The Brag #744

ALSO INSIDE:

MIKEY AND NICKY, THE BREEDERS, LINDSEY PELAS, NUN, THE OLD MAN AND THE GUN, AND MUCH MORE!

BOYGENIUS TRIPLE THREATS

THE 30 BEST ALBUMS OF THE YEAR LUCIE BEE AND THE FIGHT TO BE REAL

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this month what you’ll find inside…

10

“I think the best art is the art that makes you re-evaluate yourself.”

ISSUE 744: Wednesday 5 December, 2018 EDITOR: Joseph Earp joseph.earp@seventhstreet.media NEWS: Tyler Jenke, Bianca Davino, Lars Brandle ART DIRECTOR: Sarah Bryant PHOTOGRAPHER: Ashley Mar COVER PHOTO: Ben Sullivan ADVERTISING: Josh Burrows - 0411 025 674 josh.burrows@seventhstreet.media PUBLISHER: Seventh Street Media CEO, SEVENTH STREET MEDIA: Luke Girgis - luke.girgis@ seventhstreet.media MANAGING EDITOR: Poppy Reid poppy.reid@seventhstreet.media THE GODFATHER: BnJ GIG GUIDE COORDINATOR: Belinda Quinn - gigguide@seventhstreet. media REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS: Arca Bayburt, Lars Brandle, Tanja Brinks Toubro, Alex Chetverikov, Max Jacobson, Emily Gibb, Emily Meller, Adam Norris, Holly Pereira, Daniel Prior, Natalie Rogers, Erin Rooney, Anna Rose, Spencer Scott, Natalie Salvo, Aaron Streatfeild, Augustus Welby, Zanda Wilson, David James Young Please send mail NOT ACCOUNTS direct to this NEW address Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE: Carrie Huang accountsseventhstreet.vc (02) 9713 92692, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 DEADLINES: Editorial: Thursday 5pm (no extensions) Ad bookings: Last Wednesday of the month 12pm (no extensions) Finished art: Last Thursday of the month 5pm (no extensions) Ad cancellations: Last Wednesday of the month 12pm Deadlines are strictly adhered to.

Published by Seventh Street Media Pty Ltd All content copyrighted to Seventh Street Media 2017 DISTRIBUTION: Wanna get the BRAG? Email jessica.milinovic@seventhstreet.media PRINTED BY SPOTPRESS: spotpress.com.au 24 – 26 Lilian Fowler Place, Marrickville NSW 2204 EDITORIAL POLICY: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher, editors or staff of the BRAG.

regulars The Frontline Game On The Watcher Sounds Like Gig picks

30

“We went into it trying to make a movie about something with integrity.”

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Boygenius

36

Dungeons And Dragons

13

Body Type

37

Jirga

14-15

The 1975

38-39

Suspiria

16-17

Nun

40-41

Overlord

18-19

Panda Bear

42-43

Lucie Bee

20-21

Wu-Tang Clan

44

Lindsey Pelas

22-23

The Breeders

45

Jailbreaking the Gender Binary

24-25

Interpol

46-49

Angie McMahon

26-27

Handsome

50-54

Tinder And Intimacy

29

First Reformed

56-57

Idles

30-31

Jamie Lee Curtis

59-62

The 30 Best Albums of the Year

32-33

Mikey And Nicky

64-65

Christmas Gift Guide

34-35

David Lowery

68

Tweedy

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“There’s money to be made when people are frightened.” thebrag.com

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the frontline

With Patrick Campbell, Allison Gallagher, and Henry Case

RE-ANIMATED WOOD It’s been 12 years since David Milch’s beloved Deadwood left television screens after being cancelled by HBO – prematurely, as many argue – after just three seasons. Things were left relatively unresolved, and fans clamoured for a proper ending to the critically-acclaimed show, which ran between 2004 and 2006.

And now, over a decade later, it looks like those shouts have been heard. In a statement released Monday, HBO Films confirmed that a Deadwood movie has begun production. It follows confirmation from back in 2016 that Milch had been given the all-clear to write a script. It’s exciting news for those who have, for years, craved a continuation of the show. What’s even more exciting is that much of the original cast is returning to reprise their television roles. Ian McShane and Timothy Olphant will be returning as Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock alongside Molly Parker, Paula Malcomson, John Hawkes, Robin Weigert, Dayton Callie and Anna Gunn just to name a few. The script has been written, of course, by David Milch, and Daniel Minahan, who directed a handful of episodes in the show’s first two seasons, will be returning for directing duties.

Deadwood

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

ON THE PLUS SIDE Disney has announced more details of their upcoming streaming service. In a phone conversation with investors the company’s CEO Bob Iger revealed the service will be called Disney+. He also outlined a few more projects we can expect to see on the service.

Consequence Of Sound reports a prequel series to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is set to feature on the service launching next year, joining the already announced The Mandalorian. The new series will focus on Diego Luna’s rebel spy character Cassian Andor in the early days of the rebellion. Luna is signed on to play Andor. There’s also a new Marvel series on the way focused on Tom Hiddleston’s Loki character from The Avengers franchise. Hiddleston is also signed on as the lead for the series. Variety also reports that another Marvel series following Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch is in the works. The streaming service is set to launch early next year and already has a bunch of exclusive content in the works including a live action remake of The Lady And The Tramp. Disney is also set to release its live action adaptation of Aladdin in May next year.

IT’S A-ME, LAWSUIT The heat is officially on for anyone who’s been running one of the many sites that, for years now, have distributed free versions of Nintendo’s games to anyone who wanted them. A judgement released today has gone Nintendo’s way, and is holding the owners of long-standing websites LoveROMS and LoveRETRO responsible for a whopping total of $12 million USD of damages to the Japanese video game giant. As Torrentfreak reports, Jacob and Cristian Mathias were sued in July for the infringement of Nintendo’s intellectual property having p p y rights, g g hosted thousands of ROM files – basically, digital copies of almost game ever released – for years, all available for every Nintendo g free download. download Piracy has been a widespread issue facing the industry for decades, with a third of PC gamers admitting games indu pirated at least one game in their lifetime. But the illegal they’ve pir download of older games was considered by a segment of the community to be an acceptable transgression, as most gaming co games were otherwise unavailable to play outside of of the gam owning the th original cartridges.

Mr. Mario Mario

Margot Robbie

P.I.-CHIKU

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Pikachu was voiced by Deadpool, uh, look no further. Your extremely specific fantasy is about to come true. Warner Brothers have recently released the first trailer for the upcoming film Detective Pikachu, a live-action CGI movie based on the wildly successful Pokémon franchise. In the film’s trailer, a failed Pokémon trainer named Tim Goodman (played by Justice Smith) teams up with a furry, detective-hat wearing Pikachu. After discovering that Tim is the only person able to understand what Pikachu is saying, the two work together to locate his missing father in the futuristic metropolis of Ryme City. The first peek of the film doesn’t only introduce us to everyone’s favourite electric mouse, though. We get glimpses of a CGI-rendered Charmander, Bulbasaur, Jigglypuff and about a dozen other beloved species from the iconic franchise. As previously announced, Ryan Reynolds voices the little yellow guy – to the profound disappointment of Danny Devito fans everywhere – and it toes a line between bizarre and kind of incredible?

SPICE UP YOUR LIFE In their first interview since reuniting, The Spice Girls have revealed that they never asked Victoria Beckham AKA Posh Spice if she wanted to join their 2019 reunion tour. Awkward…

The remaining members’ interview with Jonathan Ross aired recently in the UK. NME reports that Mel C told Ross that she’d seen Victoria recently, saying, “She is still very much a part of the Spice Girls, she really supports us and we really support her. But she did raise the point that she was never actually asked. We just presumed.” Geri also added “I spoke to her two days ago, before the announcement and she has said it for years that she just doesn’t want to do it anymore, so we knew that.” The news that Beckham wasn’t involved in the tour didn’t come as a surprise to most fans, as she has refuted reunion rumours for years.

The Spice Girls

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COVER STORY

An Impossible View

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Boygenius photo by Kristy Benjamin

“I think the best art is the art that makes you re-evaluate yourself.” thebrag.com

COVER STORY

W

hen you stumble upon friendships that poke at those slumbering, unseen aspects your character, it feels like a rare, treasured thing. Made up of indie folk artists Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers, the supergroup boygenius is an extension of that same bond: these are three friends who delicately tease out the best parts of one another.

“We knew how we wanted to be talked to, so we knew how to talk to each other,” says Bridgers of what it was about their relationships that allowed each of them to open up.

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Indeed, a thread that’s woven boygenius is a towering sense of hurt – yet the musicality remains hopeful throughout. Asked about the period of increasingly conservative governance both the United States and Australia are moving through, Baker replies quickly. “There’s a value in just being hurt with each other,” she says. “It’s important to say, ‘I’m feeling this and you can feel it with me and we don’t have to be alone.’”

On ‘Bite The Hand’, Dacus sings, “I can’t love you how you want me to.” The sentiment, she says, “is widely applicable to any relationship between somebody who is asking for too much and the other person who has to admit that they can’t fulfil someone’s expectations.”

Asked if Bridgers has had to reconsider her approach to romantic love, she says she’s started going to therapy. “It has helped a lot. I feel like you can get tunnel vision in relationships. Or, like, if you’re in an abusive relationship you can be tricked into thinking that the world looks a certain way,” she says, “and you can never look outside of it.”

In ‘Stay Down’, Baker sings, “So would you teach me I’m the villain, aren’t I, aren’t I the one?

▲

Dacus mirrors the thought. “I knew that neither one of them would present a weird power dynamic,” is how she puts it.

Forming earlier this year – and off the cusp of releasing their own solo records to critical acclaim – the three-piece, all of whom are in their early twenties, have recently released the six-track EP boygenius. It ties together imagery of space-travelling dogs, Biblical references, and pores over the reasons to let go of unhealthy relationships.

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▲

An Impossible View

COVER STORY

Constantly repenting for a difficult mind.” “That song’s actually about being in a relationship and working on how you deal with anger and how not to turn it into resentment,” she explains.

“I think that because we’re humans, we latch onto patterns. We start to presuppose a negative outcome for our interactions with that person, and then that ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy where we create more conflict and we breed more resentment.”

Maybe Baker isn’t the villain; maybe the villains are the habits forming in her thought patterns. “I’m putting those words in their mouth,” she says. “That song is an indictment of myself for having negative reactions based on my self-esteem.”

In the process of putting this EP together, some brought completed songs to the table – “I’m a very calculated writer, but also a very private writer, and I tend to have the whole song formed before I go to record,” explains Baker – while others accumulated sounds in the studio, building up a song from scratch.

“That was really neat for me to learn how to give myself time to let go of the hard and fast rules I had for how a song has to be, and allow it to evolve,” says Baker.

“I don’t choose the obvious thing a lot of the time,” says Bridgers of her own lyric writing. She’ll gravitate towards the weird abnormities in her life, rather than traumatic events. She lets her memories sit. “Someday I’ll be compelled to write about the shit that’s on my mind right now. But at the moment I’m writing about the shit that happened to me when I was a teenager.”

Asked what books and fi lms have had an impact on them this year reveals they share a need to

understand human behaviours. For Bridgers, it was Tenth of December by George Saunders, a collection of short stories that fi nd meaning in life’s fl eeting moments, and the Japanese coming-of-age fantasy anime Kiki’s Delivery Service. “It’s like a poetic way of talking about wanting to do art,” she says.

For Baker, it was Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, a novel that merges the story of refugee’s fl eeing war with a sense of magical realism while satirising the current geopolitical arena.

“I love things like that that make huge concepts digestible in a really disarming way,” she says.

And The Good Place. “[It’s] unfolding these grandiose moral quandaries that are really at the heart of all human behaviour,” she says. “I think the best art is the art that makes you re-evaluate yourself, right?”

For Dacus, it was last year’s genre-blending short stories Her Body And Other Parties

by Carmen Maria Machado and 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room by gay African-American writer and social critic James Baldwin. “The crux of [Giovanni’s Room] is that he won’t let himself love the person that he really loves and is ashamed of his body, ashamed of his feelings, he was ashamed of everything true about him,” says Dacus.

“I wouldn’t say that I’m ashamed of myself,” she continues. “But I don’t know if I always recognise the worth in negative things. And so that book helped. So did being around Phoebe and Julien.

I think they really do understand the worth of negative emotions. I write about dark stuff, but it’s usually pretty hopeful.

“I think there’s a lot to learn in just taking a good long sit in the dark places of your mind to just scope it out and see what’s there, and come out of it knowing yourself better. Like, that’s innately okay, and I just needed more practice at that,” she concludes.

Though all in similar places in their lives, they have different motivations for why they pick up a guitar and put lyrics to the page. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently,” says Bridgers. She describes a desire to want to “make music, more than I want to have music.”

Dacus spent years writing music for herself before showing it to anyone. “It wasn’t meant to be heard, so I always found out a lot about what I thought just from basically talking to myself,” she says.

“Making that effort to rhyme or stick to a metre gives it a structure to pour into, and it also like makes something beautiful out of something that could be really complex,” she says.

For Baker, it’s two-fold. “I think it’s almost reflexive.

Ever since I was a kid I think the way that I’ve been able to articulate my feelings best and the way that I’ve been able to work through them is by putting them in a song; unpacking them that way. Then I can make them into a work of art that I can step away from and have perspective on,” she says.

And from the performance side of things, her motivation is astoundingly uncomplex. “It’s the plain and simple joy of the look on people’s faces when they’re singing along.”

What: Julien Baker Australia 2019 tour Where: Oxford Art Factory With: Gordi, Julia Jacklin When: Tuesday February 19 And: boygenius is out now

“There’s a value in just being hurt with each other, in just saying that ‘I’m feeling this and you can feel it with me and we don’t have to be alone’.”

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Boygenius photo by Lucy Pentelute

In many ways, boygenius has been more than a process of divulging sounds and song-writing processes: it’s been a therapy in itself. “It’s nice having any kind of perspective. It’s nice commiserating with your friends and talking to people. And talking to therapists helps a lot,” Bridgers explains.

“I think that because we’re humans, we latch onto patterns.

We start to presuppose a negative outcome for our interactions with that person.”

SUPPORTING EACH OTHER.”

“WE’RE ALL

FEATURE

The New Truth Allison Gallagher chats to Cecil Coleman of Body Type about the band’s reverb-drenched, magnificent EP

Anyone who has seen the band live knows the kind of electricity that happens when they play together, and encapsulating that sound into the recording process was a big part of it for Coleman and the band. “We’re our truest selves when we’re onstage together,” Coleman says.

For the band – Coleman, Sophie McComish, Annabel Blackman and Georgia Wilkinson-Derums – Body Type has been an experience in mutually growing together, making a supportive environment for each other to explore and express their ideas.

Though they had all played other instruments before, Body Type was about getting out of their comfort zone.

“It was born out of all of us wanting to find a creative and safe space without judgment where we could play music. We’re all at the same level of our instruments and wanted to see what that would feel like, “explains Coleman.

“Over the past two years we’ve learned so much and been influenced so heavily by each other. It’s a really beautiful thing about us: in a sense we’re all kind of learning together and that’s what’s made the connection so easy between us. We’re all supporting each other.”

Body Type began with the friendship of Coleman and McComish, who had attended uni together back in their hometown of Perth. After reconnecting in Melbourne, they both found each other both living in Sydney in 2016. “I told Sophie I was learning drums and she said she’d been teaching herself guitar. I had never had a jam before, or played drums in front of someone else.”

Wilkinson-Derums was a fellow ex-Perth resident living in Sydney, and Blackman came into the fold through a mutual friend’s sharehouse. “Soph saw a guitar in her room one day and asked her if she played guitar. We were like, come to this warehouse in Marrickville and play some stuff with us!”

After playing together for six months – “a gradual build”, according to Coleman – the band began recording their first songs, an early version of ‘Ludlow’ being released as a single in November 2016. thebrag.com

“[Kon] works out of an incredible studio in one of the guys from Powderfi nger’s house on this farm, in the middle of a forest,” explains Coleman.

“While we were touring we did this intense twoday session after the Alex Cameron Brisbane show. We drove to this place first thing in the morning, smashed out three songs, fl ew back to Sydney, and played the Sydney show that night. We were all pretty wrecked,” Coleman laughs.

Hearing the songs on the Body Type EP in contrast to their earlier versions, it becomes apparent that the band have fi gured out a way to operate together in sync over the past two years. Everything clicks in a way that suggests a communal songwriting process.

“That was really special. At the moment, the way it works is that someone will bring an idea to the band and we’ll workshop it together. A lot of the songs on the EP, parts have grown or changed over time and that’s what we’re about. Sharing the song and experience with each other. We work together really well, which has been a really nice thing to have.”

One gets the impression, too, that the women in Body Type have clicked on a level that goes beyond simply musicianship; that they’re deeply in tune with one another in a personal sense as well.

“While I’ve been on the phone to you I’ve received about fi ve messages from Sophie,” Coleman says.

“Without a doubt, those three women are my dearest friends.”

Coleman explains that – cliché as it may be – it’s a kind of familial bond that exists between the four.

“They’re the people I tell everything to. I share my work life, my personal life, and up until recently my home life, because we all lived together for a period. We may get angry with each other, but it’s like arguing with family.”

“I get to travel around the country with my best friends, and go through it all together. It’s the best.”

What: Body Type is out now

WHEN WE’RE ON STAGE TOGETHER.”

The Body Type EP is a lush, swoony collection of songs that situate intricate guitars and dreamy vocals with driving rhythms and a kind of rawness; a scuzziness that carries the songs over. Tracks like ‘Ludlow’ and ‘Dry Grass’ could, in other hands, lean too much into a hazy saturation of reverb – but instead, they’re galvanized, energetic songs that combine a kind of visceral effervescence with a strong ear for melody.

Recording for the Body Type EP was done over two stints. ‘Silver’ and ‘Arrow’ were both recorded in Marrickville last year with acclaimed engineer and friend of the band Antonia Gauci, whose credits include tracks by heavyweights like Lil Yachty and Kesha along with Australian acts DMA’s, Alison Wonderland and Kucka. The rest of the EP was recorded with producer Kon Kersting, most of it at the Brisbane-based Airlock Studios while the band were on tour with Alex Cameron back in April.

“WE’RE OUR TRUEST SELVES

T

he debut self-titled EP from Sydney quartet Body Type has been a long time coming. After releasing a steady stream of singles and garnering a reputation as an unmissable live act in the two years since their formation, drummer Cecil Coleman describes a feeling of “sweet release” at having a completed body of work now out in the world.

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FEATURE

The

1975

& The Power Of Change

“AUSTRALIA HAS SUCH A TRIBAL AFFILIATION

TO WHAT IT ASSUMES IS COOL OR ALTERNATIVE OR LEFT.”

by Patrick Campbell

W

hen The 1975 wrapped up touring behind their sophomore album I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it the band was in turmoil. Lead singer Matty Healy was using again and his bandmates were worried.The group were preparing to record their third and final album Music For Cars, but after a decisive argument with the band Healy decided it was time to go to rehab.

A year on Healy is clean and the band are about to release A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, the first of two albums set to be released in the next year by The 1975 as part of their Music For Cars era. “I kind of got obsessed with our third album being our last because I’d become obsessed with that idea narratively and as a writer,” says Healy. “What you always want is a great ending.

“But, then when it came to doing that, I’d just shit myself because I realised, this is the reason that I get out of bed every morning. I don’t want to stop at 29: I want to tour for the next two years and I want to make new records. I think the only way to do that now is do two albums [at once].”

The first of these two albums is the band’s greatest experiment yet. It has all the typical signs of a The 1975 album – look no further than the self-titled opening track, not to mention song titles like ‘I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)’. Listening to the thing in full however, and it becomes clear it’s unlike anything the band has done before.

The 1975 – and Healy especially – have always pushed away from limiting their sound to one genre. “If I was forced to say something, I’d say [we make] art-pop, only because it’s popular and it’s formed through kind of culturally heavy ideas,” the

singer says after a long pause. “The only thing I know about my music is it’s pretty and quite dense.”

The concept of genre and what feels like the eternal battle between “pop music” and “cool” music annoys him, especially in Australia. “Australia has such a tribal affiliation to what it assumes is cool or alternative or left.”

It’s a fair observation. Australia often seems unable to define alternative and cool outside of what is played on triple j and never on stations like KIIS and 2Day FM. Whilst the cultural divide is more obvious in Australia than other countries, the artist is quick to explain that it also fuels his work. “That’s what all of these alternative movements were about – the punk movement, the grunge movement – these things were all about subverting form. They were about being counter-cultural. They took the cultural idea and they countered it with something subversive.”

He goes so far as to say making punk music isn’t very… well ‘punk’ anymore.

“If you’re doing something that’s been done before you are the opposite of punk.

You are the opposite of alternative. You are a conservative.” This is why Healy would rather work within the realm and ideas of pop. “Going into pop music, the biggest genre in the world and changing it, changing what it means to people and subverting it, that’s ten times more punk than any bullshit view of what punk is.”

Back in 2015 the artist took to Twitter to berate Justin Bieber’s hit track ‘What Do You Mean?’ saying he was singing about “nothingness”. Looking back on it now, the artist admits he was harsh – but he still believes he had a point. “Do something in pop music that really changes my mind about the world. That would be impressive.”

“ I DON’T WANT TO STOP AT 29: I WANT TO TOUR FOR

THE NEXT TWO YEARS AND I WANT TO MAKE NEW RECORDS.”

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FEATURE

A

Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships explores almost every element of music that has found its way into the popular landscape in the past two years - from the dancehall production underlying ‘Tootimetootimetootime’ to the scattered jazz elements in ‘Sincerity Is Scary’. Of course it wouldn’t be a The 1975 album without a trademark synth-pop banger, and though nothing quite reaches the pop-perfection of ‘The Sound’, some tracks come close.

“As long as it’s shining, a magpie doesn’t care if it picks up a piece of foil or a diamond or a piece of silver. A beautiful melody is my ‘shiny thing’. As long as the melody is beautiful, I can be like, ‘I’m doing that, I’m making that.’”

On the wide variety of genres on the album, Healy says it was never intentional. “I’ve never started a song and then been like, ‘Oh, it needs to sound like a different style of music.’ I always look at it like a magpie.

“I’ve spent my whole career giving my audience the benefit of the doubt. I’ve never patronised them and assumed that they couldn’t deal with an hour and a half album or fucking two of them in a year.”

When it comes to the critical and public reception of the ever-evolving band Healy seems less bothered than he used to be as well. “There’s this idea that people of conservative thought will maybe not want you to evolve – but I don’t worry about that.

The follow up to A Brief Inquiry, next year’s Notes On A Conditional Form is expected to be the group’s most intimate album yet.

Healy is confi dent that the music will be well received even if there’s no ‘hits’ on the record. “I just think about the fact that I make albums. There’s loads of reasons why I’m not a big single artist like Ariana Grande. One of the reasons would be that it’s a real artform to design something to be consumed over a short period of time.

“I try and write things in the context of a record.The singles are me playing the game because I kind of have to. I have to tell people I’m putting an album out.”

“IF YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING THAT’S BEEN DONE BEFORE

I

YOU ARE THE OPPOSITE OF PUNK. YOU ARE THE OPPOSITE OF ALTERNATIVE. YOU ARE A CONSERVATIVE.”

n the short gap between their first two albums, The 1975 found themselves transitioning from playing small theatres to selling out arenas around the world. Ahead of their largest tour yet, the singer considers whether he’d like to go back to the smaller touring circuit.

“I think there’s a real misconception there because the onus of that is always on the

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artist. Like, if you’re massive you can play small shows if you want. I’m doing one in December at the Barfly which is the first venue we ever played when we recorded the 1975. It’s like 200 cap and we’re playing it.

“When people say, ‘Oh, I miss doing small shows,’ what they really mean is ‘I miss the time when our show didn’t cost so much money and we couldn’t do it without 200 people involved.’”

It’s answers like these that showcase Healy’s absolute honesty. He’s an open book and is unafraid to share his thoughts and opinions – no matter how strong. It’s not surprise he has that confidence though: he’s one of the biggest musicians in the world.

Before hanging up he revisits the idea of going back to playing smaller venues and sums up his feelings perfectly. “I don’t miss nobody giving a fuck about me – no, I don’t.”

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FEATURE

“I FIND THIS ALBUM

REALLY SAD, GRIM, AND BLEAK.” 16 :: BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18

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FEATURE

Doug Wallen chats to Jenny Branagan of NUN about her band’s breathlessly bleak – yet oddly danceable – sound

W

Dreading It

hen it comes to dread-soaked synth-punk, few bands do it better than NUN. But fans of the Melbourne quartet’s self-titled 2014 album might need time to adjust to the band’s long-gestating follow-up, The Dome. Where the first record was harsh and abrasive, the second is surprisingly poppy and streamlined. Even frontwoman Jenny Branagan’s baleful vocals feel more clean-cut and accessible.

Yet, rather than sacrifice the pitch-black mood of earlier tracks like ‘Uri Geller’ and ‘Cronenberg’, The Dome exploits the thrilling dichotomy of brighter, punchier songs that dispense regular doses of fear and paranoia. “Sometimes that has more strength to it,” says Branagan by phone. “It’s unsettling in its own way. I find this album really sad, grim, and bleak.”

That perspective isn’t shared by bandmates Steven Harris, Hugh Young and Tom Hardisty, who brandish various synths and drum machines. “[They] feel very differently,” she confirms. “They feel that this is a very bright and uplifting thing. We all come at it in a different way.”

