TWENTY MINUTES WITH THE DEVIL

AUSTRALIAN ROCK COLLECTIVE’s: KRAM Speaking words of wisdom for emerging musos

By Alice Worley Australian Rock Collective are back with another ‘Beatles installment after two sold out circuits of Abbey Road - Live. This time around they’ll be celebrating the final ‘Beatles album; Let It Be. Here’s a brief bit of background for you. While recorded predominantly before Abbey Road, Let It Be was released in May 1970, almost a month after The Beatles had broken up. As with Abbey Road, this was an album The Beatles never fully got to celebrate and tour themselves. So ARC are here to do just that. To refresh your memory, Australian Rock Collective is made up of Kram of Spiderbait, Darren Middleton of Powderfinger, Davey Lane of You Am I, and Mark Wilson of Jet, and as with their last circuit, they’ll be joined on stage by a bunch of other lovely guest musicians to help them bring Let It Be to life. I don’t know how many of you reading made it to the Abbey Road tour, but even as someone that’s not a hardcore ‘Beatles fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The show had so much soul and love and care put into it. You could tell everyone on that stage had such a pure admiration for the band they were paying tribute to; every one of them shaped by those albums and songs they grew up with. My personal favourite performance from that night would certainly be Kram singing I Want You (She’s So Heavy). That final build of the drums rumbling towards the song’s conclusion was felt in every cell. I do believe my sister and I looked at each other with tears in our eyes at the end of it and just said “Wow”. It was a dopamine roller coaster. Speaking of the Spiderbait drummer, I got to have a chat with the wise and charming Kram about the Let It Be tour and the ARC’s motivations for hitting the road once again. So, with Abbey Road done to great success, what was the purpose of doing another album when the first tour seemed perfect, and was such a well rounded project? Well, Kram and the others don’t think you can really do this album without the other. “We were gonna do this show last year, and we kinda made the decision that if Abbey Road went really well then we

