At times, Quivers‘ songs seem to emanate from the best college radio station of the 1980s: Sam Nicholson’s songs swoon and jangle with sounds of The Chills, The Go-Betweens and a dozen other Australasian bands in that vein, not to mention the radiant echoes of The Kinks. Nicholson wrote Quivers‘ new album, We’ll Go Riding on the Hearses, in the aftermath of his brother’s death. But he channels his grief into brightly rendered songs like “You’re Not Always on My Mind,” which exudes a cocktail of nostalgia and celebration.
The debut album from Quivers, “We’ll Go Riding On The Hearses”, is an album about road-trips with ghosts, loss, memories and hard-fought optimism. Originally released on hand-made cassette tapes, this album crept under my skin and made itself comfortable – this is half the reason I had to start a record label, in order to help share this with more people. I’m proud to re-release this record on 12″ vinyl, as the very first LP on the Hotel Motel imprint.
Released May 22nd, 2018 Quivers: Sam J Nicholson (songs, guitars, piano, harmonium). James Woodberry (bass, acoustic, sings). Michael Panton (guitars).
Adam D’Andrea (drums, sings).
New single released 20th February 2019, on Hotel Motel Records
There’s a low, gritty, bluesy rumble to Angie McMahon’s dramatic, poppy rock and roll — at times, she sounds like a one-woman reincarnation of Fleetwood Mac, which is a pretty lofty goal to set for yourself. In “Keeping Time,”McMahon has fun with sweeping shifts in volume, seemingly fading out until she hits a rousing chorus and unleashes a whoop worthy of her classic pop-rock forebears. At that point, the windswept drama of it all seems to transport her to another era entirely.
The Melbourne-born singer-songwriter is touring the United States for a run of shows that includes a date with Pixies in Tennessee, backed by a new two-track EP, A Couple of Songs, out March 7th on Dualtone Records. Videos for both of those songs — the already-released “Keeping Time” and the brand new “Pasta” — are premiering they make for a perfect showcase of McMahon’s gifts as a songwriter and vocalist.
“Pasta” is the standout though, an undulating rock song that McMahon says is “about feeling really tired, trying anyway, and wanting to rock out like Springsteen.”
That video has McMahon playing a show to (and sort of with) a pack of dogs. “When I needed to make merch for my first tour, I spent so long freaking out about it, worrying that it wouldn’t look cool and I wouldn’t be able to design something that felt genuine,” McMahon. has said “The day before it was due, I quickly scribbled this picture of some dogs lining up to go to a concert (dream come true). I got to the tipping point where I let go of the pressure and just did whatever felt good. This music video is a kind of adaptation of that. The gold star reminds me of being a kid and having encouragement, getting a tick of approval or whatever, but the adult version that I’m learning is that you just have to encourage yourself and not wait for other people to do it. And if you can’t make yourself feel awesome, dogs might make you feel awesome. It’s a reminder to go outside.”
Both of these songs will be on Salt, her debut full length, due out later this year.
Amyl and the Sniffers are Amy Taylor (vocals), Gus Romer (bass) Bryce Wilson (drums) and Declan Martens. They formed in Melbourne, Australia in early 2016 and wrote, self-recorded and released their debut EP, “Giddy Up”, all in a span of twelve hours.
Their second EP, Big Attractions, was released in February 2017 then re-released as a 12” double EP with Giddy Up, through Homeless Records in Australia and Damaged Goods in the UK. Both PBS FM and Triple R FM in Melbourne made the record ‘Album of the Week’ and the band went on the sell out multiple Australian headline shows. 2018 saw limited edition vinyl copies of Giddy Up/Big Attractions fly off the shelves, pushing Amyl and the Sniffers into the Top 40 on the UK Vinyl Charts.
The band made their international debut at The Great Escape festival in May followed by sold out shows in London, before flying out to the Los Angeles to join King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard on a 22-date tour of the United States.
Return trips to both the UK and US followed later in the year, where the band played to packed houses and rave festival reviews.
Chapter Music welcomes Sweet Whirl, aka Melbourne artist Esther Edquist, to their roster with this six song EP , Love Songs & Poetry introduces Edquist as a master of smoky self-analysis, casting a sharp eye over blurry situations and dissecting hazy mornings-after with wry resignation. Using her bass guitar as a singularly expressive lead instrument, Esther imbues bleak moments with space, mystery and romance. The Sweet Whirl band includes drummer James Vin- ciguerra from Total Control, and Liam Barton of Laura Jean and Gregor’s live band, who also recorded the EP.
Esther’s previous band Superstar released two albums of delay-drenched pop on the Bedroom Suck label. She also released a tape of no-fi solo bass and vocal recordings on experimental label Nice Music in 2016.