It’s easy to see both sides. For all the wonky drag of the slowburn ‘Pick Up the Phone’, or the sustained fever-dream vibe of seven-minute closer ‘Debris’, ‘Another Year’ pairs Branagan’s protest-like lyrics to gleaming, pinging melodies. Even opener ‘Wake in Fright’, with its unmistakable nightmare mantras, feels strangely empowering, while ‘Can’t Chain’ is an outright pop anthem that manages to top the first album’s fist-pumping single ‘Evoke the Sleep’.

But again tapping that paradox of dark and light, Branagan says ‘Can’t Chain’ was written in response to a friend’s suicide attempt. Even the titular hook – “Can’t chain these morons down” – was a blackly comic way of saying you can’t truly hold on to someone who doesn’t want to be here. “You’re wanting to keep your friend safe and happy,” she explains, “but at the end of the day, what control do you have over another person’s choice?”

As for the sample at the end of the song, it’s from the 1972 BBC mini-series Ways of Seeing, written by the late English academic John Berger. Branagan regularly makes such mood-setting interludes for NUN, and she’s recently turned her hand to music videos. She’s also responsible for the concept of the new album’s unsettling black-and-white cover art, which shows a male figure in jeans, runners and T-shirt facing off against an enormous eye in front of a star-pricked night sky. She collaborated on the cover with Per Bystrom, who drew the character, and graphic designer Luke Fraser, who tied it all together.

“I had a really clear idea of what it should be,” says Branagan.

“I wanted it to look like a weird disco record, but at the same

time [express] the concept I was exploring within. The infrastructure was based on old psychology stuff from the ’70s, which I often use in NUN: amazing, out-there, really insensitive ads for American drugs for depression or anxiety. I very much wanted to have that feeling of the ego looking at itself and screaming.”

And there’s no missing the inspiration of 1971’s cult classic Australian fi lm Wake in Fright – based on Kenneth Cook’s equally disturbing novel – on the song of the same name.

Branagan, who was born in Ireland and has spent only part of her life living in Australia, fi nds herself drawn to the “feeling of eeriness and otherness” of that movie and also 1975’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.

The four-year drought between albums, meanwhile, can be credited in part to the band’s unique way of working. After writing the songs, the members play them live extensively “before even thinking about recording them,” admits Branagan. And while The Dome was essentially recorded in five days at a holiday house in Victoria’s coastal village of Fairhaven, the band stepped away from it before listening to it individually to see what they each wanted to change.

It’s also tempting to cite the members’ full slates. Hardisty also plays in Woollen Kits and sometimes Constant Mongrel and Terry, in addition to recording bands, while Steven Harris has a solo project and Hugh Young plays in Constant Mongrel.

Branagan is half of the bass-heavy duo Vacuum, who are working on a 12-inch EP and video at the moment. And everyone in NUN works full-time, with Branagan staying very busy as Writers Services Rep for APRA AMCOS. To fit the new album’s smoother sheen, Branagan made a point to approach her singing differently. In contrast to what she calls the “internal and muddy” atmosphere of their debut, she wanted to match The Dome’s “sharper [and] more glassy” sound. What resulted is by turns foreboding and welcoming, often within the same thought. And though it was a challenge to stretch herself vocally, she had help from Young, who sang in the Australian Boys Choir as a child.

Anyone who has seen NUN knows that Branagan is a prowling, almost intimidating live presence who never stays still. She recounts her parents finally watching her sing with the band, telling her afterwards that it was a bit scary. But that’s all part of the unique foursome’s visceral layering of pop impulses and darker portent.

“It’s just what comes out,” she confesses. “My instrument in NUN is my voice, and I need helping getting that out. So my body just follows.”

What: The Dome is out now

NUN photo by Kalindy Williams

“YOU’RE WANTING TO KEEP YOUR FRIEND SAFE AND HAPPY, BUT AT THE END OF THE DAY,

WHAT CONTROL DO YOU HAVE OVER ANOTHER PERSON’S CHOICE?” thebrag.com

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FEATURE

Everything Happens At Once W

“[TRAVELLING] CAN BE KIND OF A DRAG SOMETIMES.”

ith his Panda Bear project, Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox has earned a place in the indie rock canon. His breakthrough album, 2007’s Person Pitch, is to this day cherished by fans and held up as a landmark album of neo-psychedelia and avant-garde pop music.

Starting out in the late ’90s, Lennox has released five Panda Bear records plus a further 11 as a member of Animal Collective. That’s a considerable back catalogue, especially considering the lateral density that typifies the American musician’s releases.

“Making the stuff is my favourite part of the job,” says Lennox.

“I spent the past two and a half months just every day writing stuff.

It’s been probably my favourite part of the year. I still have a lot of juice for that side of things.”

Lennox lives with his partner and two children in Lisbon, Portugal.

He’s called the coastal European city home for over a decade, preferring the calmer atmosphere and moderate climate to that of his previous homes in New York and Baltimore.

He still regularly tours with Animal Collective and this December brings Panda Bear to Australia for the very first time. Were it not for the demands of his job, however, Lennox might never be inclined to leave Lisbon. “[Travelling] can be kind of a drag sometimes, but it’s a worthwhile trade-off,” he says. “And playing the shows and the experience of performing is really great, it’s just everything surrounding the touring that takes a toll on me. But I don’t mean to complain about any part of it. I certainly feel very fortunate to do what I do.”

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Animal Collective has released roughly twice as many albums as Panda Bear, but Lennox’s solo work has never seemed like a side-project.

He’s established a distinct creative identity away from the group on five LPs that each offers a rich sensory experience.

“When I do a show that is just me, if it goes good it’s a relief but there’s nobody to share that relief with, and if it goes bad there’s nobody to buffer the horrible feeling that that brings,” he explains. “It’s the same with releasing stuff or making the stuff when it’s just me. I know if it doesn’t work and it doesn’t come off well I’ll have nobody to lessen the blow. But it’s okay, I’ll get over it.”

Buoys, the upcoming sixth Panda Bear album, will be out in February 2019. It follows 2015’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, which Lennox regards as the third and final instalment in a significant chapter in the Panda Bear narrative.

Buoys is the start of a new stylistic exploration, as evidenced by the minimal and auto-tune laden lead single, ‘Dolphin’.

“Even while we were mixing the Grim Reaper stuff I felt like it was time to try something else,” Lennox says. “I felt like I’d refined a process over the past three albums and wanted to try something really different. Even if it fell on its face, I’d rather try.”

Ultimately, Lennox chose to discard his previously fruitful working method and dive into the relative unknown.

“I didn’t know where I was going to go,” he says. “I put out an EP this past January called A Day With the Homies and that feels like a very different thing than the new thing. But at the same time, I always intended them to be part one and part two.

They’re just very different. I’ve come to think of them as sun and the moon. Homies is very warm and very fiery and Buoys is cooler and more watery.”

Panda Bear’s music has always possessed a vividly sensual quality.

The relatively lean ‘Dolphin’ has a sort of a liquid quality, evoking the sensation of being submerged in water; a feeling only augmented by

the vocal auto-tune and a water drop sample used in place of a snare drum.

“I start with like a thousand things that I want to project and over a span of time I realise which are the most important things or the most powerful feelings that lasted over that period of editing.

“With Animal Collective it’s very similar. All of us throw around a whole bunch of ideas and then at the end a lot of it doesn’t make sense so much any more or all that stuff that we talked about going into the project doesn’t really feel represented at the end. But it gets you where you’re going, so it’s important in that way.”

The Person Pitch liner notes famously included a wide-ranging list of musical influences, from The Beach Boys, Can and Metallica to Ennio Morricone, Wu-Tang Clan and Caetano Veloso. Lennox says there were some significant influences on Buoys too.

“I couldn’t give you an example of this artist or band that I wanted to emulate that sort of sound. But there’s a lot of contemporary production – I’m talking more so about the mainstream sound – that I wanted to use as a springboard.

“I don’t think the end product really sounds like Travis Scott, but I can correlate the broad strokes of the sound sonically to stuff that you might hear on [New York hip hop radio station] Hot 97 or mainstream radio. Stuff that gets millions of plays, like Ariana Grande or something like that.

“I don’t think it sounds like that, but there’s a foundation to the thing sonically that I hoped would resonate with somebody who was listening to that kind of stuff. I guess I’m speaking specifically of younger people, people sub-15 years old. I think that comes from having kids who only listen to that stuff. I’m making something that’s trying to speak to them.”

Where: Sydney Opera House When: Wednesday December 12 And: Buoys is out Friday February 8 via Domino

Panda Bear, Painting by Hugo Oliveira, Photography by Fern Perei

Augustus Welby talks the future with Panda Bear, AKA Noah Lennox of Animal Collective

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“I’M MAKING SOMETHING THAT’S TRYING TO SPEAK TO [MY KIDS].”

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FEATURE

Protect Ya Neck Doug Wallen coaxes insight from rap god and long-time member of the Wu-Tang Clan, Masta Killa

W

hen the Wu-Tang Clan last came to Australia, in early 2016, they unfurled a dank and stormy live show with just five of their rapping members present. This month they’ll nearly double that showing, with nine veteran MCs storming the Opera House’s Concert Hall stage for a sold-out run of four nights.

While the last tour tapped Ghostface Killah, RZA, GZA, Masta Killa, and Raekwon, this Sydney exclusive adds Method Man, Inspectah Deck, Cappadonna and even U-God, whose recent pull-no-punches memoir Raw followed a protracted legal battle with Wu-Tang over royalties. So has that particular fracture now been healed?

“That is a question you’re gonna have to ask U-God,” says Masta Killa over the phone, laughing. “I’m not really into his personal business. I can say I see U-God at every show. He hasn’t missed a show. So I assume he’s in a good place.”

Born Elgin Turner, Masta Killa joined Wu after the ensemble had already formed and recorded. Thus, he appeared on only one track on their 1993 debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), which turned 25 this year. But he’s been a steady presence ever since, and his four solo albums have showcased extensive collaborations with Wu’s other members.

Besides, his best work more than holds up, whether it’s his decisive final verse on the first album’s ‘Da Mystery of Chessboxin’’ or his stalking turn on Raekwon’s 1995 single ‘Glaciers of Ice’.

from other countries – including Australia’s Ben Simmons.

As with most performers who have visited Australia before, Masta Killa gushes about the country. But he’s unusually specific in his praise, calling out the Melbourne vegan restaurant Loving Hut as a highlight of his 2016 trip here. Like fellow Wu members GZA and RZA, he’s a long-time vegetarian, having embraced the lifestyle about two decades ago. “I was never a big meat eater,” he says, “so once I started to advance in my studies about how the body works, [I decided] you should only put life into life.”

While Wu-Tang hasn’t released an album since 2014’s uneven A Better Tomorrow – unless you count the following year’s infamous one-copy-only Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, purchased at auction by real-life troll Martin Shkreli – their brand remains resilient. Even when RZA, GZA and Ghostface recently made a Space Ghost-esque web series sponsored by burger chain White Castle, in which they answer fans’ questions while drifting through space, they manage to keep it feeling cheeky and charismatic rather than grating or greedy.

“HIP HOP IS GLOBAL NOW.”

When asked what has made 36 Chambers so enduring after a quarter of a century, Masta Killa frames it as Wu-Tang’s world-building origin story. “It was the album that introduced Wu-Tang Clan,” he observes.

“When you do your homework, you have to go back to that particular album. That opened up everything else – everything related to Wu-Tang. You have to visit that to understand where it came from.”

Of course, it helps that the album’s dark DIY delivery – both in terms of rapping and production – makes it feel just as raw and immediate today. Beneath that grime, ‘Bring Da Ruckus’, ‘Protect Ya Neck’ and ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ stand as timeless anthems of street rap. “When there’s substance there,” says Masta Killa, “[that] doesn’t really die or dilute itself. At its purest state, it’s always what it is.”

The same goes for hip hop itself, which has evolved from humble New York block parties to sold-out stadiums around the world. “Hip hop is global now,” he agrees. “There’s so much music out there from every angle.” And while he hasn’t a chance to dig very deep into Australia’s contribution to the genre, he compares its vast reach to that of popular American sports like basketball, singling out all the NBA stars coming

After the critical and commercial success of U-God’s memoir, you can expect to see similar tomes from the rest of Wu-Tang in the coming years. Masta Killa is working on a book himself, though he’s more interested in developing a movie about his life. In that same spirit of looking back, he refl ects on how he’s evolved as a MC since making his Wu debut: “I’ve gotten more comfortable with my talent. You get better as you go on, if you’re truly dedicated to your craft. I’ve always tried to give people something they can appreciate, because I love the art.”

As for the brain-busting prospect of seeing Wu-Tang at the Opera House of all places, Masta Killa boasts: “That’s a historic building, and we’re gonna come and give it our all.” Even playing the same stage four nights in a row doesn’t present an obstacle in his eyes.

“Every show is always unique,” he says, “no matter what the arena might be. You will never get the same exact show no matter where you play, because every night there’s a different crowd.”

And for everyone who was blown away by the five-member Wu-Tang attack last time around, the nine-strong version is going to be that much mightier – with less stepping in for absent rappers on key verses and much more collective muscle. “Even if it was just two of us, you’d feel the Wu spirit,” says Masta Killa. Laughing, he adds, “It’s like watching Superman as opposed to watching Super Friends.

You’re gonna get everything.”

Where: Sydney Opera House When: Saturday December 8 to Tuesday December 11

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FEATURE

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FEATURE

T

he Breeders have always been a unique band. Led by sisters Kim and Kelley Deal, albums like Last Splash defined them as one of the most interesting rock bands to emerge from the alternative melting pot of the 1990s.

Five years ago, the band’s classic ‘Last Splash’ lineup reunited for a series of much-lauded anniversary shows around the world. Flash forward to this year and they’ve released All Nerve – their first record in a decade, and first to feature bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim Macpherson since Last Splash. It’s an album of confident, visceral songs that sees the band utterly re-invigorated.

We spoke to Kelley Deal about reformation, recording All Nerve, and the joys of being present while playing music.

“WE ALL FEEL VERY

ROOTED IN OUR AESTHETIC.” The BRAG: I know Jim and Josephine have been in the band again for some time now. Take me back to those first rehearsals for the Last Splash anniversary shows; what was that like?

Kelley Deal: We got together and all went down into Kim’s basement – where we used to practice, and still do.

We got back on the same equipment we had when we recorded Last Splash and toured it, opening for Nirvana and playing Lollapalooza; the same gear.

Same Marshall amps and everything.

So there we are, with the same gear, playing this record. And I remember being amazed at how much like the record it sounded. It was like, “oh, that’s how that song is played.”

Kim and I have played with other musicians in The Breeders and each one of them is amazing and unique, but when you get the people who actually created the part and made it their signature, and you hear it, it’s like, oh my god. It sounded effortless, it sounded just right.

The reformation began as a small idea of playing the Last Splash shows and it snowballed into something with more momentum.

Was it a bit overwhelming or did it feel natural?

Kelley Deal: We had a really great time doing the Last Splash tour. As the year went on, you start planning for the next year, and we were asked to do some shows for the following year. We were like, wait a minute, it’s no longer 2013 – what should we play?

Are we still doing that or not? And so,

everyone had music they were working on that we started to incorporate and play live.

Kim had ‘Walking with a Killer’ which she had released solo, and that was the first one. It was something everyone was into re-interpreting, that would sit well with what we were doing. Then we just started adding songs, playing things live, like – okay, this works.

Was there a sense of pressure when you started to realise these songs were coming together as a new record?

Kelley Deal: My first feelings were excitement... and then dread. It’s a long process... constructing the songs, deconstructing and reconstructing them. In terms of feeling nervous about the album itself, I think I kind of felt the same way I did when we were recording Last Splash. No one was there in Coast Recorders back in 1993 thinking, “Oh yeah, this is going to zoom to the top of the charts!” So, we’ve always just kind of been doing our thing. It’s super important when you’re in the middle of that process to not consider what other people are going to think about an album, or what its place is in your oeuvre. It’s important to get immediate with the music – and that’s my favourite part.

That makes sense. I feel like you’ve rarely been a band that was concerned with what other people were doing at the time, or what people thought of you.

Kelley Deal: When I hear a band I

“PLAYING LIVE MUSIC FOR OTHER PEOPLE IS SUCH

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really like, and a new trend comes, and you hear them go towards that sound...

I don’t know, I don’t think we do that; we all feel very rooted in our aesthetic.

There’s nothing wrong with exploring different types of music, but that’s not what this is – and I think if it became that, we’d need to call it something else.

You were talking earlier about deconstructing and reconstructing.

I know Kim is the starting point for a lot of the Breeders’ work; I’m curious how collaborative a process putting the songs together is?

Kelley Deal: It really depends on the song. Some tracks like ‘Walking with a Killer’ came completely done. Some songs are really jammed out – Kim and Jim will just start playing something in the basement. That’s how ‘MetaGoth’ started: Kim was working out a bass

part, Josephine was in New York. And so that song started there, with the three of us, and then Josephine wrote the words and guitar part afterwards.

You’ve talked in the past about how around the time of Last Splash there were times where you weren’t able to be as present as you’d have liked.

I’m curious if that sense of feeling present live is something you’re very aware of now?

Kelley Deal: I really am. It’s one of the best things about doing it. I was recently playing a show, and the crowd was good, the mix was good, my guitar tone was good, I could hear everything... Playing live music for other people is such a gift and an honour. It’s always fun, but I had a real feeling of gratitude in that moment.

It went deeper that night. It’s a really nice thing to have.

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FEATURE

A Bigger Splash

Allison Gallagher learns that Kelley Deal of The Breeders is feeling freer than ever

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FEATURE

“THAT WAS THE CONCEPT GOING INTO THIS RECORD;

KEEP IT MINIMAL.”

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FEATURE

Look Back In Anger Paul Banks, frontman of indie rock luminaries Interpol, tells Allison Gallagher he is comfortably placed between a rich past and a burgeoning future

15

years after the release of their iconic debut Turn On The Bright Lights, post-punk luminaries Interpol aren’t slowing down. Their latest, Marauder, is an incendiary album that feels desperately urgent – in part due to it being recorded live to tape with minimal overdubs.

we get the right take. That was when he suggested we record direct to two-inch.

We spoke to the band’s frontman Paul Banks about recording the album and pushing through nostalgia.

Personally I wanted what we were accomplishing in rehearsals to be really faithfully reproduced, I wasn’t looking to get a lot of layers going. We intentionally kept the keyboards to a minimum. As a group, we were all of the mind of making a stripped down, raucous, rock record.

The BRAG: Marauder has been out for a couple of months, I’m curious how having a little distance, what your feelings are?

Paul Banks: You spend a lot of time writing and recording an album and then once it’s out, it’s all about the live thing. So I’ve been experiencing the record in that context. I feel really great about it, but I’ve been focusing on the live performances of the songs we’re playing. It’s almost easier for me to comment on a record that’s like ten years old – with Marauder, I’m really excited about what we made but I can’t say it’s changed that much in my mind.

I guess it’s a process that’s difficult to disengage from right away once it’s done.

Paul Banks: It’s like the snapshot of where I left it in the studio, but there were 15 months ahead of that working on it. My experience of the record is the inverse of everyone else’s. It gets released and people can listen to it on repeat, and I have not done that since the release. I haven’t really listened to it.

You recorded with Dave Fridmann – in the past you’ve been a little hesitant to bring in outside producers, so I’m curious what that process was like.

Paul Banks: It was really seamless and rewarding for us. I think his way of communicating with us as a band was very simpatico. I think that’s one of his high level talents, because I imagine he’s that way with every artist he works with. With us, it felt like, this guy really understands what we’re doing musically, and also has a great facility with the language of music.

Sometimes it’s difficult to express sonic concepts in words so you just kind of scramble and struggle to describe what you’re looking for.

Fridmann seemed to be able to pick up anything you were trying to indicate. So his feedback into our process always felt very succinct and very on point There’s a real immediacy and liveness on the record. Was that something that came through for you to?

Paul Banks: Yeah, I think that was the concept going into this record; keep it minimal. I think he heard our demos and kind of thought, okay, you guys are playing these songs in rehearsals at a level where we could go to tape and expect no fuck-ups, and no need for overdubs if

You get into this world of, like, this is committal, so let’s get it right.

When you’re working in Pro Tools you could just punch every bar if you want, but you can’t do that if you’re recording as a group to tape.

The lyrics on this album are a bit less oblique than in past, but there’s still a lot of narrative elements, you take on characters or different perspectives. I’m curious whether you have an idea about whether a set of lyrics is going to come from a personal standpoint or a more detached point of view going in?

Paul Banks: I don’t really have any kind of value distinction between the two things. Putting an honest first person eye in front of something doesn’t make it any more about the human experience to me. You know what I mean? You can say a lot when you’re projecting those things onto a character. You’re utterly free.

So honesty in that sense is almost like a limitation.

The time that album was made means there’s a level of nostalgic and romanticism that I feel like can be potentially constraining. I’m curious how you reconcile that nostalgia with being an artist who is still making art and pushing forward?

Paul Banks: For me, there’s not much need to reconcile. Because of the timing, we were deep into writing this new record when we went on that tour. It wasn’t like, we now have nothing to offer moving forward so let’s look back. We’re a band that’s still very active and we feel very active, and therefore it’s okay to look back and not have to reconcile that sense of “fuck, where’s the future?” because we already had one foot in what the next step for the band was going to be.

You’re playing at the Opera House in Sydney which is obviously a fairly iconic space.

Paul Banks: I’m kind of hung up on architecture and I feel like to be in such an iconic space... I think it really fucking matters. It’s wonderful when you get to play in a historic space like that. I can’t think of many that compare. To be inside a structure that’s not just iconic by name but also a real landmark architecturally, it’s great. I’m stoked, we’re all stoked.

Where: Sydney Opera House When: Saturday January 5

“SOMETIMES IT’S DIFFICULT

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FEATURE

How To Be

I sat down to have a chat with the enigmatic, charismatic and revolutionist Handsome.

We talked about origin stories, queerness and changing the fucking world, one heart at a time, through some radical electronica and a sweet gang of creative misfits.

T

he BRAG: What was the origin of the HANDSOME project?

Handsome: I was releasing music as Caitlin Park, which was a folk project. I put out two records. It was cool but also, I’d started this when I was in my early 20s and I think I was kinda playing a character; a character I think I’d modelled off some of my older friends at the time.

While I was making a third record I realised this didn’t feel like me anymore, and this feeling coincided with heaps of different things that happened in my life, like meeting Kat [Dopper] for example. I met a bunch of people through my partner and y’know, friendships evolve and things change – I started to learn that dancing was okay.

You didn’t dance before?

Handsome: No, I was really staunch about it because I wasn’t comfortable with myself. As I got older that changed. I think a huge part of that was because I’d become much more present in the queer community and had been going to parties and being like, “My god this is so fun, I really feel like myself here!”

Sounds like ultra good vibes.

Handsome: Totally! Then I started working at a record label, a hip-hop label [Elefant Traks], which definitely changed my musical palette.

Seems like all these things were conspiring to create some change.

Handsome: You’re right. [Laughs.] This is the origin story. One thing that really shook me was a night after a huge Heaps Gay party during Vivid. A friend and I were DJing there, we had a big night and ended up getting home at 6am. I remember crouching around a heater with her, still really buzzed, while

looking through our phones and finding out that the Orlando shooting had just happened.

It shook me because not only are we part of the queer community, but we had literally just come from a queer party. It was scary to imagine someone coming in and opening fire like that. It’s scary to get that wake-up call and that reminder that you’re still a minority that is hugely discriminated against. That sort of thing is less likely to happen in Australia because we have amazing gun laws, but who’s to say it couldn’t?

It’s always jarring to be reminded of your otherness, but that can help shift your self-perception too. Like recognising that you’d outgrown the Caitlin Park project.

Handsome: Exactly. That’s the point it became clear to me that Caitlin Park no longer felt like me, and I wasn’t making music that was changing people’s lives. I wanted to make music that would create a change. And so HANDSOME came into play.

How much of Caitlin Park still lives within HANDSOME? Or is that separate altogether?

Handsome: It feels pretty separate to me.

When HANDSOME was starting, people had trouble letting Caitlin Park go, or would try to create a tie between both projects. When

Handsome photos by Anna Hay

By Arca Bayburt

Handsome photo this page by Jess Gleeson

Handsome

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“IT’S SCARY TO GET THAT WAKE-UP CALL

AND THAT REMINDER THAT YOU’RE STILL A MINORITY THAT IS HUGELY DISCRIMINATED AGAINST.” like I was coming out again, in a very public space, which is a powerful statement.

Your music is described as Tomboy Pop. What’s that about? How would you define that?

Handsome: I like the word play a little bit but also it feels like an accurate representation of who I am. It’s a totally personal thing. I also think there’s like an element of the music that sounds a bit like what a tomboy is: there’s a grittiness to it.

What’s the HANDSOME Gang all about?

Handsome: Allowing people into a space to feel safe but also to encourage selfexpression; whether that’s through art or poetry or whatever it inadvertently includes collaboration. I want this project to be something that actually creates social change.

Do you have any plans to take over the world with the HANDSOME gang?

Handsome: Yeah I have. I mean on a grand scale I just want it to feel like a movement.

I want people to like where HANDSOME is going and for them to feel they’re part of something special because they are. And the reason is because I’m part of a [queer] community of people that have spent a lot of their lives thinking that they’re different, in a bad way, and they’re terrified of that. I want to empower those people.

