Time Off Issue #1545

Q U E E N S L A N D ' S H I G H E S T C I R C U L AT I N G S T R E E T P R E S S • 2 1 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 11 • 15 4 5 • F R E E

KIMBRA

BEN SALTER

ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI

GEOFFREY EOFFREY RUSH

ALICE COOPER JOSH PYKE OH YE DENVER BIRDS MITZI

INSIDE: COUNTER REVOLUTION GUIDE & TIMES

BRISBANE / GOLD COAST / SUNSHINE COAST / BYRON N BAY

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INDUSTRY NEWS James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond, manager of rapper The Game – an Interscope recording artist – and CEO of Czar Entertainment. Rosemond is currently being held without bail in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center after being hauled up on 18 felony charges.

It is believed that cash and cocaine was delivered to Interscope’s Los Angeles offices in road cases disguised as musical equipment and shipped to a Manhattan recording studio where it was then distributed.

SMALL LIVE GIGS WORTH $1.2 BILLION A new report has revealed some astonishing figures in relation to the value of the live music industry nationwide, hot on the heels of last month’s report that showed the value of the live music industry in Victoria. The report, called The Economic Contribution Of The Venue-Based Live Music Industry In Australia was commissioned by APRA|AMCOS in conjunction with the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Victoria, Arts NSW and Live Performance Australia and conducted by Ernst & Young, who found that the national live music industry is worth over $1.2 billion. It was estimated that 41.97 million patrons attended approximately 328,000 venue-based live music performances at 3,904 live music venues across Australia.

14,800 full-time jobs are created by this industry and $652 million in profits and wages are generated, figures that prove small venue live music is a legitimate industry. Music Victoria’s Patrick Donovan told The Front Line the report is timely as the music industry readies itself to approach government for a fairer deal for contemporary musicians.

“The music industry around Australia is about to make a submission for the National Cultural Policy, which is the first policy that combines culture and arts since Paul Keating’s Creative Nations Policy 20 years ago, so the timing is quite relevant,” he said. There are numerous ways that the industry can be supported by government, Donovan explained. “More arts funding should be allocated to contemporary music over heritage arts and there are other revenue streams that live performers should be entitled too, such as the alcohol excise.”

There were unfortunate figures as well, though, with the average musician taking home just $12,200 per year from live performances.

GOTYE’S CHASING THE GARDEN As Gotye and Kimbra’s Somebody That I Used To Know stays at the top of the ARIA Singles chart for its sixth week running, it becomes ever closer to being one of the most popular Australian songs in a long time. The most recent song to spend this long at the top of the charts was Savage Garden’s Truly Madly Deeply, which enjoyed an eight-week tenure in the number one spot back in 1997.

Gotye’s Making Mirrors album isn’t having quite as much luck; it’s still unable to bump the seemingly unstoppable Adele from the number one position on the album charts, the British songstress chalking up her 18th week on top with 21. The last record to spend this long at number one was Mariah Carey’s Music Box way back in 1994.

LANEWAY POST TEASER St Jerome’s Laneway Festival posted their dates, venues and a teaser video for the 2012 edition online last week. The Brisbane event will be taking place at the same location in Alexandria St, Fortitude Valley Saturday Jan 28. The teaser video received a huge response, mainly due to it being soundtracked with the song Midnight City by lauded French indie-electro artist M83, who has shot to the top of the list of predictions for acts appearing on next year’s festival bill.

MINX CAN DJ After months of build-up, Sydney-based DJ Rachel Phillips – better known as Minx – was last week named the winner of EMI’s She Can DJ initiative at Sydney hotspot Ivy. Phillips already has a solid local profile through her monthly Ivy residency and international DJ commitments that have taken her as far afield as Dubai and Taiwan, but winning this competition has meant she is now over in Ibiza for the summer closing parties and upon her return she will complete a mix – her second, after completing one in 2009 for Onelove – to be released through EMI. Next year she will undertake a production masterclass courtesy of SAE and continue working on producing original material with a view for an album release next year.

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BROKEN HAND WON’T STOP BRITISH INDIA British India frontman Declan Melia suffered a serious injury last week on the eve of one of the band’s biggest tour announcements to date. Melia was skateboarding but came off his board when a pebble became lodged in the front wheel. The singer broke his wrist and two fingers in the fall. Doctors were forced to operate to insert a steel rod into his wrist and said he will not be able to use the injured hand for six weeks. The band’s manager Glenn Goldsmith told The Front Line that the band’s upcoming national tour will still go ahead. “Declan is still able to sing and he can’t really play the guitar anyway,” Goldsmith said. The band are currently in the studio recording a new track, its release will coincide with the aforementioned tour. “Nic Wilson can play all the guitar on the session today,” Melia told The Front Line from the studio. “He taught me to play anyway.” The band’s upcoming tour will hit 15 regional centres as well as the usual capital cities.

FRESHLY INKED Gold Coast garage rockers Bleeding Knees Club, pictured, have signed a deal with US label IAMSOUND records. The band, who recently announced that they have officially become a three-piece, were courted by “a few” labels, but bassist and vocalist Alex Wall told The Front Line IAMSOUND were “really keen to let me and Jordan [Malane – guitar] direct all of the creative stuff and do what we usually do and let us have our say instead of just telling us what do which is really important to us.” The label will release their debut EP Virginity next month and their debut album, recently recorded with Dev Hynes (Lightspeed Champion), early next year.

The crew at UNFD have quickly snapped up another quality Aussie act, with Sydney’s The Bride their latest signing. The label will release their debut album President Rd later this year; it features some new tunes and a few old favourites re-recorded.

While she didn’t win the EMI She Can DJ competition, Alison Wonderland might as well have.

She was so impressive that EMI decided to take her onboard anyway, signing her up to a worldwide contract, and sending her to Ibiza and London alongside eventual winner Minx.

Melbourne’s Cave Of The Swallows, have recently signed a US record deal with Bieler Bros. Records. The band’s abruptly titled debut single I Hate You comes off their album Dead Upon Your Feet and according to their bio, there’s “no gimmicks and no bullshit”.

UNSEEN NIRVANA FILM SCREENS THIS WEEK The never before seen concert film Live At The Paramount featuring Nirvana at their peak, will be screening in cinemas around the country this Friday night. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the band’s iconic album Nevermind and this is one of many celebrations happening in tribute to this great band, great album and, of course, the greatness of Kurt Cobain. Organisers say the concert is the only known show by the band to have been recorded on film and has not been seen publicly before. The performance was the band’s first homecoming after the legendary album had fans going crazy, bringing Nirvana international success.

Tickets and details are available on CinemaLive’s website, and tickets will come with a copy of the 20th Anniversary double-CD deluxe edition of Nevermind.

RADIO AD REVENUE FALLS IN SYDNEY, BRISBANE AND PERTH The commercial advertising radio revenue figures for August in Australia show a drop of 1.52 per cent for Sydney down to $18.03 million, a 3.58 per cent drop to $9.35 million in Brisbane and a 3.65 per cent drop to $7.6 million in Perth. Chief executive officer of Commercial Radio Australia, Joan Warner explained that the market had softened a little: “The market appears to be reflecting the economic uncertainty being flat

at the moment in many sectors, a fall in retail sector spend and a general overall softer advertising market”.

Alternately, Melbourne and Adelaide’s revenue had slightly increased. These Deloitte figures report the total metropolitan radio revenue received for each calendar month and include all direct and all agency revenue.

NEW INXS, NO BONO INXS released a new track online called Tiny Summer last Friday, which set tongues wagging immediately.

The talking point was the lead vocalist, more to the point, who he is. The distinctive accented voice was tipped to be Bono by many, but a representative from the band’s camp resolutely told The Front Line last week that it was not the U2 vocalist and refused to reveal the identity of the singer. At the time of print the vocalist’s identity still has not been released.

INTERSCOPE IN COCAINE SCANDAL One of the world’s biggest record labels, Interscope Records, has become embroiled in a massive investigation into the shipment of cocaine, it has been reported. The offices of the label, which is home to megastars such as Lady Gaga, Eminem and U2, has been alleged by United States federal prosecutors as a transit point for cocaine and cash. These allegations have been made in the wake of the indictment of 46-year-old

MUSOS SCOOP CREATIVE ARTS EMMYS There were a fair number of musical winners at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmy Awards, with Justin Timberlake doubling his Emmy collection when he picked up two more of the awards for his re-occurring appearances on SNL, scoring the gong for Outstanding Guest Actor In A Comedy Series and Outstanding Original Music And Lyrics for the comedy track he performed on the show. Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball special was recognised for its editing while the comedy series Portlandia, created by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, was honoured for its costumes and Harry Connick Jr won for the music direction of his filmed Broadway concert.

EVERYONE’S TALKING STRANGE Thanks to a video sponsored by an American detergent company, jovial Melbourne indie-pop kids Strange Talk’s Climbing Walls track went viral last week. In the video viewers could click on items they wanted to win, this took them to a Facebook app where they register their details to be in the running to win. Some may consider the tactics sneaky, but they seem to have worked in favour of both the band and the company; to date the video has had almost 400,000 views. Extra excitingly for the band, it has seen them top this week’s Billboard ‘Uncharted’ Chart; an impressive first dip into the expansive American market. Speaking to The Front Line, the band’s Gerard Sidhu admitted there were some initial reservation; “We didn’t want it to come across the wrong way,” he said. “But I think our management is very aware of that and they knew it had to be done in a certain way.” Adding, “I think in the sense that the marketing campaign wasn’t direct, it was more an association through colour and vibrancy and youth, it was done cleverly and it wasn’t too much of a sell out.”

MOVES AND SHAKES Deborah Conway has announced she will be leaving the Queensland Music Festival team to focus more on her own musical pursuits and as such there is now an opening for a new artistic director of the festival. Conway has led the festival for the past four years, during which time she has overseen the curation of two festivals; one in 2009 and one this year. There is no word yet as to who her replacement will be or how they will be selected.

INDUSTRY NEWS

CHASING GOLD

A contender for two 2011 JÄGERMEISTER INDEPENDENT MUSIC AWARDS – and also one of the scheduled performers at this year’s ceremony – Melbourne rapper ILLY (aka Al Murray) discusses the state of Aussie hip hop with BRYGET CHRISFIELD.

Jägermeister Independent Music Awards, highlights hip hop’s recent local chart successes: “I think Gotye [Making Mirrors] was a number one album, I’m sure it was, but before him the last two number one Aussie albums were Drapht [The Life Of Riley] and Bliss N Eso [Running On Air]. And a lot of the more mainstream music industry in the country really doesn’t give the genre the credit that it has worked its arse off to deserve, you know? So it’s good to see the Aussie Indie [Music Awards] and other sorta small things paying [hip hop] the recognition that it’s owed and hopefully that’s a trend that keeps going.”

When asked whether he believes the Australian music industry is adjusting fast enough to accommodate the rise of Aussie hip hop, Murray contemplates, “Um, now [it] definitely is, pretty much. I think it probably took five or six years longer than it needed to, but at the same time – I mean, the genre and the people within the genre probably needed a lotta time to adjust to the industry side of things as well. You hear about artists in this genre being a bit green to the way the industry works, whereas in other genres the procedures [have] been established for decades even. So I think the way it’s happened has been really good. I think the scene’s in a great position, there’s a lot of talent and now there’s a lot of outlets for that.”

ILLY

The prominence of Aussie hip hop on festival line-ups these days provides further evidence that the genre’s popularity is on the rise.

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ince their inception in 2006, the ceremony formerly known as the AIR Awards (Australian Independent Record) have grown, from originally acknowledging excellence in four categories to the 11 gongs now up for grabs. This year will see the announcement of the inaugural award for Best Independent Dance/Electronica or Club Single and every year the categories have been adjusted to reflect the changing nature of our nation’s musical climate. The first year these awards ran, Aussie hip hop ruled supreme with Hilltop Hoods polishing their trophy cabinets to accommodate two out of the four awards offered: Best Performing Independent Album (The Hard Road) and Independent Artist Of The Year. The Hard Road was the first Australian hip hop album ever to debut at number one

on the ARIA Albums Chart and also went on to dominate the Australian Record Industry Association awards (ARIAs) in 2006, winning two of the five categories the Adelaide hip hop collective were nominated for that year: Best Urban Release and Best Independent Release.

The following year, a separate award was introduced to acknowledge the hip hop genre at the AIRs and the Best Hip Hop/Urban Release statuette was once again collected by Hilltop Hoods. In subsequent years, the gong was awarded to The Herd (Summerland, 2008), Pez (A Mind Of My Own, 2009) and Urthboy (Spitshine, 2010). Melbourne MC Illy (Al Murray on his passport), whose debut album The Chase has been shortlisted in this category for the upcoming (slightly renamed)

“Without a doubt,” the MC concurs. “The line-up this year at Splendour, compared to last year’s [and] compared to the year before in terms of the local hip hop contingent, yeah! I mean, that’s the thing, like, the festivals are the closest connection – those lineups reflect more than anything within the industry, that is slower to respond, you know? The festivals, they have to be on the pulse of what’s going on.”

Describing the Aussie hip hop scene as “a sort of fraternal scene compared to others” within our national music landscape, Murray contemplates his competition for this year’s Best Independent Hip Hop Album award: Bliss N Eso [Running On Air], Joelistics [Voyager], Drapht [The Life Of Riley] and Sietta [The Seventh Passenger].

“Like I was saying to a friend the other night, I honestly would be stoked with and for whoever wins – they’re all really cool people. I’m actually touring with Sietta from the end of the month to October and Drapht and B N E I’ve looked up to for years and been mates with, so it’s awesome to be in that category with such an esteemed group, really.”

Murray has also been shortlisted for the Best Independent Single Or EP at the Awards for his track It Can Wait (featuring Owl Eyes) and he’s the sole hip hop representative in this category, something the rapper admits is “good for the culture”. Diversity is particularly celebrated here, with the shortlist rounded out by Adalita (Hot Air), Stonefield (Through The Clover), The Jezabels (Dark Storm) and Emma Louise (Full Hearts And Empty Rooms). The inaugural year for this category was 2009, when Philadelphia Grand Jury’s Going To The Casino was honoured, followed by Little Red’s Rock It last year.

Murray’s mates Bliss N Eso flew the hip hop flag on the 2010 shortlist for their Down By The River cut.

“I’m really stoked to be nominated for that,” Murray shares, “because I have a lot of respect, particularly for The Jezabels, but for all the other artists as well.

“It looks like It Can Wait is gonna go gold in about a month, so when that comes ‘round that will definitely be a cool little thing.” On how he enlisted Owl Eyes (AKA Brooke Addamo) to lay down guest vocals on his nominated single, Murray explains, “Well we have a mutual producer, Jan Skubiszewski – he’s made a lot of my stuff over the years and Brooke was an artist that he was working with at the time. Originally, I’d done the melody and the harmony on It Can Wait and we were like, ‘It needs a female vocal’. Brooke was in there the next day working with Jan, so it just sorta came about like that. And she killed it and I think it’s done her no harm and it’s really good to see how she’s going now.”

Kinda like when Kimbra met Gotye through their mutual producer François Tétaz, which led to her featuring on his number one smash Somebody That I Used To Know.

“Yeah, definitely on a much, much, much, much smaller scale,” Murray laughs, “but, yeah, something similar.”

Having performed at last year’s ceremony with the M-Phazes entourage, Murray will once again take the stage at this year’s Awards, taking place Wednesday Oct 12 at Revolt in Melbourne.

“Yeah, me and Brooke,” he confirms, “so it should be interesting to see how it goes.” Reflecting on performing on the Forum stage at the awards in 2010, Murray admits, “I definitely feel more uncomfortable in that setting, because hip hop is such a… it feeds so much off the crowd energy and a lot of the time the crowd, in those sort of settings, doesn’t give a fuck.” Will he get any other special guests involved? “I don’t think so, no, I think just Brooke.” What about some dancers? “Get the Wickid Force Breakers involved! “[Laughs] I am actually mates with a few of those dudes, so maybe, who knows?”

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IN BRIEF Frenchman DJ Mehdi has died at age 34. A Parisbased producer and integral part of the Ed Banger label, Mehdi was fatally injured when his Paris rooftop collapsed during a party.

GO AHEAD AND MAKE YOURSELF Alt-rockers Incubus have announced their first Australian tour in three years on the back of their seventh studio record If Not Now, When?. This will no doubt be music to ears for the Californian’s many Aussie fans, the band enjoying a huge following here ever since Science was unleashed way back in 1997.

These are the band’s first dates Down Under since they were part of the national Soundwave Festival in 2008, so make sure you show some love when they arrive at the Brisbane Convention Centre Friday Feb 10. Tickets are on sale next Wednesday Sep 28 through Ticketek with a special pre-sale for dates happening Monday Sep 26 from 2pm. Ticket prices and supports are still unconfirmed at this stage.

SWINGING INTO TOWN The International Swingers may not be a name that rings a bell for many, but the men behind the curiouslytitled supergroup will certainly cause you to sit up and take notice. Featuring Glen Matlock from The Sex Pistols, Clem Burke of Blondie, James Stevenson from The Cult and Gary Twinn from Supernaut, these legendary men of rock have been a part of some of the most iconic groups of the last 50 years. Together, they will be coming to Australia at the tail-end of the year to provide a full spectrum of tunes from their respective back catalogues and more. Expect these dates to be an absolute hoot for punk and classic rock fans when they hit the stage at The Zoo Friday Dec 9, Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast Saturday Dec 10 and Kings Beach Tavern, Caloundra Sunday Dec 11. Keep an eye on rocksoup.com.au for forthcoming ticketing information.

HELLO YOU FOOL, THEY LOVE YOU Well it’s official – Roxette is still a global pop force to be reckoned with, 20 years on from the halcyon days for the Swedes. First they were only scheduled to play Sydney.

Then due to overwhelming demand they expanded to most major capitals in Australia. And now with those shows all but snapped up, they have announced some news that will undoubtedly be joy to the ears of anyone who was late to take a Joyride: they will be playing a second Brisbane show at Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Friday Feb 24.

This is in addition to the previously announced show at the same venue on Tuesday Feb 14. Tickets will be on sale 3pm Thursday Sep 22 via Ticketek and start from $90 + bf. Support for the evening will be Australian sons 1927.

Florence And The Machine have released the tracklisting for their second album via their iTunes pre-order page.

Titled Ceremonials, it is pencilled in for an Oct 31 release and will follow up her wildly successful 2009 debut Lungs.

Superstar DJ Calvin Harris got behind the decks four times in 24 hours last week.

The workhorse flew between the Dominican Republic, Baltimore, Montreal and Las Vegas for the separate events.

GALATIC CHIMPS

REMEMBERING WHERE THEY’RE FROM As one of the most revered and iconic metal bands in the last 20 years, Opeth continue to flip the ideals of what a band in the heavy realm can release and the musical boundaries they can push. Critics are already falling over themselves to heap praise on the band’s latest offering Heritage, a technical and refined album that harks back to the brooding intensity of 2003 revelation Deliverance.

A rare touring commodity in international waters, it’s the band’s first shows in two years here in Australia so don’t hesitate to get in early and confirm your place at The Tivoli Thursday Dec 15 – it’s sure to be one hell of a night. Tickets available Friday 23 Sep 9am through Ticketek with supports to be announced.

West Coast rapper The Game has alleged that 50 Cent is gay via Twitter. The L.A rap star made these claims speaking to gossip site TMZ. Screamfeeder have just gained complete control over their back catalogue and to celebrate, they are treating fans to a 40 track b-sides and rarities compilation, aptly titled Cargo Embargo. Get the album through www.screamfeeder. bandcamp.com.

Jacque Hollander, former publicist for James Brown, claims the singer was murdered, and has hired a private detective to investigate the soul visionary’s death.

Brown suffered a heart attack Christmas Day 2006.

IN BRIEF Recent visitor to Australia, Kanye West is launching a women’s fashion line at Paris Fashion Week next month.

Queen guitarist Brian May has candidly admitted that he contemplated suicide following the death of Freddie Mercury in 1991.

PRAISE THE LORD When it was announced last year that three of Australia’s most treasured singer-songwriters – Holly Throsby, Sarah Blasko and Sally Seltman – were going to be teaming up for a collaborative project, there was never a doubt in anyone’s mind that the music created would be nothing short of amazing. The blissed out perfection of Seeker Lover Keeper’s self-titled album has been one of the high points in Australian music this year and in an absolute must-see for fans, the ladies have announced they will perform a select run of shows in churches across the country, a coupling that is sure to create an experience unlike any other. In your last chance to catch the group on this album cycle, the three lass’ will be performing in full band mode at St John’s Cathedral Monday Nov 21 with tickets on sale Tuesday Sep 27 at 10am, priced at $57 + bf via Ticketek.

