Melbourne’s Slum Sociable are Edward Quinn (production, guitars, keys) and Miller Upchurch (vocals, percussion). The duo, currently touring their debut EP TQ nationally, are joined live by drummer Ryan Beasley and bassist Dylan Savage.
Edward Quinn and Miller are old friends, but started working together as Slum Sociable, A long time ago we were introduced by an old drummer in our band, I thought he [Miller] was the best singer I knew so I got him on those tracks.
It was never going to be released but we had someone pass away and we thought we’d honour his memory — he was the first person to hear these tracks, he was the first person we felt comfortable enough sending them to — we thought we’d release this body of work in his honour.
The name It’s a line from the Scorsese movie Gangs of New York, at that time I was obsessed with Daniel Day Lewis still am, I guess — he was going to the butcher at some stage and it’s kind of like an alliteration but it’s not really…it kind of sounded sticky. I just like those two words together, hopefully it doesn’t come back to bite us with “slum” being in it.
Australian freak-rock monsters King Gizzard and & Lizard Wizard are chugging their way to their stated goal of releasing five full-length albums in 2017. The fourth, “Polygondwanaland”, came out last month, and the third, Sketches of Brunswick East, was among most bloggers 50 Best Albums of 2017. Now the yet-to-be-announced fifth seems imminent, with two new songs emerging last week and another new one landing today via Melbourne’sTriple R Radio. “Greenhouse” is right in the Gizzard pocket, with dark synths, sitars, and ominous vocals swirling in a druggy ooze. Perfect for the holiday season! With 12 days to go before the New Year, King Gizzard and & Lizard Wizard have just enough time to release like six more records. But it seems, finally, that one will be enough.
This new one by Melbourne’s Ali Barter is only just the first glimpse of her just-announced debut album.
Having just premiered the track ‘Cigarette’ revealed details of a debut LP titled A Suitable Girl.
“It’s the beginning, it’s like the frustration,” she said of the new single. “There’s a [couple] and they’re having this relationship and in love. Then the first thing happens and someone gets pissed off and then it leads to the big fight. So it’s kind of like a third of the way in, it’s when trouble’s brewing.”
Having released several shorter EP records to date, but no full-length record, the longer format has allowed her to open up a little more – or perhaps it’s the opening up that allowed for more songs?
“I just wanted to be really honest about my feelings,” she told the hosts of the record, produced by Holy Holy’s OscarDawson. “I’ve done three EPs and I found the more that I did – produced things, explained things, covered things in metaphor – I didn’t feel I was saying things that are true to me. So with this album… I wanted it to be really natural and authentic.”
Ali detailed more of the record’s inspirations and writing process and you can check out the new lyric video below. If you’d like to hear this one live, and maybe a few glimpses of the rest of the record, Grab my debut album “A Suitable Girl”.
Cigarette
This song is about being overlooked. It’s about feeling frustrated for being treated like a piece of meat. I had been doing some writing with a producer in LA called Harlan Silverman. We wrote another song of mine, Far Away, together and I knew I wanted to work with him again. He sent me a demo of this song and I just loved it. I wrote some new lyrics and played around with the chords and it sounded great. I love collaborating with other writers. In a studio, in a living room, via email. It’s so fun.
One Foot In
This song is about someone who I thought was being a flake. I wrote it with Bertie Blackman and Thom Macken on the central coast of NSW. We made a demo in Thom’s living room. Bertie played the drums. I wrote the words. Thom was the producer. It was fun. This song is one of my favourites to play live.
Girlie Bits
I wrote Girlie Bits song in a beach hut in Goa. It was really hot. So hot that we had to stay inside most of the day. I went a bit stir crazy so thank God I had a guitar. I felt trapped on that holiday and I think that helped in the feeling of the song. I wrote the song in 10 minutes and made a demo of it on my iPhone. I still can’t believe it was in the Hottest 100.
Tokyo
This song is about a holiday I took with an old boyfriend. When I look back at this trip I see it’s kinda the moment it all started to fall apart. Tokyo is a really beautiful place but I found it so desperately lonely while I was there. I couldn’t find the words to tell this person how I felt and there was this sadness because I think we both knew the relationship wasn’t going to work.