If your family disowns you or you feel out of place or ousted in society then you are going to seek a family elsewhere. That’s what a chosen family is for. A lot of my friends have so many fucking horror stories. They’re people who’ve been thrown out of their houses for months on end when they were 16 and things like that. Those stories need to be heard, but also those people need to feel like they aren’t always going to feel so helpless.

We certainly have to do the Auditing of The Self much earlier than a straight person.

Handsome: Exactly right. And as much as that’s scary and terrifying – it’s horrible that we have to do that – it makes us who we are, it makes us stronger and I that’s something that should be fucking celebrated.

What’s on the agenda for the gang. Are you going to expand beyond music?

Handsome: I like the idea of doing collaborations with artists or having multiple creative projects in some way driven by queer people. I love film. I love fashion. It would be really cool to give artists of all persuasions jobs!

Do you think it feels good for you to be on stage now because you’re on stage as yourself?

Handsome: Totally. It’s such a different thing like when Caitlin Park used to get on stage. I’d have this whole character, down to the voice and mannerisms of someone else. Now I talk the way that I usually talk.

There’s nothing in between you and the crowd. No hiding behind a guitar.

Handsome: Yeah! Just getting up there with only a mic is one of the best things I’ve ever done.

me and my label first launched HANDSOME, I was a little pushy about not talking about Caitlin Park because I was terrified that I’d be boxed in; everyone was like, “Oh you play an acoustic guitar, that means you’re a folk musician.” [Laughs.] I’m like, I’m so much more than just that.

Maybe that’s why it’s important in the beginning to divorce yourself from what

thebrag.com

people know you as so you can establish a new identity with what you’re doing now.

That puts your anxieties about Caitlin Park in perspective, especially considering the fear of being pigeonholed.

Handsome: Totally. I didn’t want to make this record with the Caitlin Park name, I want a fresh start. It’s funny that when HANDSOME started I dropped ‘Late Night Ball Game’, which is a song about coming out. It really felt

You also dance now!

Handsome: I dance now! [Laughs.] I’ve got a massive single that’s going to come out early next year… It’s all coming together. I think next year we’re gonna be touring a lot. I’d like to go overseas and build a team who really cares about what I’m doing but also, I’ve got grander ideas in the works too.

To take over the world.

Handsome: Yeah, to take over the world.

BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 27

arts in focus FEATURE

HOPE AGAINST HOPE: FIRST REFORMED AND THE END OF THE WORLD

By Joseph Earp

E

arly on in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, a priest and a believer talk the end of the world. The believer, Michael, sees no future for the human race. “Opportunistic diseases, anarchy, martial law,” he mutters, his greying head bowed. “You will live to see this.”

None of what he says is fantasy. Even the conservative politicians around the world who wake up every morning and argue against best science – even they know what is coming. It is, by now, almost inevitable. Just two years ago, scientists working away at the suitably named Cape Grim in Tasmania measured 400 ppm of Co2 in the atmosphere. A threshold had been crossed. “It’s a bit sooner than we expected,” a scientist named Paul Krummel nervously told Fairfax at the time.

That’s how it’s been ever since: our worst nightmares are coming true, and faster than we can keep up with them. Endemic species are going extinct en masse, so much quicker than predictions suggested they might. The acidification of the ocean is snowballing out of our control. Even modest estimates suggest that the air might be poisonous within a generation.

“We can’t undo any of this.

And it will get worse.”

We can’t undo any of this. And it will get worse.

“We are now closer to the risk of crossing thresholds or tipping points, which are large features of [a] climate system prone to abrupt, irreversible change when a critical threshold level of temperature rise is reached,” Dr Martin Rice, the head of research for the Climate Council, told the BRAG earlier this year. “The melting of the Greenland ice sheet would eventually raise sea level by approximately seven metres. That would commit humanity to continuously rising sea levels for centuries.”

Who would want to bring a child into such a world?

Who would condemn their flesh and blood to a warming earth without a future, ravaged by disease and decimated food supply lines? Not Michael.

“Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?” he asks the priest, Father Toller. His eyes imply he already knows the answer.

But Toller is not so sure. He argues against Michael at every point, his eyes flashing. “Who can know the mind of God?” he muses. The grieving Toller, his son dead, dependent on the spirits he sips alone, late at night, seems suddenly invigorated.

For the first time in years, he is alive. And it is the end of the world that has done it to him.

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S

ix years ago, I was sitting in a wide, carpeted room in a psychiatrist’s office, sipping cheap coffee and telling a huddle of strangers about my drinking problem. I was drunk, even then.

My heart wasn’t really in the story. Like so many addicts, I’d grown very good at telling the tale as it was meant to be told; how I was ashamed of my actions; how I’d hurt the people around me. The other addicts looked at the floor and waited their turn to speak.

When I was done, the psych asked if anyone had anything to say to me; any words of advice. A big burly man with a thick moustache sitting across from me grumbled a little, and shifted in his seat.

“I guess,” he said. “I guess my question is: don’t you want to live?”

It was a long time ago, and alcohol wrecks your memory, so I don’t really remember exactly what happened next. I think the psych, embarrassed, moved us on. I do know I didn’t say anything to the man. I think I just stared at the floor.

I did have an answer, though. And the answer was surprising to me. It was yes. I did want to live. Despite everything, I did want to keep going. I wanted to grow old. I wanted to have kids. I wanted to keep living my life. And it was that realisation that, slowly, day by day, led me on a shaky path to sobriety.

A realisation like that wasn’t built to survive our current news cycle. Each day, the more I read, the less sensible it seems to stay sober. What’s the point? You might abstain from drugs or drink in order to live a long, comfortable life. But nothing is suggesting that the rest of our lives will be long or comfortable. Everything is suggesting that we will live through collapse, days marked by the destruction of old comforts and the establishment of fresh pains.

So what’s the point? It seems harder and harder to glean. Recently I worked out that I could start drinking in earnest again now, and die around the same time as the planet.

“What’s the point?

It seems harder and harder to glean.”

T

oller never becomes hopeful, exactly. He has no reason to. After all, whatever hope might be able to do, it can’t preserve the arctic shelf, or stop the conversion of the Amazon rainforest to savanna. Instead, Toller becomes committed. After Michael the believer takes off the top of his own head with a shotgun, Toller revives the man’s cause, planning a domestic terrorist attack that he hopes will take out one of the biggest polluters in the States.

But, as with so much climate activism, it’s a symbolic act, not a practical one. Taking out one man will do nothing – there will be so many others to take his place. Real change – the only kind of change that will be able to avert the fastapproaching climate apocalypse – requires more than protests, and marches, and laws. More, even, than murder. It requires either a revolution so drastic as to be hitherto unseen in the history of the human race, or it requires a mass die-off of the human race.

“Humans are like any other plague animal,” John Gray once wrote. “They cannot destroy the Earth, but they can easily wreck the environment that sustains them ... It is likely that disseminated primatemaia [a plague of people] will be cured by a large-scale decline in human numbers.”

Maybe years ago we could have averted all this.

We can’t anymore. Sobriety won’t change anything; suicide vests won’t change anything; activism won’t change anything. Toller knows this. It’s why, when his planned attack is undone by chance, he turns his violence onto himself. He, after all, is the carrier of climate change’s original sin: the sin of being born, of being another mouth on a planet being eaten.

I could start drinking in earnest again now, and die around the same time as the planet. I won’t though.

Or at least, I don’t think I will. Human beings have this raging, unceasing desire to go on. Of hoping when there is no reason to hope. Samuel Beckett wrote about that. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Toller has no real reason to keep living. But he does. He lives because he is a machine bred to do exactly that. The film doesn’t end on an act of heroism, or an act of defeat. It ends on a creature going on when it can’t – when it shouldn’t. There is poetry in that too. thebrag.com

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FEATURE

The Survivor: Jamie Lee Curtis And Resistance

By Belinda Quinn

T

he sun is yet to rise and 59-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis is lying in the mud in Charleston, South Carolina. Her rib has fractured after having fallen from a roof. “I was lying in a muddy, kind of murky, swampy area – I was in a lot of pain, but I was trying to grin and bear it,” she says, painting the memory of being onset for the new Halloween film. “And there was just this moment, I remember it, going, ‘What am I doing?’”

She throws up her hands and laughs.

As the mud seeped into her character’s clothing – the staunch grandmother Laurie Strode – a thought came to Curtis: “I miss my husband, and my son, and my daughter, and my family, and my dog, and my life.”

Throughout her 40-year-long career, Curtis has been a stickler for doing her own stunts. In James Cameron’s ’90s action thriller True Lies she refused to let her double do the helicopter scene, and wilfully suspended herself 60 metres above the sea.

Although acting in the new Halloween, a sequel to 1978’s shocking original was physically painful and emotionally taxing, Curtis made it clear on The Project that “anyone trying to raise a couple of kids or hold a couple of jobs works way harder than I’ve ever worked a day in my life.”

Getting the role of a sweet, pot-smoking and intelligent babysitter in the original film became the catalyst for Curtis’s journey towards being crowned the scream Queen of modern slashers (and in turn, her way of following in her mother Janet Leigh’s footsteps, who played the lead in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho).

In fact, Curtis’ return to the series had more of an impact than she could have hoped for. After just two weeks in cinemas, Blumhouse’s Halloween sequel topped box office charts and is now the highest grossing slasher film in history.

“And now, here I sit,” says Curtis, brandishing a wide, comfortable smile, “in a red power suit, having gone around the world. I’ve been around the world talking about this movie, this wonderful movie. It’s like…” she clicks her fingers in the air, and after a brief, gaze-holding pause, finishes her sentence: “that!”

“We went into it trying to make a movie about something with integrity.”

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T

he time between that moment lying in the South Carolina mud to sitting in Sydney Harbour’s Park Hyatt hotel now feels like an instant. “So that’s thrilling, that we went into it trying to make a movie about something with integrity. We all worked our asses off and now it’s coming out and it’s a success. And I get to be the ambassador,” she says, eyes beaming behind her thick, blackrimmed glasses.

Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween

John Carpenter

Curtis was an executive producer on the Halloween sequel alongside the film’s original co-writer John Carpenter. She’d often aid director David Gordon Green in speculating what effects the masked, nonverbal serial killer Michael Myers had on teenage Laurie Strode. And how her post-traumatic stress disorder could disrupt her life without proper acknowledgement, support, and care. thebrag.com

COVER FEATURE

arts in focus

“This isn’t Spotlight, this is a slasher movie.

But it’s about something.”

Jamie Lee Curtis in 2018’s Halloween

Curtis and Green envisioned that Strode’s education suffered; that her daughter, Karen, was drunkenly conceived in a bar bathroom, and that Laurie would often pester Karen’s school teachers about their evacuation strategies.

“I really do believe that David gave me a chance to be an actress again. Because I haven’t. I sold yogurt that makes you shit for seven years,” she told TooFab. Throughout the production of the 1988 Oscar-nominated heist comedy A Fish Called Wanda, Curtis would often break down in tears off-camera because she had to leave her six-month-old daughter at home. Doing commercials for brands like Activia allowed her to be the mother she wanted to be to her two children.

She assures me no producer is an island. “There are 120 other crewmembers beside me: I’m a member of the crew. I’m the one, you know, doing the high-five tour around the world,” she explains. And this particular tour has been fuelled by public conversations about trauma.

At this year’s Comic-Con, a middle-aged man told Curtis that her portrayal of Laurie Strode in 1978 helped him gain the courage to pick up his knitting needles (as she does in the movie) and run out of his house mid-home invasion – she stepped into the audience and held him while he wept.

T

he Halloween sequel is being referred to by its creators and critics alike as a feminist film, championing the #MeToo movement and survivor empowerment. A few weeks prior to our interview, seven women across Australia were killed in a matter of five days. In the majority of these cases, the alleged killers were men known to them; they were partners, ex-partners, even stalkers.

On bringing up these figures and noting how the themes in Halloween will be personal for many Australians, Curtis is wary not to overstate the film’s power.

“Look, at its core, it’s a slasher movie. I’m not pretending that this is… my brain just froze, what was the fantastic movie that made about the clergy abuse in Boston?” Spotlight? “Spotlight! This isn’t Spotlight; this is a slasher movie. But it’s about something. “[It’s about] the trauma that we tried to portray in a very real way, in a very open, honest way, and [we] show what it looks like… in a fiction. [That] was very important to me and the filmmakers,” she continues.

“And so that it is resonating with you and other people, that there have been stories that have been in the press after the movie was written that then dovetailed into it and gave the movie the gravitas and made what we were talking about something that is crucial to be talking about…” she says, letting the thought linger in the air before moving to the next.

Her voice returns to its steady pace. “Now, I did the interview to sell Halloween. But Johnny Dodd – the man who wrote it – and I started talking about all sorts of things, and what came out was my opiate recovery. And I just think that it’s amazing, because there are so many people who are struggling in the world, and I was one of them. And I’m very lucky.”

A

s Dodd wrote in the aforementioned article, Curtis’ addiction started in 1989, ahead of the spreading United States’ opiate epidemic. While making a film, a cameraman commented on Curtis’s “hereditary puffy eyes” so she decided to have minor plastic surgery. A doctor prescribed opiates to cover her pain.

Curtis details a long family history of addiction. Her father used alcohol, cocaine and heroin; and in 1994, her step-brother passed away from a heroin overdose. She admitted to stealing pills from friends and family and was eventually found out by her older sister Kelly, but not until 10 years of using had passed.

“I think if all of us can actually acknowledge safely that we struggle with something, it gives other people an opportunity to know that they can do it too, and that there can be a hopeful end to it all,” Curtis explains of her chance to talk about her experiences with addiction. “And literally one of the things that I was having to say to somebody, was because of, again, an unexpected benefit to a slasher movie!

I mean it’s a freaken slasher movie!

“But what [Halloween has] allowed me to talk about is something way bigger than a slasher movie ever will be, which [is] the lifesaving moment that happened for me when I acknowledged that I was addicted to opiates.

It’s a huge problem in America … And so my recovery from that certainly got fuelled by Laurie’s recovery from Michael.”

“And I know this is going to sound bad, and please, please don’t take it the wrong way, but everybody has trauma,” she explains. “And I think what we’re learning is that when you get good help and support, you can move on from it so that you can actually have a life. And so that’s been interesting to me to see that response as I go around the world.”

The power of good horror often lies in its ability to allow audiences to feel the fragility of life, to appreciate it, and to bond people in shared experiences of adrenaline-fuelling, endorphin-rising fear.

While Curtis isn’t a fan of horror herself, performing as Laurie Strode over the past four decades has aided her to confront her own demons and build her confidence – she’s even more outspoken, more relatable.

Asking whether performing as this particular version of Laurie Strode has had an impact on her strikes a nerve. The tempo of her speech slows to a tampered beat, wherein every word leaves a mark. “Yes. Resiliency, you know? The possibility of hope,” says Curtis. “You know, we have to live in a world where we believe in some possibility of redemption, of recovery.”

Returning to the character has even inspired her to write her own eco-horror film, which she plans to direct in the coming years. Seeing how dedicated she is to her craft, we can only imagine what the O.G. scream Queen will have to offer in her sixties.

Her eyes glaze, and her voice, though still strong, shakes. “I’m sober 20 years in February,” she says. Before this interview, Curtis learnt that America’s People magazine planned to put her recovery from opiate addiction on their cover.

What: Halloween is out in cinemas now

thebrag.com

BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 31

FEATURE

“In A W om a n Under t he Inf l uence, C a s s av e t e s’ mo s t fa mou s f il m, a hus b a nd’s in a bil i t y t o under s ta nd his w if e’s err at ic beh av iour causes him t o mo s t ly communicat e in y el l s.”

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thebrag.com

arts in focus

Bad Men:

No Romance for H o w E l a ine M ay D e c o n s t r u c t e d t he C a s s av e t e s M a n in Mik e y a nd Ni c k y

By Kai Perrignon

I

n 1998, the band Le Tigre, fronted by once and forever riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna, released ‘What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes’, which answers its titular question with alternating cries of “Genius!” and “Misogynist!” These responses are cheeky extremes, but they speak to a real struggle many viewers have when watching the work of American filmmaker John Cassavetes.

The progenitor of the American independent film scene, Cassavetes’ films are confronting character studies of tormented people trying (often through screaming matches) and failing to understand themselves and each other. And as much as I love many of the director’s films, it’s hard not to hear Le Tigre rattling around in my head as I watch them, struggling to place my knee-jerk repulsion at some of his ideas.

In the films of Cassavetes, men are inherently violent (mostly emotionally, though sometimes physically), primitive creatures who take out their inner frustrations on those around them. In A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes’ most famous film, a husband’s inability to understand his wife’s erratic behaviour causes him to mostly communicate in yells and – in one uncomfortable moment – a hard slap. He doesn’t change by the end of the film.

In Husbands, maybe the go-to film for evidence of Cassavetes’ misogyny, three middle-aged men freak out when a childhood friend dies, and they go on an extended bender where they treat everyone – especially the women around them – with a mixture of callousness, violence, and immature spite. They are unable to untangle themselves, and so they take it out on everyone around them. That kind of behavioural description can be applied to the men in almost every Cassavetes film, and I can’t think of

a single one where these male creatures grow as humans. Cassavetes seems to think that ugliness and misogyny are intrinsic to the male gender.

Not quite a “boys will be boys” attitude: more of a dejected acceptance of the evils of men.

I don’t think that Cassavetes was a misogynist.

His films are all absolutely critical of this abhorrent behaviour. But he is a romantic filmmaker, in the sense that he clearly values the nobility of his men’s futile attempts to change.

At their core, Cassavetes’ films deeply respect every character as deeply human and worthy of compassion. That’s a fine idea, but it inspires a bit of queasiness when one considers that many of these characters are – in Cassavetes’ world – irreparably awful men.

One of the best films that deconstructs this worldview is Elaine May’s – soon to be released as part of the Criterion collection – 1976 Mikey and Nicky. May’s film depicts the very long night that follows after Nicky (Cassavetes himself), a low-level mobster on the run from a contract on his head, calls his childhood best friend Mikey (Peter Falk – a long way off from the grandpa in The Princess Bride) for help. Mikey is as bitter as Nicky is paranoid, and their erratic, panicked odyssey across the city releases years of pent-up frustration and rage.

May, who came to prominence working with fellow comedian Mike Nichols (who later made The Graduate) before directing the cringecomedy classics A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, uses the long takes and cluttered mise-enscene of her previous work and pushes them to almost parodic extremes, resulting in an exhausting cinematic experience that perfectly emulates the feeling of Cassavetes’ directorial

works – if not quite the look (Cassavetes would have used more close-ups). The “one long night” conceit pushes the typical Cassavetes behaviour to its frantic end-point: any charm built into this type of characterisation is shaved away by the sheer relentlessness.

In essence, May was remaking a Cassavetes film in her own image. Her cringe-comedy background lends itself well to this sort of sweaty drama, but she’s seemingly less interested in how these men want to change and more in what devils they already are.

They are petty, they are selfish, and they barely even like the people they’re supposed to love.

There is no nobility in their heart of hearts, no honour among thieves – they’re just two lowlevel arseholes looking out for number one, even and especially if that means screwing over each other, their wives, and the women around them.

In a key scene in the middle of the movie, Nicky and Mikey (both married) go to the house of the former’s mistress, Nellie. Promised a little action of his own, Mikey uncomfortably sits on a garbage can in the kitchen while Nicky has sex in the living room. After Nicky pulls up his zipper, Mikey kisses Nellie, under the mistaken impression that she is expecting him.

When she fails to reciprocate, Mikey slaps her, and Nicky berates her for her lack of hospitality.

Nothing quite so extreme ever happens in any of Cassavetes’ films, but Mikey and Nicky’s flippant attitude towards their misogyny is eerily reflective of how his characters tend to act. Cassavetes never wrote a scene so unambiguously horrific but May saw a clarity of ugliness in his films – and was bold enough to put it onscreen.

“El a ine M ay wa s r em a k ing a C a s s av e t e s f il m in her o w n im a ge.” thebrag.com

BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 33

arts in focus FEATURE

IT’S ABOUT TIME:

DAVID LOWERY AND THE OLD MAN AND THE GUN

By Manuela Lazic

A

fter his critically-acclaimed 2013 Texas crime drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, his fantasist kids film Pete’s Dragon, and last year’s mesmerising meditation on time and grief A Ghost Story, American director David Lowery once again switches gears with The Old Man & The Gun. Starring screen legend Robert Redford in what the actor has since declared to be his last role, this 1970s-set cop-and-robber film is as much a modern play with the tropes of that genre as it is a tribute to – and a study of – Redford’s star persona. We talked with Lowery about his understanding of Redford’s iconicity, and how his subconscious seems to always drive him to explore existential questions, whatever genre he works in.

The BRAG: What was it particularly about this script that you found interesting?

David Lowery: It was really the fact that it was gonna be a Robert Redford movie. They sent me the New Yorker article that the movie is based on, and asked me if I’d be interested in writing and directing it, for him to star in. It wasn’t really the fact that it was about this character or the crazy true story, although the bank robbery sounded exciting. It was that I would get to make a quintessential Robert Redford movie!

What do you think makes it so quintessentially a Robert Redford film?

David Lowery: I think Robert Redford has essentially spent his entire career cultivating the image of an outlaw, even though he hasn’t played a bunch of outlaws. He certainly made his name, you know, as Butch Cassidy, playing a criminal, and this was an opportunity for him to put on those shoes once again.

I find that the character of Tucker in a way makes me think a lot of your previous film A Ghost Story…

David Lowery: Oh really?

Yeah, because it’s all about time again!

David Lowery: It’s true! [Laughs.] I mean, it’s true! I’m glad, I’m glad!

Because Tucker, by repeating always the same actions, continuing to be a bank robber into his old age, is kind of trying to fight time, I suppose?

David Lowery: You’re onto something there! It comforts me to know that I’m maintaining the same, you know… narrative turn. I was so worried that this movie would be so different that it would alienate people, but that there’s parallels with my previous film, that makes me happy.

I don’t know how aware you are of it, but there are so many other details as well, such as the signature on the wall, that is very much reminiscent of the notes in the walls in A Ghost Story. Can you talk a bit about that?

David Lowery: I definitely realised that while editing the movie, but to be honest, it was when we were scouting for locations, we were looking at all these

“I think Robert Redford has essentially spent his entire career cultivating the image of an outlaw.”

houses and we found one that had a signature on the wall. I just thought that was so perfect that I wrote it into the script and only after the fact did I realise, ‘you know what? That’s exactly like A Ghost Story!’

[Laughs.]

That’s so lucky!

David Lowery: It’s one of the things… You find those things because you’re looking for them. Because I’m making the movie, I’ll see that they are right when I’m writing, even though I’m not consciously aware of how those things connect to what I’ve done in the past.

But there’s meaning in the film, so of course, if I see something like that, I’ll get excited about it and use it.

Yeah, it’s like your subconscious working.

David Lowery: Completely. I have a lot of faith in my subconscious at this point.

It’s interesting how there’s a classic robbercop dynamic between Tucker and the Casey Affleck character, John Hunt, but there’s a new dimension there because of the fact that Hunt is so depressed at first, whereas Tucker is really happy. There’s this really strange, but, I think, really heartbreaking moment when Hunt is talking to a witness of one of Tucker’s robberies and the person keeps saying, ‘Yeah, he was just happy’ and it’s really weird to see Hunt looking miserable but just repeating the word ‘happy’.

David Lowery: Yes, exactly!

Can you talk a bit about that contrast between them?

David Lowery: One of the things that was important to me with this movie was that John Hunt, Casey’s character, doesn’t catch Forrest Tucker. In real life, he never caught him, but he also never met him.

I had written that scene where they meet each other because I felt that you need to have a scene like that – you need to have a scene where the cop and the robber meet, it’s a classic trope of the genre – but I didn’t want Hunt to catch Tucker, I wanted him to let Tucker go, and I had to figure out a way to get him to a place where that felt like the right choice.

It took me a while to figure it out but ultimately, I realised, he needs to fall in love with Forrest Tucker: there needs to be a romance there! And the best way for that to happen is for him to be brought to life by the pursuit of this guy – he needs to be in a place in life where he’s so unhappy, that when he’s given the opportunity to pursue this guy, it ignites something within himself. And that ignition is not a drive to capture him, but a drive to find out what makes him happy.

So Hunt the character, in many ways, represents me writing the film, falling in love with Forrest Tucker the character, and not wanting to catch him! [Laughs.] Not wanting to put him behind bars! It meant then to go back to the beginning of the character’s arc, and to make him have a midlife crisis. Hunt is much younger than Forrest Tucker: he’s turning 40 when the film begins and he feels like an old man, and his life is illuminated by this old man who acts like a 15 year old boy! And that dynamic was really helpful when I was writing those two parallel stories.

It seems that their happiness is linked to having a purpose or a cause, but at the same time Tucker doesn’t really have a purpose. I think that, again, like A Ghost Story, this film becomes about so much more than just robbing banks. It’s about,

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thebrag.com

“It comforts me to know that I’m maintaining the same narrative turn.”

‘What are you doing with your life?’

David Lowery: Definitely.

That’s why I love the scene where they meet and Tucker tells Hunt to look sharp because then he looks like he knows what he’s doing: that’s such an interesting way of showing that Tucker is actually also in a crisis and doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

David Lowery: I really wanted it to be about more than just bank robbers. I really am not that interested in robbing banks; I’m interested in people who are living their life doing things that make them feel alive and make them feel like they’re making the right choices in life. And vice versa! You know, the tragic side of this is somebody not doing that, and that’s interesting too, but the actual thing that they’re doing, whether robbing a bank or being a detective catching a criminal, I’m not that interested in. I’m not someone who’s totally fascinated by true crime, and so finding those other aspects to use the true story to illuminate something about human nature was far more important to me.