NYE SPOONING Fucking hell, where has 2011 gone?! It seems like only yesterday we were getting over our 2010 hangover and now here we are, getting ready to do it all again to welcome in 2012. And this hangover is sure to be immense with Grinspoon, a band who need no introduction after recently polling three albums in triple j’s Top 100 Australian Albums of All Time, just confirmed to be ringing in the new year at Twin Towns Services Club down on the Gold Coast. Smack bang on the Queensland/ New South Wales border, it also gives you the unique opportunity of enjoying two countdowns with a lack of sunshine state daylight savings. Thank the cows! Taking place Saturday Dec 31 (obviously) tickets will be available through the venue with prices to be announced soon.

YOU’LL KNOWN THEM SOON ENOUGH No doubt you’ve already heard Ffunny Ffrends – it’s one of the tracks of the year for Christ’s sake, look it up! But don’t be expecting some Brooklyn or LA hipsters, the culprits are in fact a Kiwi-led band based in Portland, Oregon, Unknown Mortal Orchestra. An abnormality, both in formation and a musical sense; formed by The Mint Chicks’ Ruban Nielson while the band were bunkered down in the US, Nielson’s weekend psychedelic recording sessions in a friend’s basement have quickly transformed from hobby to international touring band, their self-titled debut one of the underground finds of the year with its quirk fusion of dreamscapes and 60s pop. While they are in town doing some shows including a slightly confusing appearance at the Homebake festival, they have decided to put on some headline slots, performing at Alhambra Lounge Sunday Dec 4, tickets $35 through OzTix.

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Skipping Girl Vinegar are an easy band to fall in love with. Their music is full of awkward whimsical beauty and their eclectic live shows highlight a group of talented musicians and friends capturing the essence of the basic joy of playing together. Chase The Sun, the opening cut from latest album Keep Calm Carry The Monkey, is the second single to be released from the LP and is simply put, an utter slice of pop heaven. The Monkey Into Space tour will be rolling into town for some select shows at The Basement beneath The Gold Coast Arts Centre Thursday Nov 3, Joe’s Waterhole, Eumundi Friday Nov 4 and the Beetle Bar Saturday Nov 5 with support for the tour coming from The Trouble With Templeton and Myles Mayo (Eumundi, Brisbane only). Tickets available through the venues direct and OzTix. Proudly supported by Street Press Australia.

AND THE WALLS CAME CRASHING DOWN Now this one is going to be god damn brutal! 30 years into their career and German thrash heroes Destruction show no signs of slowing down. The three-piece have returned with another carnivorous opus Day Of Reckoning and are flying on to our shores to share the pain with their legions of Australian fans. And even better news is that the bill will be bulked out by domestic paint peelers Mortal Sin and 4ARM, a triple billing that is sure to leave your neck in a state for weeks. Make sure you don’t miss out when the three bands play The Hi-Fi on Sunday Nov 6. Ticket prices are as-yet-unannounced but will be available from the venue website shortly.

Pearl Jam celebrated 20 years since their landmark debut Ten, with a two-night stand at 37,000 capacity Alpine Valley Music Theatre, Wisconsin.

Assisting the birthday celebrations were Mudhoney, Queens Of The Stone Age, The Strokes and Chris Cornell.

Kelis has hit out at racial issues in the UK following an incident at a London airport where the RnB singer was the victim of a verbal race attack.

Another Jack White/Insane Clown Posse collaboration has surfaced. Titled Mountain Girl, it is a leaked b-side to the artists’ first single together, their cover of Mozart’s Leck Mich Im Arsch.

With 29 store closures in the past four months, music retailer HMV in the UK has announced plans to phase out the sale of CDs completely within the next five years.

Gold Coast garage rock kids Bleeding Knees Club have confirmed a US label deal inked with IAMSOUND Records.

PRIME LANEWAY DAY FOR BRISBANE The always delectable Laneway Festival has just announced its dates for 2012 and Brisbane finally gets to once more enjoy the full day out it deserves. Pinned as a Friday twilight event for a few years now, the Brisbane date has been pushed to Saturday meaning a massive day of epic tunes while still giving you over 24 hours to clean up for your role on Monday as a respectable part of society – fantastic! Laneway will take place in Alexandria Street, Fortitude Valley Saturday Jan 28 with full line-up due to be announced on Oct 10.

FAR FROM CONFUSING Strange Talk are making sense to all the right people with the Melbourne four-piece’s track from last year Climbing Walls hitting top spot on Billboard’s Uncharted Chart while the video for the track was the most viewed Oz music clip on Youtube last month, scoring even more hits than Gotye’s massive tune Someone That I Used To Know. This is huge news for the band, with lofty praise coming from tastemakers across the globe while their self-titled EP has been picked up internationally by it label Neon Gold.

The band treat the south-east corner to a couple of dates, playing Elsewhere on the Gold Coast Friday Nov 18 and Bowler Bar in Fortitude Valley on Saturday Nov 19 with a deep bill of support coming from The Belligerents, Audun, Tim Fuchs and Tropics. Tickets are on sale through Moshtix for the rather affordably price of $14.

MERE NOISE MELTDOWN VENUE CHANGE Originally schedule to take place at the Step Inn, the summer slam Mere Noise Meltdown has had to change venues due to unforeseen circumstances and will now be taking place at Woodland instead with dates, times and line-up all remaining the same. With the inventors of ‘jet-rock’, garage destroyers Guitar Wolf, flying over from Japan for the event, this will undoubtedly be a sweaty night of horn-worthy madness. A deep list of local supports including The Horrortones, No Anchor and Cannon only help to sweeten the deal further. All this and more will take place Saturday Dec 3 from 4pm with tickets for the meltdown $32 through OzTix or $40 on the door. And if you’re quick on the uptake, the first 100 tickets sold also receive a free album from Mere Noise headquarters – stop it!

THIS TIME IT’S REAL Although it took them almost a decade to get from formation to first album, Faker’s debut LP Addicted Romantic proved quick to find it’s place on the stereos of many Australians, however it wasn’t until second album Be The Twilight was released in 2009 that the band really made their mark on the musical radar.

Driven by inescapable single This Heart Attack, the album went gold in the country and has only fuelled anticipation further for third record Get Loved which is due for release in January 2012. Not content with their support slot for the upcoming Wombats tour, the Sydney lads will be hitting all major points in southeast Queensland with the band appearing at The Northern, Byron Bay Thursday Oct 20, Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast Friday Oct 21, The Zoo Saturday Oct 22 and Joe’s Waterhole, Eumundi Sunday Oct 23. Get your tickets through OzTix for $25 which also includes their latest EP How Did We Not Get Loved? Sweet!

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13

with pub rock for that era, penning arguably one the darkest pop odes ever to our fair country Sounds Of Then (This Is Australia). They will be sure to bust out that and plenty more classics when they hit the stage at Mansfield Tavern Rock Arena this Friday Sep 23. Tickets are available through Moshtix for $23 with special guests on the evening, Prefontaine and Unplanned Holiday. Get out of the city and check out some tunes!

MAGIC MULLUMBIMBY NIGHTS Although it’s only young in years, the Mullum Music Festival is quickly asserting its self as a must attend event on the summer calendar with a wide-reaching line-up that spans four big days and nights. In the ‘biggest little town in Australia’, Mullumbimby, you can get your dance on to a host of local and international acts including The Congos, Lanie Lane, pictured, The Bamboos and The Dynamites with Charles Walker, while away from the music you can enjoy free rides on the magic bus. Intrigued? So are we. Held Thursday through Sunday, Nov 24 -27, depending on how flexible your boss is, a four-day ticket will cost $210, while a one-day adult will set you back a reasonable $68. Tickets are on sale through the festival website and if you’ve got some sprogs then get them along too – kids aged five and under are free.

REELIN’ IN THE YEARS

LET’S HAVE SOME APPLAUSE Part of the second crop Harvest announcement that was confirmed last week, New York-via-Connecticut five-piece Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have quickly followed their addition to the line-up with their own tour news, revealing that they will be treating select cities to sideshows whilst in the country.

With new album Hysterical fresh off the press and a fantastically danceable library of tunes from their prior two releases, you’ll be sure to hear the David Byrne-esque voice of frontman Alec Ounsworth in full volume at this tidy little bonus date. The magic is going to happen at The Zoo on Sunday Nov 20 with tickets available through The Zoo’s OzTix page and supports to be announced shortly.

GET ON THE RIDE Georgia Fair have got two damn fine bites of news for all you eager fans out there. Firstly, they’ve got a debut album pencilled in for Oct 21 – titled All Through Winter, it will no doubt build on the promise of their Times Fly EP from late last year. Secondly, they are bringing these new songs out to a venue near you, having just been announced as support act for The Panics on their east coast Rain On The Humming Wire tour. Catch this excellent double billing at The Northern, Byron Bay Thursday Oct 6, The Hi-Fi Friday Oct 7 and Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast Saturday Oct 7. Tickets for Byron and the GC are through OzTix while Brissie peeps should head to Moshtix or The Hi-Fi website. Prices are $29 + bf.

BE PART OF THE GANG Epic news for suburban rock fans – The Mansfield Tavern is back to its noisy best. And a night that is sure to be a loud and large one is GANGgajang’s return to the fabled venue. Formed in 1984, the band became synonymous

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In a coup for fans of the classics, Steely Dan, fresh from garnering rave reviews on their most recent US tour, will be making only their second trip to Australia in 40 years as part of the ongoing A Day On The Green show series. As if that wasn’t enough of a deal maker, guitar virtuoso Steve Winwood will be joining Donald Fagan, Walter Becker and co. in his first visit to our country since 1991. And just in case you were still undecided, youthful songsmiths Oh Mercy will be opening musical proceedings at all shows. Check out this vintage double bill when they head to the magnificent grounds of Sirromet Winery, Mt Cotton, a short drive from Brisbane and the Gold Coast, on Sunday Oct 23. Tickets can be purchased through Ticketmaster starting at $149 + bf.

SLOW MEDIUM

GAME ON!

Bob Katter’s Australian Party just announced that former Test cricketer Carl Rackemann will run for Joh’s old seat at Kingaroy. Just what we need, a broken down pace bowler calling the shots, although it’d be tough to do worse than the current mob…

Get your geek on and check out Emulator, the massive retro gaming exhibition that’s kicked off this week at Bleeding Heart Gallery in the city. The old games are where it’s at people, get amongst it…

ABOUT FACE

DETHRONED Kyle Sandilands had to close King Kyle Management after his last client Sophie Monk abandoned him, although his spin was “I don’t want to manage anybody because it takes too much time”. Shame you started a management company then, idiot…

It’s great to see Foo Fighters paying out on that insidious cult of bigots the Westboro Baptist Church, openly mocking them as they picketed their show. Good to see the Foos using their massive profile for something positive, a far cry from their early days as AIDS deniers…

LYIN’ SHAME

ON THE BUS

Just because you legally manage to exploit a contract loophole to abscond to a competitor for a massive cash grab doesn’t mean you “leave with dignity”. I’m looking at you Ross Lyon, may you spend the rest of your days clad in that hideous, insidious purple…

Hilarious political interlude in New Zealand during the week when a bus driver at the Pacific Island Leader’s Forum told Julia Gillard to “get on the spouses’ bus”.

Was he inferring that he thought Tim Mathieson was our PM? Either way, that guy should get a pay rise…

SPOT THE PM!

JONSON STREET BYRON BAY Thurs 22 Sept

JOSH PYKE & EMMA LOUISE Fri 23 Sept

FAT ALBERT Sat 24 Sept

TRANSVAAL DIAMOND SYNDICATE Fri 30 Sept

A LITTLE PROVIENCE Thurs 6 Oct

THE PANICS Sun 9 Oct

GRACE BARBE Wed 12 Oct

THE JEZABELS Thurs 20 Oct

FAKER Sat 29 Oct

SOLID GOLD HALLOWEEN

TICKETS AVAILABLE ONLINE www.thenorthern.com.au 15

Fifteen years into their career, MACHINE HEAD delivered their arguable masterpiece as a band – 2007’s The Blackening. MATT O’NEILL catches up with vocalist and guitarist ROBB FLYNN to discuss follow-up record Unto The Locust and what it represents for the veteran metal outfit. Photos by ANDREW BOYLE.

LET FREEDOM RING WITH A SHOTGUN BLAST M

achine Head have always had a strange relationship with their audience. Specifically, their fanbase has frequently insisted on reducing the band’s career to the context of a solitary record. Whereas the majority of influential metal bands have had the good fortune to have their legacy established over a series of albums, Machine Head’s work has always mysteriously been defined in relation to a specific album. Granted, it hasn’t always been the same album, but it has only ever been one.

The most recent example has been The Blackening.

Released in 2007 to almost universal critical acclaim, the band’s sixth album is a legitimate contender for the most acclaimed metal album of the past decade. It broke through to the Top 20 in Australia, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium and Sweden and managed to outsell the band’s prior album within two weeks of release. It secured a Grammy nomination in 2008 while Metal Hammer Magazine later declared it Album of the Decade.

“It was a fucking blur,” vocalist and guitarist Robb Flynn laughs. “The first year of that album was just a fucking blur. I mean, I’d just had my second son – and three weeks later I went on tour for three years. I don’t even know if I soaked all the success in when it happened. I don’t think it was until around the time of the Grammy’s that it really hit me – where I was like, ‘Fuck, I’m at the Grammy’s? That’s fucking Tina Turner up on stage…This is a whole different level here!’

“You know, we didn’t win [the band eventually losing out to Slayer], but the sheer concept of even being there was just a whole new level of accomplishment for the band,” the guitarist reflects incredulously. “To have been nominated and surrounded and recognised by musicians who had been making music for fucking 50 - something years was just like ‘Wow – what the fuck is going on here?’ It was pretty cool.”

Since that point, all discussions of Machine Head’s work have been framed within the context of The Blackening.

There have been a number of variations on the theme – from the idea of a band releasing one of their most critically and commercial successful albums in their fifteenth year to the simple curiosity regarding how they would follow it – but each discussion has merely emphasised the belief that Machine Head’s career should be divided into two categories: pre- and post-Blackening.

“For the last six months of our touring cycle for The Blackening, all we heard from anyone and everyone we spoke to was, ‘How are you ever going to top The Blackening’?” Flynn laughs. “We knew before we even began writing this next record that it was a beautiful moment – like, an incredibly beautiful, powerful moment in our careers – and that we were never going to recapture it.

We knew that we just had to create another great moment for ourselves.”

All of which is somewhat understandable – except it’s something Machine Head have been dealing with for practically their entire history as a band. Originally, it was their 1994 debut album Burn My Eyes. A landmark record

16

for the development of modern heavy metal, Burn My Eyes’ precision synthesis of hardcore sensibilities and thrash metal musicianship simultaneously laid the foundation for both metalcore and nu-metal. Until 2003, it was considered Machine Head’s sole classic record.

“I don’t know. I feel, ever since the first album, we’ve been way outside what the regular metal world was doing,” Flynn reflects. “We had a lot of people who loved it, yeah, but we had a lot of people who hated it too. We were blending hardcore and hip hop into metal and thrash and we didn’t feel even then that we fit in or knew what was going on.

In some ways, we rode that outer rim for so long that we started blocking out the outside world.”

Alternatively, there was controversial third album The Burning Red. Released in 1999, the band’s third album saw Machine Head experiment with elements of pop, hip hop and rock and utterly divide their fanbase in the process.

Recorded with then-ubiquitous producer Ross Robinson (Korn, Slipknot, Fear Factory), the album was perceived by detractors as a concentrated attempt to breakthrough to the mainstream by appealing to the then-popular nu-metal phenomenon.

urther and reached out with feel we could have gone a lot further it than we did.

“With every record since, I think that’s what we’ve really tried to do. Sometimes it’s worked better for the records and sometimes it’s worked worse for the records, but we’ve always tried to expand where we were and not get boxed into a corner. That was always the big fear for us – that idea of getting boxed into a corner we would never get out of.

You know, each time we tried something, it expanded our horizons and allowed us to do the records we did later.

“You know, by doing melodic songs on The Burning Red, it allowed us to do songs like Descend The Shades Of Night on [2003 album] Through The Ashes Of Empires, which allowed us to do songs like Halo on The Blackening,” the frontman elaborates. “Each piece of the puzzle kind of leads to the next, if you know what I mean. If we hadn’t taken those risks on The Burning Red, people never would have heard The Blackening.”

It’s a particular injustice to limit the band’s work to a single album because it’s only through their discography that one comes to recognise their accomplishments as a band.

Taken as a whole, Machine Head’s catalogue encompasses

“...EVER SINCE THE FIRST ALBUM, WE’VE BEEN WAY OUTSIDE WHAT THE REGULAR METAL WORLD WAS DOING.” “I love that album. It’s still our second-biggest record,” Flynn says with a laugh. “To me, the melodic risks that we took – that was the huge thing on that record. Songs like The Burning Red, songs like Silver, even the hooks in a song like From This Day – those melodic bits that weren’t really there before that album. It’s a criminally overlooked aspect of that record because, by doing those sorts of songs, it allowed us to open up our sound and do some of the songs we’d do on other albums.”

It’s something every band has to deal with to some degree but it seems particularly unfair in the case of Machine Head – largely because it’s difficult to think of a contemporary metal band with a more comprehensive or cohesive discography. Far from a series of unrelated releases and experiments, Machine Head’s catalogue actually represents an identifiably evolutionary arc – each release a reaction to and development of the concepts and ideas pioneered by its predecessor.

“Beginning with The Burning Red, I think we found a really good groove as a band,” Flynn reflects of the band’s development. “You know, with every record we’ve done, we’ve tried to avoid making the same record over again. I think, when we made our second record [1997’s The More Things Change], we sold ourselves short. While a lot of people really like that record – and I really like that record – I

a stunning array of stylistic experiments – from the protometalcore of Burn My Eyes’ Davidian and the rap-metal of The Burning Red’s From This Day through to the prog-metal influences of The Blackening.

If nothing else, such an exercise forces one to acknowledge the sheer spine behind the band’s work. Machine Head have stumbled upon several highly successful formulas throughout their career, and without exception, discarded each one in favour of pursuing frightful new fascinations.

Robb Flynn readily admits that the release of each record brings with it new fears and concerns for the band. The Blackening was almost rewritten entirely prior to release.

“Oh, totally. There’s fear about it all. When The Blackening was released, there was a definite sense of, ‘Well, I hope people get it’. Even we had our doubts. We tried to rewrite half the songs before we recorded the album,” the guitarist laughs. “We thought we’d disappeared up our own asses so we tried to go back and trim the fat – and we just couldn’t do it. It just didn’t work. We kind of just decided it felt right and decided to go for it.”

Unto The Locust is perhaps the best example. Following what is almost unarguably their most successful record, Machine Head’s seventh album tears off in a different direction on almost every track. There are gnarled, technically-demanding experiments in prog-metal psychosis and stripped-back, soul-baring acoustic epics.

So demanding was the record’s process, it actually forced Robb Flynn to seek out both vocal and guitar lessons prior to recording.

“I can’t really pinpoint one specific thing that scares me about this album but, if I had to, I’d say it’s that attitude of just deciding to go for it,” Flynn says of the band’s new record. “You know, if we got goosebumps, it stayed. You listen to a song like Darkness Within – that’s a fucking leftfield jam, man. It’s not what we normally do. There’s a little bit of you that goes, ‘Fuck, is that way too out there?’ but you just have to trust it and go with it.

“Ultimately, whether this album tops The Blackening or becomes something else entirely is not up to us – but we can stand there and say that we challenged ourselves and tried something different. The rest is up to the Gods.”

WHO: Machine Head WHAT: Unto The Locust (Roadrunner Records) WHERE & WHEN: Soundwave 2012

BACK TO SCHOOL

A vocalist for nearly 20 years, Robb Flynn nevertheless decided to go back and learn singing for new album Unto The Locust. Why? “Yeah, 19 years into my singing career I went and got a singing lesson,” Flynn laughs. “You know, I never wanted singing lessons – or guitar lessons, for that matter. I wanted to carve my own path. I didn’t want the influence of some other style coming into what I was doing. I hated the way conservatory guitarists would play. It always sounded very weird to me. I did it, too. I made my own style. I carved my own path.

“At some point along the way, I started doing vocal warmups before shows but that was about as far as I got with formal singing. Recently, though, I’d done a cover of Iron Maiden’s Hallowed Be Thy Name and a cover of Black Sabbath’s Die Young – both very hard songs to sing, very high-pitched – and it really surprised me that I could sing that high. It surprised me. I kind of went, ‘Man, I could do this!’ – but I could only do it sometimes and other times it just wouldn’t work. I was determined to own it. I was determined to kill it.