were gonna do this show; the two records are basically linked,” Kram reveals. “It’s almost like having two final records, because they had the project, the idea, and it failed miserably. They had such a bad time. “And then they regrouped and made Abbey Road, even though that record came out earlier, so we wanted to explore both sides of the repertoire and also capture the experience. Let It Be is such a different album; it’s so much rawer and simpler in some ways, but there’s more space. Although we’re approaching it in a different way, the personality is the same.” I interviewed Davey Lane last time the ARC came to town, and after hearing how The Beatles had shaped him, I wanted to hear Kram’s relationship with the music; what it did to him as a musician and how he thinks they influenced music in general. “I think all four of us, as well as so many other music lovers and artists all over, are just so into this band,” he says. “Davey always says that he worships at the altar of The Beatles, and that’s so true. You can have so much faith in that band and in their work, and he can really draw upon that, not just in his creativity but also as an unashamed fan. If we weren’t musicians ourselves, I think we still love the band just as much. “My influence from The Beatles came at exactly the same time as the Sex Pistols, and those two bands have impacted me ever since; the third being Black Sabbath. “So my orientation as an artist has been a combination of those three groups,” Kram continues. “Janet (English) gave me a tape of The Beatles and my school councillor gave me a tape of the Sex Pistols when I was in year 10, saying ‘Hey you should listen to this’. He was a cool cat, a potsmoking basketballer,” he laughs. “I’d never heard anyone like Johnny Rotten, and I thought, ‘Oh! You can sing like that, and it sounds sick?!’ You don’t have to be amazing, like a diva or anything. “And then with The Beatles there was this incredible variation in sound. One minute you’re listening to Yesterday and the next you’re listening to Tomorrow Never Knows.” Even if you’re not a huge ‘Beatles fan, you can still appreciate how albums like Let it Be and Abbey Road have changed music in terms of songwriting. Kram says it also shaped the way bands developed personalities, both individually and as a collective. “I went and saw You Am I playing at a club in Brisbane the other night; we’ve been playing with those guys at festivals for years,” he says. “But I haven’t seen them up close like that for such a long time. “Watching them, it really occurred to me that every personality on stage is just as important as the music being played. With The Beatles, each member is a personality, and such likeable characters. There’s something very relatable about the members. Even if those songs were the same, it would be a different experience if it were a different band that had put them together. It’s about the relationships with these individuals during these projects that I’m interested in as much as the songs and the music. “It’s the same with people in real life that we hang out with. People can be so interesting to us for so many different reasons. Bands are basically an extension of a friendship. That’s no exception with Spiderbait. We wouldn’t be the band that we are unless we really cared for each other and wanted to hang out together. The Beatles were one of the first bands to do that. Before, there would be the star, and then the band behind them. The Beatles said, there’s no one individual in this band, it’s a group and it has a name.” Being such an iconic group, how does one approach such a project? Kram’s advice: give it love and do it your way. “My point of view for a show like this is the same as any show I would do. It has to have an element of myself in it. Last time around when we played Helter Skelter, I mean, that’s about as Spiderbait as it gets,” he laughs. “I really had to restrain myself so I wasn’t smashing up the drum kit at the end. “But in other songs, you can tap into a performance side of you that people might not have really seen before, and that’s what I like about projects like this. Even if I’m doing a ballad, you can still get that punk vibe coming through. Once a punk, always a punk.” When ARC last came to town, there was one older gentlemen in the crowd that felt the need to scream, “You better not stuff this up!” before the group performed what I assume was his favourite track on the album. To be fair to that guy, it’s a sacred thing to so many that you’re taking on, so I was curious as to how many people have been negatively critical towards the guys for handling a project like this. “That’s the thing, we haven’t really had anyone,” Kram chirps. “Janet and our manager Fiona were in the audience at one of our shows surrounded by some hardcore ‘Beatles fans, and everyone was just loving it. We have no preconception that anyone can do it better than The Beatles, that would be ridiculous. But it’s done from a place of love and celebration of the music. “I was jamming Dig A Pony this week and just thinking, this is sick, this is absolutely sick, there’s some of my favourite drumming in this song. I mean, Ringo has always been such an inspiration to me and he is always about being inside the song, and that’s what I concentrate on.” If you’re wanting to catch Australian Rock Collective dishing out another batch of ‘Beatles magic, they’ll be playing at Canberra Theatre Centre on Wednesday, 28 July. Tickets - $81.85 - $176.15 + bf via the venue - were already flying out the door when I checked, so get in quick!

