he once was. “Nothing lasts forever,” he sighs as if just realising this truth, while a prominent synth swings from side to side like a pendulum – or is it ringing out like an emergency siren? Either way, there’s an urgency to this track that we’ve yet to hear from Tame Impala, and we’ve got all the time in the world for it.
Band Members
Kevin Parker – Guitar / Bass / Drums / Sing
Jay Watson – Keys
Dominic Simper – Guitar / synth
Cam Avery – Bass
Julien Barbagallo – Drums
When they first came to prominence, the DMA’s copped a lot of Oasis comparisons, mostly due to Tommy O’Dell’s Gallagher-esque sneer and the band’s penchant for dressing for the Manchester mist rather than the Sydney sunshine. But over the course of two albums, it has become clear that they are closer in sound to other Northerners like the Verve, the Stone Roses, and the Charlatans – bands that deal in chorused-out guitars, peeling melodies and baggy beats – with the odd strum-along to break things up. Silver is a tender tune, a shimmering summery song that straddles their Preset-produced second record, and the heart-on-sleeve balladry of their debut single Delete. Of course, anyone with enough guitar pedals can approximate a classic sound, but top-shelf songwriting and O’Dell’s ringing bell of a voice means that DMA’s stand alone, despite the many comparisons.
Our new album ‘For Now’ is out now. Includes the new singles ‘In The Air’, ‘Dawning’ & the title track ‘For Now’.
Cable Ties are a fierce, tense rock’n’roll trio from Melbourne, Australia. They take the three minute punk burner and stretch it past breaking point to deliver smouldering feminist anthems. Jenny McKechnie channels her struggles into songs that resonate deeply, giving voice to feelings often buried in modern life. Shauna Boyle and Nick Brown are a rhythm section anchored in Stooges primitivism – relentlessly hammering out a bedrock for McKechnie’s guitar pyrotechnics and vocal wallop.
The band has been committed to an inclusive feminist and political outlook since its inception in 2015, exploring issues of gendered violence, colonialism and sexual assault.
Their debut self-titled album, released in 2017 on Poison City Records, was a Triple J feature album in Australia. The band toured UK/Europe in 2017 supporting Jen Cloher, and played Punk’d Festival in Berlin. They returned to the UK in May 2019 to play The Great Escape and shows with Tropical Fuck Storm and Amyl & the Sniffers. Cable Ties have supported artists such as Joan Jett and The Kills.
“It’s a love song, but it’s about killing an immortal Nazi witch… so, I don’t know.”
Gareth “Gaz” Liddiard is sketching out a broad roadmap to “Maria 63,” the closing song on Tropical Fuck Storm’s sophomore album Braindrops. The “Maria” in question is Maria Orsic, an immortal Nazi witch who communicated with aliens via telepathy and was absolutely, positively real—at least to some far-right conspiracy circles. “She got plans for space propulsions engines from aliens telepathically, and she gave them to Hitler,” he says over the phone from his home in Victoria. “In the end, she was spirited away to Aldebaran, a planet a few light years away.”
On “Maria 63,” things turn out a bit differently: In disguise as her own daughter, Orsic flees to Argentina with the rest of the disgraced Nazis, and spends her years in exile until she’s assassinated by a Mossad agent posing as an interviewer; the violent conclusion is contrasted with repeated allusions to “Ave Maria,” that universal signifier for purity and devotion. It all adds up to what Liddiard declares, with pride, “the most convoluted love song in history.”
This devious sort of mindfuckery lays at the heart of Tropical Fuck Storm (or TFS for short), the psych-rock project Liddiard co-founded alongside his partner Fiona Kitschin in 2017 after their old beloved band, the chameleonic art-rock outfit the Drones, went on hiatus. With drummer Lauren Hammel (of Collingwood extreme-metal outfit High Tension) and guitarist Erica Dunn (who also slings riffs for the indie-punk outfits Palm Springs and Mod Con) in the ranks, Tropical Fuck Storm technically qualify as a supergroup. To that end, elements of their collective back catalog crop up on both Braindropsand its 2018’s predecessor, A Laughing Death In Meatspace: Hammel’s militant drumming, Dunn’s bristling, post-punk-inflected fretwork, Liddiard’s sardonic drawl, Kitschin’s piercing alto. But TFS’ was a chimera incubated in the dystopia of the here and now: a group reaction to all the environmental destruction (a subject Liddiard and Kitschin are very familiar with as survivors of the 2017-2018 brush-fire season, the worst in Australia’s history), inept bureaucrats, and fascist insurgencies plaguing the globe.