“So, I went to lessons. Four times over ten months, I flew to New York for a couple of three hour lessons,” the guitarist explains. “It really became about unlearning. You know, I had to rid myself of my bad habits. It was a really vulnerable experience to be honest. It turned out to be a really great place to write the album from though. You don’t sit there going, ‘Dude, I’m the guy who wrote The Blackening, you’re sitting there going, ‘Man, I can’t believe I didn’t know all this shit!’”

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NEVER THE COWARD The Cat marks BEN SALTER’s first recorded foray as a solo artist, yet there is one hell of a legacy behind its recording. He speaks to BRENDAN TELFORD about the sometimes harrowing journey of putting yourself in the naked spotlight.

B

en Salter is a busy man. Having graced the Brisbane music scene with his presence for over 15 years, first as frontman of Giants Of Science and then in a variety of other guises (The Gin Club, The Young Liberals, The Wilson Pickers, just to name a few), every musical coat he puts on is emblazoned with his overt zeal for the art form, regardless of the genre or purpose of the outfit. Yet it is under his own name, in the spotlight on his own, that Salter has been able to strip bare the various layers to truly showcase the wry, emotive songwriting that he has brandished brazenly for the majority of his musical career. It is in this format that he gets to truly take ownership of the blood, sweat and tears that are poured into the craft – and even with that wealth of shared experience, it can still be a daunting thought.

“Everything I’ve been a part of has been a part of

me, but in practical terms, a band is a band. It truly is, and always should be, a sum of its parts,” Salter moderates. “I’ve been doing this sporadic solo thing since I arrived in Brisbane in 1997. The Gin Club started as an outlet for my solo stuff, before others came into the mix and it rolled forth. And some of the songs from that time didn’t fit into what we saw then as The Gin Club aesthetic.

The Coward for example, it’s so old that it was originally called Yellow before that Coldplay song reared its ugly head and I had to change it! So a lot of the solo songs were songs that kind of got left behind that I still loved, and I took them on again.”

When Salter decided it was time to put some songs down on tape, it wasn’t as simple as hitting record.

“I didn’t have all that much stuff, I really didn’t,” he asserts. “I don’t write a lot of songs. With The Young Liberals we write loads because that is the spirit of the band – we never go in with written songs ever, we write down a list of song titles, we write a riff, get drunk, play the riff over and over again, then sign off on it and go to the next one, it’s deliberately throwaway. So I thought I would have loads of songs lying around – turns out there were fewer than I thought…”

With the process being a difficult one, Salter made sure that he had people with the know-how to get things done behind the mixing desk.

“I travelled down to Havilah, Gareth [Liddiard – The Drones]’s studio [in rural Victoria], and we also had Robert [Cranny] on board,” he continues. “When I sent them the demos I was nervous because I only had about 17 finished songs and a handful of ideas, after all these years! But these guys came in handy because they didn’t baulk at all, they were quick to say which one we should record and which one we left alone.

As it turned out we only recorded one more song than what is on the finished album, so they knew what they were doing – even though I didn’t make it easy on them…”

That included some very interesting instrumentation choices.

“I have fallen in love with the idea of chaotic music, and whilst I wasn’t ready to go in and play around with what I had, to improvise, I could inject it with that element of chaos,” Salter admits. “And it came from watching television of all things, that allowed it to all come to fruition. I saw a Scott Walker documentary where Walker came in on one recording and insisted that the sax not follow the vocal melody, and six months later I was watching Spicks & Specks and saw this guy doing covers playing Swedish bagpipes, a hurdy gurdy, and all these weird flutes. It all hit me then, so I got that guy (Peter Novotnik), and Julien Wilson (alto/tenor saxophone), and Tom [Lyncoln – The Nation Blue/Harmony) and Joel [Silbersher – Hoss, Tex Perkins & The Dark Horses], and roped them all in, but told them that they didn’t get to hear the songs, not to even bother asking about the songs, here are the chords I want, you get three takes and off you go. Straight away I was listening and I thought, ‘Holy shit, this is fucking amazing!’ I pissed them right off, though.”

Salter is renowned for his opinionated outlook, and seeing as it was his proverbial head on the chopping block over The Cat , these opinions were incredibly strong.

“Robert and I have a lot in common in terms of music and what we like,” he tells. “So I made it very clear that I didn’t want it to sound like every other record where a guy has an acoustic guitar, I wanted it to represent me more fully than that ideal. I really wanted to fuck with it, introduce this kind of spontaneity. But that could have spiralled out of control, so the dynamic between Robert, Gareth and I was perfect. Everyone was bringing their experience to the table, and they are two guys that I trust implicitly, which was so important because whilst I knew what I wanted I was also terribly insecure. There are so many variables in how you can approach a song that you can become paralysed. For example, I can be pretty pig-headed and a control freak, and I could just have easily turned into an arsehole, spat the dummy and got nothing done. Instead, for example I didn’t want to record The Mailbox Song or The Coward, I was bloody sick of those songs. Robert basically said to me, ‘You’re fucking crazy, these songs are really good, they’re going on the album!’ And after listening back on the initial recordings, it’s funny because you live with these songs and you play them so many times, but you need to listen to them from the perspective of people you trust. They are great, and I’m glad that they insisted that they stay.”

Working with Liddiard not only taught Salter things about himself, but opened up a new avenue of admiration for his contemporary hero. “Whilst Robert was there for all the interesting recordings and ideas stage, I went back down to Havilah a couple of times to mix it with Gareth. He is such a good producer – I didn’t know what to expect, I thought he might be a little short tempered because I can be a bit of an arse, but he was so patient and even-handed, he really guided me through it. It was incredible, so much more than I could have dreamed of. He never stopped liking the songs – I gave up on the whole thing at one stage, I never wanted to hear the bloody songs ever again, and yet he would sit at ProTools for hours on end. It’s not like I was paying him heaps of money either, so that was an encouraging sign.”

WHO: Ben Salter WHAT: The Cat (MGM) WHERE & WHEN: Sol Bar, Maroochydore Thursday Sep 22, The Zoo Friday Sep 23, The Spotted Cow, Toowoomba Saturday Sep 24

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DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE Melbourne’s ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI have been confounding audiences nationally and internationally for over a decade. Ahead of their latest Australian tour, MATT O’NEILL speaks to multi-instrumentalist KELLIE SUTHERLAND about the band’s unique career to date.

A

rchitecture In Helsinki have never been an easy band to understand. For over a decade, their every move has flown in the face of both expectations surrounding their style of music and assumptions regarding their own identity as a band. Originally a loose confederation of art students and musicians oscillating around singer-songwriter Cameron Bird, Architecture In Helsinki have gradually evolved over the course of their career into an almost unclassifiable entity.

“We’re never really satisfied,” multi-instrumentalist Kellie Sutherland explains of the band’s modus operandi. “As much as I can say, ‘I really love this album’, there’s always going to be something else for us to work on. I mean, we make albums but we also do our live shows – which are super important to us creatively. It fulfils you in ways that making an album doesn’t and it’s the kind of thing that’s always changing and always improving. We’re always working on something different.”

The band was originally assembled in the late-90s to flesh out the songs of de facto frontman Bird. Throughout the project’s infancy, different members would be spontaneously added to the group – gradually altering the nature of its mission.

Pivotal former member and producer James Cecil met Bird at art school while Sutherland was invited to play clarinet for the band upon running into the band’s frontman at a party.

were picked up along the way – and creative artists who wanted to make some music.

“You know, we were playing at our local pub for years before we actually thought about recording,” the multi-instrumentalist laughs. “When we finally got around to it, we started and then we scrapped it and then we started again and scrapped it again.

It does surprise me that we’re still together – but that’s the reason why. We didn’t have any high ambitions. Our growth together, as friends and creative individuals, has been very gradual.”

WHO: Architecture In Helsinki WHAT: Moment Bends (Modular/Universal) WHERE & WHEN: Tivoli Sunday Sep 25

The group’s eventual debut album, 2003’s Fingers Crossed, was somewhat reflective of their unorthodox formation. A technicolour spree of electronically-blasted pop music and more elaborate and experimental fare, the album’s instrumental complexion was equally informed by aspects of rock, dance.

“The way we make music now is very different to how we made music on our first album. Or, well, not different – but we know a lot more as musicians. At the time, we were kind of experimenting, really,” Sutherland remembers. “None of us had ever made an album before we made our first album as Architecture In Helsinki. I look at the songs and I love the songs but I can look at the album and kind of rip it apart in terms of production. I’m not disappointed by it, though.

“I sort of look at our whole time together as a band as a form of growth, really,” Sutherland goes on to muse. “I’m not really disappointed with anything we’ve ever done. I just see every individual thing we’ve done as a step in the process to where we are at right now. That’s not to say that this is it or that our current album is definitive or anything like that. It’s just the next step. Every album and live show is a bit of an experiment.”

Speaking purely in musical terms, the band’s discography has always been framed by commentators in terms of their relationship to pop music. 2005 sophomore record In Case We Die was praised internationally for streamlining the band’s brash, experimental approach into more manageable pop songs while 2007’s Places Like This found the band dealing with criticism for streamlining overly much. It’s always been an ongoing debate between the two facets of the band’s work.

“I think that, for us as a band, the way that we are as musicians is not that common,” Sutherland considers. “More people are focussed on being musos or having a sound that’s so specifically theirs that they can replicate really easily because that’s their natural voice. Our natural voice is really multi-faceted.

How each album, each song, each phrase in each song takes shape is informed by any number of different factors.”

Speaking more broadly, the band’s career has always embodied an uneasy relationship between the expected commerce of a popular band’s career and an experimental band’s individual need for artistic freedom. Despite having toured and performed throughout Australia and the US alongside legendary names like Death Cab For Cutie and The Presets, Architecture In Helsinki refuse to settle comfortably into the expectations of the commercial stratosphere.

“We’re sort of more artists that make music than musicians, if you can make that distinction,” the multi-instrumentalist elaborates.

“On a personal level, I reject ideas like making an album once every two years and tour each of them for precisely nine months.

Where is the time for you to grow and explore as an artist if you’re constantly making records or constantly playing shows?

You know, I’m not the sort to make plans or repeat myself.”

Nowhere is this sense of contradiction more evident than on Moment Bends, the band’s most recent album and arguably their most streamlined collection of work to date. Furthermore, the record was released on Modular – the definitive heavyweight label of their genre. Still, the record’s inception immediately contradicts any presumptions of commercialisation or streamlining.

“It did take a pretty long time. I think a lot of the reason comes down to the fact that we recorded it in our own studio,” Sutherland says of the album – recorded and produced by the band themselves and released some four years after their last album. “It took a long time because we had our own space and that allowed us to experiment with lots of different ways of working, of personnel, of scheduling. We were just exploring all our options.”

This is largely what makes the band such an unclassifiable entity – they are constantly subverting the expectations surrounding both their music and their methods as a band. As they’ve become more commercially successful and internationally respected, their work has actually become less conventional and more independent.

Musically alone, they’ve shifted their sound with every release in their catalogue. They simply don’t sit still long enough to be categorised.

“I guess I am kind of surprised that we’re still around,” Sutherland laughs. “We never set out initially to be a band, make an album, whatever. We never said we were going to make a single and get it on triple j or that we were going to tour America. We didn’t set out like that. We set out as a bunch of friends – or people who

19

FLIGHT PATTERNS JOSH PYKE’s reputation in Australian music is just about as good as it gets.

With the release of his third album Only Sparrows, the singer-songwriter known for his acoustic storybook style explains to TYLER MCLOUGHLAN why he needed to shake himself up.

a positive notion even though it’s talking about a big force blowing you away. It’s forcing the flight and to me flight represents freedom and so it’s saying sometimes when you’re facing adversity, you’re forced in a new direction and that can be a really positive thing.

“The last two albums – I absolutely love them and I’m very proud of them – but they’re very autobiographical and I didn’t want to do that again. I wanted to push myself in a different direction and really confront the challenge of writing songs that people would still feel were intimate and that they could relate to their own lives but draw the stories from a broader range of influences. So instead of writing about myself and my own experiences, I was trying to write about ideas that were inspired by a painting or a book that I’d read, or a trip that I’d taken or a snippet of conversation that I’d heard from someone on the train or whatever… So that was the main challenge and the main difference and I found it really creatively quite liberating.”

A trip to America allowed Pyke to address this challenge and further confront his creative process.

“I went through a really massive crisis of confidence about half way through writing for this record where I just started to question everything,” he continues, “and I think it’s ‘cause I’d written a lot of the songs touring Chimney’s [Afire] and then I’d had quite a big break from them from doing Basement Birds and everything. When I came back to them I had lost a lot of perspective and I just felt a bit lost really.”

T

he growth of Josh Pyke since the release of his sophomore album Chimney’s Afire in 2008 is plain from the opening sound of his new album Only Sparrows. For starters, it’s a beat instead of the expected spritely acoustic guitar – and secondly, the beat is Pyke’s voice in beatbox style. Though it stands alone for merely the ten-second introduction before moving behind the music, its significance points to a major shift in the writing and recording process for Pyke, despite him already having a winning formula.

“I think Clovis’ Son is a good indication in a broad sense of what I was trying to accomplish on this album… I did want it to be quite an ear-catching opening track and make people prick up their ears and go, ‘Oh right – here we go, something a bit different’,” he explains.

The track was inspired by Pyke’s fascination with a

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painting in the Gallery of New South Wales referencing the French monarch who was supposedly betrayed by his two sons. Finding this to be historically inaccurate, he started contemplating how truth tends to change over time relative to circumstance, providing a fitting symbol of how his own musical truth was changing, which then led him to the album’s title.

“It’s a paraphrasing of a line in that song which says we are only ever little sparrows on a mountainside,” he says of Only Sparrows. “So I guess it’s the idea that we’re little cogs in a big machine and that’s something that I was really feeling. At the point in my life when I was writing this record I was feeling pretty little. I was feeling like I was a little influence; I felt like I had very little influence on the world. Then the second line of that phrase says then the wind came up and blew away her footing and forced her into flight, and for me that’s quite

The album’s lead single No One Wants A Lover highlights his New York self-confrontation with the lyrics: “I think I needed to feel a distraction/ And I’d never seen the January snow/ Sometimes it’s good to feel lost and it’s good to be alone.”

“It’s a typical art imitating life song,” he explains, “because the song is about me trying to shake up my relationship with what I create as a creative person. It’s not about a relationship between people. As a creative person I have a relationship with songs and that process, and at some point in the last year I felt like I really needed to shake that process up, so the metaphor of a lover and a city is actually talking about me and songs and me and my creative process. So I was dwelling on those things and that inspired me to go to New York and then of course I ended up bloody writing a song about exactly what I was kind of struggling against, which is always the way,” he says with a wry chuckle.

Cue producer Wayne Connolly, whom Pyke thanks in his liner notes for getting him back on

track, and a new band approach inspired by his collaborative Basement Birds experience.

“I found it really hard at first but then as we got into the pre-production processes like rehearsing these songs up with the band, it was all sounding so good and the guys were doing such a great job that I really did find it quite liberating. It let me be part of a band; it let me focus on what I do best which is singing and playing guitar. I’ve never been a great bass player or drummer or anything like that,” he admits frankly, referring to his prior habit of playing most instruments on his albums. “I’ve really enjoyed dabbling with that stuff in the past but it was amazing to hear people who are really excellent at their craft playing to my songs and letting them shine.”

Considering the internal creative conflict tackled and won, Pyke is understandably happy with the outcome.

“I’m stoked,” he admits. “I don’t listen to my own music but I got in the car this morning and the CD was in the car and it turned onto Follow Me Down and I was listening to it for about 15 seconds before I realised it was my song, and I was listening to it going, ‘Oh this is great, what is this?’ And then when I heard my voice I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me!’” he laughs without any awkwardness. “I feel really proud of it and I feel relieved that it’s turned out as well as I had hoped that it would.”

Currently on the road for an 11-date national tour, Pyke earlier took the time to showcase Only Sparrows in a series of intimate ‘fans first’ dates, donating the proceeds to the Indigenous Literacy Fund for whom he is an ambassador.

“The reality is, and I never lose sight of this, the only reason that I have a career as a musician is because people support it and come to shows and buy the records.

So before heading into the bigger venues where I knew that I wouldn’t have a chance to come out and say hello to the crowd and all that, I really wanted to play smaller shows so that I could say thank you to the people that have been supportive of me my whole career – that’s really why I wanted to do it. And I was really happy to do it.”

WHO: Josh Pyke WHAT: Only Sparrows (Ivy League) WHERE & WHEN: The Northern, Byron Bay Thursday Sep 22, Coolangatta Hotel Friday Sep 23, The Hi-Fi Saturday Sep 24

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PROMISES, PROMISES It’s hard to avoid KIMBRA right now and, really, who would want to?

She is spreading her wares following the release of her debut album Vows and BEN PREECE gets the lowdown on her whirlwind journey to date.

21, but Kimbra has taught herself with assistance from a myriad of influences from the vocal legends such as Jeff Buckley or Nina Simone to the likes of Prince, Bjork and even Jannelle Monae. But as she explains it, it wasn’t the overnight experience it seems from the outside.

“I was 17 and started work with Franc and I guess we focussed on development rather than going straight in and recording the album. I had a lot of songs but they weren’t necessarily there in terms of sound, and they were scattered with ideas so we spent a lot of time analysing what I wanted to do and lyrically what I wanted to say. So that takes time and then through those threeand-a-half years, I took a writing trip to America for some time and then worked on a lot of the album by myself at home. It was a really varied working process – M-Phazes came on board for the very last stage of the album, I guess, to help me finish things off and emphasise the bottom end and help just to bring life to some of the rhythm section, which was perhaps something I wanted a little more of on the last few tracks of the album.

“When I moved to Melbourne, I had a lot of songs that I had written back in New Zealand but I really wanted to start afresh and draw from the experiences I have here in Melbourne,” she explains carefully. “Settle Down and the very last track The Build Up were written back in New Zealand so there’s a couple of old ones that made it on.

But yeah, most of it was written here and there would be about 50 or 60 songs that we had to cull down, but it did become quite clear which ones were the standout from the early stage - melodically the most powerful.”

S

he needs no introduction to Australian music fans – Kimbra is simply everywhere right now. Be it the string of radio singles that have seeped into our very consciousness or the high-profile guest spots with the likes of Miami Horror and, of course, on that Gotye track. Things are looking pretty sweet for the New Zealand-bred, Melbourne-based songstress and the set-up for the release of her debut album Vows couldn’t be better.

For Kimbra though, all of this notoriety is a culmination of a lifetime spent eying the spotlight, wanting to be a star, while the album itself she says, was three-and-a half-years in the making.

“Cathartic would be the best word to use as it’s been a long time coming,” she reveals. “I’ve had to internalise the songs and not share them with many people so it feels really great to finally share them and have people

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experience them for themselves rather than explain what the album will be like. I spent such a long time working on it that I’ve prepared myself for it and also to be busy. It all feels like it’s moving naturally, it doesn’t feel rushed or anything. It’s definitely always been what I’ve wanted to and I started out quite young – I was actually gigging in New Zealand when I was about 14. It was at that point that I knew that was what I wanted to do but I guess I’ve been blessed to get the opportunity to do it professionally and be supported to record this album.”

Vows is an eclectic journey of sonic variation that displays Kimbra’s ambitious nature loudly and proudly. It was selfproduced with the assistance of Francois Tetaz (Gotye, Bertie Blackman, Sally Seltmann) as well as Australian urban export M-Phazes. The album was recorded at home and in studios all over and presents Kimbra’s view on life and love. Not easy for someone who is still only

Perhaps a perfectionist with production, one of the true stand-out points of Vows is the songwriting.

Kimbra clearly has quite the prowess for a pop melody and, occasionally with Tetaz’s help, has managed to craft an album brimming with diversity and charm.

“I definitely hear a lot of my songs in my head, often with string arrangements and horn parts, but obviously because I can’t translate that, I sing the songs out when I’m writing,” Kimbra laughs. “I’ll sing all the parts and record them into ProTools. Another way is just to write something on the guitar but now I’m feeling more confident on ProTools I can really get those vocal arrangements across a lot easier. It’s very different for every song, I wouldn’t say there’s one method I use, it just all depends on what the song asks for.

“Even when I was 16, one of the ways I tried to change my songwriting was to use layers. My teacher gave me an eight-track to use and it was something of an epiphany. So when it came to working with Franc Tetatz,

vocals became such a strong part of what we were doing and even in the live band setting, it’s still a big part of what we do – to have vocal sampling live on stage. It’s a way to use my voice as more than a voice and actually an instrument. Learning from singers like Bjork or Jeff Buckley, the way you colour your voice can be so dynamic, it can be just like a saxophone or a tuba or something. It’s just all about the way you resonate. One of the greatest things I took away from Franc though was to view your album like a movie – you’ve got the opening scene, the climax and the rolling out of the credits. It’s a real movement and a journey and because he’s worked on the likes of Wolf Creek, he knows how it all plays out.”