Lockdown Tips and Tricks To Ward Off Boredom

By Chris Marlton Finding entertainment is easier than ever in today’s world of smart TVs, smartphones, smart watches and endless shows and movies on streaming services. However, people are finding that these easy distractions can lose their shine over extended periods of time. Recent lockdown laws in major cities around Australia have revealed that we are less capable of entertaining ourselves than we may have thought. But fear not, there are solutions. Here is a short list of simple tasks that will distract you from boredom. And you might end up having a little bit of fun along the way. Write A Novel First up, we have what might seem like an obvious project to embark on, but you’d be surprised how many novels haven’t been written in the past 18 months. The hundreds and thousands of novels that haven’t been written since the pandemic began are akin to mass-burning of books, but even worse, they’re being destroyed before they ever began. You can use a pen and paper, a computer, or even your phone, but you must start writing today. Think of some characters and write about them doing things. Once they’ve done some things they can then discuss the things they’ve done with themselves or with each other. Threequarters through the book reveal that some of the things one of the characters did was dishonest. When you’ve written roughly 100,000 words you can send your novel to a publishing company. Congratulations, you’re now a novelist. Design a Submarine If you thought writing a novel was daunting, take a deep breath, maybe two, because this next lockdown boredom buster is no walk in the park. Step one in designing a submarine is gaining a degree in mechanical engineering. Universities in Australia are currently throwing themselves at local students with a range of online options to help make up for the loss of income from international students being unable to enter the country. Once you’ve gotten yourself a Bachelor of Engineering degree, you’ll have to get yourself an integrated Naval Architecture design software suite. I personally recommend Paramarine, by QinetiQ, but there are several top choices available, and all will get the job done. You may wish to “pirate” the marine software, since the full suite isn’t cheap. No matter what marine engineering software you choose, you’ll quickly find that few things pass the time, or are as personally satisfying, as designing your very own submarine. Become a Private Military Contractor So, you’ve written a novel, designed a submarine, and the lockdown is still going on… what’s next? Fret not, because the submarine you’ve designed isn’t going to gather dust on your metaphorical diningroom table of a USB hard-drive; it’s time to sell those blueprints. And who better to buy your submarine than the navy of a global superpower? There’s nothing stopping you from shopping around, to make sure you get the best deal for your lockdown submarine design. Defence contracts aren’t secured overnight, so be patient, but if you stay the course you could find yourself making some decent money without ever getting up off your couch! Pilates Self-care is the final piece of the puzzle in this magical solution pie. There’s lots of apps around for pilates. Download one, and start doing Pilates. Chris Marlton is a Canberra based comedian, writer, painter, and film-maker. His Canberra Comedy Festival show Mephisto Waltz is on Wednesday, 29 September, tickets on sale now at canberracomedyfestival.com.au/ event/chris-marlton-mephisto-waltz/ Chris also runs a monthly stand-up comedy night at The Front in Lyneham. Upcoming standup comedy tickets are available at www.linktree.com/3blindmen, and you can follow @threeblindmencomedy on Instagram and @ChrisMarltonComedy on Facebook.

(PHOTO)BOOK REVIEW

WITH CARA LENNON

Billie Eilish by Billie Eilish [Wren & Rook]

Why are photobooks so goddamn fun? Try to make me follow your Insta and I will roll my eyes right into the quarkth dimension. Same photos in a big shiny hardcover? Sign me up five times and staple my license to your mailing list. Slick in format and warmly weird in content, this is exactly the Burtonesque, high fashion horror show that any Eilish fan is gonna absolutely love. Read cover-to-cover, the photos show a story rarely alluded to in Eilish’s accompanying commentary. A homeschool kid raised by two musicians in shambling surrounds, going through the obligatory Pink and Bieber phases, wound by degrees into a machine of cameras, crowds, hype, and fantastic scale. Eilish grew up writing songs with her brother Finneas, her first hit Ocean Eyes blowing up when she was 13, hitting the Billboard charts with her EP Don’t Smile at Me at 16. Her distinctive aesthetic set her apart from other tweeny pop stars, her intense colors, cluttered prints and bling against creepy minimalist backdrops elevating Eilish from popular to iconic. It’s a style that translates dramatically to full-sized glossies, and Billie Eilish makes the most of it with seriously gorgeous shots from her music videos, stage shows, fashion shoots, and behind the scenes mayhem. Eilish presents her early family candids as a celebration of her loved ones and an invitation to relate to her adolescent awkwardness. However I did find that, even as a unapologetic Eilish fangirl, the commodification of a teen star’s childhood is an uneasy proposition. Collectively we’re still coming to grips with the idea that people need platforms, but exposure and self-expression don’t automatically equate to empowerment. Young people need and deserve to be heard, but we know by now the kids with the most microphones pointed at them can be some of the most vulnerable.

I found myself lowkey scanning this part of the book for signs of dance moms and showbiz nastiness amongst otherwise wholesome family photos (but turned up nothing). If you can put the trauma of being woke in 2021 aside it’s a fairly sweet collection of baby photos that follows a girl through her glow-up into stardom. Eilish’s commentary is sparse and, apart from a smattering of meme humour and some fan service, revolves around her loved ones.