It’s interesting you say that, because I feel like the character of Tucker himself is kind of just the ‘image’ of a bank robber: he’s not doing much of what is usually associated with robbing banks, he’s not violent, he’s just showing up and taking money, and he’s become this kind of mythical figure. Casting Redford in that role is great because just his face signifies everything: you don’t need to even have the actual activity of robbing!

Yes, completely, I know exactly what you mean. I think the real Forrest Tucker wanted to be Robert Redford! [Laughs.] He didn’t really want to be a bank robber, he wanted to be Robert Redford playing a bank robber! And there’s something so...

You know, the fact that he never did it for the money, he never did it for the actual need of shooting or robbing banks, he did it for some other, ineffable reason, maybe it was the thrill, maybe he just enjoyed thebrag.com

the rush of it... but I think, more than that, he wanted to be an archetype. He wanted to be an archetype of an outlaw, and that’s something that Robert Redford is. Robert Redford, he’s never robbed a bank, as far as I know, but he represents the archetype of the outlaw through and through, and I think that’s what Forrest Tucker wanted to be.

My favourite moment in the film is when there’s that footage of Redford when he was younger, from The Chase, and again, not to go on about this, but I think that’s a clear connection to A Ghost Story and how it shows time passing in a very clear way. When I saw his face there, so young, I immediately burst into tears. I wanted to know what you thought about when using that technique to show him through time?

David Lowery: I had a very emotional response to it the first time I saw it too. Prior to putting that clip in there, it was just a fun sequence, a really fun and rollicking series of different images. It gave information about the character, but it wasn’t very emotional, and the thing I missed about it was seeing his face.

We had a lot of stunt doubles, younger actors, but we never showed his face. I really wanted to make sure that the audience were aware that Robert Redford was Forrest Tucker, so on a very pragmatic level, I just thought it would be useful to put him in there. So then we did that, we edited it in, and the first time I watched it I was overwhelmed by how moving it was.

Because suddenly, we are seeing the breadth not just of this character’s life, but of this actor’s life too!

We are seeing the breadth of Robert Redford’s life and suddenly, indeed, it becomes all about time, and our perception of time, and how fleeting time is. All of that is wrapped up in our understanding of who Robert Redford is as a cultural icon and an actor.

It’s immensely moving, and I haven’t quite wrapped my head around it yet. But it’s something that I can’t imagine the movie without now.

In a way, it’s what cinema is, just capturing things and keeping them forever… I think your films

keep doing that a lot.

David Lowery: I’m sure that the next movie I make will do a similar thing just accidentally, and my subconscious will keep doing what it does!

Can we talk about the style you chose? It feels very late 1960s-1970s, with all the camera pans and the zoom-ins… How did you decide to use this style? Was it just to pay homage?

I think it was mostly to pay homage. I definitely wanted this to feel like a classic Robert Redford movie, so I was looking at the films that he made in the ’60s and early ’70s and trying to, you know, have the touchstone. But I didn’t want to romanticize it, I didn’t want this to be poetic in its approach to nostalgia. I didn’t want it to be overly deferential, so we really tried to follow the stakes.

When we had the opportunity to shoot outside in the middle of the day, when the light was the worst, we would take it because, if you’re making a little independent film in the 1970s, you don’t have much time and money to do the shot, you shoot whatever you have time to shoot. We tried to keep that approach to the film: we didn’t try to turn it into an Instagram version of the period.

We really wanted it to feel like a movie that was made, without much time or money, back in 1978, or ’68, or whatever year you want it. But more than a lot of the fun touchstones – the zooms, the camera pans, even the font that we used – more than anything else, it’s the fact that the film was shot on 16mm. You don’t see that that much anymore – most of the movies being made today are shot on 35mm film, or if it’s Chris Nolan, he’s shooting on 70mm and it’s all about clarity, and depth, and resolution.

We decided to be anti-resolution. We shot on 16mm, then we cropped it to 2:35:1, so then there was as little resolution on screen as possible. So much of the beauty is that. So much of the DNA of the movie, the tone of the movie, is through that particular aesthetic choice.

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arts in focus FEATURE

HOW TO PLAY

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

IN A LANGUAGE YOU DON’T KNOW “English seems to act akin to bumper guards in a game of bowling.

You might not need it, but it’s there just in case you do.” class, you can more or less follow an analogous path with two languages.

How do we tie these threads together?

Let’s consider a pre-school in East Vancouver in Canada, where the academic Susan Fraser decided to observe how young children from an immigrant background learned to play with each other without having a common language in 2007.

“By October of their second year in preschool,” she writes, she had observed “that the children had established a very powerful play theme that involved the girls pretending to be princesses, whereas the boys took on the role of knights. There was also play involving a dragon lurking somewhere in the classroom … Some of the first English words the children used were fight, castle, and knight.”

“How tempting it is to look at problems that span the world and think that — if I knew you and you knew me — we’d have a new repertoire of ideas to tackle.”

By Evan Fleischer

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game is a place where play can be shared. You can look at me and I can pass you the ball regardless of whatever the sport happens to be. But that paradigm shifts slightly when we play a game that’s based on all of us telling a story amongst ourselves, like the roleplaying game Dungeons And Dragons.

That paradigm shifts even further when we step outside of the English language to play the exact same game in a language that might not be as familiar as it otherwise could be — and it’s a paradigm that still poses

the same question: how can playing Dungeons And Dragons be a shared experience if you don’t speak the language?

You begin in a tavern. Or, rather, a taverna. I’m sorry — should I say a meyhane? You begin in a taberna.

Wait — what did I just say? I beg your pardon — a . You are in a

One way to start building those bridges would be to get a working sense of global gameplay: if you tour the D&D Subreddit, you can spot an Icelandic Dungeon Master writing about running a world where ‘common’ is Icelandic and ‘highcommon’ is

English as a way to get around any burdens of translation; you can see others in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere talk about their preference for ‘Spanglish.’ English seems to act akin to bumper guards in a game of bowling. You might not need it, but it’s there just in case you do.

That puts D&D across the world in line with how English morphs into a macaronic language in India, Nigeria, and elsewhere. A macaronic language is a term whose meaning is roughly akin to code-switching but features two languages instead of two dialects.

Instead of switching between a ‘lowerclass’ dialect and a ‘high class’ dialect when speaking to someone of a certain

The teachers noticed this and arranged complimentary lessons accordingly, teaching the children about different aspects of the Medieval period. When the dragon emerged as a character in the classroom, “the children were now able to use their shared understanding of dragons to generate a new repertoire of symbolic and representational behaviors.”

How easy it is to look at that quote and make the leap to adulthood, where dragons can and do emerge.

How tempting it is to look at problems that span the world and think that — if I knew you and you knew me — we’d have a new repertoire of ideas to tackle; dragons that span the world like the old Norse Jörmungandr. How we can look for a way — any way — we can get there together.

“If you tour the D&D Subreddit, you can spot an Icelandic Dungeon Master writing about running a world where ‘common’ is Icelandic and ‘highcommon’ is English.”

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arts in focus

“As a qualified paramedic with 20 years on the frontline under my belt, my inclination is to want to save lives.”

FEATURE

THE CYCLES OF PAIN Belinda Quinn talks to Benjamin Gilmour, an Australian paramedic and filmmaker about his experiences working with former members of the Taliban for his latest film

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ustralian director and paramedic Benjamin Gilmour moves beyond the patriotic war film in his Afghanistan-based drama Jirga – one that he affectionately refers to as a “traditional road movie” – and focuses on humanising our perceived enemies; enemies that Western militaries have poured resources into fighting for decades now.

“As a qualified paramedic with 20 years on the frontline under my belt, my inclination is to want to save lives, and this film is no different,” Gilmour explains. “Jirga is essentially an anti-war film that I view as a type of humanitarian project, one I approached in much the same way as a shift on the ambulance.”

In the slow-burning film, Mike Wheeler – a guiltstricken, stoic Australian former solider – travels to southern Afghanistan with wads of cash gladwrapped to his stomach. He plans a dangerous journey to make reparations to the family of an unarmed civilian he killed in a raid three years earlier.

Using a hand-held camera bought in a shopping mall in Pakistan, Gilmour learnt how to shoot the beautiful, rocky – and ultimately dangerous – Afghan landscapes surrounding Kandahar by watching YouTube videos.

“I was sleeping fully clothed with my passport in my pocket, knife in my hand under my pillow and waking up to gunshots or mortar blasts,” said Sam Smith, the Australian actor who played Wheeler, to Sydney Morning Herald.

The film was originally scheduled for shooting in Pakistan, but the Inter-services Intelligence – “the Pakistani secret service,” explains Gilmour – blocked the shoot for “political reasons” and banned them from the country.

“The reason we wanted to shoot in Pakistan initially was the relative safety of it,” says Gilmour. This, and the fact that the western border regions could imitate Afghanistan’s landscapes. A Pakistani businessman had promised around $100,000 in funding, but it was ultimately pulled. Rather than perhaps sensibly thebrag.com

heading home, the two travelled to Afghanistan to start filming.

In Jirga, Mike Wheeler enlists the help of a reluctant taxi driver, played by Sher Alam Miskeen Ustad, whose performance stands out across the board, in order to navigate the dangerous territory. “[Ustad is a] remarkable actor, remarkable individual,” explains Gilmour. “I remember [before] my first film, Son of a Lion, listening to him tell a story from his own life as a member of the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets who occupied the place in the 1980s.

“He recounted taking out a Russian tank with an RPG from a mountainside and he demonstrated this by lying on a charpoy rope bed and using an empty Pepsi bottle to demonstrate firing the rocket,” he elaborates. Seeing this, Gilmour jumped at the chance to cast him.

Wheeler’s journey is interrupted when members of the Taliban take him hostage, and on learning of his desire to seek forgiveness, decide to lead him to the family. Asked how Gilmour ensured his representation of the Taliban was a truthful depiction, he says that former Taliban members were on set when it came to creating these characters, as well as the other Afghani actors.

Gilmour also recounts meeting a member of the Taliban in 2004 while in Kohat, Pakistan. “[I] found the guy to be annoyingly pious, but very friendly, and reasonable, and extremely hospitable … this is true: the Taliban are human beings. Many are misguided, but simply put they are, for the most part, Afghans fighting off a perceived occupier.”

When it comes to what drew Gilmour to write this particular story, he explains, “War kills and maims.

It causes untold physical and mental injuries.

Australia has a veteran suicide rate numbering in the hundreds. Not to mention the devastation on civilians in the countries where we play out our wars, civilians who suffer in far greater number. Anyone with compassion and conviction who has seen what I’ve seen and heard what I’ve heard would do the same.”

Jirga has since been selected to screen at Toronto Film Festival and chosen as Australia’s submission for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award at the Oscars, among being screened at Sydney Film Festival.

“Jirga is essentially an antiwar film that I view as a type of humanitarian project.”

On the topic of how the film represents white guilt, he says, “I certainly don’t shrink from that aspect.”

But instead, he claims the film might offer a way out.

“Because many Indigenous communities, and not just Afghan ones, have an ancient history of restorative justice and forgiveness in the context of genuine remorse,” explains Gilmour.

On reaching the community, Wheeler is asked to leave his cash behind and to instead seek justice from a small council, and the son of the man he killed. “Mike is told that genuine forgiveness can’t be bought. For true redemption, a human needs to present themselves without an artificial way out,” says Gilmour.

Jirga is named after the traditional Pashto assembly that predates modern written laws, and has been used to settle disputes throughout Afghanistan’s (and within some Pashto communities in Pakistan’s) history.

Jirga has the potential to make room for less imperialistic storytelling, and to encourage active listening and understanding from Western countries; it asks audiences to look for complexity in peoples we have no direct contact with; that are distanced from us.

“Jirga has a clear message to everyone: the Taliban, the Westerners, and the Afghans,” he says. “Even in the horror of warfare, you can’t escape moral accountability.”

“Many Indigenous communities, and not just Afghan ones, have an ancient history of restorative justice and forgiveness in the context of genuine remorse.”

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FEATURE

From Suspiria to Die Dritte Generation and Back Again:

THREE WITCHES, THREE GENERATIONS, AND THREE DIRECTORS were arrested in the early 1970s, and The Third Generation referred to what came after the controversial prison deaths of key RAF members in 1977.

Revisiting Die Dritte Generation, it becomes readily apparent – from its shared obsession with the RAF down to its six acts and the power plays and internal factionalisation active within the microcosmic cluster of its core characters – just how strong an influence Fassbinder’s film has on the recent horror film.

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By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

“A comedy about parlour games in six parts, full of suspense, excitement and logic, cruelty and madness, just like the fairy tales we tell children to help them prepare for death through the changes of life”

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wap “comedy” and “parlour games” with “horror movie” and “dance” and the introductory statement that launches Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s extraordinary 1979 film Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation) could apply perfectly to Luca Guadagnino’s recent reimagining of Dario Argento’s 1977 Eurohorror classic, Suspiria.

Of the many dizzying anecdotes that swirl around the Munich production of that original film include casual references to Argento going drinking with Fassbinder himself, Udo Kier (who appeared in both Die Dritte Generation and Suspiria), and none other than David Bowie, who arguably produced

his best work in the second half of the decade in the same country with his iconic “Berlin Trilogy”, Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979).

Amongst the chess, the darts and the games of Monopoly, in Die Dritte Generation another game plays out as a group of middle-class Berliners band together to form a barely functional – yet highly performative – terrorist cell, dabbling in bank robberies, attacks on public monuments and, finally, the abduction of a wealthy businessman whose success in IT is explicitly linked to the climate of fear sparked by the domestic terrorism that riddled the country at the time. What they don’t realise, however, is that there’s money to be made when people are frightened: less the cutting-edge radical shit-stirrers

“There’s money to be made when people are frightened.”

they consider themselves to be, they are in fact good old-fashioned capitalist pawns, upholding and maintaining a system that needs terror to turn a profit.

As rendered so explicit in Guadagnino’s Suspiria, this period in Germany was marked by the actions of the RAF – the Red Army Faction – a term interchangeable with the Baader-Meinhof Group, in reference to the militant group’s central figures Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff.

Guadagnino’s film is set during the so-called “German Autumn” of 1977 when the RAF executed the double whammy of kidnapping and murdering wealthy businessman Hanns Martin Schleyer and hijacking a Lufthansa flight, the latter resulting in the death of all but one of the hijackers and the controversial deaths of jailed RAF members in their cells, officially stated as suicides.

Guadagnino’s film is riddled by television news footage and iconic magazine covers of famous German news magazine Der Spiegel, underscoring the thematic and narrative centrality to the film’s 1977 context of the RAF (particularly in regard to the false suggestion by the central dance studio/coven that the mysteriously disappeared Patricia – played by Chloë Grace Moretz – has left the Markos Tanzgruppe to join the rioting youth who support the RAF).

If the connection of the RAF to Fassbinder’s film wasn’t clear through the film itself, the title makes it explicit: the so-called First Generation was linked to the early period that Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof (two of the group’s four founders), the Second Generation took over after the bulk of their predecessors

38 ::38 BRAG :: BRAG :: 744 :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 05:12:18

einhof, Baader and Fassbinder had all crossed paths previously during the 1960s when their shared spirit of postwar radicalism saw them in similar social circles, the former two taking their passion for change in a strikingly different direction. With its techheavy mise-en-scene and cacophony of media noise, at the heart of Die Dritte Generation lies a powerful critique of just how heavily the so-called revolution is mediated; in a powerful foreshadowing of the 24/7 news cycle that we today take for granted, in the late 1970s Fassbinder presents an unceasing onslaught of media sounds and images, constantly in competition with even the dialogue of his own characters. When the mediated, performed surface slips away, Fassbinder reveals that underneath lies nothing more than literal pant-wetters and actual clowns, pliable servants of the very system they pretentiously claim to be challenging.

While Guadagnino’s engagement with horror is less consciously ironic than Fassbinder’s with the political thriller, this aggressive association between power and performance is also central to his vision of Suspiria. Fassbinder’s literal game-playing is replaced here with power-dynamic defining dance and movement, as generations of witches old and new fight for supremacy and the ideological direction their supernatural force should be focused in.

Both films frame this around what in their own way is an unabashed abjection; while the body horror of Guadagnino’s films has tended to polarise audiences on its success (I’m afraid for myself at least I personally consider it the weakest part of the film), Fassbinder takes a typically more darkly comic approach, each of his six acts launched by an on-screen quote from graffiti found in local public toilets at the time the film was made.

Guadagnino’s film uses the RAF as a neat parallel to the coven’s own politics as intergenerational warfare between an thebrag.com

arts in focus

Is history doomed to repeat, no matter the ideology of those who think they are bringing change?”

old guard who resist change and a new generation who demand it, resulting in a seemingly inevitable bloodbath.

presence, an ambience that for those aware of its history is granted a notable political dimension.

What might get lost in the shuffle between the overt similarities between Die Dritte Generation and Guadagnino’s Suspiria, however, is just how much Argento’s film was fascinated with similar themes, despite not making them as explicit as its 2018 reimagining.

At the heart of all three films, in a variety of ways, lie questions of class: Fassbinder’s bourgeoise-turned terrorists are marked as much by their economic privilege as the covens in both Argento’s and Guadagnino’s films.

In the latter, much is made early in the film of Susie’s (Dakota Johnson) financial desperation; her being accepted into the Markos Tanzgruppe is clearly a relief for simple matters of actual financial survival as much as her ambitions to develop her dance skills.

Designed by Karl von Fishcer in the 19th Century to honour Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, during the reign of the Third Reich its scale and classical design drew the Nazis like a moth to a flame. They held many rallies there, and scenes from Leni Reifenstahl’s Hitler Youth propaganda film The March to the Führer (1940) includes footage of Königsplatz.

In the 1977 Suspiria, one of my favourite blink-and-you’ll miss it moments shows Suzy (Jessica Harper) driving past a row of famous McDonald’s ‘golden arches’ as she leaves the airport that rainy night to get to the Tanzakademie where the film’s action will largely take place. Later, the conversations she has with Udo Kier’s Dr Mandel and Rudolf Schündler’s Professor Milius are filmed on-location outside Munich’s BMW Headquarters, temples to multinationalism if ever there is one.

As Milius explains to the young woman, the coven is driven by the desire for financial gain; their greed and corruption is explicitly economic in its intent.

It’s too easy to dismiss the world of Argento’s Suspiria as somehow wholly fantastic and abstracted, but there is strong, deliberate evidence – albeit far more subtle than in Guadagnino’s version – that even here, the reality of the world within which the film is set still bleeds in.

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n Argento’s film, this is perhaps nowhere more powerful than in the famous scene where the blind piano player Daniel (Flavio Bucco) is gruesomely killed by his bewitched, suddenly ferocious guide dog. As he walks through Munich’s famous Königsplatz, cinematographer Luciano Tovoli’s swooping airborn camera and Goblin’s ominous soundtrack create an overwhelming sense of supernatural thebrag.com

Long before Guadagnino’s project was announced, many critics had drawn significant parallels with Argento’s selection of this particular location for one of his film’s most vicious scenes; for example, James Gracey has suggested the director sought to “align…the evil and oppression of the three mothers with that of the Nazis”, while Julian Horrocks considers it “a comment on fascism”, finding direct symbolic parallels between Daniel/Italy, the dog/Mussolini, and the eagle that overlooks the public square representative of German fascism itself.

In different means, through the tale of powerful witches, both Guadagnino and Argento link terror and power to economics and class in ways that each in their own ways share Fassbinder’s view that corruption and capitalism go hand in hand. Both versions of Suspiria are about those in power wishing to maintain a corrupt, greedy status quo and the radical, destabilising force of generational change. But Fassbinder’s final conclusion about the success of the latter deviates substantially from the two horror films: living through and making films while the RAF and Baader and Meinhoff were front page news, Fassbinder – who had, along with many fellow filmmakers in the New German Cinema movement, aggressively tackled the contemporary political climate in the country previously – in Die Dritte Generation is ultimately far more sceptical, exposing the terrorists as puppets of a corporate machine they have no idea are in control, and that they are boosting an industry that runs on the precise sense of terror they have created.

and Argento, it brings much-needed generational change between the horrors of the past and hopes for a more optimistic future, driven by the young. But for Fassbinder – notably the only German of the three – radical action simply continues to grease the wheels of the same grotesque cycle of capitalist corruption. The young cannot be agents of change if they allow the old guard to continue to profit.

Yet perhaps ultimately, however discrete or overt their individual politics may be, what unites all three films – Argento and Guadagnino’s visions of Suspiria and Fassbinder’s Die Dritte Generation – is the centrality of their women characters. With all the hype over Tilda Swinton’s nowpublicly confirmed dual performances in Guadagnino’s film as both Madam Blanc and the central male character, Dr. Jozef Klemperer, it’s worth noting that Fassbinder in both Die Dritte Generation as well as many, many other films was rarely afraid of stepping away from gender binaries, nor was Argento: his femme fatale in Tenebre (1982), for instance, was played by famous Italian transgender model and actor Eva Robbins.

It’s perhaps also worth noting that with all the current excitement around Dakota Johnson, Swinton and Jessica Harper (the latter returning to the 2018 Suspiria after starring in the 1977 film), Die Dritte Generation too is marked by the presence of three of Fassbinder’s own iconic long-term women collaborators, his own ‘three mothers’ of sorts; Hanna Schygulla and Margit Carstensen in front

“The young cannot be agents of change if they allow the old guard to continue to profit.” of the camera, and Juliane Lorenz on editing duties.

While much ink has been spilt over Fassbinder’s gender politics, there’s little denying that he gave us some of the most vital, strong, complex and memorable women characters European cinema ever offered, from Maria Braun to Petra Von Kant. Women were an essential part of his cinematic universe, both behind the scenes and in the films themselves.

The ultimate ideological vision of Die Dritte Generation may diverge significantly from both Argento and Guadagnino’s films, but as such it provides a useful point of reference to re-interrogate the thematics of the most recent version especially, which wears its love for Fassbinder’s film on its sleeve as shamelessly as it does Argento’s.

Without spoiling the latter, revisiting Die Dritte Generation helps articulate questions that sits quietly just off camera, in Guadagnino’s brief post-credit scene: What next? Is there really a new way forward, or is corruption built into the system itself? Is history doomed to repeat, no matter the ideology of those who think they are bringing change?

Where Die Dritte Generation and both versions of Suspiria diverge the most, then, is their fundamental belief in the utility of radical action; for Guadagnino BRAG BRAG :: 744 :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 05:12:18 :: 39:: 39

FEATURE

FIGHTING THE FASCISTS

Belinda Quinn chats with director Julius Avery and Danish actor Pilou Asbæk about the genre-blending horror-cum-war-cum-sci-fi flick Overlord

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here’s a growing stable of films that weave fiction into the darker pockets of our histories, and World War II seems to be an overwhelming favourite among filmmakers. J.J. Abrams’s latest Bad Robot production Overlord manages to squeeze two prosperous genres into one: the contemporary war film and the Nazi zombie horror genre – although, it’s been noted by the film’s publicists that there are no zombies in Overlord. Instead, the film is populated by “super-soldiers” created by Nazi scientists, and are nothing like the undead you’d find in Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow, for example.

When Australian director Julius Avery first read Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith’s script, he remembers thinking, “This is completely bonkers; it’s like Indiana Jones on acid.” Abrams reached out to Avery after watching his heist thriller Son Of A Gun, and having been a long-time fan of Abrams, Avery was admittedly both excited and nervous.

“I love what he stands for and his company.

I mean, with Bad Robot you expect the unexpected,” explains Avery.

– a practice not uncommon for war film actors. “We were shooting [at] the same place as Mission Impossible and Jovan got an invite to watch Tom Cruise at work,” explains Avery. “He was like, ‘Julius, I just went and met Tom and he did the most amazing stunt. I want to do all the underwater stuff myself.’”

Jovan, like most of the cast, received combat training from U.S. Marine Sargent Freddie Joe Farnsworth. “There were moments where I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s really drowning for real. Quick, get him out!’ But they’re professionals, they do it all the time. And they made it really safe. So credit to him, you can see his face, see the struggle – and it’s a really great way…” he gathers the thought, “it’s a birthing into war.”

“This is completely bonkers; it’s like Indiana Jones on acid.”

Actor Pilou Asbæk, who plays the villainous Dr. Wafner, chimes in. “That’s a great way of saying it. I went down to the Mary Poppins set – it was very different.” Avery lets out a big, wheezy laugh. Asbæk, a Danish actor best known for his role as Theon Greyjoy’s uncle in Game Of Thrones, is cheery and clearly loves to squeeze

in a joke whenever he can.

“He likes to subvert the genres. I’ve always been a big fan of his work because every time I go to one of his movies I’m surprised.”

Indeed, the first third of Overlord’s narrative keeps you on your toes. In the initial sequence, a C47 aircraft is shot down while flying over France during the Normandy Landings of World War II. We tumble through the air with protagonist Boyce until he lands in a river. It’s an immaculately recreated sequence, something paratroopers would have experienced during the war’s infamous D-Day, the biggest seaborn invasion in history to this day.

While underwater, Boyce struggles to unbuckle himself from a parachute. Jovan Adepo, the actor who played Boyce, was adamant on performing his own stunts

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Unlike the American saviour complex and revenge fantasy found in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, or the tackier, wonderful, brash gore of C-grade Nazi zombie horrors, what sets Overlord apart from the array of films that rewrite history is the way it has instilled nuance into its heroes. Boyce proves a dangerously timid and ethically naïve hero, and Nazi Commander Wafner an unnervingly charismatic villain.