The album has the singles (Settle Down, Cameo Lover, Good Intent), the breezy pop (Two Way Street), the big Prince-esque ballads (Old Flame, Withdraw) and a nod to Nina Simone (Plain Gold Ring) but Kimbra’s focus on lyrics throughout shouldn’t be ignored.

“It’s important to be honest and truthful in anything I say,” she explains. “Of course there are exaggerated emotions on there and moments that perhaps aren’t literally from personally experiences. It’s important that people are connecting with a real person. My favourites change every few months but Limbo is the one I like now – I produced and arranged that one all myself and I feel quite proud of being able to do something like that. It also reflects some of the more recent influences I’ve had like Dirty Projectors.

It has interested rhythms that I’d like to listen to.”

And now finally comes the time for headline shows. She’s appeared on most festival bills in the country but Kimbra simply cannot wait to stretch her wings in her own show.

“I’m excited to share the whole album with people and really looking forward to being able to play headline shows and play not only the singles but also the more intimate moments of the record. That’s the hardest part, getting people really into those moments – they have the album at home and experiencing those songs when you actually know them is much more of an experience.

It will be good to show the ballads on the album also which you can’t do much when you’re on a festival bill.”

WHO: Kimbra WHAT: Vows (Warner) WHERE & WHEN: Spiegeltent Friday Sep 23

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NEW NIGHTMARE His nightmares have fuelled hits across five decades and like every good slasher movie, ALICE COOPER isn’t short of sequels.

TRISTAN BROOMHALL cakes on the mascara to get his Wayne’s World moment with shock rock royalty.

single-handedly creating shock rock. He’s quick to reminisce though how things were simpler in the 70s.

“In some ways you could get away with so much more then, because everything wasn’t so politically correct,” he recalls. “I always tell people I’m politically incoherent, so I don’t have to be politically correct. Think about it, would they be able to make Blazing Saddles now? Not at all – and it was a giant hit in the 70s and nobody thought anything about it because everybody got insulted in it.”

2011 sees Furnier updating his nightmarish vision with a new opus and follow up to that iconic debut.

“WE’RE ROAD RATS – THAT’S WHAT WE DO. THIS SHOW THAT I’M DOING NOW IS PROBABLY THE BEST BAND I’VE EVER HAD.” “We weren’t even planning to do an album,” he says.

“I got together with Bob Ezrin – who produced the original Welcome To My Nightmare – and all of a sudden we’d started writing songs and the next thing you know I thought, ‘Why shouldn’t Alice have another nightmare? Let’s make a part two!’ We decided what Alice’s nightmares would be 35 years later. It ends up being one of the five best albums I’ve done.”

There are some interesting personalities joining in on Alice’s nightmares, including a peculiar choice to play the devil in What Baby Wants.

T

here are few artists who can claim longevity on the scale that Alice Cooper has and even fewer without bowing to outside pressures and ‘toning down’ their art, but Cooper, born Vincent Furnier, has carved himself out a career exploiting our darkest nightmares and devilish desires.

His stage antics, uncompromising showmanship and uncanny ability to pen some of the most unexpected hits have all contributed to a career that’s spanned over 40 years. He’s still on the road and bringing his latest nightmares to Australian stages, celebrating the release of new album Welcome 2 My Nightmare.

The original Welcome To My Nightmare was a tearaway hit in 1975, marking the point that he split with his hugely successful band and, at the time, Furnier was taking a huge gamble going it alone.

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“The odd thing about it was that the scariest thing you can do is have a band like Alice Cooper – the original band – and have so many hit albums in a row and then step away from the band and do a solo project. It didn’t work for Mick Jagger, it probably wouldn’t have worked for Freddie Mercury,” Furnier explains. “The problem was that the band and myself, who are still best of friends and were even best of friends then, just couldn’t see eye to eye on what was next after [1973 album] Billion Dollar Babies. It was just one of those things where I wanted to make it more theatrical and I think they just wanted to back off from the theatrics.

On the next project I said, ‘Guys, everyone wants to do their own projects, I’m going to do my own’.”

The album was a hit and since those early days if there’s one thing that Furnier gets the most credit for, it’s almost

“Bob and I write 99 per cent of everything,” Furnier continues. “We sit down and just basically do most of the writing ‘cause he brings out the worst in me and I try to bring out the worst in him. Then we start colouring it, we start deciding things like if we were going to have a moment where the devil wants Alice’s soul in the nightmare, who would play the devil?

“Well, we start thinking Christopher Lee would be good, or Vincent Price was great in the original one, then we’d say let’s go totally opposite – how about Ke$ha? Which is just so off the wall, but it’s a perfect match. First of all Ke$ha sort of represents a disco thing and Alice hates disco, so she would be a great devil. On the other hand of it, Ke$ha would rather be a rock’n’roll singer in real life than a diva. So I think we’re pushing her towards getting a band rather than a review, but she does a great job.”

HOWEVER, it just isn’t an Alice Cooper album without a memorable ballad and Furnier has bared his sensitive

side and had more tearjerkers than any other hardrocker on the planet. The lighters in the air moment on the new album is Something To Remember Me By. “Dick Wagner and I wrote Only Women Bleed, You And Me, I Never Cry and How You Gonna See Me Now, which are the four biggest ballads I’ve ever had,” Furnier explains.

“This is a song that we wrote in probably 1975 and every time that we tried to do this song, I really didn’t have the voice to sing. I said, ‘I’m not going to do this song until I can sing it better than Dick Wagner’ – and Dick Wagner’s got a great voice. So finally, I got my voice in shape and I played it for Bob and Bob said, ‘I love this song.’ I said, ‘Great, we’ll put it in after Ghouls Gone Wild’ which is sort of an insane 50s/60s beach party song. You know, Alice will fall in love with one of the zombie beach babes and we’ll have this tender song of him singing to this ghoul. It is one of the prettiest songs that Wagner and I have written.”

Welcome 2 My Nightmare also presented Furnier with opportunities to work again with some of the musicians he’s played with over the years, most notably Steve Hunter, who played on the original …Nightmare.

“You know, if Dick Wagner were physically well I’d have him in the band too ‘cause they’re just two of the best guitar players in the world,” Furnier enthuses. “Every time I see Steven Tyler he asks me how the dynamic duo are and he means Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter.

“Steve Hunter just plays his butt off on this album and he’s still one of the best live guitarists there is. I said to him after the recording, ‘I don’t know how you feel about touring, but I would love to put you in the band’. He says, ‘I ain’t been out on the road for a long time, I’d love to!’”

If you’ve experienced an Alice Cooper show you’d know that it’s a feat of theatrical rock extravagance. So how much work goes into getting it up and running every tour?

“It’s a machine, we tour every single year; we go out and play a hundred cities every year,” Furnier tells.

“We go from Moscow to Perth, we go all over the world and every year we change the show into a new show.

We’re road rats – that’s what we do. This show that I’m doing now is probably the best band I’ve ever had.”

WHO: Alice Cooper WHAT: Welcome 2 My Nightmare (Sony) WHERE & WHEN: Brisbane Convention Centre Saturday Sep 24

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PANIC! AT THE DISCO

First they infected us with A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, then they captivated us with Pretty. Odd. and now it’s Panic At The Disco’s turn to remind us why we fell in love with them in the first place. With Vices & Virtues, their first album as a duo, frontman/multi-instrumentalist Brendon Urie and drummer/percussionist Spencer Smith have proven that their best ideas are just starting to get realized. The record not only marks the beginning a new era for this Grammy-nominated, Las Vegas-based rock act but in many ways also rings in a new period of musical and emotional growth that shows no signs of subsiding. Vices & Virtues effortlessly bridges the gap between the energetic pop anthems of A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out and the psychedelic leanings of Pretty. Odd. while simultaneously showing a progression that’s evident in everything from the album’s arrangements to its instrumentation; it shows a new side of the band without sacrificing the identity that they’ve worked so hard to establish over the past seven years. Panic! At The Disco have never been the easy to categorize and Vices & Virtues continues in that tradition — something the band couldn’t be more thrilled about.

Since forming in 2003, All Time Low have become one of the biggest pop-punk bands to emerge on the scene, building a grassroots following of die-hard fans with very little radio airplay and a touring ethic that would rival roadweary vets like Green Day. Their profile is only going to rise with the recent release of their stellar fourth album Dirty Work – a 12-track mix of hard-charging anthems and sugar-shot rockers that are poised to dominate house parties and joyrides this summer. What’s more, it shows off just how diverse All Time Low’s influences are; the track Under A Paper Moon was inspired by an Ella Fitzgerald song and Just The Way I’m Not is the band’s homage to Def Leppard classic stadium rockers. They didn’t lock themselves away to record Dirty Work – All Time Low spent a gruelling two years making the album, in between brief breaks from their non-stop touring schedule (which has included top slots at Warped Tour in 2007, Bamboozle in 2010, and festival billings with their heroes Blink-182). The band’s diversity and determination will see the boys go far.

YELLOWCARD

STORY OF THE YEAR

FACE TO FACE

THE DAMNED THINGS

SET YOUR GOALS

FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND

HELLOGOODBYE

DRUGS

Sometimes stepping away from something can remind how much you love it. Yellowcard’s hiatus for the past few years was in no way an ending for the group, but rather a pause that’s revived the band’s passion for their music. The writing process for the group’s energized new album, When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes, lasted for the better part of 2010. The band members sent demos and song ideas back and forth via email, and flew to each other’s homes in Seattle, Los Angeles and Phoenix to expand those initial thoughts. The pieces slowly began falling into place and the record came about naturally, without any real plan besides making good music the band was excited about.

The final album’s ten songs both recall what fans love best about Yellowcard and evolve their music forward. Many of the lyrics deal with what’s happened to the musicians over the past few years. It’s about looking ahead, rather than backward, and being able to move on. That message of forward motion isn’t just in the album’s lyrics. It’s something Yellowcard is embodying as a group as they unleash their fifth and arguably finest album.

In the five years Bay Area pop-punk band Set Your Goals have existed, they’ve already achieved what most bands only dream about: toured the world, gained huge respect from their peers and achieved massive credibility among their wide-spread legion of fans. So what exactly separates Set Your Goals from all the other bands? For one, they have no gimmicks. They don’t need to wear flashy neon or sing about getting wasted to melt their listeners’ faces. Instead, they channel positivity through their lyrics and let the music speak for itself. They’re changing the game and blazing trails with their unique style that’s influenced by ‘90s skate punk and melodic hardcore. No trendy haircuts or cheesy breakdowns here, just straight up head bobbling pop-punk like it’s never been played. Avoiding the sophomore slump like it was the plague, Set Your Goals came out guns-ablazing on second album, This Will Be The Death Of Us, the follow-up to their fan-coveted debut Mutiny. Now, they present third album Burning At Both Ends. Set Your Goals have already proven their longevity and dedication to the music through relentless touring and their acclaimed releases, becoming more and more recognized as one of the pop-punk greats.

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ALL TIME LOW

Hard work, determination and success go hand and hand—and no one understands that better than Story Of The Year. In that spirit it should come as no surprise that these post-hardcore sensations decided to title their fourth album The Constant. It’s an album that marks the beginning of an exciting new musical chapter for this fearless fivesome. While the band have already released three studio full-lengths: 2003’s Page Avenue, 2005’s In The Wake Of Determination and 2008’s The Black Swan, The Constant picks up where the band left off and proves that Story Of The Year sound more top of their game with each subsequent release. While countless acts have come and gone since Story Of The Year formed over a decade ago, the band credits their success to their ability to form a unique niche in the punk community. Ultimately having already conquered the mainstream charts and converted countless cynics via their music and incendiary live performances, at this point, Story Of The Year are making music simply because they love it without any other outside influences creeping in to distract them.

Funeral For A Friend’s journey from hardcore roots and DIY shows to major label records and worldwide tours has built a long and prosperous road that many home-grown bands from across the alternative spectrum have been travelling along ever since. Those that play to crowds of thousands each year on Warped Tour, that adorn countless magazine covers, that grace the stages of arenas and that still have ink drying on their recording contracts all owe a debt of thanks to the quintet’s approach, ambition and aesthetic. For those reasons (and more) it would be easy to understand if Funeral For A Friend chose to retreat into the comforts of nostalgia and the appealing warmth of retrospect as their ten-year anniversary draws near. But, instead of seeking solace in the memories of past triumphs, the band have set their feet forward as they boldly stare down all that lies ahead with their stunning new album, Welcome Home Armageddon. With every emotion captured and channelled through an album that is both immersive and urgent, Funeral For A Friend enter their second decade together reinvigorated, ready to continue on their path and determined to change things all over again

Face To Face recently released album Laugh Now, Laugh Later is the band’s first release in over nine years, since 2002’s How To Ruin Everything. Their new seventh studio album is chock full of the classic hook-filled choruses and signature riffs the band has been known for over the last two decades and revisits some of their earlier sounds. To put it simply, it’s pure, unadulterated punk rock; energetic, fast, furious, honest and urgent. Celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, the band formed in 1991 in the small town of Victorville, California. Over the last 20 years the band has released a string of crucial punk releases including Don’t Turn Away (1992), Big Choice (1994), Face To Face (1996), Ignorance Is Bliss (1999), Reactionary (2000), Standards & Practices (2001) and How To Ruin Everything (2002).

And now, the release of Laugh Now, Laugh Later proves once again why they’re considered one of the most important and influential punk bands of the last two decades.

A lot has happened to Hellogoodbye since the Huntington Beach, California-based act released their breakthrough album Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs! in 2006.

Over the past four years the band have parted with their old record label, retooled their lineup, released a handful of EPs and performed everywhere from the Philippines to living rooms. All of these cumulative experiences play into the band’s new album Would It Kill You?, a collection of perfect pop gems that not only proves that Hellogoodbye are still relevant but affirms that if anything, they’ve sharpened their musical edge over the past few years.

From the horn-driven, Shins-esque indie rock romp Betrayed By Bones to the intricately arranged masterpiece The Thoughts That Give Me The Creeps, Would It Kill You? sees the band exploring new instrumental timbres that bring out the inherent sonic subtleties in these tracks.

Musically, the record retains Kline’s love of doo-wop and oldies, but puts them into a fresh, new context to keep these influences from sounding clichéd. After three years of hard work, sweat and anticipation, Kline and his bandmates are simply happy to finally have the album finished and can’t wait for their fans to hear it.

With members from Anthrax (Scott Ian, Rob Caggiano), Every Time I Die (Keith Buckley) and Fall Out Boy (Joe Trohman, Andy Hurley), The Damned Things are undoubtedly a musical force to be reckoned with. While each individual in the band has experienced their own successes, The Damned Things’ debut album Ironiclast, which combines their love of classic rock anthems and powerful melodies with heavy metal intensity, turns out to be much more than the sum of the separate parts. Their songs feature those elements of classic rock with the heavier aspects of Anthrax and Every Time I Die, and the hook-laden choruses of Fall Out Boy. We’ve Got A Situation Here is probably the best example of The Damned Things’ hybrid approach, with its sludgy riffs, catchy chorus, tempo change breakdown and some solos. While they’ve all experienced a degree of success, every member of The Damned Things acts like there’s something still to prove, and part of the exhilaration of it is starting over, going back to the reasons they first started playing music. Three years in the making, The Damned Things are ready to play for you.

Blessings often come in disguise, and the formation of Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows (DRUGS) is an example of how the ending of one experience can be a transformative stepping-stone toward something greater. When front man Craig Owens was let go from the Michigan based post-hardcore band he’d fronted since 2001, he was faced with an uncertain situation. Instead of dwelling on it, he turned that energy into the motivation to create a new project that would eclipse anything he’s done in the past. DRUGS is an exciting new musical project that pairs Owens alongside other musicians who have undergone similar experiences, and join forces on a mission to create something vital and new. To round out the band, he selected Underminded guitarist Nick Martin, From First To Last guitarist Matt Good, Matchbook Romance drummer Aaron Stern and Story Of The Year bassist Adam Russell. While this group of rock veterans had never played together as a unit before, they had an undeniable chemistry from the moment they first got together in the same room. Ultimately, Owens can’t wait to hit the road with DRUGS to bring the glory of his redemptive new creation to the masses.

YOUNG GUNS

When High Wycombe based quintet Young Guns released their debut EP, ‘Mirrors’, in July 2009, they had nothing to their name. But with a lot of hard work and determination, the group started gathering positive reviews and media coverage. The support slots they’d aspired began to come thick and fast, with shows alongside The Blackout, Lostprophets, Taking Back Sunday and Fightstar, as well as appearances at the Download and Sonisphere festivals. By the time August came around, the band found themselves nominated in the Best British Newcomer category at the 2009 Kerrang! Awards, quite the contrary to Wood and his band mates initial modest expectations. By the end of the year the band had won the Rock Sound and Kerrang! magazine end of year readers polls for Best British Newcomer and Best New Band. They released their debut album All Our Kings Are Dead in 2010 to great response. Young Guns are a band who wants to stay in control, creating their own future and living up to nobody else’s expectations but their own.

THIS PROVIDENCE

Seattle rock act This Providence’s 2006 self-titled debut introduced the world to the band’s inventive brand of indie rock, their latest album proved how versatile they had become from spending the past two years on the road and refining their craft. Who Are You Now?, released in 2009, is a collection of extremely varied rock songs that were influenced by everyone from The Cure to The Beatles and showcase This Providence’s rock edge as much as it does their stripped-down sensibilities. From dance-floor anthems like That Girl’s A Trick to pop-inflected rockers like Playing The Villain and ambient acoustic explorations like Chasing The Wind, This Providence have truly realized their musical potential with Who Are You Now? As far as their live performance goes, they aim to enrapture their audiences with their high energy level, crowd involvement and kick-ass sounds.

GO RADIO

Armed with an enviable combination of musical prowess and an impressive collection of honest, melodic songs, Tallahassee’s Go Radio is one of the most exciting new bands to emerge from Florida’s hotbed of rock’n’roll talent.

Second EP Do Overs And Second Chances is a perfect showcase of the band’s abilities, evoking the excitement of discovering something fresh, exciting, real. While the euphoric riff of When Dreaming Gets Drastic is an explosion of an opener, it is epic closing ballad Goodnight Moon that truly displays Lancaster’s unique vocal talents, as he encapsulates real emotion in every note. The quartet both formed and released their first EP, Welcome To Life, in 2008.

After sensing that they had created something truly special, they decided to test the new songs out on the road, spending the following two years captivating audiences with their refreshing take on pop-rock. Go Radio has the rare ability to transcend genres – something that they are excited to push to its limits on tour in the coming year. The band have made it their mission to play to diverse audiences, something that keeps that fuels their desire to stay inspired as a band.

MAKE DO AND MEND

Adamantly earnest and unwaveringly driven, Make Do And Mend have spent the past four years gaining footholds and garnering attention in every corner of today’s music landscape. Building off the steam of two previous EP releases, a widely acclaimed split seven-inch with Los Angeles’ Touché Amoré and years of relentless touring, the four-piece raised the bar for melodic post-hardcore with the release of their debut album End Measured Mile. The record finds Make Do And Mend building on their gruff brand of punk rock, blending passion and intensity with melody and sincerity.

Heralded as one of the best punk records of the year, End Measured Mile has been raking in critical praise.

Make Do And Mend have earned a solid following through rigorous touring and an honest approach to their music and fans, sharing a passionate and unyielding live show and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that hard work and passion are far from dead in music today.

WE ARE THE IN CROWD THE SWELLERS

From the perpetually down-on-its-luck, blue collar, rustbelt factory town of Flint, Michigan, comes signees The Swellers: a punk band that knows a thing or two about making hard, no-nonsense, but infinitely catchy music. When The Swellers began in 2002, the group molded its sound—a cross between classic punk and ’90s rock—at the Vehicle City’s local music incubator, the legendary Flint Local 432, an all-ages, volunteersupported club that also produced the band Chiodos.

Following in the footsteps of other hard- Flintites who’ve made their name on the world stage—film provocateur Michael Moore, ’70s hard rock pioneers Grand Funk Railroad, ’80s grindcore/death-metal pioneers Repulsion and the late rapper M.C. Breed—The Swellers have forged a hard-edged, yet accessible style of punk over the better part of a decade, the last three of which have been spent touring non-stop with the likes of Less Than Jake, Set Your Goals, Four Year Strong, A Wilhelm Scream and Streetlight Manifesto, among numerous others. Now signed to Fueled By Ramen, it was just a matter of time before the team that gave us Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Panic! At The Disco, and Gym Class Heroes would catch up with The Swellers.