With Love Songs & Poetry, Sweet Whirl emerges into a world of fully fledged songcraft. The EP’s six songs illuminate questionable life choices, revealing the beauty and glamour lurking within.
“With music this soft on your skin, small acts of rebellion feel big.” – The Guardian
“Beautifully melancholic and ethereal” – Lost At E Minor
“This might not be music for fucking but it could be music for thinking about making love” – Who the Hell
Jen Cloher is a highly respected recording and performing artist and co-founder of Milk!Records.
From the artwork of the album down to the songs themselves everything about this album is soaked in drama, What makes “Dead Wood Falls” so fantastic is its simplicity. It combines honesty and minimal folk styling’s to explode a wonderful collection of songs that showcase a very disciplined artist. Every song is carefully crafted and placed on this album to give a continuity that is vital to helping you the listener connect to all of the stories being expressed.
..it’s hard to believe this album was released back in 2006, but then again a classic album is by definition timeless. There’s a certain simplicity to this album – despite all the bluesy, country and rock touches, it is Jen Cloher’s sombre and poignant vocals that pierces the blackness that hold the listener enthralled…”
The albums seventh track “Rain” is a highlight and an example of the Jen Cloher magic. The song itself flirts with that storytelling tradition but the song doesn’t slip into the cliché’s that often come along with that creative template. There is still a healthy dose of fiction acting as the safe place for the real hurt of this piece of communication to be buried so that you get the perfect mix of personal pain and metaphors. Regardless of all this scientific dissection the fact remains that the song “Rain” has a powerful dialogue capable of cutting you deep and hitting you directly. When you hear those lyrics you know that Jen lived every inch of them and like all of the classic songwriters of our time it connects to your story and helps give light to both the confusion and conclusion needed to discover that brand new start.
Autonomy can be damn frightening. The realization that arrivies after a breakup, before a solo move, following a graduation, etc.—that you’re actually in this thing alone and it’s only you in the driver’s seat can leave you feeling scared silly. Or it can leave you feeling high on independence and excitement. Julia Jacklin’s “Crushing” is a striking search for self, a call to upend that which tethers you down. But it’s also rooted, deeply, in a sense of calm.
The Aussie songwriter’s ability to process emotion is out-of-this-world sharp, and this album is her best, most piercing work to date. This album “Crushing” can change from melodic balladry to anthemic rock at the drop of a hat. And for its entirety, Jacklin, slowly gaining cred as one of the most underrated singer/songwriters working, basks in a newfound clarity. Crushing is the brave story of a woman, and an artist coming into her own. Securing that agency, however, was no walk in the park. Jacklin clearly had to sort through mountains of wreckage to arrive here, but the album’s autobiographical nature is what makes it so affecting. Jacklin has said, and in writing it, she realized “how not very special” she is (evident in “Body” as she sings, “It’s just my body / I guess it’s just my life”). But in recognizing the non-exclusivity of her experiences, she made something singular.
This video for “Pressure To Party” (directed by Julia and Nick Mckk) features Julia and her siblings, plus a guest appearance from Body Type.
Julia Jacklin performs “Don’t Know How to Keep Loving You” for a World Cafe Session with contributing host, Kallao. Recorded live at WXPN Studios in Philadelphia on 1/23/2019.
Hatchie is the world of Harriette Pilbeam. Step inside her mind; a dreamy landscape where cascading synths, jangling guitars, propulsive rhythms and white noise undulate beneath irresistible pop melodies. Rather than focusing on the external world of her life in Brisbane, Pilbeam turns her gaze inwards, making a soundtrack out of her daydreams, setting her emotional life to song.
‘Without A Blush’ is taken from Hatchie’s debut album ‘Keepsake’ out June 21 on Double Double Whammy, Heavenly Recordings
Australian band Gang of Youths have been getting both critical and commercial acclaim Down Under with an absolutely fantastic second album, ‘Go Farther In Lightness’, leading them to sell out pretty much every venue they play in Oz. for some reason their success doesn’t seem to have reciprocated over here in the UK akin to how successful DMAs have been, but recent radio play for their single ‘Let Me Down Easy’ is sure to bring them to the attention of the wider public.
The first music I heard after landing in Austin was a cascade of metallic-guitar harmonics, cut into declarative power chords and shot over breakneck hard rock as if Mogwai had taken off at the speed of Blue Öyster Cult. Then singer-guitarist David Le’aupepe took the noise to a higher plane of debate with his earnest, preacher’s cry in “What Can I Do If the Fire Goes Out,” an anthemic knockout from Go Farther in Lightness, Gang of Youths’ second album and an award-winner in their native Australia last year. The band was founded in 2012 in Sydney, where members were attending an evangelical church, and there was an air of the early, brazen U2 in “Atlas Drowned” and “Just Say Yes to Life” – but with more guitar-drums bedlam, razing feedback and sly classic-rock touches like guitarist Joji Milan’s Queen-like skids in the latter song. Gang of Youths played another, longer set the next evening, opening up their songbook and spreading the firepower. But there was a striking sense of hurry and mission to their four-song day-party blitz at Sidewinder, as if their lives and our spiritual fates depended on the connection. Le’aupepe introduced “Just Say Yes to Life,” with a reference to his father, who is ill with cancer. The singer spoke about the fear of impending loss and the inspirational lesson that has come with it. “He lived a life and said yes,” Le’aupepe declared. “So don’t fuck around. Just say yes.” The music followed with affirming force.
