Posts Tagged ‘The Drones’

TROPICAL FUCK STORM – ” Braindrops “

Posted: August 24, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Highly anticipated second album, one and a half years after their critically acclaimed debut LP. Featuring members of the now-defunct band The Drones. Recommend If You Like: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Nick Cave, The Slits, Protomartyr, The Drones, Gang of Four, IDLES.
“I’ve invented fake news as a genre of music,” Gareth Liddiard observes with a laugh. Heʼs talking about Maria 63, the closing track on Tropical Fuck Stormʼs sophomore LP “Braindrops”. The song takes aim at the once-marginalized alt-right conspiracy theories that now seem to be a driving force behind the rise of fascism in global politics. “It may be the most stupid song ever written,” Liddiard jokes. Heʼs wrong, Maria 63 is emblematic of Tropical Fuck Stormʼs keen ability to mine the extreme edge of pop cultureʼs periphery for potent musical and conceptual spice.

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Tropical Fuck Storm were formed around 2017 in the city of Melbourne, Victoria along Australiaʼs south-eastern coast. The band released their debut long-player A Laughing Death in Meatspace on Joyful Noise Recordings in 2018. Each of the bandʼs four members bring considerable experience to the group. Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin were part of the long-running and critically-acclaimed act The Drones, while Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel have performed in a variety of well-received projects. Perhaps itʼs that wealth of rock and roll experience that allows Tropical Fuck Storm to so expertly deconstruct and distort the genreʼs norms. “Everything we do, we try to do it in a weird way. The whole album is full of weird beats, and just weird shit everywhere,” Liddiard explains. He cites Doc at the Radar Station-era Captain Beefheart as a key sonic touchstone, and Braindrops certainly shares the Captainʼs penchant for pounding abstract grooves.

It’s a amazing doozy, perhaps even more so than its predecessor — and keep in mind, this is coming from a band known for slinging tales of Soviet chess machines, shellfish-related conspiracy theories, and “antimatter animals.” Consider the tremulous guitar riff leading off album opener “Paradise” a facsimile for the record’s sun-poisoned strain of dadaist pop: an prolonged, paranoid sirens’ song peppered with references to Pokémon, Eugene Leary, global warming, and leg-humping dogs. Highlights include “The Happiest Guy Around,” a rowdy cut that, with its chattered vocals and ebullient energy, recalls a Beegees simulation gone awry; and the bristling title track, a sprightly, staccato race against the doomsday clock.

Tropical Fuck Storm have achieved a uniquely off-kilter sound on Braindrops.

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TROPICAL FUCK STORM – ” A Laughing Death In Meatspace ” Best Album of 2018

Posted: January 13, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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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, Gareth Liddiard, 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

TROPICAL FUCK STORM – ” A Laughing Death In Meatspace ” Best Albums Of 2018

Posted: December 22, 2018 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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With Australian garage-psych group The Drones on hiatus, Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin joined forces with drummer Lauren Hammel (High Tension) and guitarist/keyboardist Erica Dunn (Mod Con, Harmony) to form Tropical Fuck Storm, who had only started to write/practice when invited to tour North America with King Gizzard and Band of Horses. A record born on the road, A Laughing Death in Meatspace picks up where The Drones left off and instantly goes in a dozen new directions. “It sounds like it looks,” Gareth wrote on Facebook when TFS revealed the LP’s vivid, psychedelic cover art. Everyone sings in the band, which gives them a unique energy and, sometimes, a poppier side than The Drones. It’s a big, bold and brash LP, putting a post-apocalyptic spin on politics, our screen obsession, or recounting chessmaster Garry Kasparov’s 1996 match against a computer. Not subtle, but neither are these times.

Just another day at TFS HQ, captured on cellulite by the Fellini of Thornbury, Chris Matthews, AKA Flagz of Defero Productions. You Let My Tyres down is from the soon to be released debut album A LAUGHING DEATH IN MEATSPACE (Released MAY 4th).

Recommended If You Like The Drones, Nick Cave, Dinosaur Jr., Iceage, Protomartyr. The phantasmagorical debut album by Tropical Fuck Storm, A Laughing Death in Meatspace, delivers a fraught vision of algo rhythmic apocalypse. The debut dive-bombs into the realms of mortality and immortality, moralizing and amorality; the passing of time, and how little we have left.These are lurid songs, urgently told through Gareth Liddiard’s barbed and byzantine lyricism, abrasive guitar slashes, drum adrenalin, raunchy bass and electronic undercurrents. They’re raging, rapscallion, and funny, lyrically delving into everything from internet shaming to the kuru “laughing death” disease of the PNG highlands to Russian chess great Gary Kasparov’s portentous loss to an IBM computer. Live, Tropical Fuck Storm are a force of nature, conjuring chaos at every blistering performance, with zero shits to give for corporate music hegemony. “Kneel down by the advertising, don’t you make a single false move” calls out the female chorus of Fiona Kitschin and Erica Dunn echoing the dismay of our time as we bear witness to the sinister seductions which social media surveillance has entangled us. A Laughing Death in Meatspace doesn’t show us the way out of this situation, but it howls along with us as we peer into the maelstrom ahead.