TERRIBLE THINGS

New Universal Motown band Terrible Things could be considered ‘rock all-stars’, with ex-Taking Back Sunday vet Fred Mascherino, Coheed And Cambria alumnus Josh Eppard and Hot Rod Circuit guitarist Andy Jackson forming the powerful triumvirate. While they were all fan of one another’s work before, when it comes to new collaborations, the chemistry is not always guaranteed.

Luckily, for them and for us, everything worked out swimmingly. Appetites whetted for the splintering, pointed rock we’ve come to expect from each member of the reserved trio should prepare for added twists to their own reliable brand this time around. Terrible Things have made a concept album about a series of fires that haunted Mascherino’s former hometown in Pennsylvania. On the album, the band addresses such themes of fear and alienation, as well as touching on the town’s fear and atrophy. Considering each of the members’ stellar pedigrees and the fresh new ideas they’ll each bring into this new project, the band should really be called Awesome Things. (Sorry.)

ALESANA

Alesana released their debut album On Frail Wings of Vanity And Wax in 2006. It was built around a dynamic, emotionally-charged, three-guitar attack; it was a sound the band defined as their own, and one they expanded on with second album Where Myth Fades To Legend.

With their second album, the band entered the big time, achieving acclaim in the U.S. and across the globe, building a huge fan-base overseas. The band’s third and finest effort, The Emptiness, finds the explosive sextet at their most creative; it offers the listener a theatricallike experience that stretches beyond the expected nuances of a rock record, incorporating a string quartet and a newfound maturity. However, Alesana’s main focus is providing an energetic and memorable live show for their fans. With the creativity of their lyrics, the passion of their music and the energy of their live show, Alesana’s next chapter is set to be the band’s biggest yet.

Formed in 2009, this is a band that had all their dominoes poised and ready to fall in their favor in quick succession. Armed with an irresistible combo of male and female vocals, the EP (Guaranteed To Disagree) and studio album (Best Intentions) We Are The In Crowd have released are only tastes of what’s on the horizon.

Originally a studio project between Tay Jardine (vocals), Jordan Eckes (guitar/vocals) and Mike Ferri (bass) there was an obvious chemistry that they felt could be better translated through a full-band sound. When Rob Chianelli and Cameron Hurley joined on drums and guitar respectively, they found their niche in the sort of straightforward, brutally honest pop songs that only those in the throes of young adulthood could convey.

Whether it’s a feeling of being tongue-tied, heartbroken or betrayed, each emotion earns a new life through the words and music of this quintet. A band of driven, self-aware individuals who are out to make music that is fun and have fun doing their craft in return, their “in crowd” is for anyone who wants to enjoy and relate to their music. Nothing is exclusive here, and everyone will be joining this crowd soon.

WE ARE THE OCEAN

In 2007, at the tender age of 18, Dan Brown and Liam Cromby joined Jack Spence, Tom Whittaker and 15-yearold guitar hero Alfie Scully to form We Are The Ocean. In these four years, the band have toured with Funeral For A Friend, You Me At Six, Thrice, Fightstar, The Used and Underoath and played Download Festival. When the band recorded their debut seven-track self-titled EP, they put the track Nothing Good Has Happened Yet online, only to have it go viral. The buzz solidified when the EP came out in 2009; six more rocking melodic post-hardcore anthems accompanying the crowd favourite. Wasting no time, the band recorded and released their debut album, Cutting Our Teeth. It was well received, but it still lived in the shadow of its predecessor. In just over a year the band recorded their second album, Go Now & Live. It’s is an honest and real record that brings all the enthusiasm and energy of the debut to a new set of songs that matched the debut, if not exceeds them. After Cutting Our Teeth the band all discovered and rediscovered music that got them excited to make music again, and it shows.

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BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Three quarters of Brisbane indie disco darlings MITZI – namely JAD LEE, CALE SUESSKOW and DOMINIQUE BIRD – are more than ready to help themselves to a second serving of Parklife pleasure. The band apply some slick phone passing to triple team BENNY DOYLE.

THE WAITING GAME Although the glorious single I Believe In Love Kid has been floating around the internet for a few months now, a full-length debut from OH YE DENVER BIRDS is unfortunately still a while away. DOM STEPHENS talks about the (almost) finished product with BENNY DOYLE.

Spawning from former triple j Unearthed winners BMX and Comic Sans, Mitzi has provided a fresh musical take that’s proven exciting for all concerned.

“I guess it was just a new thing for all of us, as none of us really had any experience playing live dance music in our previous bands,” frontman Dominique Bird offers, “like BMX didn’t have a drummer and was really electronic and then Charlie [Murdoch – bass]’s band was like dance punk or whatever. It was just such a new thing for all of us and it seemed to work. We all got along really well and things have just taken off from there.”

M

itzi’s composed dancefloor soundtracks and their ability to translate such tunes in a live environment are quickly seeing the young Brisbane boys ascending a path that has made global names of domestic artists like Cut Copy and Miami Horror. Speaking with Time Off, keys and knobs man Jad Lee explains their immediate plans to continue Mitzi’s upward journey.

“We’re aiming to do an album,” he informs. “We’re not really too sure on the release schedule. We’ve got to finish a couple, well, a single that needs to be mixed and all that sort of stuff but yeah, the plan is to release an album sometime in 2012.” And creating this debut album will be made all the smoother with the band’s new postal address. Lee continues: “We’ve just moved into the studio space in West End so we’ve all compiled our gear together which is a lot more productive. We’re taking it pretty serious doing that as it will force us to stay in the studio and put our head down. We’ve just moved in and brought all our gear in and it’s a really cool little environment to write and record and stuff.

Before that we were all kind of doing stuff separately in bedroom studios so this is a lot better situation. It’s pretty decked out and pretty legit which is good as there’s not too many spaces in Brisbane and it did take us a while before we found something we were happy with.”

Having played Parklife prior to this year’s instalment, the band are fairly astute in pointing out what separates the festival from the pack. Rogue blonde drummer Cale Suesskow takes over the phone and gives his opinion.

“I

Stephens admits the album is “probably 95 percent finished”, but sitting idle, inviting like presents under a Christmas tree, it’s going to be a test for the songwriter not to tinker with the good work.

“I dunno,” Suesskow briefly ponders. “Parklife just always seems to have, in the dance genre – the indie dance genre – they just always seem to have the best acts. Like some of the other festivals, they have some good acts but they are a bit more on the commercial scale I guess. Parklife just has a lot more of the upcoming acts, like the buzzed acts; Parklife seems to grab them before anyone else does.”

t wasn’t turned over in a day, like there was a lot of pre-production put into it and we’d done a few demos of the songs before.”

Stephens is discussing I Believe In Love Kid, the first taste of Oh Ye Denver Birds’ debut record, and it’s a complete revelation, recalling the likes of Yeasayer and Spaniards El Guincho. “This is probably the second or third version of it, which is interesting because you listen to the few demos before and they’re a bit different to that. I guess that is just the evolution of the song.”

Stephens is quick to add though that although shimmeringly upbeat, fans shouldn’t expect this to be indicative of what’s to follow on their debut LP Good Ivy.

This upcoming run of dates is a co-headline tour between Oh Ye Denver Birds and Sydney experimental pop upstarts Megastick Fanfare, an audio partnership that seemingly goes hand in hand. If only someone had asked earlier...

And like many other eager punters, Mitzi too will be foaming at the mouth when a pair of slack haired Canadians destroy all in their path.

“Death From Above [1979] for sure,” Suesskow states, regarding their must see for the festival. “I’ve been a fan of their stuff for a while now and just to see them live, especially after they broke up [in 2006], just to get the chance to see them live is something pretty special I think. Not just me but pretty much everyone is in the same boat there. And just seeing their recent footage from SxSW and they played that little venue and there was people rioting – It’s going to be crazy.”

WHO: Mitzi WHERE & WHEN: Parklife, City Botanical Gardens Saturday Oct 1

HOP TOPIC Part of the line-up for The Big Night, a much anticipated show held in Tweed Heads this week, CHARLIE ‘THE EDUCATOR’ THOMSON from THE WINNIE COOPERS chats with SAM HOBSON about the identity of the Australian hip hop artist.

Ostensibly, he defines what he and his outfit do as ‘live hip hop,’ and posits that perhaps the key to these two factions of hip hop in Australia merging – the local, and the international – is in the crossover bands who play within the ‘live’ aesthetic. A ‘live’ hip hop act is one who recreates their music using instruments and arrangements more traditional to a rock performance; to bring an organic, and arguably more immediate sound back to something traditionally built from samples, and played on decks. Likening the ‘live’ hip hop act to a ‘rock’ act, and then the rock act to something more widely accessible, Thomson’s angle begins here.

H

ip hop, in Australia, is a polarising thing.

Australian hip hop has a minority, but nonetheless hardcore following; people who are fans of acts like Drapht, Bliss N Eso, and The Hilltop Hoods seem to interchangeably love those bands, but little of the genre’s international offerings; little of what the purists would argue was the genre’s more substantial, more fundamental acts. You’d be hard pressed to find a devout Drapht fan who also listens to someone like Nas. Sure, there’s the odd and perfunctory Tupac song buried somewhere on their iPod, perhaps something from Watch The Throne; but they wouldn’t know their Blueprint from their Blueprint III, much less have any awareness of an album like Reasonable Doubt.

It’s rare that someone who can tell their Joe Budden, from their Royce da 5’9”; who knows their Black Milk from their Black Thought, and can recognise a Dilla sample from a DJ Premier clip would also enjoy The Hilltop Hoods as the hardcore ‘Hoods fans do. It’s just not a thing.

So this is the division. And perhaps this is because of a fundamental cultural disconnect. Perhaps it speaks of the minority culture in our society really having no popular musical presence, and very little influence upon our cultural identity. Perhaps it’s because of that lack of awareness; be it a sensitivity issue, or merely just lack of exposure to that subculture, that black American music doesn’t resonate with the average, Drapht-loving Aussie hip hop fan.

But these are generalisations from someone who sides firmly with American hip hop. When all this is put to our man on the inside, The Winnie Coopers’ Charlie Thomson, he’s naturally – and very pleasantly – defensive.

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“It’s definitely still growing and developing,” he effuses happily. “I think having a live hip hop act is still a relatively new thing, and Australia’s a pretty tough market. I think as a genre, live hip hop however is generally well-received by all kinds of Australian audiences.

It’s definitely something that is going to get bigger.

Traditionally, the industry’s dominated by rock artists, but I think the landscape is changing, and more and more people are becoming open to Australian hip hop.

“Obviously, the culture started in America,” he continues, “but I think the genre is finding its own Australian identity. It’s not just about me rapping with an Australian accent. I think the content, and the subject matter is unavoidably Australian, and that’s what people identify with. I think you have to keep as [culturally] relevant, and as genuine as possible.

“I’ve often heard hip hop music being described as parasitic – where it takes elements from different genres, and sounds, and life in general. For me, that’s more the artists always pushing the boundaries of what hip hop is.

I think that’s what keeps that type of music really fresh and interesting. Just when you think something can be pigeonholed, someone will create something which is a new take on it, and a new look at it, and I think that’s something that’s really vibrant about the genre.”

WHO: The Winnie Coopers WHERE & WHEN: The Big Night, Twin Towns, Tweed Heads Friday Sep 23

“I don’t think so, that song’s a bit different to the rest of the stuff on the album,” he reveals. “Because we’ve spent a lot of time preparing, it’s been written over the course of a year or a year-and-a-half, there’s a lot of different stages to the album so I think it goes through a bunch of different styles throughout. Part of me would probably prefer to have a coherent genre at hand but I guess through the collaboration process of a bunch of people and having a few songwriters bringing in different stuff it just merges throughout the repertoire of songs.”

Good Ivy was originally pencilled in for an August release this year but fans of the band will now have to wait until next year with a release date pushed back until early 2012.

“It just got to the point where it wasn’t the right time for us,” Stephens continues. “We would have loved to release it this year but with deadlines being pushed back, we didn’t feel comfortable releasing it. We felt it had a better chance of getting to a wider audience if we waited to next year.”

“I think that it’s maybe not the best attribute of myself,” he admits, regarding the suggestion the tracks will continue to be adjusted. “I tend to be a little bit of a perfectionist in those ways. I do want to go back and retouch a few things but I’m trying not to think about it too much because I’m really happy with it at the same time.”

“We’ve been friends for a long time,” Stephens explains of the prior relationship between the two bands. “We’ve all just been quiet admirers of each other’s music but we’ve never actually played a show together or hooked up. So I think this tour was a good opportunity to gig together, hang out, and I guess we have similar sounds which always makes for a good show for fans of the music which we play – it seems like it would be a good night.

It’s been talked about for a while now and our manager has been wanting to do something like that for a bit.

But if the offer was ever put to us before, we all would have been like, ‘Yeah, that’s definitely a good idea’.”

WHO: Oh Ye Denver Birds WHERE & WHEN: SolBar, Maroochydore

Friday Sep 23, Alhambra Lounge Saturday Sep 24 and Wednesday Oct 19 (supporting Baths)

BETWEEN ROCK AND AN ART PLACE

MARINA ROSENFELD is one of the most idiosyncratic sound artists in the world. MATT O’NEILL speaks to the multi-faceted composer ahead of her debut Brisbane appearance. really,” Rosenfeld reflects. “It’s the other stuff – thinking about all the ideas around music-making, the staging, performance, history, objects and such – that have come into the picture as things have progressed. I started with music and will probably end up there as well.”

I

Her infamous Teenage Lontano work is perhaps the ultimate demonstration of her capacity. A surreal rendition of composer Gyorgy Ligeti’s 1967 orchestral work Lontano, Teenage Lontano involved a choir of teenagers singing to iPod cues coupled with additional sound layers distributed through massive suspended speakers.

t’s difficult to capture the essence of Marina Rosenfeld’s career in print. Often, her work can be so astonishingly vast in scope as to utterly dwarf any attempt at simple description. Conversely, it can often be so stark and intimate as to utterly contradict any such gargantuan conjurations. Occasionally, it can be both.

“People say I have a fairly recognisable or consistent sound at this point, and that aspect of it is really instinctual, not the result of any plan or conscious exclusions,” the artist explains. “The thread that runs through everything for me is really the conceptual side – the ideas I’m interested in.

“[It’s] not forced, but it has worked out that way,” the New York-based artist muses regarding the dichotomy of her work. “I do try to bring something of that personal sensibility to the larger works too – and maybe also stay somehow aloof from too much personal expression when I, for instance, perform solo.”

“In brief, in my larger-scale works, the performances and installations, I’m usually interested in some aspect of the social or material conditions of the situation of music making – what we amplify ourselves with, how we sing when we sing, why we separate things into categories and what happens when we violate various conventions.I’ve had wonderful opportunities in the last few years and worked with some great producers, curators and festivals.

It’s been a massive learning curve and my work has grown as a result of invitations to work, for instance, in a series of huge, decrepit spaces after the first Teenage Lontano production in New York (at the Park Avenue Armory).

Consider, for example, the performance she’ll be offering for this year’s Open Frame festival. A minimal solo performance built on a foundation of DJing, Rosenfeld’s supposedly stripped-back offering is actually built on a foundation of painstaking hard work which fold in years of collected sounds. “I play mostly my own hand-crafted dub plates, so the sounds are things I’ve worked out in the studio over the last year or two. I tend to hijack my own production from other projects – any sound I like enough finds its way onto a plate eventually where it will be superimposed over sounds from other projects or zones and I’ll get to see what that’s like.”

It’s this ability to blend contradictory aesthetics that makes Rosenfeld such a fascinating artist. Unlike most sound artists, Rosenfeld’s work sits equally comfortable within the worlds of visual art and installation as it does within the realms of sound and music.

“Yeah, I guess I’ve been a musician from day one

“I’m taking it day by day, project by project,” she muses.

“There’re ideas I’ve got germinating, that I’m waiting, sometimes for years, to have time to really do. I just wish for time, really. I hate the idea that time is always passing and passing and passing... maybe music is one way we try to stop it, or at least make it count.”

WHO: Marina Rosenfeld WHERE & WHEN: Open Frame, Brisbane

Powerhouse Wednesday Sep 28-Thursday Sep 29

HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS

SCOTT MORRISON has never favoured any individual form of expression.

Ahead of the launch of his new Ballad(s) DVD at Brisbane’s Open Frame Festival, MATT O’NEILL speaks to the Sydney audiovisualist about why that has been the case.

LOOMING SPECTRES Launching their debut album Established Ghosts, GALAPOGOS’ frontman DANIEL NEWTON chats with SAM HOBSON about making the record, and feeling invisible.

So perhaps the key to understanding who they are can be found primarily in their music. If you can picture the drawling, structural looseness of R.E.M meeting the warm melancholia of 90s alternative rock stuff, then add in a dash of punk, you’ll have yourself a decent approximation of the guys’ musical personalities.

constant process that is usually finished when the work is due to be presented. A work called oceanechoes was nine seconds dissected and re-arranged from a three-day shoot focusing on fields of grass only.

O

ften, audiovisualists are spoken of almost in terms of superheroes. Whereas most artists elect to pursue one specific discipline, audiovisualists are so talented and so ambitious as to take on multiple pursuits – sound, image and text. Sydney’s Scott Morrison, however, offers a different explanation for his current vocation. The expression ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ seems to be the most comfortable epithet for the artist.

“I’ve always loved sound, but I found I was a terrible musician; I really love film, but I hated the larger process required when creating in this format,” Morrison explains of his career. “I found I could edit video quite well. I started out making and mixing video for my musician and DJ friends, so I’ve always had the intention and inclination for synergy. As I found my rhythm whilst at art school, it became a natural combination of my sound projects meeting my video projects halfway.”

Still, it’s less than accurate to frame Scott Morrison’s work in such terms. It’s not so much a case of an artist being unable to express himself fully within either medium as an artist attempting to express something so specific as to render most traditional artforms inadequate. There is something within Scott Morrison’s deconstructions of sound and image that simply could not be carried by cinema or music alone.

“I spend a whole bunch of time filming a location. No direct plan, just a place. I shoot everything and anything,” the artist explains of his artistic approaches. “From there I view and dissect the content, then re-assemble, break that back down again, bring it back up. It’s a

“I don’t like to present interpretations of a place in particular – more a location that may have resonance universally,” the audiovisualist elaborates. “A field of grass, a forest, a rainstorm. I like that people may recognise the context, but not in its structure. I like playing with this. This allows me to inject my concerns, my self into this. I think that if I was to present a specific location, it would alter the perception, or at least my own intentions for a work.”

Ballad(s) only serves to emphasise the point. Launching at Room40’s annual Open Frame Festival later this month, Ballad(s) is a DVD/album encompassing a series of deconstructed landscape vignettes – a theme of Morrison’s work over the past handful of years. A rather unique release, one can’t imagine where else it could fit besides on a label like the multi-arts focussed Room40 and the audiovisual-focussed Open Frame festival.

“I’m constantly looking to refine my approach to work, but I’m always open to letting my personal life and experiences affect this development,” Morrison muses. “I find there is no way for this to not happen.

The Room40 release represents nearly five years of making this kind of landscape deconstruction. And in that time I’ve grown. I just want to keep making work, and being honest and resolute in how I do it.

“I’m hoping to perform in Japan soon, and whilst there I want to spend some time gathering content for some gallery shows next year. There is also a forest north of Seattle that keeps me up at night. I got to walk through it sans camera last year and it left me absolutely besotted. I need to film it, I think it’s love.”

WHO: Scott Morrison WHERE & WHEN: Open Frame, Brisbane

Powerhouse Wednesday Sep 28-Thursday Sep 29

J

ust who Galapogos are, remains a mystery. These five guys; they who wilfully misspell Galapagos in such a way that could only suggest they’re Smashing Pumpkins fans, and whose bio – such a thing any burgeoning music group bleeds to keep current – is empty of much but a quietly arty band-picture, and a shrug of a mission statement: these five guys at the heart of the enigma you assume, at least, are rather confident.

“Everything’s pretty exciting,” their singer Daniel Newton enthuses, speaking of the album’s long-awaited launch this month at the Beetle Bar. “We recorded originally as a three-piece, so to have people come on board and finally get to play it in a live arena is really exciting; we haven’t played live since January. It’ll be cool just to give this record a new experience.”

Where most bands would be all about spruiking their debut record at this point, Newton instead insists that it’s the creative change they’ve undergone since its recording that he’s most proud of.

“Since the recording stopped, we haven’t stopped jamming and writing and we feel the best is yet to come…though this record’s definitely an indication,” he explains. “We’re very proud of it, and it’s the best move for Galapogos in terms of where our sound may be heading, and what we’re willing to move on from.”

So Established Ghosts was a catalyst for the band; a deep and booming footprint marking the first of many steps that’ll soon find them in powerful stride. One can only imagine how exciting it must be to have that creative energy so fervent and new amongst them.

“To us,” Newton explains warmly, his voice nodding, “we wanted to make the classic first record; to introduce us, where we’ve come from, and where we may go.”

