Fast-rising Australian four-piece Spacey Jane have announced they are set to take their debut album “Sunlight” on a huge national tour. With numerous shows across the country planned, cancelled, rescheduled and cancelled again in 2020, the Fremantle act are keen to get the show on the road with over two months of gigs scheduled right across the country.
Western Australians fans might not have waited as long for the chance to see the band live, but expect demand to be high for tickets to shows at Fremantle Arts Centre on Friday, April 9 and Mandurah Performing Arts Centre on Friday, May 14.
Spacey Jane kicked off 2021 with a bang, taking out the No2 spot in triple j’s Aussie chart with “Booster Seat”. Three more tracks from Sunlight made the countdown, with Weightless at , Straightfaced and Skin placing’s, marking a momentous and celebratory day for the band. They backed it up last week taking on triple j’s Like a Version with a cover of The Beatles’ Here Comes The Sun,” along with a performance of “Booster Seat”.
Released in June last year, Sunlight voted Album of the Year in the triple j Listener’s Poll. And just a few days ago, one of their earliest singles Feeding The Family achieved Gold Status.
The band have revealed how pleased they are to finally be taking the full album on a tour, stating “we’re so excited to finally have the opportunity to play these songs on the road! It’s been a long time since we’ve managed to tour Australia, and we’re all rearing to go! These will be our biggest shows to date, in venues we’ve only dreamed of playing – see you out there.”
Spacey Jane will be joined on the tour by another of Perth’s most prized musical acts Carla Geneve, who has just announced the exciting news that her debut album Learn to Like It is coming out in April.
They’re the psychedelic four-piece who hail from Sydney, Australia, ready to whisk you off onto a magical mystery tour of their own. An attempt at untangling hazy, drunken memories from a heavy weekend down the beach – whether it be Bondi or Brighton. After forming in 2015, the pals are fast making a name for themselves with their dreamy psych-rock, with singles Cheesy Love Song and Tangerine highlighting how far they can push their sonic sound.
Lazy Eyes have announced the upcoming release of their second EP, dropping a new single and sharing tour dates. The band return in 2021 today with a new single, ‘Where’s My Brain???’, the first taste of The Lazy Eyes’ next chapter. In a press release, the band explained that ‘Where’s My Brain???’ was written during the band’s formative years, at a time “when the setlist was lacking fast paced, energetic tracks” ,
“We needed that one last song that the audience could mosh and get sweaty to,” they said. “The song is loosely about losing your mind over something and wanting to have a tantrum, but really it’s just a jam.” . The psych-rock Sydney outfit dropped their debut EP, ‘EP1’, in June of last year. Upon its release, NME said in its review that The Lazy Eyes “coast from dazed pop to shameless love ballads, claiming pole position for the next mainstage psych outfit along the way”.
“These Aussie teens are blazing a fresh path for psych-pop with a mesmeric throwback sound – and as that dialogue might suggest, they’re not cutting any corners.”
The Lazy Eyes make no qualms about wearing their psych-rock influences on their sleeves, but do so with the kind of cheekiness only a teen band could get away with (take the self-deprecating title of the charming ‘Cheesy Love Song’, for example). Written largely during their high school years, The Lazy Eyes’ sole EP already provokes equal measures of nostalgia and “cringeness” for the group – a sign they’re ready to evolve and carve their own path to the big league.
A cross between The Flaming Lips and The Beach Boys. Wonderful stuff.
The Lazy Eyes are a four-piece psychedelic rock band based in Sydney, Australia. The band are Harvey Geraghty (vocals, guitar, keyboard), Itay Shachar (vocals, guitar), Leon Karagic (bass) and Noah Martin (drums).
It’s a record that “sounds like an AI supercomputer trying to create a ‘70s rock record… Narrated by a drunk boy who’s just come back from tour.” That’s how Perth’s Psychedelic Porn Crumpets are pitching “Shyga! The Sunlight Mound” – an album title best bellowed out loud in your silliest Mighty Boosh voice.
