Here’s a fun fact: Other than English, French is the only other language to appear on all government authorised passports worldwide. Why I know that? I have no idea. Here’s another fun fact: The extent of my French vocabulary is limited to what I learnt in Year 8. I remember a handful of words and…
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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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Tullara’s debut EP Better Hold On had been a long time coming. The songwriting process began around three years ago, encapsulating a broad spectrum of emotions ranging from intense heartbreak to bounding optimism and retelling a personal journey within six short tracks. The honesty of this EP is inescapable. From first listen it’s evident that Tullara…
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Banks & Steelz, the collaborative project of Paul Banks of Interpol and RZA of Wu-Tang Clan works on paper, but how has it actually turned out? Given my lack of prior exposure to both Interpol and Wu-Tang Clan, I’ve come in with no expectations of what either of the two featuring artists should be bringing…
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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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In 2016, artists of colour have expectations placed on them from both sides of the political spectrum – those on the right would rather they stayed silent about their concerns, while oftentimes those on the left expect each artistic statement to be a political paean and call to arms. This is, of course, an unfair…
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Back in September, I sat opposite Briggs and Trials in Brisbane as they told me about Reclaim Australia, the debut album by their collaborative project A.B Original, and how it stood to shake up not only the Australian music industry, but our social community as a whole. Generally, you learn to take such grandiose claims…
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Mothers are the latest in a long and illustrious line of Indie bands from Athens, Georgia, with their hipsteriffically titled debut When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired. While they have many things going for them, not least their fantastic singer, the album could benefit from a little more editing and a more…
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I’ve followed Illy since his earliest releases. I remember first getting into him in high school when he reworked Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”. Next I smashed his second album, The Chase, on my train rides to and from my first year of uni. When touring his fourth album Cinematic, I saw him play on an…
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There’s a strange level of joy knowing that an album of such an immense quality as Don’t Let The Kids Win was written and released by an artist that grew up not too far from where I did. Much of where I grew up is quite maligned and often only makes the media headlines for…
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St. Paul and the Broken Bones know how to bring it. I saw them earlier in the year when they toured on Bluesfest, and their Sydney sideshow was just one of those sets you had to see to fully understand and appreciate. For a band to play such a polished set, you could easily think…
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Solange Knowles‘ A Seat At The Table may very well be the album that brings the artist to breakthrough-levels of success but for those who have been following her music for the last few years, this 21-track epic is the result of a creative talent that has been thriving and developing outside the mainstream for quite some time….
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Irish duo Hvmmingbyrd come to us with their debut EP Know My Name; released in September, the first offering from Deborah Byrne and Suzette Das sees the ladies step out from the alt-folk realm their music once occupied, in favour of some ethereal and distinctly more electronic soundscapes. What results is five tracks of promising material from a duo who,…
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Adelaide singer, songwriter and guitarist Begbie is only twenty years of age and has developed some talented tracks that you should definitely get behind if you’re into the indie scene. The journey is only just underway, but the skills are there for a path of success. Riddles opens with the track “Bottles on the Floor”; it…
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I don’t know about you, but there’s just about nothing better than a party band making party tunes for getting absolutely rattled to on a Saturday night. Having followed the progression of Northeast Party House for the past couple of years, you get the feeling that the lads from NPH enjoy a good party and…
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Sometimes a piece of art becomes so intertwined with a contemporaneous event that true, unbiased analysis becomes impossible. Just as Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was erroneously seen as a response to 9/11, and Bowie’s Blackstar became his swansong, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree comes in the wake of a tragedy. Halfway through the writing of the album’s material, Cave’s teenage son died in…
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Despite being short for their hometown of Glasgow, GLA, the latest release from four-piece Twin Atlantic, may as well stand for ‘guitars, loud, aggressive’. Now onto their fourth full length release, the group have an unarguably high benchmark to meet on the back of 2014’s successful Great Divide, and they certainly give it a red…
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If someone says they’re a Wilco fan, it could really mean a lot of things. Maybe they’re wearing a chambray shirt and cowboy boots, in which case they probably mean they like Being There or AM. Or perhaps they’re high and paranoid, in which case they’re Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fans, or they’re high and loving…
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Christ, there have been some absolutely stellar Australian album releases this year that have captured the full spectrum of emotion, threaded catchy-as-fuck guitar riffs and percussion throughout, and presented it in a rocking format to hungry music fans. Like Horror My Friend, Slowly Slowly and Pretty City before them this year, Ceres have produced a 2016 album that has done…
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Travis Collins has come a long way since taking the prize of Toyota Star Maker Quest (a competition that has kick started the careers of Keith Urban, Lee Kernaghan, and James Blundell to name a few). Now, twelve years later, Travis has released his fifth album, Hard Light. Delving into loss, love, courage – it…
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Ball Park Music have wooed audiences across the nation with their genre-defying versatility and clever lyrics, cementing themselves as a stalwart of the Australian alternative music scene. Their fourth studio album, Every Night The Same Dream, following on from Puddinghead, demonstrates a mature, moodier direction and does not disappoint. The shamelessly fun first track “Feelings”,…
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Too often, acts struggle to find a quality sound on their sophomore release that meets both the changing tastes and influences of the band members, but also tries to meet the demands of the fans they won over with their first release and any potential new fans that may be out there. For an act…
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Caracal was one of the most anticipated releases of 2015. Disclosure had burst onto the scene two years before, with the brilliant debut LP Settle and lead track “Latch”, which introduced the world to the undeniable Sam Smith and that those two hair raising, falsetto syllables, “Da! Da!” (You sang them in your head right…
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During my first listen of The John Steel Singers’ new EP, Midnight at the Plutonium, it’s a cold Melbourne winter day, but damn, this album makes it feel like a Brisbane summer afternoon. At just eight tracks, it’s short and sweet, and the funk that seeps through has a good chance of getting you bopping around,…
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It feels like Montaigne’s debut album, Glorious Heights, has been a long time coming. Yeah, she’s been in listener’s ears since being unearthed back in 2011, but it’s not like she’s spent the past five years sitting back resting on the laurels she created as a high schooler. Some might not have blamed her if…
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There aren’t too many good things to come out of illness and disease. Two of them, however, are the first two releases from Sydney band Gang Of Youths. While 2015 was hit by the massive and anthemic concept LP The Positions, 2016 is inevitably going to become enthralled by its follow-up EP, Let Me Be…
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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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Brisbane artist Emma Louise took the music world by storm at 19 years of age, producing a debut EP that earned her a nomination for the 2011 J Award Unearthed Artist of the Year. A beacon of raw musical talent she soon had a debut full-length album and an ARIA nomination under her belt. Sophomore…
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Rap music has always had an undercurrent of self-examination to go along with its social commentary, but it seems that now more than ever, we want introspection from our artists. From Kanye West’s lexapro lyrics to Kendrick Lamar’s visionary classic from 2015, verses that could have been ripped from the casenotes of a psychologist are…
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Hey Geronimo‘s Crashing Into the Sun may be one of the great mis-timed album releases. When it’s 10 degrees, you don’t long for an album full of summer jams and Beach Boys harmonies. Crashing Into the Sun denotes fun and heat, from the glorious beach-body album cover to the Sgt Pepper’s psychedelia. While it may stand in stark contrast to the…
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