“I rang [Abrams] up and was like, ‘Hey man, the premise is really cool – it was crazy horror, sci-fi, action – but I really want to spent time to invest in these characters and I really want to get behind them before they jump into hell,” says Avery of his wish to develop the roles in the film.

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arts in focus

“Because if you don’t care about them then there is no jeopardy, and it’s all for naught. You can have as many explosions as you want, but if you don’t care…” he throws his arms up into a shrug.

“There were moments where I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s really drowning for real.’”

In an interview with Flickering Myth, Asbæk said, “I’ve always teased my colleagues when they’ve done Russians and Germans, and I was like, I’m never ever going to do a German.” When queried on his reasoning for this, he says, “Did I say that?

Maybe I was drunk doing the interview.”

He elaborates: “There are some people I don’t want to portray on films. I think there are some historical characters, especially in our lifetime, that I would never ever do now, because it would be too, too…” He finds the word he’s searching for: “too evil.

It doesn’t feel right, it’s not right.”

Asked the biggest challenge of playing Wafner, he says, “I got to work with Julius and work through the clichés of an evil Nazi super-soldier. I liked a character where you can’t really define him. We know he’s evil, the history books tell us this man is evil – but how can we make an evil man charming?”

He says that giving the unhinged Commander more screentime and making sure that he felt “three-dimensional” is what allowed the audience to see through the layers of his identity – and this in turn aided the depths of Overlord’s heroes and heroines.

“I think in the next couple of years, we are going to create characters that are going to be even more…” he stops and brings his index fingers to his temples and taps them.

“More nuanced?” I ask.

“Yes, more nuanced. I think even if you’re making fantasy or fictional films, you want reality. You want something that resonates with us as human beings.”

What: Overlord hits Australian cinemas on Thursday December 6 thebrag.com

BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 41

FEATURE

“I don’t really need dick-sucking mansplained to me”:

“I think [some sex workers are] still very caught up in

AND THE FIGHT TO BE REAL

those preconceived ideas of what is sexy.”

By Belinda Quinn

vid nerd, gamer, and independent sex worker Lucie Bee has taken the day off to mourn. A chaotic graffiti mural hangs behind her – a relic from an old photo shoot – and her dog, a rescue lab-cross-staffy named after Twin Peak’s Agent Dale Cooper, frequently crawls into her lap while we speak over Skype.

hair and an undercut, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle undies, and well-worn sneakers.

Stan Lee, the legendary comic book writer, editor and publisher, has just passed away. “My partner sent me a message saying, ‘I’m going to be home at ten, there’s been some bad news on the internet today. And I want you to know that I love you and it’s going to be alright,’” Bee explains.

Bee’s connection to geek communities means she’s come into contact with men who self identify as “incels” – involuntary celibates – and people who have felt excluded from sexual spaces.

Over eight years ago, Bee discovered that she could bring her die-hard obsession with all things geeky and nerdy into the sex industry, and make a living off of, essentially, being herself.

Not, mind you, that she’s achieved all that without a lot of hard work.

In the past year, Bee has travelled to New Zealand to talk about gaming and sexual consent at the NZ Games Festival; gone on triple j’s The Hook Up to talk about the diversity of clients seeking out her services; and appeared on ABC’s You Can’t Ask That alongside the likes of Australian sex workers Jules Kim, Christian Vega, Tilly Lawless, and Ryan James.

The breadth and depth of services offered could span to healing from sexual trauma – which escort James is known for – to playing video games followed by penetrative sex. “When people look for an escort or they think of a porn star, they think of a specific stereotype,” Bee explains. “And when you come into the industry, you usually have those preconceived notions yourself.”

For Bee, these notions consisted of hair extensions, sexy lingerie, and heels. But it wasn’t long before she realised she could make do with purple 42 :: BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18

“I have some very well-intentioned friends in this industry that often want to give me advice. I don’t think they understand how I’ve got to where I am being who I am,” she explains. “I think they’re still very caught up in those preconceived ideas of what is sexy.”

“Some people don’t come out of that awkward teenage phase as easily as others, and I didn’t,” she says. “I had a really rough start in my personal life. I honestly thought I was going to be alone.

And that was well before I got into the industry. So I feel for that. I feel for that intense loneliness.”

Bee wants to stay open to people who are struggling to have sexual relationships in geek communities.

“I don’t want to see people fucking miserable or radicalised by people who don’t have their best interest at heart,” she says.

The term ‘involuntary celibate’ was originally coined in the nineties from the good intentions of a bisexual Canadian woman. After struggling to find the confidence to go on dates herself, she created an online forum intended as a support group. Little did she know, the term would later become associated with violent young men feeling denied their ‘right’ to sex.

“The thing with these communities is that [some members are] not there to support the men who are currently feeling this way; they’re basically there to stew in their self-pity. They breed off of that shit. And there are people in those communities who are not struggling to meet anyone: they’re psychopaths and they’re just there to poke the bear,” she says.

ee’s role in the industry isn’t reduced to sex or just being sexual. “It’s about getting them to experience being relaxed in the company of a woman that shares their interests, because a lot of them come to me and they have some silly ideas.

But I’m not going to brow beat them: I’m going to say, ‘That’s a bit [off], and here’s why’. I’ll be frank with them.”

Bee puts a lot of time into simply talking and building up a rapport with clients. “I get nervous when I meet someone new, but I think for a lot of people, putting themselves out there and being really vulnerable can be a little nerve wracking,” she says.

Bee treats all her clients with the same care: “whether it’s the macho-est of

macho men, or it’s someone who’s quite timid and shy.”

And part of that sexual learning curve means she refuses to negate her own pleasure during these experiences. “I’m very clear with people that I see about what I do and don’t like. If something doesn’t work for me, I’ll tell them,” she says.

When it comes to consent, Bee explains, “[I think] that some people do need lessons and they do need to understand reading signs and stuff like that.”

Bee descends from a long lineage of resilient women. Raised by her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, at one point all of them sharing a townhouse together, her family have grown to be accepting and understanding of her career.

“Everything I’ve ever written, my mum proofreads it. I run ideas by her about

“Everything I’ve ever written, my mum proofreads it.” thebrag.com

arts in focus

“I sent my grandmother a copy of the Penthouse magazine I was on the cover of with little bee stickers all over my genitals.” photo shoots and marketing. I sent her and my grandmother a copy of the penthouse magazine I was on the cover of with little bee stickers all over my genitals,” she says.

Lucie Bee photo by Evelyn Hunt

Any job has its peaks and pitfalls. It seems a peak of sex work for Bee is the way it’s allowed her to define her boundaries around sex – and to know her worth.

“Sometimes people learn to assert themselves more through this industry through the good and bad experiences that they have there. But to be fair, I’d say it’s nothing that I didn’t have to learn in my personal life as a sexual person before this industry,” she says.

“But I think being in this industry means that I am infinitely less likely to put up with a lot of different stuff, especially in my personal life. It’s like, if I’m not getting paid, why the fuck would I be dealing with this?”

thebrag.com

ee and her partner are currently in an open relationship, partially because they’re both queer and have different tastes in sexual partners. “I think people think that because I’m in the industry that I’m quite [about] one night stands, and I’m all up in the Tinder.

Fuck, Tinder is terrible. It is stressful.”

While being called a slut, whore, hoe, – “basically synonyms for my job,” – online don’t really bother her, she has a fi le containing the more serious threats that could actually impinge on her safety. “There are times where you just think, ‘Ugh, I want to just take the power back, because you think I’m stupid because of what I do’,” she says.

Some of these messages include unsolicited advice, and suggestions that Bee get a boob job if she wants to succeed in sex work. “It’s like, to be fair, I don’t really need dick-sucking mansplained to me,” says Bee. “And I can confirm that the size of my breasts has literally zero to do with my ability to fondle people’s genitals.”

After having had a tumultuous year, Bee has made a conscious effort to share all the nuanced facets of her life, from her struggles living with ADHD to coming out as genderqueer and coming to terms with experiencing sexual assault on the job. “I think it’s really important that people see sex workers in the community as people,” she says of being open to her audience.

She’s returned to treating her attention deficit disorder with Dexedrine (more

commonly known as dexies). “Prior to that I didn’t get anything done,” says Bee. After being prescribed an inept dosage, she changed her “mental health squad,” learning that one size doesn’t fit all.

Bee’s often met with assumptions that her job negates self-respect, but for her, that couldn’t be further from the truth. “It’s just given me way better an idea of what I deserve and what I expect, and I have people who see me professionally who very much respect my boundaries and do as their told. And if I don’t have that in my personal life, then I don’t want that.”

When Bee was starting out in the industry, she’d often test the waters of whether to be assertive about her needs. “And now I have the reputation of being a real mouthy cow – and it’s wonderful.”

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FEATURE

THE HISTORY BUFF Becki Green chats with Lindsey Pelas, the Louisiana born-and-raised supermodel and podcaster

“Most people don’t understand that ‘Instagram Modelling’ sounds dismissive.” things that can do harm – there’s a difference).

The people that tweet, comment and message rude and disgusting words are abusers. If the intention is to hurt you, [then] that is an abuser and they shouldn’t be given such a casual and incorrect term like hater.

You’ve spoken out on how people often deem big boobs as being provocative, and how small boobs are often seen as “artsy” in photo shoots. When did you first notice this, and where do you think this idea originated from?

Lindsey Pelas: I noticed it in college when I was a bartender. I used to wear these crop tops, the same as my other co-workers, and I got a lot of heat where they didn’t. There was always this idea that someone with an A-cup was cute and harmless, and I was some modernday version of Hester Prynne.

L

indsey Pelas first noticed that people looked at her differently while bartending in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Then in the midst of finishing her history degree at the State University, she realised that while her colleagues at the bar were generally let be, she’d cop frequent unsolicited attention. And what it all came down to, really, was the size of her breasts.

After meeting Dan Bilzerian at the Playboy Mansion in 2014, the ‘King of Instagram’ filmed a slow-motion video of her jogging, and the clip reached over 10 million views on YouTube. She now has no less than eight million followers on Instagram and curates her own podcast called ‘Eyes Up Here’, wherein she works to end stereotypes made against models, from debunking myths of plastic surgery to revealing experiences of harassment and sexual assault in the industry.

Fast forward to modelling and being in Hollywood, there is definitely a category busty women are put into vs nonbusty women. The world has a weird habit of deciding mental and social characteristics for women by [judging] their physical bodies.

But that’s not all: over the years Pelas has revealed herself to be a true polymath. In addition to her modelling and podcasting work, she’s also developed a reputation as a deft actress, and a savvy and environmentally conscious investor: she’s one of the key forces behind Sugar Taco, a soon to be launched sustainable restaurant created and backed entirely by women.

We talked to Pelas about how the term ‘Instagram model’ is often unfairly used to dismiss a person’s career, what it means to be a ‘hater’, and why we oversexualise some women’s bodies and not others.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity

The BRAG: I read that you have a BA majoring in History. What was the most valuable thing your degree taught you, and how has it impacted on your approach to your career?

Lindsey Pelas: My education taught me to have a sense of scepticism. I don’t rely on surface-level thoughts like I may have done before college. My education also helped me develop a stronger sense of empathy and a passion for others. I studied, in-depth, subjects like poverty, race in politics, genocide.

My ultimate goal in life is to use my influence in a positive way to help people understand one another.

Can you tell us something about Instagram modelling that most people in the general public are unaware of?

Lindsey Pelas: Most people don’t

understand that ‘Instagram Modelling’ sounds dismissive. The models I know, including myself, have booked legitimate modelling work for legitimate brands. I’m a member of SAG; I’ve worked with brands like YEEZY and Revolve. “Instagram Modelling” has historically been used to place women too curvy, too petite, too plus-sized and too non-traditionally model-looking into a dismissive category that separates them from models they consider legitimate.

What are the best and worst things about using Instagram as a selfmarketing tool?

Lindsey Pelas: The best thing is the ease! It’s very easy to upload an ad, and to create marketing materials. The worst thing about Instagram as a self-

“There’s a whole lot of work that goes into something that looks so easy.”

44 :: BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18

marketing tool is the upkeep. Keeping up a public life can be exhausting.

Who are some of your favourite Instagram models out there right now, and what is it about them that you love?

Lindsey Pelas: My favourite models who are on Instagram are friends of mine: Arianny Celeste, Emily Sears, and Ana Cheri to name a few. They are all genuinely good people.

In your interview on nudity and empowerment with Khloe Terae, you said it’s important to distinguish between online commenters who are ‘abusers’ and ‘haters’. How do you distinguish between the two?

Lindsey Pelas: It’s pretty easy. You will never hear from a true hater. They will never comment, tweet you, follow you or talk shit. People don’t spend time worrying about things they truly hate (unless we’re talking politics or

What made you decide to go with a wet theme for the calendar, and what was your favourite shot?

Lindsey Pelas: I thought the best way to top my Nearly Naked calendar was by being wet! I had so much fun getting creative with it! My favourite shot actually ended up being a really simple one floating on a raft in a pool. We never imagined the shot would end up so dreamy and I look like I’m floating in heaven!

What’s your day-to-day routine look like?

Lindsey Pelas: It’s all over the place!

Shoots, meetings, glamming, editing pictures, sending emails, negotiating brand deals, organising podcast guests and themes, doing research for them, tweeting non-stop, working out, learning lines, taking content photos, auditions, and filming… There’s a whole lot of work that goes into something that looks so easy.

What was it like going on The Eric Andre Show?

Lindsey Pelas: Absolutely insane. It’s even weirder than it looks. I still need therapy…

thebrag.com

arts in focus

FEATURE

JAILBREAKING THE GENDER BINARY

Meet the coder on a quest to jailbreak the gender binary by Jess Cockerill

“We’re used to saying all kinds of words like, ‘delivery-man’, and using ‘man’ and ‘men’ as the word for all of humanity.”

Derwent was originally motivated to create the plugin by their own experiences of being gendered online. Many people are still unfamiliar with nonbinary language and the plugin allows people who might experience gender dysphoria to bypass those experiences.

“Any incoming message for me gets changed to not be gendered, and that’s actually really awesome,” they said.

O

ur world is full of binary systems: humans use ‘male’ and ‘female’; computers use ones and zeroes. But though we might try sort things into opposites, this usually oversimplifies things. Derwent McElhinney is a Melbourne-based software developer who identifies as a “Doritopowered code machine on a quest to destroy the gender binary”, and their latest project uses a Google Chrome plugin to challenge our assumptions about gendered language on the internet.

Their creation, titled Jailbreak the Binary swaps all the language in a computer browser to remove gender from the equation. Users can become familiar with nonbinary pronouns and get some insight in the extent to which gender affects our language on a daily basis.

“Any text that appears in the browser goes through this plugin before it is displayed to you, even if it’s subtitles on a movie you’re watching on Netflix,” Derwent explained. “It doesn’t work for images or videos, but anything that’s text-based, it will convert.”

Derwent said because gender has been baked into our language for a really long time, it can be an awkward shift for people to start using non binary language, but once you get the hang of it, it starts making sense. ‘He’ and ‘she’ become ‘they’; ‘mother’ and ‘father’ become ‘parent’; ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ become ‘sibling’.

“We’re used to saying all kinds of words like, ‘delivery-man’, and using ‘man’ and ‘men’ as the word for all of humanity, and using all these gendered words for what is really a non-gendered usage,” they said. “You’re jailbreaking your brain, the way you think about the world, in terms of a binary, because this binary system has been set up and it takes a lot of mental energy to actually break out of it for the first time.”

The plugin builds on Danielle Sucher’s open-source plugin Jailbreak the Patriachy, which swapped gendered words to draw attention to gender inequality. The software uses Javascript, a coding language that’s supported by all web browsers, to modify content on the page as it loads.

Derwent repurposed Sucher’s word list from Jailbreak the Patriarchy, though they admit there’s not always a neat nonbinary fit in the same way that male and female words can be swapped.

“Some words didn’t really make any sense at all without gender, for example ‘manly’ and ‘womanly’, ‘paternal/maternal’... there isn’t really a non-gendered equivalent because you’re actually referring to something specifically as being defined by gender,” they said. “It’s definitely not perfect; language is an ongoing process.”

Given that computers are essentially built on a binary – let alone the online algorithms that sort us into categories constantly – I wondered if Derwent found the internet to be a particularly gendered space. They said although there’s a lot of push to fit into one box IRL, more often we go without gender online.

“You can have a completely text-based conversation with someone, on forums or messengers, and if they assume your gender, that’s on them, but it’s more common to not assume people’s genders,” they said. “We’ve almost evolved past the need for it.”

These online interactions have normalised nonbinary language even among people who may identify with a particular gender IRL. Derwent said the internet had also allowed nonbinary people to connect with each other, and share their ideas more widely.

Next up, Derwent plans to create a plugin which adds a nonbinary option to web forms: the kind you’d complete while booking tickets and appointments, filling out surveys, or shopping online. Derwent’s been doing this themself for years, even hacking their Facebook account to use nonbinary pronouns before the option became available to users.

“This binary system has been set up and it takes a lot of mental energy to actually break out of it for the first time.”

“You could go into the HTML and change the form, so that it submits that you have no gender… a value of your gender that is basically 0. And I do that with any form I can,” they said. “It doesn’t always work, but most of the time when I book airline tickets, I’ll get Mx. Derwent McElhinney printed on it.”

Derwent encourages others to explore their identity and experiences through software.

“It really showed me how easy it is to make a plugin, it’s so simple,” they said. “There’s plenty of tutorials out there... if you think of a cool idea for a plugin to mess with your browser in any way, it’s very easy to do.”

Much of this is due to the open source nature of the internet, to which Derwent says we owe a lot.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of giants,” they said. “The internet could’ve gone a completely different route, of being all closedsource and proprietary, but the people who were there from the beginning, founding all the web technology, made it open source, and we have a great deal to thank them for.”

thebrag.com

BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 45

THROWBACK

An Introduction To Our

Throwback Section I’ve been the editor of the BRAG for about 15 months now, which is a bonkers sentence to write, mostly because it feels like it’s been about two weeks. But that’s the march towards the grave for ya: that shit don’t slow down for anybody, no matter how much of your brief life you spend hollering about it.

2018 has been a transitional year for the BRAG. We moved from a fortnightly model to a monthly one. We dug into new forms of journalism, from long-form reporting and interviews to opinion pieces from some of our favourite writers in the country. We expanded our team, working closely with the extraordinarily talented Belinda Quinn and Allison Gallagher, two of the most dedicated and insightful journalists in the country. We welcomed newer voices like Doug Wallen, he of Rolling Stone Australia, and we did bold new things with old ones. And we made a concerted move away from the old street press style of stocking up on brief artist interviews, and towards a style of writing that was politically engaged, reactive, and as cutting-edge as we could make it.

I’m aware that all of this sounds like that awful back-patting that editors can become addicted to. But that’s not really what this is about. What this is about is celebrating the work of young writers in this country. That’s something that the Australian liberal government has literally never done, and it’s something that we even as readers and consumers can forget to do all the time. We live in an America-centric culture, and sometimes, to our detriment and the detriment of our creative up-and-comers, we don’t always celebrate the journos and creators we have toiling away in our own backyards.

To that end, as part of our 2018 throwback content, we are re-publishing three of our favourite stories from this year. Included is our cover feature with Angie McMahon, surely one of the most talented and interesting artists of the last decade – one that is bound to go on to do even bigger and brighter things. We’re also running Belinda Quinn’s excellent interview with Idles, a band that have emerged through the fire and into the light.

And, finally, to wrap things up, why not take another opportunity to check out Quinn’s article on Tinder and intimacy, a piece that has only become more relevant since it was first published in our Sex Issue earlier this year.

That’s all from me. As ever, thank you for picking us up. We love you for it.

Thanks, Joseph Earp

46 :: BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18

thebrag.com

THROWBACK

“I want to be the best songwriter and performer that I can be.

But it’s so easy to say those things, and when it’s real,

you just go, ‘Fuck.’”

Angie McMahon And The Things Songs Can Do

By Joseph Earp

A couple of years ago, Angie McMahon tried to kick music. She was nearing the end of a literature degree, and had taken the opportunity to study abroad, in England, in the hopes that it would focus her learning. Taking English literature had been her second choice – just after graduating high school, she unsuccessfully auditioned for a music college. “I can’t sing jazz, and my technique is terrible,” McMahon laughs now. “I played them a sad breakup song I had written instead, and they were like, ‘This is not going to get you into the course.’”

thebrag.com

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THROWBACK

“It’s weird to have ambition and then have things put in front of you.”

48 :: BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18

thebrag.com

THROWBACK

“Making music is hard, and scary, and will take a long time,

but you never have to worry that you’re doing the wrong thing.

You can just do it.”

B

ut the set-back was only minor: studying literature appealed to her too. She had long enjoyed reading, ever since she was little – her father, who works in law, loves books, and she grew up surrounded by them.

“I always loved writing,” she says. “It was always songwriting I was most drawn to – but I did the degree because I wanted to get better at writing, and have more knowledge of books.”

But the degree had been hard. Or, maybe not the degree itself. It was more juggling music – the thing she so loved – with her studies. Working out which one sustained her: that was the puzzle. And self-doubt only made it harder. “While doing the uni degree, I went through periods where I was like, ‘I’m not good enough, I’m not brave enough.’”

So, away from home, studying overseas, she decided to see if it was viable to drop music altogether; to test how much it would hurt to abandon that part of her life completely. “I did almost no music while I was there,” she says. “I dropped it for three or four months. I had a guitar with me, but I didn’t pick it up. And in a way, that was actually really good. When you’re overseas, that’s when you have your self-realisations.”

She laughs. “I came back from that feeling more confident about myself just generally. I was like, ‘Get over yourself, you’ve had a big breath, now you can try harder.’”

It can be a scary thing to come to terms with, the idea that there are these parts of yourself that you desperately need to indulge. But it can be joyous too. One day you just wake up and there it is: the understanding that the course of your life is set.

“Realising I wanted to make music made it so much easier after I graduated, because I knew that had to give music a good shot,” McMahon says. “It was hard, but I was so ready.

“And it’s a nice feeling, in a way. Making music is hard, and scary, and will take a long time, but you never have to worry that you’re doing the wrong thing.” She shrugs, contentedly. “You can just do it.”

L

ast October, McMahon released ‘Slow Mover’, an extraordinarily elegant and intelligent song about indecision and the aching desire to be kinder. The song is a stunning work – a compact piece of art, so sharp it could draw blood – but that never guaranteed its success. After all, there are a lot of perfect pieces of art that go under the radar, or draw only modest crowds; a lot of songs that have to wait decades to be properly appraised.

Not ‘Slow Mover’. In one of those beautiful, rare cultural moments that see great art recognised in its own time, ‘Slow Mover’ caught almost immediately. But as much as McMahon was deeply

honoured by the suddenness of the success, she felt dangerously unprepared for it too. “I struggled,” she says. “I was crying a lot and I was really anxious; really overwhelmed. I went to a therapist for the first time. There was so much to process. I was not coping at all; there was too much to think about; too much to schedule; too many things to put in my brain.”

McMahon pauses; takes a sip of her coffee. She’s sitting towards the back end of Bondi’s Gertrude And Alice, stretching out across the table. It’s a Friday, the day outside is muggy and oppressive, but in here it’s as cool and as still as a church, and the books – teetering in piles; packed tightly into shelves – only enhance the space’s sense of reverence. There’s something about being surrounded by all that literature that changes the lilt of one’s voice, so McMahon talks gently, only slightly louder than the soft folk being piped over the shop’s speakers.

“All these plans started happening,” McMahon continues. “You have to plan releasing the album, and plan the next three years, and plan your international career. I want to be the best songwriter and performer that I can be. But it’s so easy to say those things, and when it’s real, you just go, ‘Fuck.’ It’s weird to have ambition and then have things put in front of you.

“It would be ridiculous to complain about it, but it’s just overwhelming. The reception was just lovely.

And that was overwhelming. And the industry is such a big one – made up of so many moving parts – you suddenly feel like you need an opinion on everything. It’s like, you need to learn how to belong in all these new spaces. You need to learn how to be again.”

M

cMahon records a lot of voice memos these days, and on planes, as she tours the country promoting ‘Slow Mover’, and her precise, subtly furious follow-up single ‘Missing Me’, she listens back to them. “I have 2,000 voice memos on my phone. None of them are labelled.”

They’re songs – or rather, they’re the mutant, halfformed things that come before songs; automatic writing exercises, rambly and long. “There is one that is like ten minutes. When I heard it, I was like, ‘What is this?’ It’s just me in a songwriting mood: I clicked record on the phone, and then it’s a stream of consciousness thing. There’s just all this shit. At three minutes in, I’m listening, and I’m like, ‘That’s not a chord. And what words did you just sing?’ But then seven minutes in, there’s something I never would have got to otherwise.”

It’s a songwriting lesson McMahon has found valuable to learn – that you have to silence your inner critic, and accept that sometimes it takes six

minutes and 59 seconds worth of nothing to create something, even though you have no idea how good that something is going to be.

“You have to drop the judge,” she says. “You have to get rid of that voice for a length of time – a day, an hour. And then you have to put on all these different hats throughout the creative process.

There’s the writing hat; the editing hat. You have to treat the song in different ways.”

McMahon needs the creative process. She knows that; accepts it. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t also that worry in the back of her head that there might be some vanity to what she does. After all, Bob Dylan might be Bob Dylan, but he’s not a cure for cancer; Leonard Cohen was a singer, not a heart surgeon. And there are times when McMahon finds herself concerned that what she’s doing is so much indulgence.