Shyga! is an atomic blast of a listening experience, featuring some of the band’s fastest, loudest material yet. With enough juice to power a rocket, the ripping lead singles, ‘Tally-Ho’ and ‘Mr. Prism’, gave a good indication of what to expect, and came bundled with mind-melting Claymation videos.
If you dug those high-octane nuggets, you’ll be pleased to know the rest of Shyga!scales similar heights of speedy sonic insanity, evoking the strung out chaos of a week-long bender fuelled by boozy hijinks, debauchery, and – to use the band’s own euphemism – “chemical enthusiasm”. The explosively creative SHYGA! is their fourth album in nearly as many years for the Porn Crumpets, who have consistently delivered on the expectations that their brilliantly ridiculous band name has set.
Their ambitious two-part debut “High Visceral” (released back-to-back in 2016 and 2017) almost immediately established their sound, all tie-dyed riffs that looked back to ‘60s psychedelia but injected with the frenetic garage rock crunch of early Tame Impala, Pond, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Carving up house parties and venues along the way, they cultivated a bulletproof rep as one of Perth’s gnarliest rock shows.
In recent years, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets buzz from out West went national, and then global, allowing the band to spread their headbanging spectacle to Europe, the UK, and Japan. It was in that Groundhog Day blur of touring life – all celebratory late nights and headache-grey-tour-bus mornings – that Shyga! The Sunlight Mound began to take shape.
Forced off the road by the COVID-19 pandemic, Jack McEwan – the singer, shredder, and creative engine of the wild Psychedelic Porn Crumpets locomotive – used the extended off-cycle period to reflect and rejuvenate. That’s the obvious starting point for countless rock records, but where Shyga! immediately distinguishes itself is in rather than slowing down and ruminating on the bizarre reality of touring life, it attempts to sonically recreate its intensity. The blistering energy “reflects the madness, crazy midweek adventures, highs and physical lows of touring,” Jack explains, “an album where every song is adding to a bender,” and paced like a punishing tour schedule, where moments to come up for air are rare and brief.
Blink and you’ll miss it’ Jack notes on the relatively calm opener ‘Big Dijon’, foreshadowing the scorching pace to come in the 40-min listen before the track detonates into ‘Tally-Ho’.
‘I’m getting used to waking up and feeling rough’ he sings between the squiggled guitar-monies of ‘Tripolosaur’, while ‘Pukebox’ is about “getting home from tour and trying to piece together what happened; it’s all a foggy, hazy memory.” .Rather than glorifying their debauchery, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets aren’t above taking the piss out of themselves. ‘The Terrors’ acknowledges that what goes up must come crashing down, with a battering wall of guitars breaking only for a descending melodic chorus that arrives like a comforting rush of endorphins amidst a hangover.
From the surging ‘Mr. Prism’ to the galloping rhythms of ‘Mundungus’ (honestly, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets should win some kind of trophy for naming things) Shyga! is like a runaway rollercoaster, where it often feels like the only thing keeping these songs from going off the rails is to maintain a breakneck forward momentum. It’s a helluva lotta fun, but it can also be exhausting.
There’s no doubting that Shyga! is Psychedelic Porn Crumpets’ most intense release yet. There’s no room for the lengthy, progressive tendencies of High Visceral, paring back the spacier, experimental moments of 2019’s And Now For The Whatchamacallit in favour of the full-throttle nuttiness of setlist favourites like ‘Social Candy’ and ‘Ergophobia’.
The turn to one lightning-paced belter after another might disappoint fans of the trippier parts of the band’s catalogue, and the way the ‘week-long bender’ concept functions can sometimes make Shyga! feel like one big blur. The mid-section especially risks sounding like too much of the same. But even though it functions like one, epic-sized 40-minute jam, there are dynamics to be found. Warm Melotron and warped string and flute patches occasionally bubble to the surface between the heaving wall of riffs and drums, and the band’s trademark sense of playful humour not only separates them from your standard issue guitar band but finds them pulling absurdist inspiration from the most unlikely of places.
The crunchy jangle of ‘Hats Off To The Green Bins’ channels the dread of cleaning up for a rental inspection, and ‘Sawtooth Monkfish’ is dotted with the vintage sounds of retro Japanese arcade games. “Pretty much a homage to all the pinball we were playing while touring around America,” Jack notes.