“I think we just wanted to make something,” Newton issues, the explanation catching wearily in his throat, “…well, I like the terms ‘heavy and weird.’ That to me describes the kind’ve music that I enjoy. When I use the word ‘heavy’, I don’t necessarily mean metal, [but] heavy in its emotional content, and its intensity.

And then ‘weird’ in the sense of just making some weird landscapes – our versions of pop songs.”

On the larger impetus behind the album’s creation, Newton reveals perhaps the biggest clue as to what the Galapogos entity is all about.

“I think any musical writer, whether they like it or not, is very thematic,” he expounds, “even if it’s not planned.

This [album] is kind of a reflection of where we were at [at a particular] point in time. The album’s name itself [speaks to that]. That’s how we were all feeling at the time amongst the music community you know. We’d been doing this for a while, and we just felt like ghosts. I guess we were kind of musing on that initial alienation that happens in any part of your life – whether it’s in a relationship, or whatever – and it’s a pretty universal theme I think.

People want to connect and be understood. And when you’re misunderstood consistently, I think it wires you a certain way, and you become a very good observer.”

There’s a swollen pause.

“Hopefully that’s still a sexy thing to sing about.”

So they’re not so much a mystery, so much as five guys who’d previously fallen between the cracks. Here’s hoping that Established Ghosts brings them some much-deserved visibility.

WHO: Galapogos WHAT: Established Ghosts (Independent) WHERE & WHEN: Beetle Bar Saturday Sep 24

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SINGLES

BY CHRIS YATES

ICEAGE

New Brigade

(Abeano/Remote Control)

TOM WAITS Bad As Me (Anti/Epitaph)

“You’re the same kind of bad as me! ” Waits hollers at me as I eagerly listen to his new single, the title track from his forthcoming record. I’d like to think so, but even I’m not into that level of self-delusion.

His voice is in full Screaming Jay Hawkins maniacal lunatic mode, and contorts and wraps around the usual concoction of twisted horns, mangled beats and smashing of trashcan lids or similar.

The preview video for his album sees him trying to come to terms with how the leaking of music on the internet is ruining the surprise for everyone, but really there’s not much to be surprised about by this track. It’s actually about as standard a song from Tom Waits as you could expect, but to be disappointed by that would be like being disappointed that oxygen is still breathable.

PHRASE Babylon (Universal)

It’s not until the second verse of Babylon that it’s even apparent that this track is from a rapper. The keyboard and guitar come off like a second or third wave UK soul thing when combined with the party drums, and Phrase kicks off his vocals doing like a Squeeze Cool For Cats kind of thing – it really works.

When he does drop the rap in things toughen up a bit, but the bounce keeps things happy. The tracks keep building and layering on, with a production more akin to some of the more flamboyant pop out there at the moment like Gotye or something.

It really represents some serious steps forward in hip hop in Australia, and proves it’s possible to cross over into other spaces without sucking.

JENS LEKMAN

An Argument With Myself (Secretly Canadian)

The rumour mill has it that Swedish native Lekman has moved back to his homeland after a few years in Melbourne, and the title track from this EP sounds like a goodbye letter to the city he is leaving behind. He argues with himself as he describes walking around the city, dropping street names and basically his entire route as he takes in his surroundings while trying to work out what the hell he is doing. The music is very Paul Simon’s Graceland and his rapid singing style is a welcome relief from his usual twee delivery. New Directions also visits the pseudo African white funk of the title track. He lounges out on the lazy elevator reggae of So This Guy At My Office, which is awkward but still appealing due to Lekman’s skill with observational and conversational lyric writing.

NKOTBSB

Don’t Turn Off The Lights (EMI)

New Kids On The Block and Backstreet Boys are now one band, but I can’t work out how the acronym works. Is it New Kids On The Backstreet Boys? Because that’s almost as funny as the song. Timing is perfect for this release – autotune makes it absolutely impossible to distinguish any of the different voices. It’s actually just a new song from a compilation featuring both bands, which suggests neither had enough hits for one on their own. Wikipedia says that Johnny Drama is not based on Marky Mark’s brother who was in New Kids On The Block, but some cousin, which is very disappointing, although I always thought it was a poor resemblance.

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Last year four disaffected Danish kids formed a band and recorded an album in four days. That album, New Brigade, is incredible short – 24 minutes, in fact. Yet almost 18 months after its Scandinavian release, and with its rerelease in other parts of the world this year, one thing is clear – New Brigade is one of the strongest, most relentless and important records of this, or any year.

It is nigh on impossible to think four teenagers crafted this visceral punch to the eardrums in the 21st century. Destructive vitality permeates every molecule on this longplayer, evoking a time when such pummelling music was fresh and exciting, instinctual and essential – the idea of popularity or creating anything other than music a foreign notion. First track White Rune is a motoric creeper of a track, a postpunk behemoth that sounds otherworldly in its fervent strength and belligerence. New Brigade emanates with a more 70s NY punk vivacity, whilst Remember offers a Joy Division-esque bounce. I’m Blessed is the closest to an upbeat track they have to offer, evoking the notion of running into the nearest person at full force, splitting skin even as you grin maniacally.

There is no hint of airs and graces here. In fact, Iceage abhor such trappings, an incredibly refreshing notion in this day and age. Every crash, bang, stutter and roar is irascible yet inherent; primal yet precise. They are honest in their approach, and whilst there is still room to grow, the innate energy that emanates from New Brigade never threatens to dissipate. All of these factors make Iceage one of the most exciting prospects in music, and New Brigade the perfect manifesto with which to launch into global aural decimation. ★★★★★

Brendan Telford

BALL PARK MUSIC Happiness And Surrounding Suburbs (Stop Start/EMI)

Ball Park Music have been riding a huge wave of momentum ever since triple j Unearthed made poster boys (and girl) of them in 2010, and with the release of debut LP Happiness And Surrounding Suburbs, the wave isn’t about to collapse anytime soon. Armed with a swag of three-minute pop jingles that have more catchy hooks than Rex Hunt, it’s hard not to feel immediately acquainted to these Brisbane kids with their honest lyrics and friendly sound.

The sextet waste no time in winning you over, the opening stanza of Literally Baby, It’s Nice To Be Alive and Sad Rude Future Dude quickly highlighting the intimidating truth – every track here is a single, every song on the record a winner. Meanwhile, the flippant nature of off-the-cuff descriptions made by frontman Sam Cromack (“smashed together like fresh fruit in the sun” – Literally Baby) only go on to make the songs more memorable, beguiling in a way as these tracks seem almost impossible to dislike. Ironically, amid all these capricious songs, it’s when Cromack shows some frailty and feebleness that the album really makes its mark.

Alligator and it’s lamenting carnal metaphors works incredibly well with the musical crescendo guiding it from the rear while immediately following, Birds Down Basements goes even more skeletal but no less intriguing; curious percussion, rich harmonies and a Hawaiian tone due to the exotic strings plucking throughout.

The fuzzed-out stomp of Shithaus quickly breaks you from your blissed out state however, before the song that began it all for them, iFly, brings it all home. If there is a more hum-worthy local album this year please make yourself known – the inane joy of these songs is actually making this reviewer now feel crazy. ★★★½

FIONN REGAN

(Universal)

Breaking through to critical acclaim with her sophomore 2004 album Let It Die, Canadian Leslie Feist skyrocketed to commercial success when 2007’s The Reminder unleashed a little whimsy of a song called 1234 (co-written by Australia’s own Selly Seltmann). Apple ads, guest spots on Sesame Street and Grammy nominations ensued for the Broken Social Scene alumnus, though Feist has always been much more than one song.

The Bad In Each Other opens Metals in an unexpected manner; bluesy guitar teams with a stomping rhythm before strings and brass open out the theme of relationship conflict. It is confident in its experimental nature and signifies an attention to detail long known to be one of Feist’s best qualities, despite the easy delivery of her beautiful vocal often indicating an effortless preparation.

How Come You Never Go There is the 1234 of Metals in terms of its pop ability to flow easily from the tongue and become embed in the brain. Though feeling joyful in tone, this anomaly finds its place in an album weighted by melancholic lows with its lyrics of desperate loneliness.

Undiscovered First recalls the bluesy swing of the opening track, adding some saxophone sass as it progresses to a group singalong to result in a song that feels as though an epic mountain range is being discovered; isolation mixes hesitantly with hope. Apparently fond of decamping to picturesque recording locations, it’s clear that Feist has allowed this visual inspiration to run through the core of Metals that in its entirety feels romantically cinematic, in a slightly morose kind of way. Making greater use of her guitar skills throughout, Feist delivers a fourth album in Metals that is not a response to the success of The Reminder, but instead reflects her growth as an enduring career artist because of such triumphs. ★★★★

Tyler McLoughlan

You Are All I See (Spunk/EMI)

Pat Grossi in a previous life may have taken his choirboy childhood experiences down a more linear musical route – instead he has, like many others in this day and age, sought to create his own dynamic expressions in the confines of his bedroom, the compositional focus founded on sonorous strings, rococo beats, RnB infusions and an impressive falsetto. The end result: You Are All I See, his first album under the moniker Active Child.

Opening with the eponymous track, Active Child makes an incredible impression, crafting an achingly beautiful song that swims across a gossamer pattern of sparkling harps and entrancing synth lines, Grossi sounding like the most pure voice being put to tape. It’s a sublime track, yet it also hides some of Active Child’s charms, a devious ploy that the next few tracks puts to rest. Hanging On is full of regret and longing, the underwater synth and hushed beats providing a platform for Grossi to pour out his heart – a truer track title could not be found.

Playing House introduces the RnB epithet that Active Child has been stamped with, aided here ably by How To Dress Well’s Tom Krell and some lyrics that put aside the yearning in place for some playful seduction. The exaggerated lushness of the production makes it even easier to slide into this world of aching, unrequited desire.

Yet the focal point is Grossi’s voice. Encased in reverb akin to singing in a cavernous cathedral, Grossi can sound like Antony Johnson (High Priestess) or a latenight RnB crooner (Playing House). The strangest reference point, but also the most poignant, is that of Justin Vernon, leader of Bon Iver. Their music may be dissimilar, but their approach to aching songwriting and the way they use their voice to fill isolated spaces and provide warmth go hand in hand. An exciting release. ★★★★

Brendan Telford

Benny Doyle

FEIST Metals

ACTIVE CHILD

100 Acres Of Sycamore (Heavenly/Cooperative)

Ambitious Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan hasn’t wasted any time resting on the laurels of his electricfolk foray The Shadow Of An Empire of 18 months ago. Delving back into the acoustic world which first brought him to the attentions of many (and garnered a Mercury Prize nomination), 100 Acres Of Sycamore is a richer experience with Regan’s lyrical dexterity in full flight, whilst the musical arrangements and folk guitar picking all create a tapestry of natural elegance that surpasses his earlier releases.

Whilst the constant Dylan references continue to plague him, Regan’s extended use of strings throughout 100 Acres Of Sycamore is more akin to Nick Drake’s esoteric ruminations on nature and the human condition. In fact nature permeates the entire album – referring to a loved one as the Lake District; the title track’s calling for us to “rise up from the trappings of flesh and the holdings of skin…from the pack who are baying and drawing your blood.” For A Nightingale evokes James Taylor’s pastoral wanderings, and evocative wordplay has always been Regan’s calling card, yet as is witnessed on the soaring Vodka Sorrow his song structure is playing an integral part to his musical evolution, offering suites of ephemeral, romantic balladry of fair beauty.

Soft and stirring, 100 Acres Of Sycamore sees Regan’s return as a folky songsmith, making music that, rather than offering twee excursions into pastoral realms or experimental pretensions, is deep and rich with intuition and evocative imagery that harbours a beautiful exploration of love and the natural world. ★★★★ Brendan Telford

WILD FLAG Wild Flag (Spunk/EMI)

There’s been a distinct lack of proper riot grrrl punk rock over the past five years which is no coincidence considering it coincided with Sleater-Kinney’s “indefinite” hiatus. Comprising former SK members Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss along with Mary Timony (Autoclave/Helium) and Rebecca Cole (Minders), the eponymous debut album from Wild Flag is a thing of angry comedic beauty. No one does spiky, taut rock with this humour and confidence anymore and yet it’s far from a retread of past sounds. The aforementioned attributes are filtered through a psychedelic nod to the Nuggets-era garage sound which represents a further progression from SK’s final 2005 albumThe Woods for Brownstein and Weiss, the former keeping herself busy in recent years writing and starring in hit show Portlandia whilst Weiss has been manning the skins for go-nowhere hacks such as The Jicks and Bright Eyes.

Opener Romance sets the tone from the get-go, punchy guitars merging with Weiss’s intuitive beat as the group vocals accentuate Brownstein’s yelpy croon over Cole’s keyboards. Second track Something Came Over Me ratchets the quality up another notch, a chugging summer anthem of melodious wonder that buries its hooks deep. Future Crimes might be the best song The Strokes never wrote whilst Glass Tambourine recalls The Go-Betweens’ simple yet accomplished songwriting, tacking on a two-minute freakout for good measure before noodling off into the distance.

The nearly seven-minute penultimate track Racehorse, exudes much of which makes this release so appealing, Brownstein bragging “I’m a racehorse…. put your moneeeee…. on me” before refrains of “pony up” and “we’re in the money” sit over a skuzzy riff then combine with funk keyboard fills on the way to the cacophonous conclusion. Scintillating stuff. ★★★★

Ed Matthews

MAKE DO AND MEND

CONFESSION

LIL WAYNE

(3Wise/Sony)

(Resist Records)

(Young Money/Universal)

End Measured Mile

The Long Way Home

Although a year late in this part of the world, Australia has finally seen a domestic release for End Measured Mile, the debut LP from Connecticut-birthed/Boston-based, post-hardcore four-piece Make Do And Mend, tying in with their first Australian visit as part of Soundwave’s Counter Revolution. But don’t worry about its tardy arrival – late is certainly better than never. In fact, you’d be pressed to hear a better 34 minutes of rock music reach out and grab you – End Measured Mile completely flawing in its confidence and composure.

Continuing in the style of their prior two releases – 2009’s Cancer and 2008’s Can’t Live Can’t Breathe EP – a track named Intro kicks off Confession’s The Long Way Home. Recorded in Sweden by metal maestro Frederik Nordstrom, the clarity and absolute precision of the production is immediate, and rather than trying to set themselves apart by diverting into vastly different territories, Confession have presented a release that stands out by absolutely nailing even more dramatic servings of what it is the band is known for.

A big part of the attraction is the gravel pit voicebox 24-year-old frontman James Carroll has been blessed with. It helps to add years to the sound of Make Do And Mend, his storytelling sounding instantaneously worn and weathered, like a tattered book of memories on your basement floor. Kicking off with the intense Unknowingly Strong and its riding guitars and urgent drumming – it’s like an immediate blast of rocky shrapnel into your body.

From that mission statement, the album is unrelenting in its power and drive. Oak Square and Transparent Seas are screamers with a nice high register guitar line slicing right through the gruff, while the static (albeit brief) breakdowns across End Measured Mile only help Carroll to pounce on you verbally with his dignified rage. Even the album’s less bruising moments such as the slowburning chug of Ghostal and Start, with its nautical tie-ins of drinking and drowning led by a somewhat skipping intro, have a composed aggression that proves effective and quite relatable to one’s own mental inner workings.

After a rather balanced measure of their components on Confused/Hopeless, Confession display their most brutal inclinations with the ridiculously heavy I Created This Horror, before going for their radio friendly best on Piece

By Piece. Next the pace is picked up and taken down another side street with the European riffage of Asthma Attack – each subsequent song managing to maintain an identity of its own. At times their influences can be quite obvious, and the occurrence of Darkest Hour-style guitar heroics in songs like The True Shine Through present a certifiably welcome addition to their palette.

Call this a 2010 debut album, a 2011 debut album, whatever. Just make sure you affix ‘of the year’ to follow whatever date you select. In fact – forget the word debut. ★★★★★ Benny Doyle

Despite the often distracting repetition of explicit language, The Long Way Home is striking in the focus and honesty that the infamous Michael Crafter has put into his lyrics and performance. Continuously easy to link to his very public lifestyle and encompassing theme of the album, this time Crafter barely dances with metaphors and simply gives us his brutal truths. In the wake of Parkway Drive and The Amity Affliction, there’s definitely far too many simply average-or-worse Australian bands tackling these sounds in 2011. Confession isn’t one of them. ★★★½ Lochlan Watt

Tha Carter IV

Before you snidely discard this album for its everything – for the shitty cover, for Wayne’s supposed bastardisation of mainstream hip hop – know that (a) Tha Carter III was actually something of a populist, southern hip hop masterpiece, and (b) the guy has mixtapes better than your mother.

But, back to the snideness, yes – this album is fucking awful; nothing like Tha Carter III. Rebirth, his ‘rock album,’ isn’t even worth mentioning in this brief retrospect, but on III he used his infamous autotune to plaintive and truly lyrical effect. (How To Love is the only track on IV that recalls this same sensibility, but it’s a ballad, which cheapens it.) Missing from IV is the blunt-force trauma of tracks like A Milli, the swift, melodic flow and relative subtlety from tracks like Mr. Carter, and his keen sense for ghetto-pop established on hits Lollypop and Got Money.

Lyrically, Wayne on IV is duller than ever. Now exclusively singing about his fortune and how he protects it with guns, there’s very little left for the fan of hip hop who listens to his stuff not to aspire to be him, but who came to marvel at his erstwhile lyrical prowess. Not even bothering to paint a full-bodied metaphor, many of Wayne’s phrases on IV simply end with their object.

“Hear no evil, see no evil. Helen Keller.” “Life’s a crazy bitch. Grace Jones.” That these come off as undeveloped ideas just makes the album seem all the more lazy.

MISS LITTLE

When Things Fall Apart And Into Place (Laughing Outlaw)

Sarah McCallum came into the Australian music scene by winning a website competition overseen by one Neil Finn.

McCallum has an extensive resume that showcases her versatility and virtuosity in the classical music world, yet on When Things Fall Apart And Into Place, her first album under the moniker Miss Little, it is a very different journey we are taken on – and one that reaps many rewards.

Opening with the beguiling Where’s The Way Out, Miss Little asserts from the onset that this will be an intricate album of sonorous pop songs that eschew traditional musical norms. The sumptuous, intricately overlaid compositions evoke Machine Translations or Goyte, although McCallum’s ideas and voice prove to be much more robust in nature. Her command of musical structure is clear from the sheer breadth of instruments on display – a plethora of organs and pianos, Wurlitzer, woodwinds, saxophone and percussion, all of which creates a densely layered sound that serves up different focuses on every repeated listen.

It’s pure, unchecked ego, is what this is.

Her vocals are the centrepiece, floating between the strength of Katy Steele and the playful dexterity of another Kate, that of the Wuthering Heights kind...

Whether it’s the coyness of The Overflow, the slightly dirty rock of Missed The Boat, the ghostly soul of Is It Safe To Land? or the off-kilter cabaret of Tunnel Vision, McCallum proves to be a chameleon, meshing these layered arrangements with lyrics that are at once plaintive and obtuse. Lushly mixed and produced by Richard Belkner (PVT, Bertie Blackman), When Things Fall Apart And Into Place is a mighty accomplishment, and a strong opening calling card for a musician who so early in her career already has a strong grasp of her craft.

★½

★★★★

Production-wise, Wayne beats his trademark dry snare into the ground, and each track sounds totally the same. Also, next time you’re in the record store, and in need of a chuckle, check out the album’s inlay.

Sam Hobson

Howie Tanks

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frontrow@timeoff.com.au

THIS WEEK IN

ARTS

WEDNESDAY 21 Brisbane Festival – fourth last day.

Today you can see The Escapists’ boy girl wall (Roundhouse Theatre); Frente! (Spiegeltent, King George Sq.); Jim Sharman’s Andy X (The Studio, Metro Arts); Rhinoceros In Love (Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse); Bell Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet (QUT Festival Theatre, Plaza, Brisbane Powerhouse); Circus Oz’s Steampowered (Playhouse, QPAC); Strut & Fret’s The Dream Menagerie (Spiegeltent, King George Sq.). See brisbanefestival.com.au for more information.

THURSDAY 22 Brisbane Festival – third last day. As per Wednesday 21, with the addition of Under The Radar shows The Bubble Effect, Anna Robi And House Of Dogs, Anyone Can Edit...Phaedra, and Macrophonics. See brisbanefestival. com.au for more information.

Manhattan – Isaac (Woody Allen) is a 42-year-old neurotic New York TV writer who has divorced Jill (Meryl Streep) and is having a love affair with 17-year-old Tracey (Mariel Hemmingway). Then he meets Mary (Diane Keaton), who is the lover of his best friend, Yale (Michael Murphy), who is married to Emily. To make matters more complicated his ex-wife has moved in with another woman, and is writing a book about her failed marriage to him... Opening night.