“I had this existential crisis this other week where I was like, ‘My job is so selfish, because it’s only for me.’ There’s enough music; no-one needs to hear more songs about sad shit. I’m not serving anything. And I think it can feel that way for a lot of people, creating things.

“I was talking to my dad about it, and I was like, ‘Do you think it’s worth all this stress?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, because people want art. They need art.

People want things to connect with, and new things to connect with. And as the world changes, art needs to change. We have to keep writing things and developing things.’”

Noise disturbs the quiet of the café: at the table next to McMahon, a woman has surprised her friend with a birthday cupcake, into which a lone sparkler has been stabbed. She’s singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her friend, and soon, McMahon starts singing along too. The music rises to fill the space.

And suddenly, it’s like this neat little illustration of exactly what music can do has manifested itself out of nowhere – music in its most primal, unsophisticated form. There’s this song – one so simple a child could sing it – and it is doing something to another human being; making this woman smile over the top of her cake and its sparkler, which is burning down to a blackened wire nub.

“It’s not necessarily about writing something that is going to change politics or the structure of the world,” McMahon says when the song is done, and the two women start sharing the cake. “You’re writing something that will touch people. It’s a good thing to remind yourself.” She smiles. “I’ve had to remember that. People want art. They really want it.

And it’s an important part of our lives.”

This article was first published in The Brag #736, April 3 2018.

“There’s enough music;

no-one needs to hear more songs about sad shit.” thebrag.com

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THROWBACK 50 :: BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18

thebrag.com

THROWBACK

What We Talk About When We Talk About Tinder: Or, Adventures in The Information-Gathering Age

By Belinda Quinn

Dating by Ian Dooley thebrag.com

BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 51

THROWBACK

“Tinder only continues to grow.

It currently claims to instigate ‘one million dates per week’, ‘1.6 billion swipes per day’ and is used in over 190 countries.”

“Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism.”

– bell hooks, All About Love.

T

he Match Group, an international conglomerate that owns Tinder, OkCupid, and PlentyOfFish is a sheer force of nature.

So it’s helpful, given the company’s evergrowing commercial interest in algorithm development and data mining, to contemplate how their sites participate in – as opposed to simply reflect – the ebbs and flows of intimacy, connection, and romantic and sexual interaction. And how an increasing, overbearing presence of capitalistic ideology within our love and sex lives might impact on our relationships.

The overwhelming and ever-growing reach of corporate tech giants Google, Amazon, and Facebook has led former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris to note that “a handful of people working at a handful of tech companies steer the thoughts of billions of people every day.” And Tinder only continues to grow. It currently claims to instigate “one million dates per week”, “1.6 billion swipes per day”, and is used in over 190 countries.

In what’s often deemed ‘the sexual marketplace’, we’re currently seeing a growing desire for instant gratification. “Fixating on wants and needs, which consumerism encourages us to do, promotes a psychological state of endless craving,” writes activist and visionary bell hooks in her book, All About Love: New Visions. “Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy.”

Similar to Facebook’s predecessor FaceMash – an interactive website built by Zuckerberg where users rated the attractiveness of women on his campus – Tinder co-founder Sean Rad said in Time Magazine in 2014, “We always saw Tinder, the interface, as a game.”

Tinder uses an ELO-desirability score. Some profiles are ranked higher than others, all in a bid to connect users its algorithms (and therefore, the algorithm’s designers) believe are in the same league.

According to Tinder data analyst Chris Dumler, “Every swipe is in a way casting a vote.”

According to New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, “sexual value continues to accrue to abled over disabled, cis over trans, thin over fat, tall over short, white over non-white, rich over poor.” If existing widespread oppressive beliefs about the sexual worth of minorities are instilled into Tinder through a voting system, surely there should be interventions put in place to ensure these algorithms don’t discriminate against its users.

I

n late 2017, French journalist Judith Duportail went to extreme lengths to gain access to her Tinder data. Enlisting a privacy expert and a human rights lawyer, she eventually received 800 pages back from the company, and was shocked to learn that Tinder knows everything from the race

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Morning Wood by Charles Deluvio

Tinder is yet to include non-binary genders on sign up, and automatically assumes that women are attracted to men, and vice versa. In Doing It: Women Tell The Truth About Great Sex, Melbourne writer Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen includes a quote from one of her interviewees. “When you are seen, when you are included, you have more agency – you have more power.”

thebrag.com

THROWBACK

“Tinder ranks some profiles higher than others,

all in a bid to connect users its algorithms believe are in the same league.” of the person you’re most likely to match with to the average amount of time someone spends on your picture before they swipe.

Luke Stark, a digital technology sociologist at Dartmouth University, writes in Duportail’s article, “Apps such as Tinder are taking advantage of a simple emotional phenomenon; we can’t feel data. This is why seeing everything printed strikes you. We are physical creatures. We need materiality.”

In a bid to become more transparent, this year Tinder responded to changing EU privacy laws by allowing anyone access to their data with the click of a button. Unlike Duportail’s experience, reading my own 33-pages of data was underwhelming. It might be a mark of my generation, but I don’t think much of Tinder or other companies selling my images or my (often stunted) flirtations via the app. It feels too distant; too obscure for me to fully realise the societal cost of my information being sold to third party advertisers.

These transactions feel invisible, almost inexistent.

The potential reward of “finding” romantic intimacy is more tempting, overshadowing the risk of contributing information – and therefore power – to various companies that may impact our future.

And even though Tinder claims it is becoming more transparent, their matching tools are integral to their intellectual properly – meaning they have no responsibility to disclose exactly how their algorithms are designed or the logic that they’re built on.

In Duportail’s article for The Guardian, privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye writes, “We are leaning towards an even more intangible world where data collected about you will decide even larger facets of your life. Eventually, your whole existence will be affected.” And while this might seem like a conspiracy theory or the foundations for an episode of Black Mirror, social control systems built off the back of data collection aren’t as far off as they seem.

In China, a ‘social credit’ system that uses the collation of data on its citizens is being planned for integration by the government in 2020. In 'Dockless Bikes, Data-Capitalism', PhD student and sessional academic Nicolas Ozolins examines how dockless bikes have been used to survey the movements of citizens by major corporationss, writing that the data gained for this system will be “used to assign individuals a number that represents their ‘trustworthiness’”. People with low scores will have restrictions placed on them, including on their freedom to travel.” And he says with Australia’s recent Identity-matching Services Bill 2018, we could potentially be heading in a similar direction.

T

his year, London academic Laura Thompson published I Can Be Your Tinder Nightmare, a revealing – albeit somewhat terrifying – body of research that unpacked the intention behind men’s explicit misogynistic harassment within online dating.

Analysing 526 messaging exchanges collected and posted by curated Instagram accounts Bye Felipe and Tinder Nightmares, she found that these men’s abusive reactions to rejection or being ignored were often an attempt to discipline women who’ve been granted access to power over the last century.

Thompson writes that these men, knowingly or not, are attempting to “reposition women and femininity as sexually subordinate to masculinity and men.”

While this form of oppressive behaviour is mostly an extension of power structures that enable violence against minorities, she writes that these apps and websites “provide the social tools for [misogynistic behaviour] to flourish.

“Looking at Bye Felipe, it’s just the sheer amount and the repetition of it – it’s quite arresting I think.

Especially some of the quite violent ones and rape threat ones,” explains Thompson over Skype to the BRAG. These messages all seem to all use a similar rhetoric, indicating these reactions are affirmed and seen as rational reactions from within their online social bubbles.

“That’s why I wrote that paper – to pull apart the themes of different discourses that they’re pulling on, because they haven’t just popped out of nowhere. It hasn’t just suddenly come along because Tinder is now a thing. They’re pulling on some quite old sexist tropes and ideas: you know, the figure of the slut, for example,” explains Thompson.

This disciplinary behaviour can be found in a more sinister movement: incels (self-described “involuntary celibates”). This year in Toronto, Alek Minassian called for an “Incel Rebellion” and massacred ten people while injuring another 16. And he isn’t the first to respond to his perceived sexual rejections in a murderous rage.

At the core, incels are entitled and self-victimising.

They direct vile and dehumanising hatred at the same women they desire. They believe sex is about dominance, rather than a mutual, creative giving and receiving of pleasure. In the New York Times’ Amanda Taub asserted that the incel mentality speaks to “broader resentments” among men in the West in response to shifting gender politics post Me Too movement, sexual revolutions, and self-esteem movements and online dating, which have given women more choice.

Thompson writes in I Can Be Your Tinder Nightmare that the men in her study “depict the dating app as a transactional space for sex where women are to be used as a ‘‘free’’ source of sex.” And Nguyen asserts that online dating has exasperated a sense of disposability, explaining that, “some online daters fail to understand that casual sex is not mutually exclusive with respect.”

In The Guardian article A Broken Idea Of Sex Is Flourishing; Blame Capitalism, Rebecca Solnit writes, “Despite half a century of feminist reform and revolution, sex is still often understood through the models capitalism provides. Sex is a transaction … it is not imagined as something two people do that might be affectionate and playful and collaborative, but that one person gets.”

Asked what Laura Thompson thinks the consequences are for having a capitalist framework for viewing people as a marketed product to consume, she says, “You hear of all these bad behaviours – you know ghosting, bread crumbing – we have all these terms now for all these basically crappy things that people do to each other whilst dating.

“And I’m sure that these less than ideal ways of relating to other people have always existed and have always been to some extent in a dating landscape, but it does seem more common. There’s less incentive really to treat people decently if you’ve got lots of other different options and you can just get back on Tinder and keep looking,” she says.

“People seem to be really terrified of intimacy,” Thompson says of her interviews with women.

“Dating’s really difficult.” She laughs. “If you can just toss people off and you don’t have to get too emotionally involved with anyone, then you keep yourself a bit more protected I guess.”

While collective changes in Western folk’s relationship towards intimacy are hard to measure, Thompson believes social and economic changes over the last few decades could have had an effect; from small communities becoming fewer and far between, to people increasingly moving for work. “People are a lot more displaced. I think it’s pretty hard to argue against the fact that there is definitely more of a fracturing in wider society,” she says.

In Sarah Schuman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse, she attributes an increasing reliance communication via email and messaging as a contributor to a loss of intimacy in our lives. And Harold Kushner writes in When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, “I am afraid that [younger generations] will grow up looking for intimacy without risk.”

T

he call-out culture of Bye Felipe and Tinder Nightmares has Thompson conflicted. “On the one hand whilst shame does play an important role in getting people to reflect on behaviours and whether it’s socially acceptable or not, and whether they should toe the line and behave better, I do think that there’s just a lot of shame being thrown around online. Sometimes it becomes quite divisive and people get more entrenched in their different camps,” she says.

But the accounts are quite useful when it comes to drawing attention to just how pervasive online sexual harassment is. “Women can see, ‘Oh it’s not just me that has to put up with this bullshit’,” Thompson explains.

There are endless Instagram accounts dedicated to calling out bad dating manners. While Bye Felipe and Tinder Nightmares focus more on volatile reactions to rejection, 24-four-year-old Shelby Lorman’s awardsforgoodboys tackles more insidious drains on emotional labour in casual intimate relationships; she finds catharsis in satirical, snarky quips.

“If you live in regional and rural areas, having access to your minority group through

a specialist app can allow access to lovers and friends you’d never have met otherwise.”“ thebrag.com

BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 53

“Tinder knows everything

from the race of the person you’re most likely to match with to the average amount of time someone spends on your picture before they swipe.” “[Women are] just constantly trying to figure out how to deflect unwanted advances without provoking a man … [there’s] just an underlying sense of fear at ‘what might happen here’, which I found really, really depressing. There’s just this constant managing of men’s emotions, and I don’t even know if they’re aware of it, but these women – some more than others – really seem to take personal responsibility for them sometimes,” she says.

Lorman hoped that awardsforgoodboys would help let women know that they’re not alone; it asks all people in intimate relationships to hold each other to better standards. “It’s dually horrifying and extremely validating to see how many people have ‘been there’ about so much of my content,” she told Huffington Post.

“I don’t think Bye Felipe and [platforms] like it will change the behaviour of individual men, but I’m not sure that’s the point of it,” explains Thompson. “I think we just need to be having broader conversations around things like consent and I think people just need to learn better frustration tolerance.” She laughs. “I don’t know how you’re going to do that unless you get a whole bunch of these men in therapy.”

T

inder and apps like it can be equally empowering tools. There are apps dedicated for people with STIs (PositiveSingles), to lovers of beards (Bristlr).

If you live in regional and rural areas, having access to your minority group through a specialist app can allow access to lovers and friends you’d never have met otherwise – and it’s a beautiful thing that gaining access to your minority group is becoming easier. Plus, selfediting can be a boon for people with disabilities that affect confidence around verbal communication.

Coming from a conservative Vietnamese family and suffering from sexual pain disorder vaginismus in her former relationships, in Doing It, Nguyen went as far as to say that online platforms gave her the tools to become the “architect of [her] own pleasure.”

According to Thompson, the presence of more choice – while it might lead to increases in lessening of commitment – has allowed for further experimentation.

She says, “People can learn a lot about themselves and what different relationships … can look like by dating widely and more casually – and that’s not a bad thing.”

P

ublished in 2000, bell hook’s All About Love: New Visions reimagined what it meant to pursue love. The author and activist writes that when women persist in intellectual thought on seeking love, they’re often seen as desperate, needy and deep in overthought. “No one thinks she is rigorously engaged in a philosophical undertaking wherein she is endeavoring to understand the metaphysical meaning of love in everyday life,” asserts hooks. And 18 years since it was published, it seems that to sit and stew on love is often still perceived as undesirable.

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On the topic of emotional labour, Thompson says, “that is a huge theme. It is a big thing that’s come out of my interviews, this general sense of real weariness, which can sometimes almost turn into apathy and passiveness.

This article was first published in The Brag #740, September 2018.

Unporn by Annie Spratt

To the Huffington Post, she defines these ‘good boys’ as “the ones who wear a feminist badge on their backpack and put ‘ally’ in their Tinder profile but can’t quite understand why it’s a problem that they, as the only dude-identifying person in the room, continually speaks first in their Women’s Studies class.”

While capitalism is often linked with terms like ‘innovation’, the most innovative lessons I’ve been given in love, sex and relationships haven’t come from money-driven start-ups or apps. They’ve come from friendships that have pushed me to do better.

They’ve come from visionaries like bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and writers like Sarah Schulman, who re-envision a world where love is transformative: a committed action, rather than a feeling we simply submit to.

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BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 55

THROWBACK

“NONE OF US ABIDE BY

[THAT’S] FUCKING

Idles:

Little Coffins Of Anger Belinda Quinn talks to Joe Talbot of Idles about sitting with grief and the road to healing

“TALKING ABOUT SADNESS AND ANGER IS THE KEY TO A MORE FRUITFUL AND

PROGRESSIVE LIFE.” 56 :: BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18

“I

’ll mend, I’ll mend, I’ll mend,” reassures Idles’s Joe Talbot on the lumbering and tender track ‘June’, repeating the words until they stick. It’s a meditation; a promise.

Recent years haven’t been easy on the 33-year-old Brit. In the beginning of producing their second record, his daughter, Agatha, died during birth.

And as a result, Joy As An Act Of Resistance is a spiralling, aching, and heart-warmingly hopeful record.

“Our music, it’s all supposed to be diegetic to what I am living in, and what we are living in. So our ethos as a band is to be as honest as possible,” explains Talbot over a severely delayed phone line. It’s not the first time he’s been struck with loss. Following his stepfather’s death, the recovering alcoholic spent his late teens caring for his mother after a stroke left her co-dependent.

The responsibility weighed on him, and consequentially, their debut album Brutalism tackled the NHS and the anger he felt at a system that failed her, whose life might have been elongated if public health policies weren’t governed under conservatives. An increasingly cohesive and refined sound began to take shape in Brutalism; Idles’ songs became more propulsive, guttural and structurally distinct, yet still full of Talbot’s tongue-in-cheek, snarky witticisms that call out racist ideology and homophobia.

In the advent of Brexit, Trump’s election, and Australia’s growingly conservative government, it feels like there’s a growing pocket of artists around the world who are becoming increasingly open to baring their wounds to their audiences. “Beyond what’s happened with my life, and my daughter, and my mother or whatever, there’s a lot of trauma going on ideologically and emotionally all over the place.

“I’m not saying I’m special in any way … People don’t really know what’s going on at the moment. Brexit was a trauma. I don’t mean that in a melodramatic way, I’m not

thebrag.com

DEAD, AND ARCHAIC, AND MISOGYNISTIC, AND BORING.”

“HAVE LITTLE PRACTICES OF BEING NICE TO YOURSELF THROUGH HARD TIMES.

THROWBACK

THE RULES OF THE ROCK STAR,

IT’S A NICE LITTLE REMINDER THAT YOU’RE STILL IMPORTANT AND YOU’RE STILL IMPORTANT TO YOU.” audience are] going, ‘Thank you so much for sharing, here’s my shit.’ And we’re like, ‘Thank you for sharing, here’s some more shit’.” He laughs. “With the second album, now I’ve got heaps of more shit and I’m like, ‘I’ve got you family, that’s cool.’”

Each show starts with Talbot giving his bandmates a friendly smooch, and he’s spoken out before about wishing for wall of deaths to be replaced with walls of hugs. “[Our music is about] the dissolution of the ego.

None of us abide by the rules of the rock star, [that’s] fucking dead, and archaic, and misogynistic, and boring,” he says. “[We want to do] something way more important than just us wanking on stage.”

The conversation often takes a few swift turns without needing much to push Talbot along; he moves onto online manners. “If I go on YouTube comments, it’s like being in a male toilet cubicle. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in one.

There’s just loads of angry men scrawling on the walls writing disgusting shit; it’s just fucking vile because they have no emotional outlet. It’s just a little coffin of anger.

They just get in and start scrawling weird shit on the walls and you’re like, ‘What’s wrong with these men?’” he says.

In ‘Samaritans’, he sings, “I’m real boy-boy and I cry / I love myself and I want to try.” He’s committed to challenging what it means to be masculine and tough, and part of that means communicating honestly. “Through counselling and everything that me and my partner have been through, I’ve realised that being open and talking about grief, and talking about pain, and talking about sadness and anger is the key to a more fruitful and progressive life.”

on my alcohol. Don’t worry about it.’ And that’s not being vulnerable, that’s the opposite.” The way his partner got Talbot to open up was to let him in on her own struggles.

Asked what advice he’d give to young men who are experiencing grief and loss, he says to find a safe space to sit with those feelings, and to feel them in full before approaching anyone. “Accepting sadness, accepting anger is a key,” he explains.

Asked how his community has helped him along his road to healing after their daughter’s death, he attributes the heft of the work to his partner. “I thought I was open and honest before, and I wasn’t really,” he says. “The way I was dealing with grief was quite caustic really. It’s a silent killer. I was becoming more and more reliant on alcohol and drugs. I would start to talk about my habits, and talk about my rage towards friends. I’d start clamming up.

The musicality of Idles points to a self-destructive, internalised aggression that can so often be found in white-boy punk rock that’s infused with rage – but Joy is an absolute critique of holding onto that aggression. In the soulful, yet gritty ‘Cry To Me’, he sings: “Here I am boy, cry for me … loneliness is just a waste of time … I will hold you and tell you everything is alright.”

And stay off the piss and drugs. “That isn’t ever gonna help, ever. It’s a sure way to not be you anymore … I’m still grieving for my daughter, but it’s a lot more manageable now … Just be proactive and just learnt to love yourself a bit more. Keep yourself well-groomed and eat well and have little practices of being nice to yourself through hard times. It’s a nice little reminder that you’re still important.”

“I was like, ‘I don’t enjoy admitting when I’m a fucking bastard at times’ … [When] it came to criticism, I was like, ‘No, no, I’m alright. I’ll get there you know. I’ll cut back

“[Our music is] not just about us unravelling, it’s also about the audience feeling comfortable in unravelling [too],” explains Talbot. “We’re getting a mirrored thing where [the

feeling sorry for myself with it, but it was traumatic,” he explains.

This article was first published in The Brag #740, September 2018.

“[OUR MUSIC IS] NOT JUST ABOUT US UNRAVELLING, IT’S ALSO ABOUT THE AUDIENCE

FEELING COMFORTABLE IN UNRAVELLING [TOO].” thebrag.com

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FEATURE

30 HERE ARE THE

your waking hours; a mighty, big-hearted work of art from an artist destined for the greatest things.

Highlight: ‘I Split My Ribs Open’

27.

intelligence than most of the indie rock records released this year. They are minimovies; layered tales of love lost and of resistance gained.

How much richer we are for having Mitski in our lives.

30.

Parquet Courts | Wide Awake!

Kings of New York cool Parquet Courts return with their most cohesive, downright loveable record yet. Tossing aside the slight sniffiness that hampered some of their earlier material, the four-piece strip things back to basics, producing a series of songs that scream pure joy.

28.

Highlight: ‘Wide Awake’

Left At London | Transgender Street Legend, Vol. 1 Running a mere four songs long, Transgender Street Legend, Vol. 1 is a remarkable record from a bold new voice, mixing sultry, multi-layered R’nB with heartfelt confessions of loss and recovery. It is the kind of thing ready to consume

“We might like to pretend that the prosaic Paul Kelly comes closest to capturing our national voice, but if anybody sums us up, it’s Bibby.”

58 :: BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18

Highlight: ‘Honey’

26.

Little Ugly Girls | Little Ugly Girls From our review: “Few acts of recent years have exhibited such a commendable command of chaos; just as the chanted choruses, and dirty spears of feedback seem about to overwhelm, the band pull back from the precipice.”

An old English teacher of mine once said that a great poem is one that holds you to a memory and then nails you there. She could have just as easily been talking about the songs on Sarah Mary Chadwick’s extraordinary new record, Sugar Still Melts In The Rain, piano-led ballads that feel intimately part of you from the very first listen.

Highlight: ‘Flow Over Me’

19.

Highlight: ‘Baggage’

22.

Laura Jean | Devotion Trading in the intimate folk pop of her past, with Devotion Laura Jean goes big, exploding her talents onto the grandest scale of her career to date. Songs tackle love, loss, and learning in a way so fresh it’s as though no songwriter has ever trod this territory before. Exemplary.

Highlight: ‘Girls On The TV’

29.

Cardi B | Invasion Of Privacy

Sarah Mary Chadwick | Sugar Still Melts In The Rain

Robyn | Honey

Highlight: ‘Money Bag’

17.

23.

It’s Robyn. ‘Nuff said.

And so it came to pass that 2018 would be forever remembered as the year that Cardi B, one-time Love And Hip Hop reality star, came to dominate the cultural conversation. With Invasion Of Privacy, a searing statement of intent, the vicious rapper has proven that she isn’t some one-hit wonder, getting by merely on a wave of headlines and controversy: she’s the real fucking deal. Long may she reign.

capturing our national voice, but if anybody sums us up as the confused, red wine-loving people we are, it’s Bibby.

Highlight: ‘Work For Arseholes”

Highlight: ‘Nobody’

BEST ALBUMS OF 2018

By Joseph Earp

20.

25.

Once upon a time, ‘fun’ seemed like the least appropriate word imaginable to describe the music of Anna Calvi – the guitar maverick’s early works are sludgey, impossible things, reeking of sulfur. But Hunter is a different beast entirely, a genre and gender-blending masterwork that tackles the stuffiness of binaries in all of their forms.

Highlight: ‘Alpha’

24.

Mitski | Be The Cowboy Each of Be The Cowboy’s 14 tracks contain more nuance, emotional complexity, and

“For me, music happens just when it wants to,” Amber Fresh, the musician behind the Rabbit Island moniker told the BRAG earlier this year. “Making songs really just happens whenever what’s going on in life and the planets align to pull a song out of the ether.” That’s not humility talking either – Deep In The Big, the latest Rabbit Island record, is so beautiful and ephemeral as to feel untouched by human hand. It’s like a thing that fell from the sky, fully formed, just for you. And all that it asks is for you to listen.

Highlight: ‘Deep In The Big’

Cash Savage And The Last Drinks | Good Citizens Gaye Su Akyol | Istikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir Ever imagined what the soundtrack to The Man Who Fell To Earth might sound like if the film’s titular alien crash landed in Turkey and not the American desert?

The answer: Istikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir, a psychedelic/folk rock masterpiece from Turkish up-and-comer Gaye Su Akyol.

It’ll melt your head off.

Highlight: ‘Laziko’

Anna Calvi | Hunter

Rabbit Island | Deep In The Big

21.

For Cash Savage, one of Australia’s most important cultural voices, being a “good citizen” doesn’t mean keeping your head down and your trap shut – it’s about practicing resistance; about holding governments accountable; about shutting the fuckers down when they so desperately need to be shut down. To that end, Good Citizens is a fiery statement of rebellion, a record born out of adversity but not bowed by it, filled with wheezy violins, and urgent, desperate choruses. Long live Cash Savage.

Highlight: ‘Pack Animals’

18.

16.

Lucy Dacus | Historian Lucy Dacus’ Historian might well be the most beautiful record that opens with its narrator swallowing a wet lump of spit.

An earthy, unabashedly honest portrait of romance in all its warty forms, it’s also Dacus’ most sonically cohesive effort to date. Despite how ugly the thing gets, Dacus keeps it buoyed with her light, almost pop-influenced touch, crafting choruses as delicate as wire sculptures.

Highlight: ‘Night Shift’

15.