There’s a sense of strong connection with her brother and her friends. The slew of baby and family photos transitions through gig and studio recording pics into staged entertainment-slashart compositions, giving us the Eilish we’re all familiar with in glorious black and neon. It’s a cool book. Get one.

Twenty Minutes

With The Devil

by Joshua Eckersley

This month we spoke to Caroline Stacey, Artistic Director of The

Street Theatre, about the upcoming original production, Twenty

Minutes With The Devil. This thrilling, black comedy is inspired by the real-life capture of the notorious Mexican drug lord, El Chapo, and taps into the basic fears and anxieties we all possess when faced with immeasurable uncertainty and ever-present danger.

Twenty Minutes With The Devil is a speculatory examination of the unknown aspects of the most recent El Chapo arrest, where by chance, two highway patrol officers apprehend, and are subsequently ordered to hunker down in a hotel room and watch over, the most dangerous man in the world. As forces on both sides scramble to gain control of the situation, the police officers have to make choices that will save their lives or seal their fate, whilst all along not knowing who is coming for them. The inhabitants of that room suffer through the excruciating emergency of their situation where any outcome is possible, and life and death hangs in the balance for them all.

Talking to Director, Caroline Stacey, she sets the scene for us: “If you like Fargo, Narcos and those type of series, Twenty Minutes

With The Devil will be right up your alley. It draws on that type of popular culture and examines some really important issues.

“The basic premise of the work is, it’s set in the locked room of the modern world, and how do we get out? How do we make the right choice before time runs out? When crisis comes, what would you do?

No help, no witnesses. What do you do?” Caroline continues. “The writers came to me about three and a half years ago and pitched the idea. It was immediately interesting in terms of the characters and all of them being under pressure and not being able to leave the room. With El Chapo handcuffed to a bed in a locked room with PAGE 28 no way out, I thought it was a great idea. So, we’ve worked steadily, workshopping, and it’s been developed from that glimmer of an idea.” The writers, real-life law professors Desmond Manderson and Louis Gomez Ramiro, being of Mexican and Australian backgrounds, combine their talents to bring a cross-cultural mix that informs this work of true crime-inspired fiction. Their unique insight into the mysterious events of that day, along with their thorough understanding of all things law and order, makes up the perfect preparation for delving into the mind of a crime syndicate kingpin. “The two writers were thinking about the problem of justice in the modern world, and they thought that this real-life capture of El Chapo provided an amazing canvas. Somebody that has escaped from the FBI and would have gotten away but was pulled over in the middle of the night, and they were just told to sit tight”, Caroline tells us. “Their question was - what did they talk about, these two lowly cops with the most wanted man in the world? What did he offer them? What did he do to threaten them? How did he charm them, and in a place that is so corrupt, why did these two nobodies stay put?” Breathing life into these characters is the incredibly gifted actors, PJ Williams, Joanna Richards and Raoul Craemer. Williams, who has a long history of performance in Canberra theatre, will be unleashing a deluge of menace and darkness as the crime lord El Ticho. He was last seen at The Street Theatre in Diary of a Madman, for which he received the critic’s award for best performance. He has also acted in a swag of other Street Theatre productions such as A Doll’s House Part 2, The Faithful Servant, The Chain Bridge, Breathing Corpses, and The Give and Take. Richards and Craemer star as Officers Angela and Romulo, the unlikely duo who apprehend El Ticho, and use every tool in the shed to keep control of the situation in their tenuous grasp. As partners, they embody the well-known ‘odd couple’ dynamic, and as Caroline puts it: “All those TV series that have cop duos, it draws upon that idiom. From Starsky & Hutch to CHiPS, to every single TV program you can name where there are two cops working together. One of them is, of course, a complete shambles, and the other is all business. So, it’s playing around with a lot of those tropes that we all know”. Twenty Minutes With The Devil will be performed at The Street Theatre from Friday, 20 August, through to Sunday, 29 August and will include a Meet the Makers Q&A session after the Sunday 29th 4pm show with the cast and the creative team. For fans of crime fiction, this production will have you captivated from beginning to end and keep you guessing with every twist and turn. And in case you’re still not convinced, the final word from Caroline is: “It’s very funny, gritty, and dark. There are big emotions, and it is incredibly suspenseful. You do not know what is going to happen next, and none of us want to be locked in a room with a drug lord.”