The Captain
The Captain is about someone that I used to be really close to who I felt was losing his way. This person I had loved was becoming someone I didn’t understand and it hurt like hell. This song almost didn’t make it on to the album. We had demoed it up and I felt like it didn’t quite fit, but during The Jezabels tour last year we started paying it and it came together perfectly.
Light Them On Fire
I did some writing in LA with a wonderful songwriter called Sydney Wayser. We sat in her living room with her cats and talked about boys and wrote this song. We both felt like we had been screwed around by a boy in our life and this song just poured out of us. It was like therapy.
Please Stay
This song is an apology. I was being a bitch to my boy while he was on tour with his band. I was ignoring his texts and being passive aggressive and immature. It happens. Sometime you just need to remember to say sorry and try not to be an arsehole. I think that’s a good life motto.
Live With You
This song is about something that happened in my life where a person came into my world and disrupted my plans. I was so angry. It used to stop me sleeping at night and it really tore me up inside. I felt powerless. This one is fun to play live because we really get to thrash it out.
Delilah
This song is about my other self. The part of me that doesn’t give a fuck. She isn’t jealous or scared or threatened. I was channeling Bette Davis Eyes and Fleetwood Mac’s Rhiannon.
Far Away
I wrote this song in LA. I had been there for two weeks driving the freeway from one end of LA to the other writing songs with different people everyday. It was my last session and I was completely brain dead. I was at producer Harlan Silverman’s studio for two hours and we wrote the first verse and chorus. Then I had to leave because I was totally spent. I really had smoked too many cigarettes and drunk too much coffee. It’s a very literal song.
Walk/Talk
I demoed this song up with a musician called Jono Boulet. We were at a songwriting camp and had a studio to muck around in so I played him this song and we recorded it. I had also worked on this song in a session with Adalita. She came to my studio, I played her some stuff and we had a jam. She is a hero of mine from when I was in high school. I was a big Magic Dirt fan. I was pretty excited to write with her. I had to have a little lie down after she left.
Drum is the bold second album from Gold Class. Recorded at Melbourne’s Head Gap studios / Tropical FuckStorm Studios and co-produced by Gareth Liddiard of The Drones, “Drum” sees Gold Class explore new territory in both songwriting and sonics.
Commenting on the album title, Adam Curley (lead singer) says “Drum is primitive. It’s physical. It’s the beat of your heart. It’s immediate. It comes from the past, but it also beckons to something in the future.” It holds other dualities, too – submission and authority; repetition and propulsion. And yet at its core, it’s just something you can dance to. “Soaring across it all is front man Curley’s voice, that stentorian howl of angst and poetic declarations.”
The follow-up to 2015 debut It’s You, Drum is a brasher, vivid widescreen account of a band hitting its stride while betraying the complex signs and scars of a life since lived.
Released August 18th, 2017 , Gold Class – Get Yours New album ‘Drum’ out now
Melbourne’s The Shifters finally follow up their cassette from a couple years back with this slightly more melodic but no less urgent single. They still sound steeped in early Fall dashed with bits of psychedelia. Based in Melbourne Australia’s The Shifters have been making a really impressive noise over the last couple of years, still in their infancy but growing stronger with each gig they do, the band have grown to become one of more interesting new groups to emerge from Melbourne’s Underground in recent years.
The group’s debut 7″ Creggan Shops impressed me with its monotone sleeve and scratchy guitar punk genius.
Market Square Recordings are proud to be releasing the band’s second 7″ A Believer b/w Contrast of Form.
Both sides combine great DIY art punk of the highest calibre.
A Believerstarts proceedings with rhythmic drum work very reminiscent to Television Personalities 1988 single “How I Learned To Love The Bomb” a steady tribal beat opening way to a mesmerising chord and fender jaguar laden hook. The track also has a very Fall-esque vibe about it, with the way the organ flows through the track…. but ultimately this is The Shifters in their most snotty art-punk best, the song is poppy, its catchy and its the sound of a great new talent.
The b-side Contrast of Formis basically a trademark sound for this band, this in my opinion is some of the most perfect outsider pop happening in the world right now, the song takes us on a journey explaining the story of a weirdo artist and his ambitions to be a “real” artist and also to possibly “take flight” the song is open to interpretation, thats what’s so cool about this song.