Death Grips | Year Of The Snitch On Year Of The Snitch, Death Grips have finally embraced the meme; their music has never been this big, this bold, or this rampantly tonguein-cheek. It’s a self-portrait from a band that have always flirted, despite their great, dark horror, with kitsch; full of strange, twisted lyrics that read like knock knock jokes, and guest appearances from artists as varied as noise god Lucas Abela to the director of Shrek (seriously). The kind of album that must be heard to be believed.

Highlight: ‘Black Paint’

Peter Bibby | Grand Champion Like a still life portrait of a goon sack, an overflowing ashtray, and a half eaten Chiko roll, Peter Bibby’s Grand Champion paints the ephemera of our everyday lives in bold, brilliant colours.

It’s an ugly thing, full of self-hatred and disgust, that somehow breaks out here and there in brief flashes of hope. We might like to pretend that the prosaic Paul Kelly comes closest to

Phantastic Ferniture | Phantastic Ferniture From our review: “Here’s a thing: we tend to overvalue singularity in music. Records don’t have to be thesis statements; sometimes, they can draw a wonky line instead of a straight thebrag.com

FEATURE

one. Case in point being Phantastic Ferniture’s aces debut record, a collection of songs that flirt with the raucous and the melancholy in equal measure.”

Highlight: ‘Ice Cream’

11.

Highlight: ‘Gap Year’

14.

Surfbort | Friendship Music

The Breeders | All Nerve

What a title. After all, All Nerve is so distinctly Breeders-esque that it feels spat out of a Deal sisters name generator. For decades now, the band have crafted impeccable, criminally underrated indie pop songs that shake like a crust punk after too many double blacks; with this, their first record in ten years, they double down on that antic energy, producing tightly-spun contemporary classic after another. Let’s just hope we’re not waiting another decade for the next one.

Highlight: ‘Wait In The Car’

13.

Throw some Ramones, some Jesus Lizard, a dash of Swami John Reis, two packets of Lucky Strikes, and half a pint of White Lightning into a blender and you’d get something like Surfbort’s fascinating debut record, Friendship Music. Something like, but not exactly, cause in truth Friendship Music is the freshest thing the American punk movement has spawned in at least a decade or two. It’s this fiery, putrid thing; a detuned, delirious work of outsider art. Surfbort forever.

Highlight: ‘Slushy’

10.

“Throw some Ramones, some Jesus Lizard, two packets of Lucky Strikes, and half a pint of White Lightning into a blender and you’d get something like Surfbort’s Friendship Music.” worth so much less than the sum of their parts.

More often than not, they’re messy, ego-driven affairs, about as cohesive as a soundtrack album: a cacophony of discordant voices and styles.

Not so with Boygenius, the debut EP from Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus. The three sonic auteurs prove committed and caring collaborators, eager to take the backseat for one another when necessary. As a result, stand-out tracks like ‘Me And My Dog’ aren’t just solo tracks beefed out with impressive backing vocals; they’re the result of three minds, impossibly entwined.

Highlight: ‘Freckles’

6.

Cyanide Thornton | Cyanide Thornton

Highlight: ‘Me And My Dog’

8.

Idles | Joy As An Act Of Resistance Noname | Room 25

Noname is an island unto herself, crafting wormy, jazzinspired ballads that feel like a mash-up of Vincent Van Gogh and Morse code. More melancholy than her debut mixtape Telefone, Room 25 is at once recognisably American, punched through with stories of adversity and triumph, and yet utterly universal: the kind of record that makes immediate sense to everyone, everywhere.

Highlight: ‘Blaxploitation’

12.

Rebel Yell | Hired Muscle Listening to Hired Muscle, the extraordinary new record from longtime synth magician Rebel Yell, is a little like being dragged across ten miles of concrete.

It’s industrial in the truest sense of the word; a grimy, stridently modern collection of songs that push the form without ever pushing the listener away.

Choruses loop like chanted curses; the instrumentation has a teeth-grinding immediacy to it; and the whole thing feels forever one moment away from total collapse. But there, presiding over the rubble of it all is Rebel Yell itself, controlling the chaos with the attention and nuance of a true master. You’ve never heard anything like it.

Highlight: ‘Toxic’

Rico Nasty | Nasty

Taking trap-influenced rap to its natural endpoint, Nasty feels like a cyanide-laced pint of Kool Aid crashing through a brick wall. A mere 21-years old, Rico Nasty has more grit and fire than rappers three times her age: her songs are as abrupt and unforgettable as a half brick to the head.

“Bitch I’m nasty,” she gloats on the album opener. You believe her. thebrag.com

Jaala | Joonya Spirit

From our review: “A bundle of corrugated iron, it owes more to the work of Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis than it does the indie rock touchstones that get trotted out ad nauseum these days. ‘Horn’ is wormy and imprecise; ‘Frogs Tears’ is all unsettled, overcaffeinated beauty.

‘Gwynne’ flirts with the kind of unhinged intensity that defines the best work of Spencer Krug. It’s a masterpiece.”

Highlight: ‘Frog Tears’

7.

9.

Evelyn Ida Morris | Evelyn Ida Morris Boygenius | Boygenius

Supergroups are frequently

From our review: “Best known as the musician behind the Pikelet

5.

moniker, Morris writes songs that are as hard to pin down as fog; pianobased heartbreakers that resist easy interpretation.

‘Freckles’, the record closer, is one of the most beautiful songs of the year so far, but it’s not worth pulling apart favourites from the record; Evelyn Ida Morris is a complete, fully-formed beast. There are only a few more impressive albums released this year.”

Remember when, shortly after the election of Donald Trump, Amanda Palmer promised us all that no matter how bad things might get, at least there’d be a new energised wave of punk to make us all feel better?

Yeah, what horseshit that turned out to be. Trump hasn’t helped punk, he’s hindered it, inspiring waves of insufferably dull punks dribbling nonsense manifestos better suited for viral Facebook posts.

At least that wave of neutered art school graduates spouting janky poetry about tearing down the wall has taught us the value of real punks – bands like Idles. Joy As An Act Of Resistance squints sideways at the political malaise of our time without ever getting bogged down in specifics, and, as its excellent title implies, it also boasts the distinction of being fun. This is a collection of sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking ditties that take aim at the broadest targets: fear, pain, and paranoia. Oh, and men with perms. Can’t forget about those bastards.

Highlight: ‘Danny Nedelko’

Cyanide Thornton takes the recognisable and turns it inside out, transforming moments of intimacy and power into great, six-minute behemoths. It’s a distinct, fiery thing, a personal statement writ in letters so big as to be accessible to all, and filled with lyrics so essential every single one feels customdesigned to be your next tattoo. It is, simply put, one of those records ready to change your life. Seek it out.

Highlight: ‘Violin Song’

4.

Mod Con | Modern Convenience

From our review: “It’s a musical tirade that has more cleareyed intensity in its opener, ‘Scorpio’, than most post-punk albums of late have over their entire running time. Lead singer Erica Dunn pushes her voice till it breaks, chord structures get built up only to crumble. The whole thing has the feel of a bad acid trip, or a day of lay-offs at a business in trouble.”

Highlight: ‘Kidney Auction Blues’

“Long live Cash Savage.”

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FEATURE

3.

2.

Courtney Barnett | Tell Me How You Really Feel

Dilly Dally | Heaven

From our review: “It’s a darker album than her debut, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit; an unsparing, dense thing. On ‘Nameless Faceless’ she addresses murder, trolls, and assault. On ‘I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch’, she howls back at the haters, her voice run through ten miles of barbed wire. The world is troubled, and Barnett knows it; the Sunday morning panic attack that ‘Avant Gardener’ pivoted on is a once a day rather than a once a week affair now, and the whole world seems to be going through it.

From our review: “Heaven, Dilly Dally’s return has been draped in themes of death and rebirth; of what happens after you get yourself on the right track. In the video for lead single, ‘I Feel Free’, lead singer Katie Monks digs up the bodies of her dead bandmates. Intercut is something resembling Heaven; a white room, filled to the brim with light, the band moving through it like oil blossoming in water.

When you’re growing up, you think that the most punk rock thing you can be is dangerous, and angry, and fucked up. Then, slowly, you learn the truth – that kindness, and strength, and resilience have a crackling energy all of their own. That the really brave thing to be in an ugly, difficult world is the opposite. ‘I Feel Free’ is the sound of a band that have that all figured out.

It’s the sound of a band renewed.”

But Barnett’s most unique skill has always been her precision, and while trawling through all that bad psychic territory, she picks out her mission statement: the world is shit, people can be cruel, but still, despite all the odds, goodness persists. Her friends are “sweet relief”; even when people do nothing, she thinks they’re doing fine; and though she gets sad, as on ‘City Looks Pretty’ she can pull it together.

Highlight: ‘Marijuana’

That, ultimately, is what is left in the wake of closer ‘Sunday Roast’; Barnett’s deep, warmly-felt connection with people, and all the things they are capable of. Time may well reveal it to be not just her masterpiece.

Highlight: ‘Sunday Roast’

1.

Tropical Fuck Storm | A Laughing Death In Meatspace From our review: “A burnt-out car of a record, the thing is a bundle of rusted sharp edges all loaded with tetanus. Fans of frontman Gareth Liddiard’s other band The Drones will recognise the busted-out poetry that made that group one of the most important in Australia. But this isn’t just Drones mk 2. It’s stranger – lumpier – than the work of that band, a freewheeling, unfettered record that incorporates elements of hip hop, post-punk, death metal, and more.

The apocalypse hangs heavy over the thing, but it’s more John Waters than it is Lars Von Trier. Liddiard can’t help himself; even when Rome is burning to the ground, he’s gotta fucking dance. Tracks like ‘Antimatter Animals’ are among the most mischievously entertaining he’s ever written. “Your politics ain’t nothing but a fond fuck you,” he hisses across that track; later, on the extraordinary ‘The Future Of History’ he warns against IBM and the cruel disdain of history.

‘Meatspace’ is what silicone valley bros dismissively call the real world, and A Laughing Death shares that same detached attitude towards people and the irrational things they do. Both ‘Rubber Bullies’ and ‘Chameleon Paint’ are about online gangs of roving tone warriors looking to bully fellow left-wingers. ‘A Laughing Death In Meatspace’ is about illness and mortality. Even the record’s gentle, surf-rock indebted instrumental track, is called ‘Shellfish Toxin’. It’s as much an anthropological study as it is an album; a huddle of sad humans dissected in the middle and arranged in tanks of formaldehyde like a Hirst.”

Highlight: ‘Antimatter Animals’

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thebrag.com

FEATURE

Joseph Earp Digital And Print Editor Of The Brag What are the best books you read this year?

I’ve been reading a lot of Derek Parfit this year.

I miss him. The moral philosopher died almost two years ago, and still his great, aching absence is being felt. After all, there’s perhaps no other contemporary thinker who made such a concerted effort to engage with complex moral issues in a way intended to reach the widest audience possible. Picking up the mantle of Iris Murdoch, he strove to make philosophy both relevant and exciting, something so much writing seems to deliberately avoid.

Reasons And Persons has been a permanent fixture of my bedside table this year.

Cartoon by Ruby Innes

In terms of newer works, I was deeply moved by Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room; electrified by Fiona Wright’s tender and important The World Was Whole; and spent a lot of time savouring Curtis Dawkins’ moving debut collection of stories, The Graybar Hotel. Oh, and Junji Ito’s Frankenstein set my brain on fire.

What was the best TV you watched this year?

Because of all of its flaws, and not despite them, the best television of the year was easily The Haunting Of Hill House. There were so many times I sat there, squirming uncomfortably, worried that the latest melodramatic twist was going to throw the whole thing into utter disarray.

But the left-turn into total sap never came. Instead, what we got was the best ten hours of television in years – an admirably trim and controlled story about longing, and grief, and the urge to do different. Long live Mike Flanagan.

thebrag.com

What was the best Netflix Original Movie to come out this year?

‘Best’ is maybe the wrong word, given the way it has consistently warped and altered in my memory, but certainly the Netflix original that’s taken up the most real estate in my head is Hold The Dark. Even now, three re-watches in, I haven’t totally made up my mind on Saulnier’s latest, a bleak deconstruction of the myth of human civility.

Sometimes I think I adore it. Other times, it seems too cold; too simple. I feel like I’m going to enjoy grappling with it for some time.

What were your three favourite horror films of the year?

Hereditary, for the way it took Roman Polanski’s arch staging and creeping dread and shot it through with something entirely new. Suspiria, for the things it had to say about grief and trauma. And Ghost Stories, for being so utterly, gloriously unpleasant.

What’s the best game you played this year?

I know the audience reaction swung away from it in the end, but Red Dead Redemption II captivated me more than any game has since perhaps Dark Souls III. Genuinely moving, elegiac, and deliberately paced, it’s one of those experiences that I deliberately savoured; eking out its pleasures slowly, so as not to use them all up too fast.

Prediction for 2019?

We will move ever closer to a preventable apocalypse engineered by fossil fuel chugging bastards who, if there were any justice in the world, would be currently lining up at the foot of a guillotine.

Manuela Lazic

Doug Wallen

Freelance Film Writer

Freelance Writer

What are your three favourite films of the year?

Support the Girls, First Reformed, Phantom Thread.

Who is your breakout star of the year?

Haley Lu Richardson of Support the Girls and Colombus.

What’s your favourite soundtrack of the year?

A Star Is Born.

What’s the best older film you watched for the first time this year?

Barton Fink.

What’s your prediction for the state of cinema in 2019?

Streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon are getting into ‘prestige’ movies and offering big directors the opportunity to make their projects with means and freedom (Annihilation, Buster Scruggs etc.) at the price of theatrical release. Nevertheless, the folks at Netflix in particular seem to be getting a little more flexible and have started showing films – for a very limited time, and often at a high price – on the big screen, as well as on their streaming platform. Perhaps 2019 will see those new giants of cinema relax further and combine their great means and reach with a greater respect for the theatrical experience.

What are your favourite three albums of the year and why?

This year was all about falling back in love with some of my favourite U.S. songwriters: Damien Jurado’s The Horizon Just Laughed (Secretly Canadian); The Rock*A*Teens’ Sixth House (Merge); and Superchunk’s What a Time to Be Alive (Merge).

What was the best book you read in 2018 and why?

It’s a strong tie between three short but gripping and immersive novels: Carys Davies’ West (Text); Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot (Verso); and Sarah Moss’ Ghost Wall (Granta).

Who was your breakthrough artist of 2018?

Sweater Curse.

What was the best gig you went to?

Tim & The Boys at Tanswells, Beechworth.

What was your favourite debut album of 2018?

MOD CON’s Modern Convenience (Poison City).

What emerging act do you think is going to breakout in 2019?

Tiny Ruins.

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Bianca Davino

Turnstile

Campaign Manager instrumentation.

In 2019 we must #MakeEMoGreatAgain.

What was your biggest regret of 2018?

Not watching enough TV! I feel like I’ve missed out on a whole year of Riverdale references.

Emma Iannello Campaign Manager What are your favourite three albums of the year and why?

Basement’s Beside Myself is a perfectly atmospheric rock album through and through. Lily Allen’s No Shame is, put simply, a piece de résistance.

And Trash Boat’s Crown Shyness builds upon the foundation that the band created with their last album. It’s one of the more unique records in the genre: it balances heaviness and melody perfectly. It’s insanely good.

What was the best TV you watched in 2018?

The Will And Grace revival.

Best gig you went to this year?

Trophy Eyes’ The American Dream Tour.

Who was the breakthrough artist of 2018?

E^ST. What was your biggest regret of 2018?

Not going to Yours and Owls.

What was your biggest triumph?

Getting a pug!

What’s a prediction you have for 2019?

Mason Ramsey will sell out a world tour. Yeehaw!

Sarah McManus

What are your favourite three albums of the year and why?

Turnstile’s Time & Space is the ultimate culmination of hardcore of the past, present and future. It’s ultra-melodic, groovy and plays with elements of youth-crew hardcore that I’ve never heard pulled off before. It has such a strong aesthetic and thematic vision that’s executed so illustriously and has incredible replay value. I’m calling it: this album will most definitely influence the next generation of hardcore.

Trophy Eyes’ The American Dream.

Everything about this album screams total triumph. Every lyric is crafted so perfectly and I honestly don’t think there’s been a time I’ve listened to this album where I haven’t totally bawled my eyes out.

Favourite break-up anthem of the year?

‘Talia’ by King Princess.

Best gig you went to this year?

Solid tie between

What was your biggest triumph Finally making my way to New York.

What was the most worrying pop punk trend of 2018?

I’ve noticed the “emorevival” sector of pop punk take an unfortunate turn for the worse.

Once overflowing with innovative acts like The Hotelier, The World Is A Beautiful Place, and Pity Sex, we’ve now been forced to consume the dribble of collegebro-core like Mom Jeans and Hot Muligan.

I will not stand for the re-hashing of secondrate Front Bottoms tracks over uninspired

Best gig you went to this year?

I can’t narrow it down to just one! Polaris at The Factory Theatre back in April, Taylor Swift’s Reputation Tour, Download Festival,

Geordie Gray Staff Writer

Managing Editor What’s the best gig you saw this year?

Arcade Fire at Øya Festival in Oslo.

What’s the best film you saw this year?

A Star Is Born.

What was your biggest regret of 2018?

Not staying in New York.

Favourite cover from 2018?

Superorganism’s mash-up cover of Post Malone and MGMT’s ‘Congratulations’.

What’s a prediction you have for 2019?

Elon Musk will drop a trap album.

Favourite band you interviewed in 2018?

Fall Out Boy.

Ariana Grande

What’s your biggest achievement of 2018?

Being asked to deliver a speech at a Women In Music event during ARIA Week.

What’s your biggest disappointment of 2018?

The death of Mac Miller.

He was meant for so much more.

Prediction for 2019?

Hanson will sell out their String Theory Australian tour and Architects will win a Grammy.

What are your three favourite albums of the year and why?

Be The Cowboy, by Mitski, non-stop feeling forever; Rue by Hellions, a bit of nepotism and a lot of love; and Golden Hour by Kasey Musgraves, a slice of yeehaw perfection.

What’s the best single of the year?

‘Shallow’ by Miss Stefani Joanna “Lady Gaga” Angelina Germanotta and Bradley Cooper.

Best gig you went to this year?

Taylor Swift.

A Star Is Born

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What’s a prediction you have for 2019?

The Internet apocalypse, Radiohead headlining Splendour In The Grass, Bhad Bhabie getting an Adidas collab.

Poppy Reid

Cher, Taylor Swift, and Brockhampton.

Best celebrity couple of the year?

How could you make me choose between Elon Musk and Grimes and Lil Xan and Noah Cyrus?

Who’s the breakthrough artist of the year?

There’s no way I can narrow that down to one, but Year Of The Knife, a straight-edge hardcore band from Delaware, are going to really be huge next year. Gouge Away are another hardcore band who truly cut through this year. Oh, and of course, Press Club.

Turnstile at The Factory Theatre, Trophy Eyes at The Enmore…

Mitski

Head Of Video What are you three favourite pop records of the year, and why?

Ariana Grande’s Sweetener was an allencompassing sensory feast that realised her perfect pop vision. Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour makes me feel like chucking on a pair of pink rhinestone cowboy boots and yee-hawing around town. Cher’s Dancing Queen. Cause duh.

Also, Vein’s Errorzone.

Errorzone is simply out of this world – it’s metallic hardcore, nu-metal ramblings and chaotic electronics, all proving heavy music is currently at an experimental high point.

What was your biggest triumph?

Starting a pop punk band and releasing music, working full-time in the music biz, interviewing my heroes and spending time with my incredible, inspirational and hilarious friends. And perfecting both parts to the 2018 smash hit ‘Shallow’ by Lady Gaga feat. Bradley Cooper.

What was the most worrying/social/cultural/ fashion trend of 2018?

People from the Eastern Suburbs that move to

the Inner West, get a shit haircut, and assume the role of a marginalised person all whilst sporting an ironic pair of TNs. What was your biggest regret of 2018?

Watching the new Brooklyn Nine-Nine season in one day and not pacing myself.

What was your biggest triumph?

Scoring a full-time writing gig when I still don’t know the difference between affect and effect.

What’s a prediction you have for 2019?

Taylor Swift and Kanye West will reveal that this whole thing was an elaborately planned media stunt. thebrag.com

thebrag.com

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Red Dead Redemption 2 Collector’s Box $159.00 / www.ebgames.com.au Are you knee-deep in Red Dead Redemption 2 but want to surround yourself in its wonder even more?

Well look no further than the Red Dead Redemption 2 Collector’s Box. This is one seriously amazing bunch of treats, all housed within a metallic tithing box with a lock and key – inspired by the lockbox used by the Van der Linde gang within the actual game. That’s just the start, however, with a doublesized puzzle, pin set, playing cards, six shooter bandana and more. We should point out this is a limited edition product, so if you’re keen on adding it to your gaming collection, act sooner rather than later in case stocks sell out. If they do, well then the physical game is still an amazing stocking-stuffer!

By Adam Guetti

As Christmas rapidly approaches, so too does the struggle of narrowing down the dreaded shopping list. But whether you’re looking out for a loved one, or just want to treat yourself to some holiday cheer, here are a handful of goodies we’d be more than happy for Santa to leave under our tree.

The Brag’s 2018 Christmas Gift Guide

Venom Nintendo Switch Power Pack & Stand

When in Rome

$69.99 / ebgames.com.au

Fans of old-school VHS-based board games are bound to get a kick out of When in Rome – the first voice augmented board game designed for Amazon Alexa that gives the classic concept a new-age twist. The basic premise is simple: grab some friends, choose your teams and then let Alexa guide you around up to 20 cities where you’ll face questions from real locales to earn points. Topics range from food and drink, to language, to the straight up bizarre. From London to Mumbai, we enjoyed plenty of laughs while learning a number of unexpected worldly facts. It’s worth stressing though that you must have an Alexa-powered device to play.

For all the wonders the Nintendo Switch provides, battery life is not one of them. Enter the Venom Power Pack and Stand. This beastly unit comes with a whopping 10,000 mAh rechargeable battery designed to double or even triple your game time (this will vary largely based on what you’re playing). Understandably, this addition means there will be a bit of extra weight added on to your system, so Venom has smartly placed a built in kickstand at the rear of its unit that thankfully adds more stability than the Switch’s own solution, making it perfect for multiplayer sessions on the go, or long flights. If you’re a hardcore Switch owner, add this one to the top of your list.

$49.99 / www.amazon.com.au

“IF YOU’RE A HARDCORE SWITCH OWNER, ADD THE VENOM TO THE TOP OF YOUR LIST.”

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thebrag.com

Fallout - Pip-Boy 2000 Mk VI Self-Assembly Construction Kit $248.00 / www.ebgames.com.au For the Fallout fan that has it all comes the Pip-Boy 2000 Mk VI SelfAssembly Construction Kit – a seriously hardcore replica of the series’ famous accessory that features working mechanisms and over 100 parts to try and assemble. This officially licenced kit has been designed to mimic the look and feel of the kits that Vault-Tec may have actually supplied to vault dwellers, so you can rest assured this is as close as you’re likely to ever get to the real thing. The best part is that it all comes with an easy-toread step-by-step instruction manual that should avoid any potential horror stories.

PlayStation Classic Console $149.99 / www.ebgames.com.au ‘90s gamers listen up, because Sony is following Nintendo’s lead with the PlayStation Classic, an adorably sized system designed to bring back those nostalgic feels. 45% smaller than the 1994 original, this miniaturised wonder comes complete with two wired controllers, a HDMI cable and a virtual memory card. More importantly, there’s 20 classic titles to enjoy, ranging from Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy VII, Tekken 3, R4 Ridge Racer Type 4, Syphon Filter and Metal Gear Solid.

Turtle Beach Recon 200 Headset

Pokémon Let’s Go! Pikachu/Eevee with Pokeball Plus

$99.00 / www.jbhifi.com.au

$119.00 / www.bigw.com.au

Finding a quality headset for your gaming console can often be a painful experience, especially if you have more than one. Turtle Beach wants to alleviate some of that stress with its new Recon 200 line, by allowing you to use the same headphones for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Even better is that switching between the two is as easy as flicking a switch. Having already put them through their paces, these are definitely some of the best valued headphones on the market, with significant bass, a capable microphone, incredibly comfortable form factor and a rechargeable battery that can last over 12 hours. Some friendly advice, though: just remember to turn them off when you’re done. We foolishly accidentally drained the batteries a handful of times before learning our lesson.

Few franchises can capture the hearts of older and younger alike, but such is the power of Pokémon. As a result, that makes Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! for Nintendo Switch the perfect present.

Based loosely on the 1998 Pokémon Yellow, Let’s Go! offers wannabe Pokémon masters the opportunity to return to the Kanto region and experience a classic journey with a few new twists. The biggest of these is deciding between the two versions – the choice of which dictates which pocket monster will be the first to join you. The Pokémon catching mechanic made famous in Pokémon Go has also been transplanted into this reimagining. For the full experience, though, make sure you nab yourself a Pokéball Plus device, and if you have yet to buy yourself a Switch, there’s even a Let’s Go!-branded console that’ll beg you for your money.

“FEW FRANCHISES CAN CAPTURE THE HEARTS OF OLDER AND YOUNGER ALIKE, BUT SUCH IS THE POWER OF POKÉMON.” thebrag.com

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DEC

New Releases

With the year almost over, there’s still plenty of games ready to make their way into your Christmas stockings.

Things get off to an absolute bang with the release of the PlayStation Classic console on Monday December 3.

