Melbourne garage-rock quintet The Murlocs are back with new track and video “Noble Soldier”, which comes via Australian indie label Flightless Records. The group are mostly comprised of members from fellow Australian psychedelic rockers King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, meaning they’re pretty much two for two with regard to brilliantly ludicrous band names.
“Noble Soldier” garage-guitar amble recalls Shannon And The Clams or even some of the more restrained Reigning Sound stuff, while the brisk crackle of Ambrose Kenny Smith’s vocals allow the track to maintain its casual saunter.
The track also comes with an accompanying video, which features a deeply surreal take on fitness and plastic surgery.
After the colourful detour of Deep Heat (2012), Oh Mercy’s ARIA-winning singer Alexander Gow relocated to the USA, where things didn’t go necessarily as planned. Recorded across three cities, “When We Talk About Love” is rife with homesickness, lovesickness and nods to Gow’s heroes – from Raymond Carver, to Burt Bacharach, the Triffids to the Go-Betweens. Opener “Without You” is expansive and evocative, with sweeping string arrangements and the kind of honest vocal delivery that pours out like an open wound. “I’m always thinking of you with some other guy,” he deadpans. Songs like “I Don’t Really Want To Know” and “Sandy” pull off that great songwriter’s trick of pairing a melancholic lyric with an optimistic melody, but it all comes to a head on Lady Eucalyptus, a lush finger-picked take on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “My cards are all dealt and done,” he sings like a man who’s burned everything to the ground just to start again.
After the swaggering glam of the Portland-recorded ‘Deep Heat’, Alex Gow holed up in the NSW coast with producer Scott Horscroft to craft a breakup record for the ages. Largely eschewing the characters he filtered his emotional point of view through on the last record, Alex (playing almost every instrument here) marries a lyrical vocabulary tied to the mature pop of the sixties and early 70s (Bacharach/David, Carole King) with a timeless sonic approach that gives his tender melodies room to breath. The vividness of ‘Lady Ecalyptus’ and ‘I Don’t Really Wanna Know’ is devastating, but the album is never a depressing or unpleasant listen, just a collection of great pop tunes.
With so many bands flitting in and out of Melbourne, it can be hard to keep track of who’s worth listening to. Tiny Little Houses, a four-piece, self-described “whatever rock” band from Australia’s second-biggest city, cut through the noise. Aside from having a great title, their debut LP, Idiot Proverbs proves there’s more than just happy-go-lucky rock coming out of their home city. At times, Idiot Proverbs is downright self-deprecating: On the first track, the band compare themselves to a literal “Garbage Bin.” But the album examines poor self-confidence with a sense of humor, leaving the listener feeling more entertained than depressed.
Band Members
Caleb Karvountzis,
Mo Sullins,
Clancy Bond,
Al Yamin,
Tiny Little Houses “Idiot Proverbs” ℗ Ivy League Records Released on: 2018-01-12
Another Milk! Records signee, the mint rock trio Loose Tooth dropped their second LP, “Keep Up” in 2018. I must admit I was skeptical: How can Melbourne keep up the guitar-pop bands of such quality, But Loose Tooth were a pleasant surprise. Their transcendent rock certainly takes cues from bands like The Cure and that classic Melbourne jangle, but it’s nevertheless some of the freshest sounds coming out of the Australian metropolis. Etta Curry, Luc Dawson and Nellie Jackson know a thing or two about hooks, and “Keep On” is especially infectious, like a pleasant nag. With Barnett on their side and plenty of catchy rock melodies in their heads, this Loose Tooth won’t fall out anytime soon.