Music video by Gang of Youths performing Let Me Down Easy (Audio). (C) 2017 Mosy Recordings under exclusive license to Sony Music Entertainment Australia Pty Ltd
The 80s influences have once again be ramped up on The Paper Kites 2018 album “On The Corner Where You Live”, but their folk roots are still there to be uncovered.
“Our hotel window in New York City looked straight into the apartment building across the street. You could see all these windows lighting up and people getting home from their nights out. We just sat there and watched them. It was fascinating. It was living art.”
Sam Bentley, frontman for The Paper Kites spoke of the moment the album’s concept clicked together. “It’s a collection of stories about these characters all living in an apartment building; I wanted to capture moments, feelings, it’s about people and their stories,” he says of On the Corner Where You Live (released September 21st via Nettwerk Records), the Australian band’s melancholic, mid-tempo companion to the recently released album, On the Train Ride Home.
Give them your tired, your lonely, your lovesick, your unsure, The Paper Kites have a song for each of them. “I created a world based on the idea of watching other people, but a lot of the songs are extensions of myself or people I know,” he says.
Such artistic insight has earned The Paper Kites (which also includes vocalist Christina Lacy, guitarist Dave Powys, drummer Josh Bentley and bassist Sam Rasmussen) a loyal, organic fan base. In the eight years since they formed, what’s followed is an impressive reach of their music, with steady international touring, nearly 47 million combined YouTube views and over 260 million streams on Spotify.
On the Corner Where You Live wafts evocatively with noir-ish saxophones, guitars, ambient traffic, even the languid sound of rain. Its levitating and bittersweet, heavy-hearted stories that are resoundingly universal.
Expanding on the group’s acclaimed second full length, 2015’s twelvefour, Sam says “I’m still very much drawn to the late nights and the sound of them: rich, honest, compassionate music.” The group originally planned to release On the Corner Where You Live and On the Train Ride Home as a double album, but decided to split them up due to the difference between the tracks – “We had these earnest, minimal, almost acoustic songs and these bigger songs you hear in On the Corner Where You Live. Like two sides of a coin, it’s the same feeling, just different expressions of them”.
The Paper Kites co-produced On the Corner Where You Live with Grammy-winner Peter Katis at his studio in Connecticut – a 120 year old victorian era home that the band lived and recorded in for 5 weeks.
On the Corner Where You Live’s opening instrumental “A Gathering on 57th” bridges the gap between the two records, the first thing you hear is the sound of the train running along the tracks and a street busker wailing into the night. The albums’ concept came to Sam while on tour – “It came from watching people really, being in unfamiliar cities, observing other people’s lives. I remember the band was staying in a hotel on 57th street in Manhattan and we’d come home from wherever we’d been. Our hotel window in New York City looked straight into the apartment building across the street. You could see all these windows lighting up and people getting home from their nights out. We just sat there and watched them. It was fascinating. It was living art.”
“Give Me Your Fire, Give Me Your Rain” takes over from where On The Train Ride Home left off. Josh Bentley’s punching drums making a statement that the record is a slightly different affair from the quiet solitude of the previous offering. A lush sonic tidal wave of midnight melancholy sets the tone of longing, loss and hope echoed through everything that follows.
The band recorded the Manhattan street noise from the window of their 57th street hotel, adding it to the lilting meditation “Midtown Waitress,” Sam tells the story of being alone in London bar years ago, where an elderly woman who turned out to be a pianist for the ballet scribbled down a melody on a piece of paper, gifting it to him, naming it “The Encounter.” During the recording session, Sam dug out that piece of paper, transforming it into a woozy, sax-based coda to “Midtown Waitress.”
“Music is so much more purposeful and devastating when it makes you feel exposed,” says Sam. Take “Deep Burn Blue,” a song about a girl who won’t leave her room. “It’s that feeling of being so inside your own thoughts that it’s debilitating.”(If that weren’t gutting enough, the song even references Nick Drake with the line, “You like the sound of a pink moon cry/Lying on the floor as the day goes by.”) Its foil is “When It Hurts You,” a harmonic lament about a man, locked-out of his apartment, making phone calls and yelling apologies from the street below. Says Sam; “You’re hoping the next morning things will smooth over, but you know it probably won’t.” Sam wrote 30 songs across three months. “It certainly consumed me. I was exhausted by the end of it,” he says, “I didn’t stop writing until Christina told me I had to stop.”