‘Mango Terrarium’ sounds like The Beatles had survived the ‘60s and became a ‘70s hard blues band, and the title describes what Jack’s home studio looked like, strewn with empty bottles after he became obsessed with Mango-infused beer. (“My brother described it as what a bee would taste when it extracts nectar from a flower.”)
It may have a penchant for the ridiculous, but the album’s craft is dead serious. They know how to offer an exhilarating album experience, and you can tell Jack paid a lot of attention to the album’s structure and sequencing. “There’s a lot of intentional[ly] shorter tracks on the record, aiming to boost the song following directly after to maintain that feeling of constantly moving forward and upward.”
There’s a method to the ‘Everything Up to 11’ madness, and after all the face-melting fretwork and hectic energy, Shyga! actually ends on a wholesome note. ‘Every old man tells me the same, live while you’re young and enjoy each day’ Jack wistfully intones over the frazzled plucking of closing track ‘The Tally of Gurney Gridman’.
It may not be breaking new ground but “SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound” proves that Psychedelic Porn Crumpets have flair and imagination to spare. It’s arguably their most daring, cohesive set yet and definitely Australia’s first great psych-rock saga of 2021.
Psychedelic Porn Crumpets “Shyga! The Sunlight Mound” is out 5th February.
Australian rock outfit King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are starting the new year with the arrival of another new single, “O.N.E.”. Released on Thursday, the latest recording from the workhorse rock band follows the track “If Not Now, Then When?” shared back in December.
Opening with some gentle, slightly-mystic notation to start the 3:40 minute song, the music quickly livens up with a Middle Eastern swing and just enough added distortion to match their trademark fuzz-rock sound. The band continues to explore notation and melody arrangements often heard in older parts of the world within their own song writing, and do so without forfeiting the energizing, adrenaline rock production for which they’re known and loved.
The song’s animated music video was directed by Alex McClaren, who added of his efforts in a statement,
The song itself feels as if it’s constantly moving along so I tried to keep the visuals continually moving forward and sliding into different visual styles and landscapes. I felt the mix of stop motion and collage through the use of found imagery and the band would help compliment the track’s lyrics and themes as I interpreted them, of dreams, nightmares, climate change, dystopias, and utopias, as well as referencing events that took place during the making of the video over 2020. All video of the band was shot by Ambrose during the second lockdown restrictions and I had to give notes on shooting and direct remotely which was strange but so was everything during that period.
“O.N.E.” and “If Not Now, Then When?” are both expected to appear on the band’s next studio album, L.W., which would follow the surprise arrival of K.G. back in late November. The Middle Eastern music-inspired album was one of the selected works included in Live For Live Music‘s “Best Psychedelia Albums Of 2020” staff picks. This forthcoming album is reportedly one of three records the band plans to release in 2021.
Like a shaken can of soda; post-punk/noise-rock from Kaurna Land, Through a juxtaposition of experimental feedback, dissonance and rich vocal harmonies, Placement deliver a ferocious and often partially improvised live show, influenced by performance art. The debut single from Kaurna Land/Adelaide-based group Placement. ‘Harder‘ is an excellent song to introduce us to the band,‘Harder’ bleeds with that “fuck off” attitude we love to hear, with the song written about the unwanted conversations customer service workers have to go through on a day-to-day basis. “At work you often can’t respond as you may want, but instead must provide the customer with a sanitised response to whatever they talk at you. I might not ever have said what I wanted to their face, but I’m saying it now” vocalist and guitarist Malia said of the song.
My favourite part of the song embodies this, coming right after the first chorus – “Get stuck into your daily tour of all the people who can’t say ‘fuck off’ to your advice” followed by the melodic chemistry of the guitars, bass, and percussion that play so well together to drive the themes of the song home. It’s a song to listen to on the way home from work on the busy roads, thinking about all the dense interactions you’ve had that day.
The song seemingly comes to a close at the two-and-a-half minute mark in a crash of feedback guitars and cymbals, before the band bring us back for one more finale, getting you all excited for what the band will bring us next. The track has a post-punk frenzied guitar attack that has an interesting mix of spoken word vocals and a more art-rock vibe, like a cross-between U.S. Girls, Protomartyr, and Dry Cleaning.