This little wonder doesn’t just house one game, but 20, including the likes of Tekken 3, Syphon Filter, Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid. Also, it’s totally adorable.

A day later, on Tuesday December 4 is the explosive Just Cause 4,

NEWS

2018

which has you visiting a South American world before allowing you to create absolute chaos.

You’ll find it on PS4, XBO and PC. Also out on December 4 is the physical PS4 and XBO release of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifi ce. It was one of the best games of 2017, so if you missed out the first time, you have no excuses now.

Meanwhile jumping ahead to Thursday December 6, Switch fans can get their creative juices flowing when RollerCoaster Tycoon Adventures rides onto the system.

The theme park sim will feature the series’ classic gameplay with brand new twists.

Wrapping up December early on Friday December 7 we have three very different games vying for your attention.

Hello Neighbor: Hide & Seek (PS4, XBO, Switch), for example, is a prequel

to last year’s unexpected stealth-horror hit, which promises more frantic fun for fans. Then there’s Subnautica (PS4, XBO), an underwater adventure set on an alien ocean planet.

What you should be waiting for, however, is the biggest game of the month – Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. This absolutely massive sequel throws in everything you could want, including over 100 stages and every single fighter from the series’ past. You can find it on the Switch also from December 7.

Sony bids farewell to E3 In an incredibly surprising move, Sony will not attend E3 in 2019 – a first for the company in 24 years. That means not only will the powerhouse company not host its annual press conference, it won’t occupy its traditional booth space either.

“PlayStation fans mean the world to us and we always want to innovate, think differently and experiment with new ways to delight gamers.” Sony told Game Informer in a statement.

“As a result, we have decided not to participate in E3 in 2019. We are exploring new and familiar ways to engage our community in 2019 and can’t wait to share our plans with you.”

Naturally, this is a massive blow for E3, and it’s not yet clear how the organisation behind the event will attempt to fill the now-empty space.

Dead-set success In news that should probably surprise nobody, Red Dead Redemption 2 has made a whole boatload of money. More specifically, however, the open-world western managed to achieve the largest opening weekend for any entertainment product in history – selling through $725 million in copies over the span of three days.

It’s also the second highest grossing entertainment launch, with only Rockstar’s own Grand Theft Auto V retaining that top spot.

reviewroundup

By Adam Guetti

Diablo III: Eternal Collection

Hitman 2 (PS4, XBO, PC)

WWE 2K19 (PS4, XBO)

Ditching its predecessor’s episodic approach, Hitman 2 delivers exactly what you want: more strategic murders as everybody’s favourite bald assassin. The large levels provide plenty of options to achieve your goal, some of which might actually make you chuckle, but you’ll also need a lot of patience to make sure things go off without a 4 hitch.

While the core of WWE 2K19 hasn’t changed all that much, it’s certainly an improvement from last year’s misstep. MyCareer is thankfully much more engaging, 3.5 but the dated visuals could still use some loving.

(Switch)

Eternal Collection’s biggest achievement isn’t that its gameplay is still a whole lot of fun even after all these years, but that the Switch’s framerate never takes a hit no matter how you play it or how chaotic things get. You may have hacked and slashed your way through 4.5 this world before, but if you haven’t, it’s arguably the best way to play yet.

Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4, XBO)

Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! (Switch)

Whether you’d prefer to play a few hands of poker, spend hours fishing, or go on the hunt for bounties, you’ll always be entertained by Red Dead Redemption 2. In a year filled with exceptional releases, the open-world epic isn’t just aiming to be top dog, but snatch the throne for the entire generation. The 5 thing is, it might just have succeeded.

A smart blend between the classic Pokémon games that popularised the franchise and the insanely successful Pokémon GO, Let’s Go is a must-play Switch title that makes great quality of life improvements to the age-old formula. The loop of becoming the very best remains immensely satisfying, the visual upgrade is a treat, and the whole experience is undeniably adorable – no matter if you’re team Pikachu or Eevee. Be sure to grab the Pokéball Plus if you’re after the 4 complete package.

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Civilization VI

(Switch)

Civilization VI was already a brilliant game when it hit PC in 2016, and this excellent Switch port is equally so. It will take some time to wrap your head around things, but the touch and Joy-Con controls have been implemented surprisingly well. Performance takes a slight hit when docked, but it’s a small 4.5 price to be able to get this treat on the go.

thebrag.com

thebrag.com

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REVIEW

“Music often takes a back seat to wisecracks that prove therapeutic for reader and writer alike.”

Jeff Tweedy’s Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) is a warm, affecting portrait

By Doug Wallen

G

iven that Jeff Tweedy is the frontman of Wilco, a band that’s shape-shifted at will across the past quarter century, it’s only natural that his memoir doesn’t hold the format especially sacred. He may loosely follow the progress of his creative pursuits, but the prevailing theme is humour. In fact, music often takes a back seat to wisecracks that prove therapeutic for reader and writer alike.

Named for an catchphrase coined by his father, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) sees Tweedy dwell as much on his personal life and family history as on Wilco and Uncle Tupelo. He does seize the opportunity for some myth-busting and sharing of his side of various disputes, but his overall irreverence makes this read more like Parker Posey’s recent antimemoir You’re on a Airplane than like your typical music tome. But seeing as Wilco’s two latest albums were named Star Wars and Schmilco, Tweedy isn’t one to take himself too seriously.

A rare schoolmate who also adored punk was Jay Farrar, with whom Tweedy started playing in a teen

“Seeing as Wilco’s two latest albums were named Star Wars and Schmilco, Tweedy isn’t one to take himself too seriously.”

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Uncle Tupelo released four albums by the time the pair were in their mid-20s. The title of their 1990 debut, No Depression, was adopted as the name of both an alt-country movement and its flagship magazine, while their third album was produced

by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and their fourth earned release on a major album. But Farrar pulled the plug in 1994, freeing up space for Wilco and his own subsequent band, Son Volt. Tweedy still nurses some hurt feelings there, but admits that he didn’t do much better when dismissing certain Wilco members.

That kind of frankness keeps Tweedy sympathetic, even at his less fine moments. And the book has plenty of those, such as when he stole his mother-in-law’s cancer medication while addicted to painkillers. But his openness seems key to his personality, and he’s remarkably honest about his struggles with rehab and therapy. And his self-deprecating streak goes a long way toward endearing him to us.

As with any memoir that spans a significant amount of time, there’s a theme of survival here. Tweedy mourns the loss of his older brother to alcoholism, and of former Wilco multiinstrumentalist Jay Bennett to drug addiction.

He details his wife’s successful battles with cancer and reminds himself how lucky he is to have stopped drinking at age 23 and kicked opioids further down the track. Family is vital to Tweedy, and some of the book’s best parts hinge on his close bond to – and cutting banter

with – his wife, Sue Miller, who co-owned the iconic Chicago indie venue Lounge Ax, and his two sons, who’ve both become his collaborators.

There’s even a cute comic, illustrated by George Eckart, about the shared epiphany after which he and his wife knew that they were each “the one.”

Subtitled A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, etc., the book does devote considerable time to that band, who debuted near the end of 1994. After writing songs for years to play against Farrar’s songs in Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy was thrilled for Wilco to exploit more open parameters: “Now it seemed more exciting to contemplate how much one band could embrace.”

While Tweedy addresses Wilco’s very public departure from Reprise over 2001’s more challenging Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – and the contentious documentary capturing that turning point – he mostly glosses over their earlier masterpiece, 1996’s Being There. And other albums aren’t given as much time as, say, his recent work with Mavis Staples. But his unwillingness to devote equal time to each talking point is part of his idiosyncratic approach, whether he’s framing Wilco as an “art collective” or joking that the only way to win another Grammy would be to kill and eat the heart of rival Dave Grohl.

For all that tongue-in-cheek playfulness, the book allows Tweedy to revisit some crucial emotions and memories from his past, which very much informed his new solo album, WARM. In the best example of that push-pull between the funny and the tragic, he explains in the epilogue that the book’s title isn’t just a family in-joke, but an uncomfortable emblem of their shared history of anxiety.

While readers won’t get a complete portrait of Wilco from this book, what they will get is a heartwarming, heartbreaking story that only Tweedy could tell.

Tweedy photo by Whitten Sabbatini

Growing up in Belleville, Illinois, a depressed railroad town half an hour from St Louis and more than four hours from his eventual base of Chicago, Tweedy was a rabid consumer of music from a young age. He inherited his much older brother’s record collection and fell in love with punk, especially The Clash and the Minutemen. At age 14, he enraged his father by honouring a request to play the album he’d just received for Christmas: PiL’s Flowers of Romance.

cover band that evolved into alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo. Tweedy doesn’t give much time to that tag, though, dubbing the band “a punk-country hybrid that a smattering of critics and punkcountry-hybrid loyalists [would] blow way out of proportion.” He does allude to such pigeonholing later, in regards to Wilco: “I really didn’t want people to think of us with a label attached – roots music or Americana or whatever brand they were peddling that week.”

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ew to stre n am s at’

ing

W h

arts in focus

WITH JOSEPH EARP

U

mbrella Entertainment, longtime distributor of genre gems, have over time revealed themselves to be one of the most exciting home video specialists in this entire country. Acting as a kind of local alternative to international grindhouse specialists like Arrow Video in the UK, and the U.S.’ Vinegar Syndrome, they release pristine and lavishly packaged remasters of classic horror, thriller, and softcore flicks, and are in the process of developing one of the most impressive back catalogues of any home media distributor in the country.

“If you’re missing Romero, then the re-release of Day Of The Dead is the buy for you.”

Day Of The Dead

Case in point: look at the two excellent Blu-ray releases they dropped this last November. First up is Day Of The Dead, the third film in George A. Romero’s zombie series. Day Of The Dead has never quite got its critical dues: it’s often seen as a less impressive successor to the groundbreaking Night Of The Living Dead, and the sharply satirical Dawn Of The Dead. But it is a far more interesting, far better made picture than its reputation might suggest. Moving his satirical eye away from capitalism and onto the military industrial complex, Romero cleverly makes his zombies more empathetic and interesting than his human heroes, a rogue’s gallery of unpleasant, cold-blooded killers who you’re never meant to care about, and who you largely don’t.

This new Umbrella re-release of Romero’s masterpiece is spread across two discs, and boasts an eye-popping amount of special features, from a fascinating and entertaining audio commentary with George A. Romero and his long-time partner in crime Tom Savini; to featurettes examining the film’s production and legacy; to an interview with Romero himself, conducted at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2008. If you’re missing Romero, as I so very much am, then this release is the one for you.

Then there’s Umbrella’s reissue of two of the strangest, most eerily compelling Eurotrash softcore flicks ever made: Emmanuelle and Emmanuelle 2. An international smash-box office hit that then became the premiere objet d’art according to creepy old uncles around the globe, the first Emmanuelle is probably best known for the expert performance from its titular lead, played by a wide-eyed Sylvia Kristel, and a scene in which a young woman smokes a cigarette using

Side Effects

her nether regions. It’s considerably less shocking in our nudity-saturated modern world than it once was, of course, but that only makes it even more fascinating as a standalone film. With its slow, careful pace, smoky cinematography, and quaint, jangly soundtrack, Emmanuelle should be of interest to aesthetes and cinephiles of all types – may it be forever freed from the disturbingly sweaty cultural grasp of hormonal weirdos and your dad’s divorced mate.

Excitingly, Umbrella’s blu-ray release also boasts a copy of the even stranger Emmanuelle 2. Certainly not able to top the original in terms of truly bizarre setpieces, it’s an oddly more humane little film. It’s a road trip of sorts, one that sees the titular pleasure-seeker moving through Hong Kong, picking up and then discarding lovers like the rest of us might go through sticks of gum. Kristel is as good; the cinematography is as lush; and its end has a haunting quality entirely of its own.

Now for something completely different, over in the world of streaming: Shirkers, available now on Netflix. This strange, deeply compelling documentary shares its name with its subject, a long-mythologised art film made by a group of teenagers in Singapore that was first creatively hijacked and then outright physically stolen by a creepy older man named Georges. Cross-cutting between retrieved footage from Shirkers, and interviews with the now-grown up key creative cast, this is a story of the way men seek to manipulate and control women; a story of deception, and art, and life itself. Sure, it’s a frustrating watch – there’s an alternate world out there where Shirkers was completed and changed the shape of Singapore’s cinema scene forever – but it’s also a strangely joyous one, ending on a note of pure inspiration and optimism. Don’t let Shrikers’ death be for naught; watch this doco and keep its memory alive.

Meanwhile, streaming giant Stan continue to impress. First up, they’ve recently added Punch-Drunk Love to their library, meaning that if you’ve never seen this extraordinary, anti-rom com by one of our greatest living filmmakers, Paul Thomas Anderson, you no longer have any excuse. The story of an angry man (Adam Sandler, never better) perpetually henpecked by his older sisters who manages to find a love that transforms his whole world, this is a monumental work; a film that meanders from Bunuellian strangeness to sun-flecked joy and genuine hope. It’s one of the most exciting and rewarding films of the 20th century, and it demands your attention.

A more uneven but just as entertaining new addition to the Stan library is Side Effects. A medical thriller that operates in the shadow of Hitchcock and Orson Welles’ Touch Of Evil, the film was helmed by Steven Soderbergh in full arthouse mode: it’s as unpleasant and abrupt as a scalpel slash, and just as memorable.

Oh, and while we’re on Soderbergh, if you’re looking for something a little lighter, why not pore back over Magic Mike? The film was unfairly dismissed as nothing but a chick flick on its original release, but it’s an astounding, gleaming work of pop filmmaking; an utterly horny movie obsessed with its male leads. The thing drips with pure appeal; let it lather over you.

“Magic Mike drips with pure appeal; let it lather over you.”

Magic Mike

Emmanuelle thebrag.com

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Sounds Like…

NEW ALBUM AND SINGLE RELE A SES WITH JOSEPH E ARP Rackett

Music isn’t nasty enough nowadays. Even the realm of mainstream American pop, supposedly the last vestige around for the sexed-up scoundrel, has been overwhelmed by a truckload of glossy stars making music accessible for the under-15 crowd. In these difficult times, safe is the new sexy, and marketability is key. So when winks are there, they’re subtle – blink and you’ll miss them moments designed to sneak past our newly appointed moral censors.

Which is fine; there’s an argument to be made that pop music is currently more creative, expansive, and interesting than it has ever been in the past. But who can blame those listeners who miss the raucous energy of the dirty rockers of the ’80s: that golden era in which Prince belted out singles that extolled the joy of cunnilingus, and over-the-top rockers streaked across stage in puddles of hair gel and sweat?

“I Please Myself shrieks and bounces with pleasure, moving from moaned choruses to guitar solos so ecstatic as to seem written in lighting.”

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Here then to bring a healthy dose of shock and sensuality to the scene are Rackett, with their excellent new EP I Please Myself. As the nudge and a wink of the title implies, this is rock music at its most tactile and its most exciting – at its most cheeky. The whole thing shrieks and bounces with pleasure, moving from moaned choruses to guitar solos so ecstatic as to seem written in lighting.

It is, from start to finish, a joyous celebration of pleasure: the pleasure of satisfying yourself when no-one around you will, as on the title track; the pleasure of finding someone to scratch those hard to reach places, as on ‘Kiss It Better’; the pleasure of telling those persistent shitheads in your life to go fuck themselves, as on ‘FU’. It is an EP about self-satisfaction and self-celebration: a soundtrack for self-discovery that’s as empowering as rock of this kind gets.

Every lyric feels custom-built to be shrieked in public; the melody lines a kind of defiant sonic signature of the self.

Nothing hurts on I Please Myself – instead, it aches. The choruses are perfectly trimmed, catchy and immediate; the musicianship on display immensely thrilling; the songwriting both mature and enjoyably direct. Every now and then the thing seems ready to topple over into pure chaotic kitsch, but it never does. Instead, it hovers right at the very limits of good taste.

It’s Rackett’s most accomplished work yet; but more than that, it’s one of the most accomplished Aussie EPs of the year.

Far less effective is Phoenix, the new record from Rita Ora. Ora has been around for a while now: a relative superstar in her native United Kingdom,

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albums Rita Ora

“Rita Ora doesn’t have anything to say, and chooses the least interesting imaginable way to say it.”

she’s never quite managed to break out on the international scene, despite a string of reasonably successful singles.

Phoenix is quite clearly her attempt to break into the big leagues, a collection of ballads that ape everybody from Ariana Grande to Little Mix to Camilla Cabello.

But, unfortunately for her, Ora reveals her slightly desperate intentions far too early: they’re there on the very first track, ‘Anywhere’, hovering just below her manipulative and manipulated voice. She doesn’t have anything to say, and chooses the least interesting imaginable way to say it, dropping in touches of trap and hip hop affectations in a desperate attempt to spice up the sonic porridge. It doesn’t work.

In that way, Ora and Phoenix are proof that music has to stand for something

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these days. Not politically, mind you – we don’t need a world full of Bonos and Bob Geldofs. But listeners are in desperate need of something; some kind of substance. It’s not enough to streak by only on glossy nothings and simpering choruses that rhyme “love” and “dove” these days. Listeners are too smart for that shit to pass the mustard. We need bite, and Ora has that in stunningly low supply.

At least Ora makes the kind of music you can play under a quiet family gathering, or in a dentist’s waiting room – its inoffensive nature guarantees that it’ll suit at least some settings. That can’t be said about the abysmal new record from Sun Kil Moon, This Is My Dinner, which is a record custom-designed for absolutely no location or moment in time that I can

imagine. Indeed, the thing seems like definite proof that Mark Kozelek hit his still rather modest high point with Benji.

He’s turned into a glorified musical troll: no longer content to bully journalists, he’s now moved onto making ugly heel turn anthems like ‘Linda Blair’, an odious and dull song that features a lengthy section in which Kozelek does nothing but gurgle in a heavy-handed approximation of the titular actress’ performance from The Exorcist. Presumably somebody out there finds dick moves like that funny; count me most definitively out.

Anyway, for music more powerful and terrifying than Kozelek could ever dream of, one need look no further than Daughters’ You Won’t Get What You Want.

A genuinely startling piece of art, it calls to mind the late career avant-garde turn

of Scott Walker; it has the same obsidian peaks as something like Bisch Bosch, and is just as guaranteed to clear a room of polite company if turned up to eleven.

Which is a considerable boon, now that we’re approaching Christmas time. Got a herd of rellies that you desperately need turfed out now they’ve handed over their shitty presents? Give ‘em a dose of Daughters. They’ll clear the place in half a second flat.

Highlight Of The Month: I Please Myself.

Dud Of The Month: Phoenix.

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LEARN WHY

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72 :: BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18

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g g guide gig g

Submit your gig and club listings, head to: thebrag.com/gig-guide.

PICK OF THE THE MONTH

Oxford Art Factory, Sydney.

Surfbort

Surfbort + Amyl And The Sniffers 8pm. $28.99.

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 5 Belly Blues Leadbelly, Newtown. 8pm.

Free.

Polish Club Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $35.66.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 6 Bleeding Knees Club Rad Bar, Wollongong. 8pm.

Free.

Glades + LA

Women Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $29.70.

Ireland Rocks Brass Monkey, Cronulla. 7pm.

Free.

Let There Be Rock Enmore Theatre, Enmore. 8pm. $89.25.

Polish Club Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $35.66.

Psycroptic The Small Ballroom, Islington.

8pm. Free.

Surfbort + Amyl And The Sniffers Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 8pm. $28.99.

Tamam Shud Marrickville Bowling Club, Marrickville. 8pm.

Free.

Tijuana Cartel Panthers Port Macquarie, Port Macquarie. 7pm.

Free.

FRIDAY DECEMBER 7 Alison Wonderland Enmore Theatre,

Stella Donnelly

Stella Donnelly

Oxford Art Factory, Sydney.

Saturday December 8.

8pm. $30.01.

Stella Donnelly has made some friends. That’s according to the name of her new tour, at least, one that will see her perform her exceptional bounty of stripped down, raw songs at venues across the country.

Enmore. 8pm. $65.

Body Type

Dragon Heritage Hotel Bulli, Bulli. 7pm.

Free.

Frank Turner And The Sleeping Souls Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $59.90.

Kamelot Manning Bar, Chippendale.

9:30pm. $70.

Step On Xmas Party Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 10pm. $11.61.

Body Type

SATURDAY DECEMBER 8

Body Type’s self-titled EP is one of the strongest releases of the year; a warm, emotionally resonant series of songs that are as brave as they are earnest. Catch the band at the intimate surrounds of the Lansdowne.

Bat Out Of Hell Ettamogah Hotel, Rouse Hill. 6pm.

Free.

Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. Friday December 14. 8pm. $17.83.

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The Bear Pack Enmore Theatre, Enmore. 8pm. $36.95.

Buy The Collective – feat: Clews + Totty + The Buoys + Cry Club Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $28.55.

Columbus The Chippendale Hotel, Chippendale. 6pm.

Free.

Dean Lewis Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $49.90.

Eliott Oxford Art Factory Gallery, Sydney.

8pm. $13.65.

No Scrubs ’90s Party Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 10:30pm. $11.61.

Stella Donnelly Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 8pm. $30.01.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 9 Bhad Bhabie Enmore Theatre, Enmore. 8pm. $59.90.

General Knowledge Band Rad Bar, Wollongong. 7pm.

Free.

PP Arnold The Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle West. 8pm. Free.

The Rose Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 6pm. $99.

Shin Dig Irish Music The Mercantile Hotel, The Rocks.

BRAG :: 744 :: 05:12:18 :: 73

g g guide gig g

Submit your gig and club listings, head to: thebrag.com/gig-guide.

Have a gig or club listing to get in The BRAG? You can now submit your gig and club listings, head to thebrag.com/gig-guide. $44.95.

Phantastic Ferniture

Japanese Wallpaper Metro Theatre Lair, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $27.

John Denver Celebration Concert Enmore Theatre, Enmore. 7:30pm. $122.35.

SATURDAY DECEMBER 15 The Chats Metro Theatre Lair, Sydney CBD. 4:45pm. $21.50.

Phantastic Ferniture Christmas Extravaganza – with: I Know Leopard, Jade Imagine, Georgia Mulligan and more Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. Thursday December 20. 7pm. $29.90.

Nothing says Christmas quite like the now annual tradition of the Phantastic Ferniture Christmas Extravaganza. Join Phan Fern as they get yuley with the help of I Know Leopard, Georgia Mulligan, and so many more.

8pm. Free.

Tamam Shud Kingscliff Beach Hotel, Kingscliff. 8pm. Free.

MONDAY DECEMBER 10 The Wonder Years Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 7pm. $54.81.

Wu-Tang Clan

Sydney Opera House, Sydney. 8pm. $99.95.

TUESDAY DECEMBER 11 Wu-Tang Clan Sydney Opera House, Sydney. 8pm. $99.95.

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 12

Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $49.90.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 13 Aussie K-Poppers United Concert Metro Theatre Lair, Sydney CBD. 6:30pm.

Free.

Dean Lewis Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $49.90.

Mickey Kojak Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 8pm. $18.25.

Pearl The Girl Oxford Art Factory Gallery, Sydney. 8pm. $15.

Dean Lewis

Randy Houser Enmore Theatre, Enmore. 8pm. $59.90.

FRIDAY DECEMBER 14 Body Type Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $17.83.

Dead Letter Circus Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 8pm.

The Chats

The Chats Metro Theatre Lair, Sydney CBD. 8pm. $21.50.

Ignite Enmore Theatre, Enmore. 7pm. $89.95.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 16 Jeff Rosenstock Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $36.70.

MONDAY DECEMBER 17 Jeff Rosenstock Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle.

7pm. $27.95.

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Living Colour Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $80.

Sebastien Leger Manning Bar, Chippendale. 2pm. $50.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 23 Dean Lewis Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $49.90.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 27 OMG – The Party!

Manning Bar, Camperdown. 9pm. $11.85.

FRIDAY DECEMBER 28 Chunk Brass Monkey, Cronulla. 8pm. Free.

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 19

The Screaming Jets Kingscliff Beach Hotel, Kingscliff. 7pm. Free.

The Beths Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $19.14.

SATURDAY DECEMBER 29

FRIDAY DECEMBER 21

So let me set the scene: it’s 2 in the afternoon and 34 degrees. The Queensland harsh summer heat had me sweating buckets up and down my street. It was there I spotted the bloke perched atop of his milk crate throne. He eyed me off as I approached. Then he said: “I’m on Smoko, so leave me alone.”

Alpha Wolf Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 8pm. $23.36.

The White Tree Band Leadbelly, Newtown.

8pm. Free.

TUESDAY DECEMBER 18

Phantastic Ferniture Christmas Extravaganza – with: I Know Leopard, Jade Imagine, Georgia Mulligan and more Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $29.90.

Metro Theatre Lair, Sydney CBD. Saturday December 15. 4:45pm. $21.50.

SATURDAY DECEMBER 22

Falls Festival – with: Amy Shark, Soccer Mommy, The Vaccines, Vance Joy, Hatchie, and more North Byron Parklands, Yelgen.

12pm. $171.14.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 20

The Chats

Chippendale. 8pm. $24.97.

Dean Lewis Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 7pm. $49.90.

Front End Loader + PEG + Small Town Incident Lansdowne Hotel,

Thirsty Merc Moonee Beach Tavern, Moonee Beach. 8pm. $21.79.

SUNDAY DECEMBER 30 Shin Dig Irish Music The Mercantile Hotel, The Rocks. 7pm. $11.82.

MONDAY DECEMBER 31 20 Years Of Cosmic Gates + Sam Jones Metro Theatre, Sydney CBD. 9pm. $87.10.

For our full gig and club listings, head to thebrag. com/gig-guide.

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