For more information, visit The Street Theatre website.

THE JOHN LENNON

SONGBOOK IN CONCERT

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Imagine

By Joshua Eckersley John Waters is easily one of Australia’s most recognisable and widely respected entertainers. This month, he is set to wow audiences with his new John Lennon Song Book concert at The Street Theatre, which will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of the classic album Imagine. John will be performing the whole album live with his band, along with a number of other Lennon and ‘Beatles classics.

John Waters belongs to a special class of performer that straddles multiple genres and formats, be it music, film, theatre, or even kids’ programming (surely everyone has seen him on Playschool at some point in their lives). Over the 50-year span of his career he has basically starred in every TV show ever made, with some of the choice cuts being All the Rivers Run, All Saints, Underbelly, City Homicide and my personal favourite, Offspring. It is really no surprise that above all else, the love of music came first for the English-born star, who landed on Aussie shores as a 20-yearold migrant with guitar in hand and 30 pounds in his pocket. Already an accomplished live performer, having spent his early years playing with a blues band in England, Waters tells us on arrival he, “just schlepped around looking for work sitting in the corner of cafes, playing guitar and singing folk songs. I had to brush up on my Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan repertoire. Then eventually I auditioned for Hair, the rock musical, and got into the show, and that put me into the mainstream of musical theatre in Australia.”

From these humble beginnings, Waters managed to ride the wave of a renaissance of Australian film throughout the 1970s, establishing himself as a dominant force in the blossoming industry. Never one to rest on his laurels, Waters kept up a constant touring regime of performing his own original compositions. Then in 1992 he created and stared in the two-man theatrical production of Lennon: Through A Glass Onion. The show was met with such acclaim and was in such high demand that it has taken John and his musical partner Stewart D’Arrietta around the world, from New York to London and back for nearly 30 years. The show depicted the thoughts and nuances of what was going through Lennon’s mind at certain points in his life, with Waters delivering monologues in a flawless scouse accent, interspersed with songs from Lennon’s entire career. According to John: “It’s two men creating this huge atmosphere and when Stewart plays the piano, he sounds like a band of six people. He really thumps that thing and makes it sing, so he’s brilliant in that way. We wrote and rehearsed the show and wondered if anybody would like it at all. We first did it at the Tilbury Hotel in Sydney and after three weeks we had people hanging from the rafters, so it was a revelation for us that we’d got it right somehow.” So, to say John Waters is an authority on John Lennon is a huge understatement. He is nothing short of the living embodiment of Lennon on stage and has honed his skills over a lifetime’s commitment to the music of one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. And it is into this light that he now steps out with the new John Lennon Song Book concert, performing the album Imagine in its entirety. According to Waters: “It’s great fun to do every track on an album, one after another, so we’ve lined up a tour doing just that, followed by a bunch of different Lennon songs in the 2nd act. It’s Stewart and I with a fabulous band, and it’s almost like we’ve been unchained,” John explains. “The Glass Onion show is strict, and the timing is exact and precise for theatrical effect, but here we can be a bit more looseygoosey and express ourselves with the songs, chat with the audience and have a laugh. I’m digging it and I’m looking forward to the tour because we’re going to have a lot of fun.” In the 50 years since the release of Imagine, it is important to note how we are currently situated, both politically and socially, given the philosophical message of hope contained in the lyrics. The subject matter is just as pointed and relevant today as it ever was, which is certainly not lost on Waters. “I don’t think it’s naïve, the idea of visualising something to make it happen. It’s a philosophical thing that’s been around for thousands of years actually, that idea of imagining and visualising something and bringing it into being. Sadly now 50 years since that song came out, we still have religious bigotry and we still have war, but we don’t have any wealth-sharing in the world. It is a long-term project to change and if we are going to save the planet and live on it still, then we have to change radically, and I think Lennon was a great voice for that.” John Waters performs The John Lennon Song Book In Concert, Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Imagine album at The Street Theatre on Saturday, 31 July at 8pm. More information is available at The Street Theatre website.