Released January 8th, 2021
Vox/guitar: Malia Wearn Guitar/backing vox: Alex Dearman Bass/backing vox: Kim Roberts Clarinet/Sax: Stu Patterson Drums: Braden Palmer
Australian five-piece Mt. Mountain are today announcing their fourth album, ‘Centre’, and sharing the first single ‘Aplomb’. Hailing from Perth, Australia, Mt. Mountain deal in a sprawling, motorik psychedelic rock sound that journeys between tranquil, drone-like meditations and raucous, full-throttle wig-outs that’ll blow your mind as much as your speakers. Now signed to Fuzz Club Records, ‘Centre’ is due out February 26th check out the first cut, ‘Aplomb’, below.
Taking cues from Krautrock pioneers like Neu! and Can whilst existing in a similar world to contemporaries like Moon Duo, Kikagaku Moyo and Minami Deutsch, Mt. Mountain are formidable torchbearers of the minimal-is-maximal tradition. Out today, ‘Aplomb’ was one of the first songs written for the album and marked a conscious shift of focus towards more rhythmic patterns within their music. Stephan Bailey (vocals/organs/flute) reflects on the song: “‘Aplomb’ is essentially the voice that I hear in my head, reminding me to not rush and slow down, and to have the confidence to bring this into practice in everyday life. We wanted there to be this clear contrast here between the tempo of the song and the lyrical content, an approach which appears throughout the album.”
Mt. Mountain is : Steven Bailey (organ / vocals) Thomas Cahill (drums) Glenn Palmer (guitar/synth) Brendan Shanley (bass) Derrick Treatch (guitar).
Romero are From Melbourne, Australia , with a nod towards Sheer Mag, Public Practice, Breakneck tunes that could make even the cleanest of spaces feel like a grimy dive bar made for moshing in. You’re going to love them: Their riffs might be front and centre and turned up loud, but this Aussie bunch can’t hide their big pop hooks. Frontwoman Alanna Oliver possesses a voice that’s rich and subtly theatrical, adding both an air of class and urgency to the walls of sound that have already scored Romero a hefty slice of attention, despite only having shared three songs so far. Spoiler: they’re all ridiculously infectious and ready to rock out to. Romero are a tremendously exciting proposition. They trade in high wire indie-rock that owes a debt to classic power-pop, having made waves back home by selling out their debut Honey / Neapolitan 7” at a rapid clip. Vocalist Alanna Oliver’s economical, drawled hooks cut back against the grain of charging guitars that owe a debt to everyone from Radioactivity to Blondie, coalescing into a killer package of studied cool.
Check out the other highlight track ‘Troublemaker’
There’s a high to ‘Honey’ that is immediate and habit forming – the sweetness belies the addictive element. It’s endlessly playable, which means there’s a good chance I’m still returning to this song by year’s end. Romero’s set the bar high, not only for themselves moving forward, but everyone else existing in a similar power pop space. Speaking of need, this is the kind of bright spot that we could all use.
Romero – “Honey” available through Cool Death Records ‘’Honey’’ is a record for the freaks and geeks alike. Hell, it’s for anybody that needs to be picked up and reminded that’s it’s not all completely terrible.
The Band: Vocals: Alanna Oliver Guitar: Adam Johnstone Guitar: Fergus Sinclair Bass: Justin ‘Murry’ Tawil Drums: Dave Johnstone
Hachiku, a.k.a Anika Ostendorf, 26, writes and produces dream pop with an avant garde twist from whichever bedroom she is currently inhabiting. Coming from Australia and on the glorious Milk Records is the one and only Hachiku. I got to see her earlier this year opening for labelmate Courtney Barnett on a brief solo tour in the winter. Right away she gripped my ears with her playing and song writing and it’s on full display here. “I’ll Probably Be Asleep” is an absolute scorcher to start the record off, sounding like it came out of the 80’s with a new wave vibe that ends with a guitar solo that climaxes as the song abruptly ends. From there we get a quieter affair in “Busy Being Boring” and “You’ll Probably Think This Song Is About You”. The former is about destroying everything around you and the later is about how to deal with a new love.