‘Keep On‘ is taken from Loose Tooth’s album ‘Keep Up’ out now:
We are always on the hunt for hot new Australian bands, we figured Courtney Barnett’s own label, Milk! Records, might be a good place to start the search. There we stumbled upon Melbourne’s Jade Imagine, who combine the best of slacker-rock with a distinctly Aussie surf-pop sound. The band’s frontwoman, Jade McInally, has been on the Melbourne scene since the early 2000s, but it wasn’t until 2016 that she sent a pile of demos to Dave Mudie,Barnett’s drummer. From there, McInally formed Jade Imagine with several other vets of the Aussie indie realm: Liam “Snowy” Halliwell of The Ocean Party and Ciggie Witch, Tim Harvey of Real Feelings and James Harvey of Teeth and Tongue. Together, they’re Jade Imagine, and they’ve yet to release a full-length LP, which means 2019 could be their big year.
from the Debut EP “What The Fuck Was I Thinking” By Jade Imagine, thru Milk! Records
TFS is the new band formed by Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin (from Australia’s epic art punk psych maniacs The Drones) with Lauren Hammel (High Tension) on drums, and Erica Dunn (Harmony / Palm Springs) playing guitars, keys and other gadgets.
We’re not sure why so many Aussies got bit by the bad-band-name-bug, but Tropical Fuck Storm were certainly not exempt from the plague. If you can pardon their unfortunate moniker, however, and focus on their music, you just might find yourself smitten with their manic psych-rock.
from TFS album A Laughing Death In Meatspace and available on TFS Records/Mistletone
They released a totally bonkers-in-all-the-right-ways record in 2018, the weird and wild A Laughing Death in Meatspace. Fans of the now-defunct The Drones might recognize Tropical Fuck Storm’s lead singer, GarethLiddiard, who was a founding member of the former band back in 1997. Liddiard is still working with Drones mate Fiona Kitschin for this new project TFS, but it’s a completely different animal. They recruited two Melbourne vets, and now it seems like the four of them might be Australia’s version of Diarrhea Planet, a kind of mythical live act and purveyor of noisy pop-punk. TFS aren’t for everyone, but if they’re for you, we’re pretty sure it won’t take you long to get on board.
Tropical Fuck Storm – You Let My Tyres Down Recorded Live – Paste Studios – New York, NY
Melbourne’s Terry has perfected a blasé, disaffected take on indie pop that smartly avoids cynicism and sarcasm. Last year’s I’m Terry, their third album in three years, is another strong collection of unassuming pop hits—often flat and plodding in that Australian way but always richly melodic, and with a warm homemade aesthetic that reflects the modesty typically found down under. Terry’s one of those bands that could’ve existed at any point in the last 30 or 40 years—they would’ve fit right in on Flying Nun—but are also always unmistakably themselves.
I’m Terry.
They are Terry. Three LPs in three years that continue to fulfil their promise of their first 7”s: one moment a witty “art” punk Wire scramble, the next moment a dumb “pub” punk oi stomper, the next a beautifully orchestrated shimmering soundscape of rudimentary melodies cascading over one another; the point being these are disparate but always succinct songs soaked in melodies, vocal harmonies that sing-song verses and terrace chant choruses, all peppered with flourishes of synths, horns and violins.
They perfected this almost immediately, and each record is a masterful fulfillment, and so…I’m Terry.
There are so few bands attempting lyrics along these lines, so it’s worth to point toward them, as this is Terry: please be kind. We are spared the righteous indignation of identity politicians, but the empathy here for those under the boot of the colony, of the fortress, of the rich and privileged, and the disappointment and disgust at the effects of what we are calling toxic masculinity informs their more aggressive lambast, and this is delivered in an overt lyricism that doesn’t disintegrate into preach or self loathing lamentation.
There’s an unbridled joy in Terry at the experience of making songs in times they are clearly contrary to, the empathy and the pleas for kindness and all that… I’m Terry is an expression of a humbling kindness, and 2018 needs more Terry!
