On their most recent album, Precious Art, Rozwell Kid commit to this very 90s, Get Up Kids-esque, early Weezer kind of fuzzy pop punk. There’s nothing that would sound out of place in the background of a scene in a Buffy episode from 1998. Here’s the main question you need to answer before heading into…
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What can I say about Ceres that hasn’t already been said – often by me? Ceres is my favourite Australian band, hands down. Their first album, I Don’t Want To Be Anywhere But Here, is one of my favourite albums of all time. Their second album, Drag It Down On You, is a melodious, cathartic,…
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Hachiku’s upcoming self-titled EP is dreamy. That sounds like a disingenuous, relatively vague description of the fuzzy beats and twinkly melodies, but Hachiku – otherwise known as Anika Ostendorf – has these deft, light vocals, sung in a clipped, wide-eyed accent are just that – dreamy. It’s an early summer, soft-lights-and-cool-water kind of sound, and…
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2016 was a hard year, globally, politically, environmentally. People made half-hearted jokes last November that at least we’d be getting a lot of good punk music pretty soon – small compensation, honestly. But the genre that flourishes the most under backwards political regimes doesn’t actually seem to be punk – often, what we remember the…
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Sometimes when you’re reviewing something subjective, like music or art, you run up against this age-old debate between subjectivity and objectivity. That’s where I am with Dirty Projectors’ new, self-titled album. I think it might be really interesting, from an objective technical standpoint, but I know it bored me and made me feel weirdly twitchy….
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2017 marks the ten year anniversary of The Front Bottoms, who have returned to Australia for their first headlining tour this month. We caught up with singer/guitarist Brian Sella ahead of their Adelaide show at the Enigma Bar to talk about the artistic process, the future of The Front Bottoms, and the current state of…
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In The Service of Spring is the debut full-length from Sydney’s Dusken Lights. It’s an extremely relaxed album – very, very low energy – but very sweet and pretty when it works. The opening track, “Superman, Wondergirl” (sidenote, why no Wonder Woman?) is a promising opener, with the juxtaposed vocals of singer/guitarist Paul O. Watling…
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I’m trying to teach myself French, and a friend put me on to Christine and the Queens (the stage/project name of bilingual French musician Héloïse Letissier). It turns out it’s only about half-useful, because Christine and the Queens’ self-titled debut has a lot of English lyrics, at least on the international release. It’s a good…
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Melbourne’s Hunting Season don’t sound fully Australian, or at least Australian right now, even though they’re playing in that very fertile field of dreamy Aussie indie-rock. They sound… Pacific North-Western if anything. Their EP Lost Forever is perhaps not even quite of the 2010s. There’s a very clear pop-punk overtone to the EP, but a…
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Thursday October 15th at The Gov, in Adelaide, was the first show of The Paper Kites’ Twelvefour Australian tour, supported by Patrick James. It was also one of the early very hot days of spring. The beer garden of The Gov felt tropical, almost pre-cyclonic, the palm trees streaming in the hot, humid breeze. It’s…
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Boy & Bear are river-boat slow, that kind of deceptively smooth-flowing pace that looks calm and languid on the surface but is moving quite fast underneath. The Sydney folk-rock quintet’s third album Limit Of Love cruises along easily, keeping a lively enough pace that it doesn’t sink into the doldrums. It is, in short, a…
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