She writes in a way that makes you feel like you’re having a private one on one conversation and I find it refreshing. The sweeping guitar riffs in “Bridging Visa B” feel like she borrowed some ideas from Courtney on that winter tour this year. The production she does on the record is so great. There are backwards loops, dropping her voice down a few octaves (“Dreams of Galapagos”), harmonizing with herself. I love when an artist sits down and makes almost an entire album by themselves. It ends with “Murray’s Lullaby”, a song to the dog, Murray, who was at the farm she was on to get her Australian Visa and it’s a sweeping beautiful ode to the companion.
On Hachiku’s debut album, Anika Ostendorf and collaborators build on the lo-fi foundations of their earlier material, making atmospheric yet achingly visceral off-kilter pop gems. While the familiar vintage keyboards and minimalist drum machines still punctuate throughout, there’s a gritty dynamism that anchors ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’, propulsive rhythms and distorted guitars underscoring its dreamy melodies and Ostendorf’s softly sung vocals.
Loss, long-distance romance, arguments with climate change deniers and bureaucratic immigration processes: On ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’, the debut album from dream pop artist Hachiku, even the topics usually relegated to inflammatory newspaper op-eds take on new depth and heart.
The project of 26-year-old Anika Ostendorf, Hachiku emerged onto the local Melbourne scene in 2017 with a suite of minimal electronic songs inspired by the folk artists she aspired to emulate as a teenager. On her 2017 EP and successive singles – all released by Milk! Records, the label whose massive merch operation Ostendorf runs with her partner, photographer Marcelle Bradbeer the now-signature Hachiku sound began to take form: Hopeful keys, occasionally anxious production and Ostendorf’s cynical lyricism, so clear-eyed you felt it had the capacity to permanently change its subject.
But even Ostendorf admits that sometimes the ideas occupying her mind aren’t clear at first. Like sediment in a glass of water, the true meanings need time to settle. Two years after subconsciously processing her grandmother’s death in a song on her EP, she noticed a “lyrically obvious” reference to it that has previously passed her by. The same is true of the territory she covers on ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’. “Thematically, what each song [on the album] would be about is so all over the place,” Ostendorf tells NME from her home in Melbourne. Over Zoom, I can see she’s tucked in the corner of what looks like an all-purpose room – there’s a couch next to her and on the other side, instruments she used to record a sizeable chunk of the new album.
That sonic turn pairs perfectly with the album’s themes of loss and grief, the exasperating experience of being a young woman in the world, and displacement (Ostendorf explores the limbo of waiting to be granted permanent residency on album highlight ‘Bridging Visa B’). The album charts a timeline of around four years, but is punctuated less by dates than the places Ostendorf found herself: “Some songs would be [written] while doing long-distance. Some were when I was back in Germany and while my dog was passing away.”
While the sense of place isn’t always noticeable for listeners, it informs Ostendorf’s understanding of not just where she was in her life when writing each song, but where in the world, too. Ostendorf was born in Michigan, grew up in Germany and studied in London before a university exchange gave her the choice to spend a year in either Singapore, Auckland or Melbourne. On the advice of her worldly grandmother, she chose the city with the fewest major cultural differences and most promising music scene.
While ostensibly in Melbourne to continue studying biology, she could already feel herself being pulled in a different direction. “I had already told my parents, ‘I actually don’t really want to do biology. I kind of want to do music instead.’” She recalls, “I think I told my father first, because he’s always good at giving life advice. And, I think growing up, he would have always wanted to become a musician if he hadn’t grown up in Germany in the ’60s and ’70s.”
Ostendorf describes hers as “a Ford family”; grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles alike all went to work for the company. It’s the reason she moved around so much as a kid, and she thinks that the stability of life with the auto manufacturer left her father with a lingering sense of ‘what if?’, exacerbated by the knowledge that childhood friends found success as professional musicians. “I think there’s always a little bit of like, ‘Ooh, that could have been me, but if I had done that I wouldn’t have met my wife, I wouldn’t have my children, I wouldn’t be financially stable’,” she muses.