Tribal Theatre until 28 September.

FRIDAY 23 Brisbane Festival – second last day.

As per Thursday 22, with the addition of Symphony Under The Stars, and Under The Radar shows Porcelain Punch, Wish We Were Here, and You Are Here.

See brisbanefestival.com.au for more information.

SATURDAY 24 Brisbane Festival – that’s it! All over

:( Your final day to see any shows at this year’s Brisbane Festival. So, get your act together and plan how you’re going to spend it. We suggest hitting up brisbanefestival.com.au for more information on what to see.

The Room – written and directed by and starring Tommy Wiseau, The Room is like no other film you’ve seen. Tribal Theatre, 10:30pm.

TUESDAY 27 The Final Taste of Hale & Pace – after 30 years of making the world laugh, the most successful UK comedy duo since Morecambe and Wise has decided to say farewell.

The iconic characters The Two Rons, Billie and Johnny, and Jed and Dave will put on their costumes and grace the Australian stage for one last time.

Concert Hall, QPAC, 8pm.

ONGOING So You Die A Little – Ed is dead.

Extremely dead. But that doesn’t mean he intends to take it lying down. Armed only with wits, best described as blunt, he intends to take on the bureaucracy of heaven, fill in the forms of salvation and return to his old life... hopefully without causing Armageddon on the way. Brisbane Arts Theatre until 1 October.

Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams – landmark exhibition of surrealist works direct from the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, presenting a historical overview of Surrealism, charting its evolution from Dada experiments in painting, photography and film, through the metaphysical questioning and exploration of the subconscious in paintings, readymade objects, photographs, sculptures, and film.

The exhibition is rounded out with late works that show the breadth of Surrealism’s influence. GoMA until 2 October.

DARK OF THE SOUL SMOKE AND MUSHROOMS SAM HOBSON TALKS WITH CAM MACKAY, CO-CREATOR OF AN ARTWORK WHICH FUSES TWO ANTISOCIAL PASTIMES; ONE UNDERSTANDABLY MALIGNED, ONE UNIVERSALLY MISUNDERSTOOD. As part of Emulator, a two-week art exhibition in celebration of classic video games showing at Brisbane’s Bleeding Heart gallery, local artists Cameron Mackay and Daniel Hancock have crafted two effigies of the saintly Mario (lesser-known works: Mario Smash Football; referee in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!) and Sonic (lesserknown works: his debut appearance in Rad Mobile as an air-freshener; star of the incomplete Sonic Crackers), and they’ve done so entirely from cigarette packaging.

Some 6,000 tiles – like pixels – make-up the reverential likenesses of the famed videogame characters, and, though many man-hours, love, and devotion went into the recreating of the two digital figures, there lies beneath that geek worship deeper meaning to the abstractions.

“Dan and I more or less contrived it, so I guess we’re the ones accountable,” co-creator Cam Mackay begins, throwing a thankful nod to the three volunteers who helped the guys physically construct the two pieces.

Thematically, with the two artworks being made entirely from cigarette stuffs, and depicting what they do, the work – still untitled – sits atop fascinatingly shaky ground.

“Definitely, [the pieces espouse] the unique merits of both, but they’re

FILM REVIEW

FRIGHT NIGHT By and large, remakes kind of suck.

It’s not just misguided nostalgia – all those horror movies from the ’80s that were recently remade were overly slick productions with no soul. They lost the little kernel of sick creativity that helped

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monsters such as Freddy and Jason tap into the zeitgeist and scare us silly way back when.

Fright Night is, pleasingly, an exception – with a great cast, it’s slick enough to look fantastic but still clings on to the outrageous comedy beats and ludicrous gouts of fake blood that made the original such a scream.

Colin Farrell takes over from Chris Sarandon as vampire-next-door Jerry, who moves into a far-flung Las Vegas suburb as his hunting ground.

But Charley (Anton Yelchin) and his estranged mate Ed (Christopher MintzPlasse) have their suspicions about the new neighbour, and their snooping sparks trouble, drawing in David Tennant in a brilliant turn as a casino illusionist.

Aussie Craig Gillespie helms this version with a sharp script by Buffy scribe Marti Noxon, which hits the mark more than it misses. As modern audiences will demand, the action is ramped up, with a furious Farrell driving Charley’s little family out of their house and into the middle of a cleverly-shot, thrilling highway chase.

Farrell oozes menace, Tennant is a brilliant cross between the Doctor and Russell Brand, and there’s more sheer entertainment built into this quirky yarn than in anything else at the box office right now.

WHERE & WHEN: Screening in cinemas now

BAZ MCALISTER

pretty tenuously linked,” he explains, humbly. “I suppose we wanted to use the cigarette packaging because it is quite beautiful as a stand-alone piece of artwork, and with the proposed introduction of the plain packaging, it might not be something that’s available as a resource to use in this way in the near future.”

So it’s almost romantic, what he’s saying. That he’s rather bitter-sweetly anticipating the death of an un-sung art. But then it’s put to him, how does one approach considering such a thing ‘artistic?’

“If you completely remove any connection with massive health risks,” he says, with good humour, “then looking at the branding side of things – for example with Peter Stuyvesant, the branding hasn’t changed at all really in the last 30 years – I find branding and packaging beautiful, so when something has been so…reliable for that amount of time, it [becomes] ‘classic’.”

That’s rather nice; art from a fading opportunity. It’s rather poignant.

“But yes, [the connection’s] pretty tenuous,” he repeats. “I wanted to use cigarette packets for a while, and in a mosaic capacity, and this is what came up. You certainly can draw correlations between the demographics of people who are playing video games. I read that white males, around 25 to 40 are the biggest target audience now.

If you trace that back to when I was a kid – I’m 30 – I was playing Sonic and Mario when they first came out and on the original platforms, and [mine] is probably going to be the last generation where smoking is widespread amongst people. So there is, I guess, an inverse relationship between the two.”

But all this exculpatory talk of tenuousness really undermines what the guys have done here, and that is that they’ve really flourished within one of the greatest definitions of art. To recognise a connection between things is in itself not only deeply intellectual, but also a beautiful, and artistic thing.

To have that idea alone on display is something that’s worth paying attention to this installation for.

WHAT: Emulator WHERE & WHEN: Bleeding Heart Gallery until 30 September

ACTOR ANDREW BUCHANAN TALKS TO BAZ MCALISTER OF THE GLEE TO BE FOUND IN PLAYING AN UNREPENTANTLY NASTY CHARACTER IN QUEENSLAND THEATRE COMPANY’S PRODUCTION OF HAROLD PINTER’S NO MAN’S LAND. Playwright Harold Pinter, when asked what his plays were about, once answered: “The weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” That’s as close as one will ever get to an explanation, but it sums up No Man’s Land to a tee – and in the case of this play, the cocktail cabinet is very large indeed and the weasels most ferocious.

Faded, jaded London literatus Mr Hirst (John Gaden) and down-on-his-luck writer Mr Spooner (Peter Carroll) repair to Hirst’s London home for an evening of sozzled intellectual discourse, marred by the menacing presence of manservants Foster (Steven Rooke)

THE LOOKING

and Briggs (Queensland Theatre Company mainstay Andrew Buchanan).

Buchanan, who’s performed recently in The Crucible and Water Falling Down at QTC, describes the play as a battle for Hirst’s soul.

“Hirst is drowning in alcohol but also haunted by memories and dreams, and the character of Spooner just appears and is trying to lead him towards the light, so to speak,” he says. “Steven and I, as the servants, our job seems to be to try to lure him back into ‘no man’s land’ through alcohol, and keep him there.”

No Man’s Land is quintessential

GLASS

WITH HELEN STRINGER At some stage everybody I know has turned into a hometown hater, possessed of an indomitable urge to forsake the River City for the bright lights of the big southern towns.

Invariably, this exodus is towards Melbourne, with its art-filled alleyways and death-grip on all things cool.

Melbourne promises exclusivity but appeals to the universally held falsehood that we each are special beings deserving of membership into the superior clique. Move here and you will be a more interesting human being, Melbourne promises; you will be instantly endowed with the kind of nonchalant righteousness that entitles you to smirk at the backwater friends you’ve left behind.

You can’t walk down a street of Melbourne without bumping shoulders with a struggling artist or 20. The city is teeming with painters moonlighting as waiters, actors as bartenders, writers as sales assistants; it’s an apparent incubator for artists, so densely packed with creative types that by rights paint should be oozing from its bricks and mortar. It’s strange then that for the last financial year the city’s major gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria suffered a 17 percent loss in revenue, which roughly equates to a loss of $3.3 million from the previous year’s takings. One of the reasons cited for the significant decrease in ticket sales was increased interstate competition or, in other words, GoMA kicking its arse.

Last month the NGV acquired a $5.2 million dollar painting, purchased by Andrew Sisson, businessman and NGV trustee, who’s no doubt wondering

whether his investment will pay off after looking at the gallery’s newly diminished budget. The painting in question, Madonna and Child with Infant Saint John the Baptist by Antonio Allegri da Correggio is an important work, but it says something that Correggio is often referred to as Renaissance art’s “fifth Beatle”; the lesser known contemporary of Da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Titian, and Raphael. For art aficionados it’s an exciting acquisition, but for the general public? That’s yet to be seen.

The NGV’s purchase flies in the face of Melbourne’s purported edginess; it’s a conservative religious painting, yet another picture of baby Jesus to add to an already overflowing collection.

Looking at the same Sotheby’s auction at which Correggio’s painting was purchased the gallery could have bought a work each from Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Yves Klein and still not have spent as much as they did on Madonna and Child.

Back in Brisbane we’re flocking to our galleries in unprecedented numbers, spending our Friday nights boozing at GoMA and taking in some art at the same time. Our galleries don’t have dress codes the rules of which include “must have well-thumbed but unread copy of On The Road shoved in back pocket”. There’s no culture of secret, invite-only openings where the gallery’s location is released in an exclusive iPhone app two hours before the show. Melbourne’s obsession with exclusivity is nothing to be proud of; art is thriving in Brisbane because we’re inclusive and that’s a far preferable, and much more attractive trait to have.

frontrow@timeoff.com.au

Pinter, weaving words into perfect, pointed sentences with delightful undercurrents of menace. Buchanan says Briggs and Foster get a lot of the finest lines and it’s been fun to embrace the unbridled nastiness.

“It’s a very funny piece and linguistically quite incredible – there are some great tirades, and it’s a great relief to be able to be incredibly threatening and nasty,” he says. “Every actor wants to play Richard III because it gives you a chance to tap into all that dark stuff you have to repress day-today. For both me and Steve it’s a lot of fun because it’s so overtly aggressive, it’s actually...well, it’s sort of gently liberating.”

C U LT U R A L

CRINGE

WITH MANDY KOHLER It can be hard sometimes to judge what’s an appropriate reaction to something you find offensive. We live in a culture when it’s not uncommon for knuckleheads to yell at women through car windows but it’s still sometimes jarring. A friend was telling me last week about an instance of being labeled a whore from a moving vehicle. She was jogging. Pretty gobsmacking, but what’s a girl to do?

Take down the licence plate number, con a gullible cop into giving you the

REVIEW

driver’s address, go round to their house and explain that no, you don’t charge cash monies for sex, you’re actually an accountant? Not a likely scenario. Nope, you just have to settle for venting to your mates. Maybe that’s why when a guy yelled out of a car to my sister and I as we walked home then proceeded to park on my street I couldn’t help but take the chance to tell him to “Get a fucking clue.” His comment wasn’t even offensive but surely yelling out cars and buggering off afterwards go hand in hand, if only for the fact that yelling out of cars

There’s a deeply psychological element to the play that causes it to work on many different levels. Some essayists have espoused the viewpoint that Spooner is Hirsts’s ‘Tyler Durden’, the hard-up yet creative poet an alter-ego for the satisfied, content yet blocked writer. Others have suggested all four characters are shattered facets of one man’s mind, as Buchanan explains.

“There seems to be this malevolent force inside the house trying to tear Hirst down, and there was a deeply psychological essay wondering if all the parts are the same person – the part that drags you down and tries to cut you off at the knees, and the parts that are fighting for the light, trying to keep your head above water.

I think [director] Michael Gow has allowed that to be in there, and also the incredible amounts of literary references to TS Eliot and Keats and Shelley texts. Michael’s described this play as a kind of psychological chess game.”

But all of this speculation Buchanan says, simply gets in the way of his job – which is working out how best to portray one of these psychological chessmen.

“From an acting point of view, you have to forget all of that and go, ‘Well what am I doing?’,” he laughs. “It’s been a funny play because you can’t think ‘Where has my character been an hour before the play starts’ – who knows? What’s true and what’s real is very, very mercurial. Have they been out? Have they been in the house the whole time? In some ways you have to forget all of it and focus on ‘the game’ – if the game is being played, what am I trying to do in the game? Then the audience is left to answer the question ‘What does it mean to you’ – because Pinter would never, ever answer that question.”

WHAT: No Man’s Land WHEN & WHERE: Bille Brown Studio until 22 October

COMING IN FROM THE COLD LIZA DEZFOULI GOES ON A SNOWY JOURNEY UNDER THE AUSTRALIAN SUNSHINE WITH MATTHEW LUTTON, DIRECTOR OF DIE WINTERREISE. “It started with the music,” says Matthew Lutton, director of Die Winterreise, which opens next week at QPAC. He’s talking about Schubert’s song cycle, Die Winterreise. “I heard it for the first time when I was last here [refering to Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, where the play has just finished its run] and I was deeply taken by it. I always wanted to make a work that uses music as its core.”

Lutton, the theatre world’s young director of the moment and artistic associate director of Malthouse, has put together an ambitious show recreating >C< DL H= L CD

Schubert’s poetic story of one man’s tangible journey through the winter of exile, setting it in a contemporary Australian environment and using three performers. How does that work?

“I was clear at the beginning that ‘winter’ was to be purely metaphorical,” Lutton answers. “It’s ironic and enjoyable to have it in an Australian house, this image of a German winter in Australia, in the heat of summer.”

Winter, he says, is seen in a “spiritual, emotional, geographical sense.” “We’re saying that we understand it as well; in Australia we can take a German HI < ;6 A>C A : H H @:I I>8

at women is a practice observed by wankers. Pulling up metres from a woman you’ve just shouted at is like saying, “I’m a wanker, so what?”

I could have ripped into this guy on behalf of all the women who never got the chance to respond to all those unwelcome comments but as much as those spirits of angered women past wanted to tip my temper over the edge, I had to admit that this guy was not a suitable target for that kind of rant, he was just a dopey dude. The act of yelling out of cars to women carries a heavy social stigma but I’m pretty sure that he was blissfully unaware of that when yelling pseudo compliments out of his window.

Reacting appropriately to any kind song cycle and see our own soul in the songs... By acknowledging the past, searching for something older than you, some part of you that you can articulate, something from our forebears that’s in our memory.”

Lutton handpicked a special team of performers for his show, which comprises dance and theatrical performance as well as music. The very fabulous Paul Capsis was the natural choice to sing.

“Paul was the first person I thought of,” says Lutton. “I wanted someone who could make the music their own, someone who could express that vulnerability – that was important to me.” The other performers include theatre veteran George Shevtsov, who Lutton describes as having a special presence.

“He nearly doesn’t speak at all on stage; he’s someone that can be confident in that.” The dancer is James O’Hara, an Australian based in Brussels, in his first performance in this country.

“The frame of the whole piece,” Lutton continues, “is of someone listening to music and associating it with his own sense of being lonely, feeling like a migrant, homeless...”

Obviously not all of Schubert’s 24 songs are included in this work. How did Lutton decide which songs to keep?

“We asked which songs had the most impact? The first song we removed is the most famous one, The Linden Tree. It was also about the songs that resonated with Paul and his pianist,” say the director, referring to celebrated jazz pianist Alister Spence.

Each performer needed to be “a creator in his own right,” the director observes.

“We had a really tough rehearsal period with only four weeks to make the piece, to learn the songs and work out how to create this. It relied on everyone’s generosity. It was a matter of trial and error. We found ourselves doing some really bad physical theatre!”

The biggest challenge in making the

DL DGG B D I GIH HI6

offended. And frankly sometimes we misjudge, as I probably did, when we ought to be offended. Some people yell “whore” at innocent women on the street, others run red lights. Which is more offensive? The guy with no social decorum or the one who could end your sodding life when that green man sets off a Pavlovian response and you step out at the pedestrian crossing listening to your fun time happy tunes without looking right again? All we can really do is keep the ire to a minimum and our gun powder dry.

of offence takes measured action because no one who has offended you will ever see your point. Take Family Guy for instance, that show thrives on the obscene but if you admit to being offended by it, fans will label you a square. That really grinds my gears.

Personally I’m pleased that Family Guy still offends me sometimes; it means I still have standards. When Peter Griffin becomes normal, we got problems.

There are so many expectations on how people should behave that it’s too easy to cause offence or become

BRISBANE FESTIVAL REVIEWS FIRST RITUAL

slideshow of heavy-handed images rotates. There are pictures of people at the beach, pictures of sporting men, and mud-drenched soldiers shouldering their brothers through hardship. Below that, fundamentally undermining what those images stand for in our culture, are two men, limply flopping about, completely failing to translate the masculinity dripping from those pictures. Were it an attempt at being subversive, or a deliberate undermining of the culturally ingrained ideas of Australian masculinity, then that would be fine. But it’s not, and so it’s awful.

Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse Split into three parts, First Ritual is a contemporary dance performance centred on a variety of human ceremonies; some, with the middle of these three sections performed by China’s BeijingDance, are significantly better than others.

Up first, and of particular note, was local dance company EDC’s Australian Mateship piece. That long-dead horse.

As dancers mince, po-faced across the stage – why, in the contemporary genre, the dancers’ can’t emote with their faces is such an obtuse, pretentious thing – behind them a

Season finished

SAM HOBSON

ANDY X

final hours of Andy Warhol’s life, Andy X is probably most fascinating when viewed as the most vital evocation of Jim Sharman’s directorial fixations.

For this writer – and the film does beg this question – the X in Andy X translates as the subject upon which Andy – the man, here reduced to a coefficient – exerts his influence; it’s almost like a mathematical function.

So the X is every person and artistic output related to his life, marked by their multiplication of his influence; X is the variable.

The Studio, Metro Arts Watching Andy X, and I’m reminded of John Cameron Mitchell’s fantastic Hedwig And The Angry Inch. Not that thematically the two are linked, but the films’ colour, exuberance, compassion, and incredibly keen melodic sensibilities line up for a perfect double-bill. This is to say, both are of the very rare calibre of being a musical film with not only great songs across the board, and also the dramatic chops to boot.

Until 24 September

A surrealist, fractured retelling of the

SAM HOBSON

work, according to Lutton, is in staying out of the way of the music.

their own; you just interpret them. We’re still refining it.”