“The first album is more political crap going on, more didactic shit,” he explains. “With this, I wanted to make an apolitical album—which is impossible. I structured most of the songs about being love songs. Whether they’re reliable or unreliable as a narrator, I don’t know. In the end, they end up being political and weird.”
That so many of their romps center around obscure conspiracy theories (consider the aformenetioned “Maria 63,” orA Laughing Death In Meatspace’s “Shellfish Toxin,” which is all about how the CIA gave fighter pilots decoy coins laced with a lethal shellfish toxin so that they could commit suicide if they were captured—allegedly) only buttresses their thesis further: in a post-internet, post-truth world, who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t?
“I find there’s a parallel with dadaism,” Liddiard explains. “That was all between the wars back in the early 20th century, and shit at that time was getting really ridiculous. The real world was so outrageously crazy, so satirizing it didn’t work. How can you parody Hitler? How can you parody Donald Trump? You can’t out-stupid stupid. Now we’re back at the same juncture, I guess, so it’s more of a dada thing. Instead of pointing out something going wrong, you just ape the shit out of it. We’re just dealing with the weird and ridiculous.”
Brisbane-based duo Amaringo release their debut album, “I Woke Up This Morning After a Dream”, out via Melbourne label Healthy Tapes (Stella Donnelly, Rainbow Chan, Dianas).
The project of drummer/vocalist Allie Wu Lin and guitarist/bassist Christian Driscoll,Amaringo create expansive and woozy atmospheres with tinges of psych that never stray too far away from their ambitious and beautiful songwriting.
Fragmented between writing and recording half of the album in a recording studio, then a year later completing the rest in a more improvised fashion, the resulting record is a startlingly consistent and accomplished piece of work. From the acoustic strums of the 70’s-inspired I Woke Up, to the major-minor drones of Saguaro, and the 7-and-a-half minute monumental Her Way, the album has no shortage of timeless moments sure to appeal to fans of La Luz and Sharon Van Etten.
Amaringo’s debut LP I Woke Up This Morning After a Dream is out October 30th digitally and on limited cassette via Healthy Tapes and features the singles Sacred and Her Way.
Bad//Dreems were born during an Adelaide heatwave in the summer of 2012. The band who have a loose new wave-cum-rock ‘n’ roll sound influenced by ‘70s Australian bands such as Coloured Balls and US bands such as Devo, Television and Wipers.
Their 3rd album,‘Doomsday Ballet’ is due for release October 18th 2019, which was recorded in Adelaide with production from Burke Reid & Jack Ladder. Live wise, the band have toured extensively in Australia and abroad, appearing at Splendour in the Grass, Falls + Laneway festivals, and supporting acts such as At The Drive In, The Avalanches and Cold Chisel.
It is this world, constructed or not, that Ben Marwe (vocals, guitar), Alex Cameron (guitar), James Bartold (bass) and Miles Wilson (drums) attempt to capture. A sound, which draws from the Australian underground of the late 70s and 80s, while also taking cues from US indie outsiders like The Replacements and Wipers. Mundane meets morbid; the humdrum meets the horror; nostalgia meets nightmare. Big dreams meet bad dreams.
After three self-released singles, Kelso (the new project from Camp Cope bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich) has just announced a debut EP ‘Always A Godmother, Never A God’ to be released October 4 via Poison City Records. Lead by the dreamy single ‘I’m Okay, Life Goes On, I Don’t Mind’ the new EP was produced, mixed & mastered by Jo Née at 3BS on Darug / Gundungurra land in Kelly’s home state of NSW. Kelso’s self described ‘cute weird songs, for cute weird people’ weave together moody lo-fi/ indie pop with gentle hooks and tales of love, homesickness, loss always searching for those meaningful little connections in life.
A year ago, Melbourne musician Grace Cummings started playing her own songs armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. She has since fascinated local Melbourne audiences as she sings simple and honest songs with a powerful recklessness. Within a year she has shared bills with the likes of J Mascis and Do Re Mi as well as a breakout performance Boogie Festival. Her very first collection of solo songs will be released by Flightless Records in late 2019.
Grace comments ,A little while ago I started playing my own songs and writing more and more of them.
I went over to Jesse Williams’ house and recorded a bunch of solo songs in an afternoon… These have become my first album.
I am lucky enough to have it put out by Flightless Records who are the absolute coolest. The album ‘Refuge Cove’ comes out November 1st.
The Fat Angel Sings 