Ostendorf’s father was both her greatest encouragement and “probably one of the best guitarists I know, actually”, but her mother wasn’t far behind. She plays the accordion and takes opera singing lessons, and as a teen Ostendorf played in her band, a troupe of IT staff at the Ford factory that performed pop songs they hijacked and rewrote about the inner-workings of the office.
“They play in a duo at friends’ birthdays and sing songs together,” Ostendorf says of her parents. “They always wanted me to start learning an instrument early on and join the choir. Never discouraging, but never pushy.”
The perfect balance, it sounds like. Ostendorf describes her father taking her to a studio when she was 17 so she could record a CD. Influenced by Regina Spektor and Fleet Foxes mostly, but also featuring a cover of a song by hardcore band Fucked Up, the formative record set her on a course as an artist – even if the medium didn’t stick around. “My dad would be happy if you mentioned this, because we still have around 800 of those CDs left that we made,” she tells me. “I don’t know why we made a thousand CDs; for our upcoming album, we only made 500.
Recorded over years spent flitting between focusses and countries, ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’ feels nonetheless resolved and settled. The song ‘Busy Being Boring’ is testament to that. Ostendorf wrote it in 2018 while applying for a partner visa to stay in Australia for a further two years. “At the start of being here I’d never really seen myself as being in one place longer than two years. For some reason when I’m not stimulated with a new thing, I get distracted really easily.”
She imagines the life of a professional dabbler: “Ooh, I can do two months of farm work! Ooh, afterwards, maybe I could move to Iceland and just work on a wind farm, or like maybe I could go to the Maldives and become a professional diving instructor!”
‘Busy Being Boring’, Ostendorf says, is her coming to terms with staying still after a lifetime of moving. “Like maybe it’s OK to just be… determined to make something work and stick with something because you think that it is worthwhile and not be so cynical and negative about it.”
She saves the cynicism and negativity for the record’s title track, which is also its opener. In a press release, Ostendorf explained the song: “In essence, it is like an escapist’s testament about the wish to gain sovereignty over your thoughts. Freud’s id vs superego. The thought of wanting to be part of something but the idea of it being way more enticing than the reality.”
The record’s only song recorded with the full Hachiku band – guitarist Georgia Smith, bassist Jessie L. Warren and drummer Simon Reynolds – ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’ is murky and cheeky, channelling a beautiful inner brattiness. Like much of the record, its driving motivation is want.
But where tracks like ‘You’ll Probably Think This Song Is About You’ and ‘Dreams Of Galapagos’ project that wanting outwards, here the song wrestles with itself internally. There is a delicious kind of petulance at play, as if having lived a life full of options has left Ostendorf with just one thing left to do: stay in, stay still and sort through her stockpile of confrontational conversations and tough experiences until, in time, she’s ready to have the last word.
I’ll Probably Be Asleep’ is out now on Milk! Records and Marathon Artists. From the forthcoming album ‘I’ll Probably Be Asleep’ released November 13th, 2020.
The prolific Melbourne band played their biggest-ever headline show to date at the 10,000-capacity venue in the capital, with the promise of “a new set, new songs and a whole new visual experience” being made by the psych-rock troupe. This was an anomaly. An Australian psychedelic rock band, blessed with the kind of name a 14-year-old comes up with during a particularly boring double maths lesson, sells out the 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace with little radio support and no hit records. What’s more, their latest of many albums since 2012 (they released five in 2017 alone) is a ferocious thrash metal concept piece about ecological disaster called Infest the Rat’s Nest. No focus group would come up with the King Gizzard approach to musical success.
The heady, inspired, confusing, and addictive path King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard set out on almost a decade ago has led to this point. Announcing – and then swiftly selling out – a headline date at Alexandra Palace, the Australian group took on one of North London’s most imposing venues. A historic landmark, thousands of fans descended on the people’s palace for the show, an indication of just how big these psychedelic outlaws actually are. Rampaging through their leviathan-like catalogue, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard pulled out all the stops for the biggest night of their lives.
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The Fat Angel Sings 