THE DRONES – ” To Think I Once Loved You “

Posted: December 9, 2016 in MUSIC
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The group has taken a serious left turn with their seventh album, “Feelin Kinda Free”. “We said ‘fuck it’ and went spaz, It’s a pretty weird record and you can dance to it,” Liddiard said of the album. “It’s time to have a groovy Drones record. We’re sick of being a bunch of drags.” The bands single “Taman Shud” voted the Australian song of the year was one of the most compelling singles of last year, but good luck to anyone who hit the dance floor to its skittish rhythms.

Boredom, the sixth track on Feelin Kinda Free, is in a similar vein. If the Drones once came on like the mutant, brawling blues-punk offspring of the Birthday Party and Beasts of Bourbon, this sounds more like the mostly forgotten Australian post-punk.

“The best songs are like bad dreams,” mutters Liddiard  It’s a fabulous opening line – and what follows is a succession of nightmares.
The Angry Penguins movement of the 1940s was an interrogation, and rejection, of an earlier kind of Australian nationalism represented by the bush balladeers. Feelin Kinda Free is as decisive a repudiation, both of the Drones’ past and of the mythic, The dominant themes here are immigration and its attendant cousin, paranoia. And Then They Came For Me finds Liddiard “feeling like I’ve overstayed”.

Taman Shud and Boredom aside, Feelin Kinda Free slithers by like a serpent in search of its next meal. The feel is unhurried, but menacing. While the songs still stretch out like elastic, there are only eight of them, so at 41 minutes, the album doesn’t outstay its welcome. The emphasis is mostly on bass and percussion: guitars are heavily treated; frequently, you’d be forgiven for thinking there are no guitars at all.

The closest thing to anything from the Drones’ past is the agonised To Think That I Once Loved You, which sits squarely in the album’s centre without dragging it down. Otherwise, Feelin Kinda Free sounds like the work of a less dour and far more subversive band.

The Drones – To Think That I Once Loved You
Tropical Fuck Storm Records – From the album Feelin Kinda Free

THE DRONES – ” I See Seaweed “

Posted: November 17, 2016 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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The Drones. On their fifth album proper, I See Seaweed, the Australian five-piece engage directly with the weirdness of the contemporary Australian experience. Here songwriter and lead Drone Gareth Liddiard eviscerates the hypocrisy of Australia’s conservative politicians, narrative-based songs are located firmly in terra Australis: ‘They’ll Kill You’ is a paean for an ex-lover who has, like so many others, gone off to Europe in a vain attempt to escape her own flaws; ‘Nine Eyes’ sees Liddiard using Google Street view to observe the social economic damage wrought on his home town of Port Hedland by “cashed-up bogan” mine workers.

The Drones have always traded in this kind of fire-and-brimstone, but it’s never sounded quite this good. One of the most obvious improvements has to do with new full-time member Steve Hesketh, whose piano and keyboard work seems not so much to add startlingly new elements to the band’s songs but to allow them to develop their artier ambitions and perform their more technically difficult material live. This personnel addition bodes well for Liddiard’s songs, though, as the additional textural detail Hesketh provides allows the songs to rely less on bludgeoning loud/soft contrasts than in the past.

Perhaps the most significant change in I See Seaweed, though, is a softening of Liddiard’s previously dogmatic misanthropy, which is on display in both the album opener ‘I See Seaweed’ and its closer, ‘Why Write a Letter That You’ll Never Send’ has plenty of zingers, but the structure of the song reveals that they’re equally self-directed: supposedly an email from a friend Liddiard is reading “verbatim” (in rhyming couplets?), its chorus features Liddiard chiding his “friend”: “Why write a letter that you’ll never send?” he asks, reminding us that “everybody’s hurting / and their needs are always stark.” It may be too late to avert the coming disaster, but we need not revel in the end – I See Seaweed’s ultimate message is that we can wait out the apocalypse and make the most of what little time remains with decency, tenderness and humour.

The DRONES – ” Taman Shud “

Posted: November 17, 2016 in MUSIC
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The song’s title is inspired by an unsolved 1948 case of an unidentified man who turned up dead on Somerton Beach in South Australia — a case which was named after the phrase “tamám shud”, meaning “ended” or “finished” in Persian, which was printed on a scrap of paper found in the man’s trousers.

Here’s how The Drones explain the song’s relation to Mr Shud’s death:

“67 years later right-wingers rule the world uncontested because left-wingers earlier outlawed everybody’s right to call out people being assholes on the grounds that assholes also have the right to believe in the possibility of a leftist utopia in which nothing straight forward can ever be said. “Taman Shud is the result of that delusion and proof to the contrary.”

Taman Shud is the first single from The Drones’ highly-regarded seventh studio album,  The album will be the follow-up to 2013’s stellar I See Seaweed.

The Drones – Taman Shud 2015 –Tropical Fuck Storm Records