Blackbird Bar

We will be using the money from the grant to improve our sound system and equipment, as well as: - Build a large more user friendly stage for our performers. - Bring big name artists from outside of Canberra to blackbird.

- Support the local music scene by having different live artists every night we’re open. - We will also open roughly one Sunday per month doing big name ticketed events

- Increase our marketing reach for events We’re very grateful for this opportunity and excited. Follow us on Facebook and instagram for updates on all of our events

@blackbird.canberra

The Boardwalk Bar & Nightclub

We are bringing live music back to Belconnen! Situated on the shore of Lake Ginninderra, The Boardwalk Bar and Nightclub is the premier entertainment hub that you must not miss! Featuring live music duos from local artists every Wednesday from 7:30pm and monthly performances from a variety of bands as well as an exciting new full production show – STUN! A Queer Variety Show. Check our Facebook events for details.

Peter Dorree - Owner

The Front

The Front is an intimate venue in the inner north looking for weekly acts on Friday evenings. We would love to showcase Canberra’s diverse music scene and we are open to all genres! You can fill out a gig enquiry form at frontgallerycafe.com to let us know if you and your bandmates are keen!

Mimir / Events Manager @The Front

UC Live

UC Live will be hosting a huge program of local and touring artists, whilst predominantly using the funding to pay for our technician’s wages. We’re also hoping to run some much-needed all-ages events!

Kels - Live Music Manager

The Amp It Up! fund was developed to assist small to medium sized live venues to recover after the impacts of COVID-19, as well as to grow opportunities for local musicians and other performance artists to get back on stage and give Canberrans some great live entertainment options throughout 2021. 23 live entertainment venues across the ACT will share in nearly $800,000 to help support local gigs and get the night-time economy going again. As a result, we caught up with some of the venues to find out how they’re gonna splash the cash, and thus what we can look forward to in the months ahead.

Gang Gang

Gang Gang’s Amp It Up program is built around bringing bigger interstate acts into Canberra under the proviso that we get to pick the supports. This will provide a bunch of local artists with the invaluable experience of performing and hanging out with nationally and internationally successful artists. Something which can be quite hard to come by for Canberra bands.

We are also super happy to be able to provide guarantees to some amazing local artists that will be launching their singles and albums. We’re so excited to see what this invaluable program does for our local scene over the next six months!

Sam Conway - Co-Owner/Manager

The Basement

The Basement Canberra crew and community are stoked to have the support of the ACT Government through the Amp It Up! grant. With their help, we’re keeping our doors open and our stages lights on, despite global uncertainty and local restrictions on freedom of movement. WE LOVE YOU CANBERRA \m/

Let the bands play on! Mik and Nic Bergersen - New Owners!

sideway

sideway is using the Amp It Up fund to continue to host and support local and interstate performers. A week at the venue features free live music Thursdays, Funk, Jazz and Soul music Fridays, electronic music on Saturdays, and live music on Sunday afternoons. Some of the exciting guests coming include Sydney-based funk artist Setwun and South Sudanese legend Gordon Koang. Finbar - Owner/Manager

Smith’s Alternative

We proposed a two-pronged strategy. Sunny Spring Sundays: a weekly series of free outdoor concerts on our street front, featuring the best and liveliest of Canberra bands every Sunday afternoon for thirteen weeks.