Musically The Shifters follow in a similar course forged by their Antipodian brothers from the early 80s NZ underground scene, groups of which came out of the embryonic Flying Nun Records catalogue, bands like the Stones, The Clean and The Bats… in-fact Contrast of Form is the closest I’ve heard a recent band capture the Dunedin sound without even trying…. there must be something cool in the water down-under??
This two-sided art-punk killer 7″ by Melbourne Australia’s fantastic scratchy guitar heroes The Shifters is available now.
Another great release from Courtney Barnett and I’m sure a very big deal for her being involved with Jack White. Hopefully Jack realises that it’s just as big a deal for him to work with Courtney. The A-Side is superb whilst “Shivers” is an excellent cover of a legendary Birthday Party track from right back at the start of their career and not penned by Nick Cave but Rowland S Howard.
Produced by Jack White for Third Man Records’ Blue Series The Band
Courtney Barnett – Guitar & Vocals
Bones Sloane – Bass Guitar
Dave Mudie – Drums
A. Boxing Day Blues Revisited is written by Courtney Barnett (it is not the same song as Boxing Day Blues…)
B. Shivers was written by the late Rowland S. Howard and first performed and recorded by The Boys Next Door.
They’re one of the only bands releasing new music (almost five albums to be exact this year, including Polygondwanaland, with several tracks released in the last several months). “Sketches of BrunswickEast” has already made most Top 50 best albums lists of 2017. We could be done here, but we’re not.
After singles “All Is Known,” “Beginner’s Luck” and “Greenhouse Heat Death,” the band have released “The Last Oasis.” Since we only remember things in short spurts here on the internet, “All Is Known” is every guitar riff ever used in rock ‘n’ roll, “Beginner’s Luck” is a smooth, cheeky gambling crooner, “Greenhouse Heat Death” is psych-meets-goth death inside of a greenhouse (this is literally what the song is about) and “The Last Oasis” is low-key and lovely, even upbeat at times, proving that you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink the optical illusion.
The Citradels are an Anti-psych Industrial Wimp rock band from Melbourne, Australia.
We hope you enjoy what we have worked hard to create. The Citradels are self-releasing their eighth album, “God Bless”. God Bless is a concept album of sorts. It abstractly explores themes of influence, religion and morality through characters from a small town gradually falling out of touch with its surrounds.
Recorded, mixed and mastered by the band from mid 2016 to early 2017, the album is a progression of the sound that the Citradels have developed since their inception five years ago. God Bless is a honing of the 60’s pop writing treated with elements ranging from doo-wop to dream pop, krautrock to country and Gregorian chant to shoegaze. The early Citradel’s sound remains but has been refined and God Bless represents a maturing of the creative concept.
Dear Milk! Records followers and fans,
To thank you for another year of supporting what we do, we’d like to give you a free compilation of some of the songs we’ve released in 2017 from Courtney Barnett, Jen Cloher, Jade Imagine and many more.
Happy 2017 everyone, we love ya XO
Jen Cloher – Strong Woman -from Jen Cloher “Self-Titled” 2017
Hachiku – Moonface – from Hachiku “Self-Titled” 2017
Courtney Barnett – How To Boil An Egg – from “Split Singles Club” 2017 www.splitsingles.club
Jade Imagine – Tell Her She’s Dreamin’ – from Jade Imagine “What The Fuck Was I Thinking” 2017
The Finks – Good Intentions – from The Finks “Middling” 2016
Loose Tooth – Everything Changes – from Loose Tooth “Saturn Returns” 2016
East Brunswick All Girls Choir – 14 Clay Gully Court – from East Brunswick All Girls Choir “Seven Drummers” 2014
Fraser A. Gorman – Blossom & Snow -from Fraser A. Gorman “Slow Gum” 2015
Ouch My Face – The Hammer – from Ouch My Face “Bunyip” 2015
Camp Cope is an alternative rock band from Melbourne. Lead singer Georgia McDonald’s seasoned, resilient vocal tone relays stories of regret, shame and embarrassment with deadpan humor and acute self awareness. Her deep natural twang adds a tier of passion to the simplest lines making Camp Cope the perfect companion for self-expression on even your worst days.
The Fat Angel Sings 