Like the The Damned down under, Amyl and the Sniffers are embracing the Australian ‘bogan’ stereotype, these Rough Trade signees are a liquor-swigging, poppers-snooting, mullet-rocking gang whose music straddles punk and FM rock – and whose gigs are sweatier than a Bondi Beach BBQ in mid summer.
you’re going to love them. They’re all about capturing lightning a bottle (a bottle of White Lightning, most likely). One of their two EPs to date, ‘Giddy Up’, was written, recorded and released in just 12 hours.
Some Mutts (Can’t Be Muzzled) Available on a 7″ available through flightless Records,
“I thought that I would want so many in my lifetime / But now the only one is you,” Totally Mild lead singer Elizabeth Mitchell sings a few minutes into the band’s sensational Her, an album that confronts the stasis, the beauty, the ennui and the comfort that comes with domesticity. Blessed with a voice that sounds like your grandma’s finest crystal, Mitchell sings haunting ballads (“Lucky Stars”), jangly indie rock (“Take Today”) and slow-crawling burners (“More”). It adds up to a bracingly pretty album, which for my money also has the single best line on any song this year: “Heaven’s knowing what you want when you’re young,” Mitchell sings on the album’s centerpiece “Today Tonight.”
Following on from their acclaimed 2015 debut Down Time (released on Bedroom Suck in Australia, Fire Records in the UK), Her is a shining jewel of an album. Elizabeth Mitchell’s voice is a thing of unearthly beauty, capable of soaring and swooping in shiver-inducing ways. As a songwriter she is equally arresting, addressing desires and dreams with affecting frankness. About the new album, Mitchell says “Her is a record of failure and victory, new desire, stale romance, queer domesticity and what comes when the party is over. I was torn between a new domestic life and the impulse to tear it all away with bad choices. I fell in love, but I wrestled for independence. I was always trying to prove that I didn’t need anyone; my wife, my friends, my band. Her is a document of a woman struggling with the idea of potential. We are told that we could be limitless, but we wrestle with unseen personal and structural walls.”
In Totally Mild she is joined by guitar magician Zachary Schneider, drummer Ashley Bundang and bassist Lehmann Smith. In the last few years the band have developed a quasi-psychic intensity, surging forward or pulling back in seamless unison. This intensity has been captured in crystalline form by producer and one-time Architecture In Helsinki member James Cecil. Her is polished and spacious, while never losing the feeling of a band in full flight.
It’s funny that East Brunswick’s debut album was called Seven Drummers – when “Essendon 1986” kicks off in earnest, that’s exactly what it sounds like. Jen Sholakis is the central focus of this spiralling, seething number, her toms rumbling the earth beneath her as her bandmates carve into their respective stringed instruments. The band has never sounded this dark, this aggressive or this forthright – and it’s this immediate shift that ends up paying off to create their finest singular moment to date. A fading, sepia portrayal of restless outward Australia that, truthfully, couldn’t have come from any other band.
“Teddywaddy” is the band’s most profound and riotous statement, focusing the seasoned intensity of singer/guitarist Marcus Hobbs, bassist/keyboardist Rie Nakayama, guitarist Rob Wrigley and drummer Jen Sholakis. Named after a slumbering patch of country 90 minutes from Bendigo, Teddywaddy was recorded with rising producer Anna Laverty (Courtney Barnett, The Peep Tempel). It follows 2014’s Australian Music Prize-longlisted Seven Drummers and 2009’s mini-LP Dead Air.
EBAGC have sojourned in Berlin and toured Asia but always circled back to Victoria, with Hobbs dropping wry geographical pins throughout his detailed songwriting. Spanning both smouldering studies of isolation and open-air eruptions of catharsis, Teddywaddy revels in such whiplashing contrasts. For every spacious swath of majesty, there’s some punked-up exorcism to fray the nerves and throttle the senses.
Band Members
Marcus Hobbs, Rie Nakayama, Robert Wrigley, Jen Sholakis
‘Essendon 1986’ is taken from the East Brunswick All Girls Choir album ‘Teddywaddy‘ was released June 29th
The Fat Angel Sings 