Looks like I was premature the other week when I listed my fave ten or so for 2017. “Cordyline Australis” should have been there.
And I have to say I envy all of you - you haven’t heard this yet. The first listen - if you put aside the hour and turn it on - you’ll be damn impressed. This is one hugely groovy disc.
You don’t know Michael Canning from a bag of chops, of course; he’s on Facebook as Michael Sea, and I did a review of his band’s last EP, “Mass Spectrometer”; I should also point out that Canning has released one earlier solo LP, and a slew of other music with other bands. Hassle the man on FB, but also go here.
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- By Robert Brokenmouth
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So as a person with an extremely limited disposable income, I am unaccustomed to experiencing so much high quality entertainment in a short period of time.
A family member tripped across some kind of free trial TV subscription service and I keep binge-watching music flicks-witnessing one marvelous show after the next, kind of glimpsing how so many of my former peers are able to stay apolitical, apathetic, suitably sedated in their consumer hypno-spells.
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- By General Labor
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You know exactly what he’s gonna say: Sydney reviewer gets pissed off at the excess of musical talent in rival city Melbourne. Gets all angsty and laments The Good Old Days when Sydney more than held a candle to Melbourne. You’re partly right.
Cutting to the chase…Claire Birchall IS one of those uber talents from “down south” who grew up in the fertile Geelong scene and now lives in Melbourne. She plays everything from beatbox-backed pop to lean and mean rock. Genres are just a vehicle for the songs. “Nothing Ever Gets Lost” is a gnarly, blues-rock album.
The purple and blue cover art deceptively looks like one of those “Back From The Grave” acid punk compilations. The music, however, is fuzzy and warm and glows from the inside. There’s a great sense of dynamics and Birchall’s voice resonates with character and a world-weary charm.
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- By The Barman
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"He was a cocked pistol." -Robert Williams.
Mad Marc Rude grew up in ‘60s New York, the son of an abuser cop and negligent mom, who frequently expelled both him and his sister from the family home. He attended Woodstock the year I was busy being born.
I think I first became aware of him as a teenager, when I read an article about the Hollywood punk underground in the pages of Rolling Stone. I already published a shitty fanzine and was the rowdy front man for a defiantly outcast Midwestern garage band that performed covers of Dead Boys, Misfits, Cramps, and Gun Club songs, as well as some sucky Dead Kennedys influenced originals with cartoonishly banal titles like, "Victims Of The System".
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- By General Labor
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Alternative title: "He Gets by With Some Help From His Friends".
Producer-guitarist Bruce "Cub" Callaway assembled a stellar cast for this, his 2013 return to recording after a lay-off, and it shows.
John Hoey (Died Pretty), Warwick Gilbert (Radio Birdman), Paul Larsen (Celibate Rifles), Clyde Bramley (Hoodoo Gurus) and Julie Mostyn Gilbert (Flaming Hands) all played roles. Lesser-knowns Ian Johnson, Louis Callaway and Harry Rothenfluh also contributed drums.
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- By The Barman
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No introduction needed for the onetime spiritual leader of the MC5 so here’s a personal note about meeting John Sinclair:
It was on a night off during a business trip that involved a flying visit to Ann Arbor, Michigan in the early 2000s. Sinclair was in town for that city’s annual Hash Bash and had just played a show at The Blind Pig. I’d been drinking at the Eight Bar Saloon with some locals, including Scott Morgan who did the introduction.
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- By The Barman
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Do you still believe in record labels? Back in the ‘80s, being released on an imprint that you knew and loved (Bomp, Citadel, Waterfront) was a surefire indication that a band possessed a “certain” sound, and was good.
Screaming Apple is the garage rock label in Germany that doesn’t release duds, so hearing about it collaborating with Australia's Off The Hip for an album by a band called The Smart Patrol was always going to be news falling on receptive ears.
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- By The Barman
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It’s a truism that many bands from Europe rock but don’t rock and roll. It’s not their fault, of course, it’s just a matter of cultural conditioning. Rock and roll is not their first musical language and the “high art” the place is steeped in suffocates that "low art", like any other form of musical expression, into submission.
So when you find a Continental band that “gets it”, you better latch on to them, tight.
Some of us are (ahem) old enough to remember a French band called Fixed Uo, who were on Sydney’s Citadel label, and made it to Australia to play and record in the mid 1980s. Rob Younger and Jim Dickson produced an album for them. Soulful garage rock was their stock in trade. They “got it”.
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- By The Barman
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Pigeons don’t belong in holes.
In other words, just as soon as you peg Off The Hip as Australia’s home for “Thee Garage Rock Sound” exclusively, they throw another curve ball like this here Brown Spirits CD.
Brown Spirits are from Melbourne and are an instrumental trio made-up of Tim Wold, Agostino Soldati and Andre Fazio, whose collective curriculum vitae includes bands like Mod Vigil, Kids of Zoo, Deep Street Soul, Russian Roulettes, Go-Set and Legends of Motorsport.
To the best of my knowledge (and I’ve heard most of them), Brown Spirits sound nothing like any of the above.
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- By The Barman
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