Christina Lacy takes lead vocals on “Mess We Made”, her first lead song since the bands debut album. Sam says “I remember we had planned to have her singing lead vocals on the last record (twelvefour) – but our producer at the time felt it sounded as if she was just singing my songs and wasn’t making them her own – so we decided that if she was singing on a record it had to be songs that she’d written and had an emotional connection to, and she did just that.”
Authenticity is important to Sam, who penned many of the lyrics for both albums while on the road, composing both albums in Melbourne. Amongst his many influences – film played a part. “I had films playing on the wall of my studio: ‘Lost In Translation,’ ‘Rear Window,’ ‘Lost Highway’,” he explains. In that vein, he wrote the piano-based track “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind” while working at a cinema.
Immersed in an aural diet of blues and jazz, “I was also listening to these ’50s mood albums like Jackie Gleason’s ‘Music to Make You Misty’ and Frank Sinatra’s ‘In The Wee Small Hours.’ I wanted to do a tribute to a mood album.” In a similar style to the covers of such albums, the artwork was painted by Los Angeles American Noir artist Gina Higgins, who also painted the cover for On The Train Ride Home and worked closely with the band on the concept.
While The Paper Kite’s songs explore longing and compulsions, Sam’s own obsession lies in breaking elusive sound-emotion barriers. “It’s a delicate responsibility to try and be sincere, but I think if there’s never a lack of feeling, it’s earnest to say the least”.
New Album ‘On The Corner Where You Live’ is available now
Band Members
Sam Bentley,
Christina Lacy,
Dave Powys,
Sam Rasmussen,
Josh Bentley,
Julia Jacklin followed up her strong and promising 2016 debut, Don’t Let The Kids Winwith something decidedly different: A chill, laidback indie rock trio album with some buddies under the name Phantastic Ferniture. The album was unfairly overlooked by most folks, but had a shaggy, loose vibe that, when paired with Jacklin’s songwriting wit and floating voice, made it impossible to ignore once you heard it.Jacklin’s solo again with “Crushing” her sophomore LP as a solo act, and neither of her previous albums could have prepared anyone for this: Crushing is an organs-on-the-table dissection of a breakup, absolutely harrowing and wrenching in its lyrical specificity and its openness. Crushing’s 10 songs examine the tumultuous waves present in each breakup. Separating in a relationship is not linear; it comes in wave after crushing wave. The anger gives way to sadness gives way to regret gives way to trying to forget them gives way to grim acceptance. Jacklin captures it all in Crushing.
Crushing opens with “Body,” a song recounting an apparently real fight with her boyfriend over him getting kicked off a flight for smoking in the bathroom, culminating in her wondering if he’ll use the nude photos he took of her to hurt her in the future. “I’m gonna leave you / I’m not a good woman when you’re around” Jacklin sings solemnly over the trace drumbeat and a strummed guitar, capturing so much with so little, the hallmark of Jacklin’s songwriting.
The album rolls like the cover of Unknown Pleasures through the feelings post-breakup, often accompanied by instrumentation that matches the ups and downs. “When the Family Flies In,” which ends with a pained ponderance over the music video she sent her ex the last time they talked, is all piano, and dulcet tones, while “Pressure to Party,” a song about wanting to force yourself out into society after the breakup, but taking the time before trying to love again soon, is upbeat, shredding and shouty. Crushing, as much as it is a breakup album, is also a showcase for how varied Jacklin’s songwriting has become in the last three years; she can do loosely tied indie rock and piano ballads and acoustic campfire songs and gruff tell offs effortlessly in a row here.
Crushing’s arc is one of reclamation; through these songs, Jacklin is able to regain some control over her body, how she wants to be loved, and her own headspace.
The album closes with a personal affirmation and a confirmation that she’s ready to let go. “I’ll be OK / I’ll be alright / I’ll get well soon / sleep through the night / don’t know how you’re doing, but that’s what I get / I can’t be the one to hold you, when I was the one who left,” she sings quietly over a Chemtrail guitar line. Crushing might be the story of Jacklin’s personal breakup, but it’s also her most universal record; it’s a salve for when you’re in the pit of a breakup and eventually you’ll get a hold of yourself, try the restaurant your ex always wanted to go to, say “fuck them,” and move on.
Produced by Burke Reid (Courtney Barnett, Liam Finn) and recorded at The Grove Studios, Crushing sets Jacklin’s understated defiance against a raw yet luminous sonic backdrop. New album ‘Crushing’ will be out February 22nd
The Fat Angel Sings 