Smith’s Wish List: a smaller number of concerts featuring Australian bands not normally in our league aimed at raising Smith’s profile both amongst the local music audience and the national music industry - Nigel McRae - Venue Owner/Manager

King O’Malley’s

King O’Malley’s has been supporting free live music in Canberra for over 20 years. Thanks to a grant from the ACT Government’s Amp It Up fund we will be able to support even more musicians by increasing both the variety of music and adding extra sessions. Musicians and their supporters have been particularly hard hit with the COVID 19 restrictions and this round of grants is very timely and welcome. Peter Barclay - Managing Director

Hippo

Hippo is a live music institution in the ACT with over 20 years of weekly live jazz in the venue on Wednesday evenings. In 2018 we started a weekly blues night on Mondays. Hippo is built on supporting local musicians perform in a relaxed, friendly, and warm environment. With the Amp It Up grant funds we will reintroduce two nights of live music at Hippo, supporting our local musicians to perform for Monday Night Blues (from 8pm) and dedicated Jazz on Wednesday evenings (from 8:30pm). Kylie Preston - Director

BEC TAYLOR AND THE LYREBIRDS SHED MY SKIN

Canberra outfit Bec Taylor and The Lyrebirds recently released Shed My Skin. The new track, following previous singles, Off The Edge and Friend of Mine, reveals a stylistic departure—less organic sounding, yet still raw.

The new one is a sonically quieter place than those previous records, with a spare production that feels considerably more concentrated. With a verse that kicks in as soon as you start, Taylor’s tenderised vocal approach leads us straight into the sinewy motions of the track. Mood setting swells and finger snaps are set alongside a percussive pulse and, as the track progresses, a discreet bass drum ushers us into subtle shifting changes in temperament. Despite the track’s overall low-key profile, there’s a palpable sense of something akin to resignation, a casual articulation of relief that’s undoubtedly tied to the narrative’s focus. It feels reflective, so the track has hit the spot in that regard. Taylor’s vocal performance is convincingly aligned to these suggestions of cleansing, with her voice oscillating between ethereal airiness and high range fragility. After the purging there’s a commitment to remove the vestiges—this, too, is supplemented by the vocal; the unknown can always induce trepidation no matter how robust this commitment to change is. The song’s melodic terrain is assiduously attended to by the production’s gradual layering of synths and rhythmic touches and vocals, helping to imbue the track with a dynamic that’s as sneakily effective as it is inoffensive.

And, of course, reminding us, in a sonically careful and finely filtered manner, what’s about to happen here. Rather than removal, we have extension, a technique not as at odds with the song’s theme as one would expect. There is a crescendo, narratively speaking, and the instrumentation puts a little soft fire behind it. Shed My Skin is a rebirth for Bec Taylor and The Lyrebirds, and in more than just subject matter. VINCE LEIGH

MOOD. START AGAIN For two years Canberra-based music artist Mood. has released [ ] single after single, undoubtedly firming up his follower base and honing his style. His latest release is a laid-back induction into his habitat, utilising a spare groove, an acoustic guitar, and an assortment of lush pads that act as a platter from which the sweeteners of the vocal layers are served up. The track’s intro instantly gives one a clue as to the song’s temperament, with its adlib-like vocal part and chord progression, setting the, ahem, mood, so to speak. And it does this with calming efficacy, leading us straight into the heart of an accumulation of soul-baring admissions, ‘a bad guy with all the wrong intentions’, Mood tells us. This candour is reflected in the barebones nature of the verses, during which we get acquainted with a series of decisions the narrator makes, with a bag ‘packed up for the ocean’. Perhaps the decision has been made for him? The pre-chorus contains a couple of self-affirmations that lead us to believe Mood. is taking the break-up rather well. Up until this point, we’ve also heard an efficient assortment of attributes that support these self-assessments; the pace picks up a little, the melody muscles up, and the instrumentation further thickens the sonic backdrop. When we do arrive at the chorus, Mood.’s voice breaks off into falsetto, a choice one would think might lighten the impact of the centrepiece part; however, it actually seems to enhance it, with the pleasing descending melody imbuing the track with a resolve one can only wish for another as they traipse through the detritus and displeasure of splitsville. The chorus mainline is the crowning hook of the track, a tumbling arrangement of notes that seem to allude to hope and thwarted sentimentality—this feature offers us a renewed experience of the verse and pre-chorus that follows. Start Again is smooth and restrained, hi-fi pop that effectively reveals Mood’s cocktail of creative talents, a combination that delivers quite salient, urbane results. VINCE LEIGH

ARCHIE formed in late 2018 while studying at the ANU School of Music, and since their launch at the start of July 2019, they’ve made quite an impact on the Canberra scene. They began with shows alongside wellestablished hometown heroes but soon began sharing the stage with the likes of Surf Trash, Neko Pink, and BENEE. It wasn’t long before the band headlined a string of sold-out headline shows around Canberra, confirming a healthy fanbase. Now, the indie dance-pop purveyors have remerged with Greener, the fourth single for the band. The new track fuses all the shiny brilliance heard in parts of their previous singles and marries that to a newfound melodic clarity and focus to be found here. Two forms of musical preludes are established before Grant Simpson’s vocal seizes the spotlight. The first sets out a laid-back groove, where funked-up clean guitars float above a swirl of synth arp and industrious bass lines, which quickly segues into a straight feel, this certifying the band’s undoubtedly joyful abandon, spiritedly shepherding us all into the zone of dance. One hears this abandon and is utterly convinced by it. The fun continues. But it’s quite a refined sense of frolic. Aided by a wellcrafted verse-melody, the song grows into an expanse of infectious cheer, decorated by some Daft Punk vocoder touches and passages of syncopation that add a sense of sonic colour and urgent dynamism. Lines like, ‘I want to run away from here / there’s so much waiting for us outside’, are imbued with an intrinsic depth in this day and age. Still, no doubt the exuberance that spills forth from this record is also alluding to the sense of freedom one faces at a certain age. Greener is not the sound of youth angst necessarily but perhaps more like youthful appetite. The dizzying sense of wonder is palpable, as too is the groups’ aligned sense of hunger. ARCHIE has refined itself, and in the process is now armed with an undeniable pop prototype that should see the band gather many eager souls and diehard devotees—not to mention innumerable plays and streams—for years to come. VINCE LEIGH

SKINNY WOLF YELLOW MOUNTAIN BELL

Last year, Canberra act Skinny Wolf released their debut Fever, a well-received alluring folkblues roots and indie dream pop lo-fi amalgamation. The duo comprising Ash Buckley and Josh Veneris has returned with a new release Yellow Mountain Bell.

As the band states:

“This one is named after an endangered mountain flower in the Stirling Range (WA), which was severely impacted by the 2019-20 bushfires. The song reflects our disillusionment with the response to the bushfires and the current biodiversity crisis.” Of course, any eco-protest song is welcome, and the more, the merrier, or the more of them, perhaps the more enlightened some of us might become. And this track is a fine addition to the no doubt burgeoning genre. A study in quiet dissent, Yellow Mountain Bell features a combination of soothing textures, eddies of synth pad lines, hovering guitar layers, and silken vocals placed over an unvarying light and steady groove, with an added percussive element that seems to help maintain the track’s vitality. Obviously, a balance between the conceptual and the musical was uppermost in the minds of Ash and Josh, and this appears to have been partly solved by these rhythmic elements. Many of the band’s previous aesthetic tendencies are present here, a lo-fi dreaminess, a cathartic sounding ethereality. The attempt at seduction is measured and well-crafted and so impressionistic as to seem languid. But all in a rewarding way; this enervation becomes the track’s strong suit, as it gently assuages, sneakily working its subtle elegance on you as an impressive artistic work might do. Yellow Mountain Bell contains its fair share of melodic inventiveness, too, the kind which leaves you unprepared and unsuspecting, for its lissom tentacles do wrap themselves around you, long after the song first drifts into your consciousness.

VINCE LEIGH