“You can’t do too much to the songs but you can’t have someone just standing there singing, either. Silence is just as important as the music – it’s a tricky structure. The songs are masterful on

WHAT: Die Winterreise

DC HD >C< 8DB

WHERE & WHEN: Powerhouse Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse Wednesday 28 September to Saturday 1 October

DC HD >C< B 8D

LEVEL 1, 151 BAROONA ROAD, ROSALIE, PH: 3876 4566, WWW.BLUEROOMCINEBAR.COM

WWW.BLUEROOMCINEBAR.COM

BARRACKS 07 3367 1954 61 PETRIE TCE, TOP OF CAXTON ST

THE BARRACKS

3367 1954

NORWEGIAN WOOD (MA15+) ADVANCE SCREENING (NO FREE TICKETS)

CENTRO 07 3852 4488 39 JAMES STREET, THE VALLEY

SUNDAY 4.00PM

9.20PM THU-TUE 11.15, 3.15, 6.30, 8.40PM

THU-TUE 10.30, 2.25, 6.30PM

THURSDAY 22ND SEPTEMBER TO WEDNESDAY 28TH SEPTEMBER 2011

JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN (PG) (NO FREE

OCTOBER 5 - 23

TICKETS)

WED 11.15, 3.15, 7.15,

SPY KIDS: ALL THE WED 10.15, 2.45, 7.00, TIME IN THE WORLD 8.55PM 2D (PG) (NO FREE TICKETS) THU-TUE 10.15, 2.45,

SNOW FLOWER & WED 9.30, 2.05PM THE SECRET FAN (M) THU/FRI 9.30, 12.15PM

CAVE OF FORGOTTEN WED 10.10, 2.20, 6.45, DREAMS (PG) (NO FREE 8.50PM

TICKETS)

WWW.PALACECINEMAS.COM.AU

OPENING NIGHT “WELCOME TO THE SOUTH” OCTOBER 5

SAT-TUE 9.30, 12.00 PM

7.15, 9.10PM

THE SMURFS 2D (G)

SPY KIDS: ALL THE (NO FREE TICKETS) TIME IN THE WORLD THE LION KING 3D (G) 4D (PG) (NO FREE TICKETS) WED 10.00, 12.00, THU-TUE 12.15, 8.20PM

(NO FREE TICKETS)

WED 10.15AM THU-MON 10.15, 12.10PM TUE 11.10, 1.00PM

WED 4.00, 7.45PM THU-MON 4.00, 7.45PM TUE 2.45, 8.30PM

SUBMARINE (M) (NO

FREE TICKETS)

5.45PM THU-MON 9.45, 11.45, 5.45PM TUE 9.45, 11.45, 6.30PM

CENTRO

07 3852 4488

SPECIAL EVENT “THE AGES OF LOVE” OCTOBER 6

THE WHISTLEBLOWER (MA15+) WED 10.30, 4.30, 7.00PM (NO FREE TIX) ADVANCED SCREENINGS

FRI- SUN 11.30AM

THE EYE OF THE STORM (MA15+) (NO FREE TIX)

THU/ MON- TUE 11.30, 4.10, 6.40, 8.50PM FRI- SUN 4.10, 6.40, 8.50PM

THE HELP (M)

WED 10.40, 3.50, 8.50PM WED 12.00, 2.20, 6.50, 9.10PM THU- TUE 1.30, 4.00, 6.30, 9.00PM THU- TUE 1.00, 8.40PM

SNOW FLOWER AND THE SECRET FAN (M) WED 10.10, 2.40, 6.30PM THU-TUE 2.40PM

SUBMARINE (M)

ONE DAY (M)

WED 12.20, 4.40, 9.15PM THU- TUE 10.45, 6.20PM

THE GUARD (MA15+)

WED 12.30, 2.30, 6.40PM

THU- TUE 10.30, 12.30, 7.00, 9.10PM

BEGINNERS (M)

WED 10.00AM THU- TUE 3.50PM

SENNA (M)

WED 4.50, 9.00PM THU- TUE 1.45, 4.50PM

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33

frontrow@timeoff.com.au

THE GREAT DREAMER GERMAN FILMMAKER WERNER HERZOG HAS TWO NEW FILMS: ONE, A COLLABORATION WITH DAVID LYNCH, AND THE OTHER, A DOCUMENTARY SHOT IN 3D. ANTHONY CAREW TALKS TO THE MUCH-ADMIRED AUTEUR. Werner Herzog is a singular cinematic figure; not just one of film history’s true greats, but someone whose work has been equally in fiction and documentary, back and forth. Bring up any distinctions between each realm, and the 68-year-old – in the same articulate, forceful, conversational voice with which he narrates his pictures – laughs it off.

34

“For me, it doesn’t really matter,” Herzog says. “I like both. It shouldn’t make anyone nervous that, for example, a writer who writes stageplays also writes poetry. But it seems to make film-reviewers nervous that I’m very fluent in both worlds. Which is strange, because the line between feature films and documentaries can be quite blurred.

It’s not so clear for me: I invent, I stage, I stylise when I do documentary, just as when I do feature films.”

And, in turn, his fiction films start to resemble his documentaries; his classics Aguirre, The Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo famously shot in South American jungles. “I keep saying my best documentary is Fitzcarraldo.

Because you just don’t move a real boat over a real mountain easily!”

Herzog cackles. The struggles of making the film were chronicled in Les Blank’s documentary Burden Of Dreams, and recounted again, nearly 30 years later, in Herzog’s memoir of the production, Conquest Of The Useless.

“I knew I had to do this film,” Herzog says. “Of course I knew it would create a host of problems and difficulties en route, but later no one would ask if it was difficult or not. That’s not how we are asking questions when we see a movie. What really is important is what you see on the screen. And does it uplift you?

Does it make you dream? Does it give you insights into human nature?

Does it stylise an entire landscape into an operatic event? Those are the questions that are important.”

When financiers suggested, midproduction, Fitzcarraldo be shut down, Herzog gave an inspirational half-time speech. “I said: ‘if I abandoned it I would be a man without dreams! I do not want to be a man without dreams!’

It’s something that’s just beyond the factual events you are staging, there has to be something more about it. It has to do with a fundamental sense of having the courage to fulfil your own dreams.”

Herzog’s films, in turn, are almost entirely about dreamers. He points to his 1974 documentary The Great Ecstasy Of The Sculptor Steiner as seminal example; “a ski-flying world champion who flies high and dreams big and, very often almost like in an Ancient Greek drama, gets punished for it by the Gods, before getting redeemed at the end.”

One of the great dreamers Herzog has ever chronicled is Grizzly Man, his portrait of Timothy Treadwell, a grizzly enthusiast who spent 13 summers living with bears on Kodiak Island in Alaska before eventually being eaten.

Telling the story of its serendipitous production clearly delights Herzog.

“The project ‘stumbled into me,’” he begins. In the office of producer Phil Fairclough, Herzog was pawing through Fairclough’s desk; “I wasn’t looking for a project, I was looking for my car-keys,” he laughs. The producer thought he was looking at research materials for the project. When Herzog had them pressed on him, he was inspired, especially when he discovered it didn’t have a director.

“I pumped my hand towards him and I said, ‘No, I will direct this movie now!’”

Herzog yelps, in recreation. “From the first moment, it was clear this was big.

All in capital letters. You do not see a story that big more than three or four times in your life. This is big! When I say it, I mean ‘capital T, capital H, capital I, capital S, capital I, capital S, capital B, capital I, capital G!” Big because it was about the fundamental relationship between human beings and the natural world?

“I don’t know what it was!” Herzog laughs. “I’m a storyteller, I’m a filmmaker, and when something like this comes across, I just know that I have to do it.”

Befitting Herzog’s career, he currently has two films arriving in Australian.

There’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, a bizarre drama that hacks apart the cop-show stand-off in semi-surreal form, and comes produced by David Lynch (“through some conversations I had with David

Lynch, where we discussed how we could make intelligent films,” Herzog recounts, “that put new life back into a project that had had no life for a long, long time”). And then there’s Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, a 3D documentary that chronicles the Chauvet Cave in France, site of some of the oldestdiscovered prehistoric cave paintings (“I’ve always been a mild sceptic of 3D, but with this film I kept saying it was imperative that we had to do it in 3D,” Herzog explains, “I do not see why I should ever do it again”), out in September.

Cave Of Forgotten Dreams was made with ultra-tight restrictions – four hours a day for a total of six days, a fourperson crew, lights that didn’t emit any temperature, special clothing – but Herzog took it in its stride. “That’s the nature of filmmaking,” he says, “I’d be the last person to ever complain about it.”

Herzog has long battle restrictions, elements, obstacles, and wild dreams to make his features; it’s all added up to an astonishing filmography. Through it all, he’s been driven by his natural inquisitiveness, which colours his works of cinema in remarkable shades.

“I do only things that fascinate me,” he says. “I’m never looking at what bestseller in the bestseller list could I make into a feature film. Films have always come at me like burglars in the middle of the night, home invasion.

Unexpected, uninvited. I’ve never had a planned career.”

WHAT: Cave Of Forgotten Dreams / My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

WHEN & WHERE: Screening in cinemas now / On DVD through Umbrella

ISSUE 1545 - WEDNESDAY 21 SEPTEMBER 2011

FELINEDOWN MEMBERS/ROLES:

Brodie-Ann Wright (vocals/songwriter/ shape-puller) and Beau Badinski (electronics/songwriter/noise making)

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN TOGETHER? Beau: Two years-ish, with this current writing line-up.

HOW DID YOU ALL MEET?

Beau: Brodie and I met years ago, all around the place at dodgy clubs in Brisbane. I’d always harass her about doing some vocals for my tracks.

That didn’t happen. I think we then re-met just before the Felinedown first EP launch. They were great so I somehow forced my way into/was forced into the band and the rest is history!

Brodie-Ann: Yeah I think it was fate really – along with Glen Gattenhof (guitars/songwriter) and the live band with Sam Morrison (bass) and Stephen Birt (drums), I really feel like all the pieces fell into place. The songs are the best we’ve ever written and the live outfit is tighter and more solid than ever before.

YOU’RE ON TOUR IN THE VAN – WHICH BAND OR ARTIST IS GOING TO KEEP THE MOST PEOPLE HAPPY IF WE THROW THEM ON THE STEREO? Beau: Who could hate Peaches?

Brodie-Ann: Hell yeah, Peaches! And I think NIN or The Prodigy is a pretty safe bet too.

WOULD YOU RATHER BE A BUSTED BROKE-BUT-REVERED HANK WILLIAMS FIGURE OR SOME KIND OF METALLICA MONSTER?

Brodie-Ann: Can we be a mix? Or maybe a bit of a Metallica monster then a Hank Williams?

Beau: Metallica used to be cool, man!

WHAT PART DO YOU THINK BRISBANE PLAYS IN THE MUSIC YOU MAKE?

Beau: I don’t think Brisbane plays any part at all. It’s the people in Brisbane that come and rock the fuck out at the shows that influence what we do.

Brodie-Ann: I agree, I don’t think our music reflects where we come from… not like an iconic Brisbane band like The Go- Betweens or The Saints that really capture the “city’s sound” or anything like that. I’d like to think we sound as if we could come from any number of cities.

It’s the people at the shows and the people supporting Brisbane music that’s important.

IS YOUR BAND RESPONSIBLE FOR MORE MAKE-OUTS OR BREAK-UPS? WHY?

Beau: Both. Make-outs because who could help themselves from wanting to ‘get down’ to Felinedown... (dig my rhyme?) And most of the inspiration for the music comes from that sort of thing. Aaaannnddd…

break-ups because we (inadvertently) make your girlfriend leave you to pursue BIGGER and better things.

Brodie-Ann: Yeah… Make-outs for certain. Then maybe a few breakups post gigs…we tend to encourage rather loose morals at our shows…

WHAT REALITY TV SHOW WOULD YOU ENTER AS A BAND AND WHY?

Brodie-Ann: Swamp People – get us to the bayou and get us some gators!

Beau: Jersey Shore, purely because I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to be fake tan orange and more importantly, to see Sam that colour and to start calling Glen ‘The Situation’.

Brodie-Ann: Screw it, I say let’s start calling him that now!

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE FOR THE BAND IN THE SHORT TERM?

Beau: Release the EP and tour the shit out of it! Play with some cool bands. Continue writing.

Brodie-Ann: We have the launch for our EP Trap Rebaited set for Oct 8 at Uber and we’re stoked! We’ve worked really fucking hard on this new music and on the live show too so it’s going to be a killer night. And then we hit the road for our national dates through Oct and Nov. We can’t wait!

Felinedown play Uber on Saturday Oct 8.

Photo by TERRY SOO.

TOUR GUIDE

GIG OF THEWEEK

INTERNATIONAL

BRYAN ADAMS: QPAC Sep 21 SEBADOH: The Hi-Fi Sep 22 EVERY TIME I DIE: The Hi-Fi Sep 23 HOLLYWOOD UNDEAD: Tempo Hotel Sep 23 ALICE COOPER: Convention Ctr Sep 24 CONGOROCK: Electric Playground Sep 29, Platinum Sep 30 AKRON/FAMILY: GOMA Sep 30 SIMPLE PLAN: The Tivoli Sep 30 MOON DUO: Woodland Oct 1 MONO: The Hi-Fi Oct 5 POUR HABIT, SMOKE OR FIRE: Miami Tavern Oct 8, Globe Theatre Oct 9 NEW YORK DOLLS: The Hi-Fi Oct 13 THE WOMBATS: Riverstage Oct 13 COUGH: Jubilee Hotel Oct 14 KOAN SOUND: Family Oct 15 SALMONELLA DUB: Coolangatta Hotel Oct 14, The Hi-Fi Oct 15 CHRIS CORNELL: QPAC Oct 15 & 17 AESOP ROCK, KIMYA DAWSON: The Hi-Fi Oct 16 BATHS: Alhambra Lounge Oct 19 DROPKICK MURPHYS: The Tivoli Oct 19 OKKERVIL RIVER: The Hi-Fi Oct 19 AGENT ORANGE: The Tempo Hotel Oct 21 THE TALLEST MAN ON EARTH: Brisbane Powerhouse Oct 21 THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, WE CAME AS ROMANS: The Hi-Fi Oct 26 & 27 BROKENCYDE: The Zoo Oct 27 THE PLANET SMASHERS: Step Inn Oct 27 MATTHIAS TANZMANN: Barsoma Oct 28 THE BUSINESS: Prince of Wales Oct 29, Shed 5 Oct 30 FOLK UKE: Mullum Civic Hall Nov 2, Joe’s Waterhole Nov 3, Old Museum Nov 4 SHAPESHIFTER: The Hi-Fi Nov 4 SIDNEY SAMSON: Family Nov 4, Platinum Nov 5 DESTRUCTION: The Hi-Fi Nov 6 KINGS OF LEON: BEC Nov 8 CHILDREN OF BODOM: Arena Nov 13 THE CASUALTIES: The Hi-Fi Nov 13 BLIND IMAGE: Jubilee Hotel Nov 18 CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YEAH: The Zoo Nov 20 HTRK: The Bridge Club Nov 26 MISFITS: The Hi-Fi Dec 2 GUITAR WOLF: Step Inn Dec 3 UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA: Alhambra Lounge Dec 4 MUDHONEY: The Zoo Dec 5 FUTURE OF THE LEFT: The Zoo Dec 6 GANG GANG DANCE: Powerhouse Dec 6 KURT VILE: Woodland Dec 8 FOO FIGHTERS, TENACIOUS D: Metricon Stadium Dec 10 EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY: The Hi-Fi Dec 13 FRANK FAIRFIELD: Judith Wright Ctr Dec 15, SoundLounge Dec 16 OPETH: The Tivoli Dec 15 ARCTIC MONKEYS: Riverstage Jan 14

NATIONAL

ART VS SCIENCE: Great Northern Sep 21, Spotted Cow Sep 22, Kings Beach Tavern Sep 23, Coolangatta Hotel Sep 24 GANGGAJANG: Mansfield Ent Ctr Sep 23 ERNEST ELLIS & THE PANAMAS: Alhambra Lounge Sep 30 JOSH PYKE: Great Northern Sep 22,

36

NIRVANA: LIVE AT THE PARAMOUNT

FRIDAY SEP 23 (9PM)

We’ve never had a Gig Of The Week before that had already happened, but there’s never really been a band like Nirvana before either. For those of us old enough to remember it seems incredible that 20 years have passed since Nirvana’s second album Nevermind and its tearaway single Smells Like Teen Spirit turned the musical landscape on its ear, but time stops for no band. Obviously the tragic passing of Kurt Cobain a few short years later meant that most people never got a chance to see this incredible band live onstage, which is why the ‘one night only’ cinema release of Nirvana: Live At The Paramount is so exciting: it’s never been released before, and captures this incendiary band in all its live glory. The event is hosted by triple j maestro Richard Kingsmill, and the $35 ticket price includes a voucher which gets you the 2-CD reissue of the seminal Nevermind, complete with rarities, outtakes and live tracks. Check out cinemalive.com for details of participating cinemas – proudly presented by triple j and Street Press Australia.

Gareth Liddiard @ The Spiegeltent

by Stephen Booth

GARETH LIDDIARD THE SPIEGELTENT: 14.09.11

The rustic and dated charms of The Spiegeltent offer beautiful respite from the urban reality of the city centre, with visitors seemingly ushered back to a bygone age as they enter the gorgeous interior. The seats before the stage are packed and the booths surrounding the perimeter quickly fi lling as inveterate entertainer Gareth Liddiard lurches into view and takes a seat on the lone stool adorning the stage, easing into an easy patter of laidback banter before a note has even been played in anger. The Drones’ frontman has clearly warmed to life as a solo performer and his easy charm wins people over from the outset, before he eases into the chillingly poignant Cold And Sober. His well-practiced between-song routine continues with some self-professed “deceptively intelligent jokes”, before he continues with Blondin Makes An Omelette (described as a song about “low self-esteem and fear of missing out”). It’s testament to his adroit skills that his set – which has remained relatively similar for the 12 months since his solo debut Strange Tourist dropped – never gets less entertaining no matter how many times it’s experienced, familiarity not detracting one iota from songs like High Plains Mailman. The ornate surroundings suit the showman perfectly and add gravitas to the inherent intensity of his songs, aided by the realisation that the display of just voice and acoustic guitar is timeless and could hark back to the stately tent’s very beginnings.

Then again Liddiard is prone to making statements that could only be grounded in the here and now, such as his proclamation that “if I could brew my own beer and make my own pizzas then I’d never have to play for you fucking cunts ever again!”, pausing for a smile before adding, “you think I’m joking” and easing into Strange Tourist. He touches on modern politics (“Bob Katter’s a fucking asshole – shoot

him”) before airing the incredible Shark Fin Blues, segueing this into the haunting Did She Scare All Your Friends Away. Liddiard is distinctly Aussie with both his drawl and knockabout everyman persona, but behind this façade lies a scathing intellect and wit, his verbose, lyric-heavy tracts delivered with such passion and conviction that all involved are swept along en masse in the tide of emotion and invective.

Liddiard doesn’t just sketch characters, he paints them in vivid brushstrokes, shining a light on their fears and insecurities and making them seem closer than kin, the mixture of empathy and scathing analysis captivating in the extreme. A beautifully restrained rendition of I Don’t Ever Want To Change leads into the perfectly applicable 16 Straws – a song about Queensland’s convict heritage – which is (as ever) stunning in both scope and execution. Even an encore of The Drones’ pathos-dripping Jezebel can’t take this incandescent night any higher – an absolutely stunning show by one of Australia’s best-ever talents.

MICHAEL GARDINER

CUSTARD

BRISBANE POWERHOUSE: 17.09.11

The Brisbane Festival patrons clearly like to think outside the box, which is why tonight finds 90s Brisbane indie legends Custard playing in the specially-assembled QUT Theatre – a scaffolding arrangement facing the outside wall of the Brisbane Powerhouse, with the band playing on the ground level facing a steeply-sloping wall of seats which quickly fi lls with fans hanging for a dose of quirky nostalgia. The setting against the crumbling exterior reeks of urban decay, but such thoughts are quickly diminished as the foursome make a triumphant entry and kick off with the pulsing Goofinder. It seems slightly incongruous being seated for such a fun gig, but the privilege of seeing this legendary band play such a special and intimate showcase more than atones for that.

The band seem hardly to have aged at all, especially the rhythm section, and they still have the same personas as ever: Paul Medew (bass) favours the country look and remains silent and stoic, Matt Strong (guitar) is the loveable rogue trading in rock chic while frontman Dave McCormack revels in his natural charisma off set by a garish faux-Hawaiian ensemble. Pack Yr Suitcases is up next, followed by Alone (it’s Indooroopilly Shoppingtown reference giving the song geographical relevance) and Lucky Star. It’s difficult to ascertain who’s having more fun out of the band and the crowd, and it indeed seems like the special event that it purports to be as they fire

PRESENTS SEBADOH: The Hi-Fi Sep 22 BEN SALTER: SolBar Sep 22, The Zoo Sep 23. The Spotted Cow Sep 24 MEGASTICK FANFARE, OH YE DENVER BIRDS: SolBar Sep 23, Alhambra Lounge Sep 24 ESKIMO JOE: The Tivoli Oct 9 THE WOMBATS: Brisbane Riverstage Oct 13 BALL PARK MUSIC: Shark Bar Oct 13, Spotted Cow Oct 14, The Zoo Oct 15 THE JEZABELS: The Tivoli Oct 14 and Oct 16, Coolangatta Hotel Oct 15 JACK LADDER: The Loft Oct 14, Step Inn Oct 15, Great Northern Hotel Oct 16 PHRASE: Sprung Festival Oct 15 360: Sprung Festival Oct 15 FUNKOARS: Sprung Festival Oct 15, Spotted Cow Oct 16 OKKERVIL RIVER: The Hi-Fi Oct 19 HEIRS, ALCEST: Globe Theatre Oct 20 FAKER: The Northern Oct 20, Coolangatta Hotel Oct 21, The Zoo Oct 22, Joe’s Waterhole Oct 23 TALLEST MAN ON EARTH: Brisbane Powerhouse Oct 21 LANIE LANE: Old Museum Oct 27 THE PLANET SMASHERS: Step Inn Oct 27 FOLK UKE: Joe’s Waterhole Nov 3, Old Museum Nov 4 SKIPPING GIRL VINEGAR: Joe’s Waterhole Nov 4, Beetle Bar Nov 5 GOLD FIELDS: Alhambra Lounge Nov 5 GYROSCOPE: The Zoo Nov 16 CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH: The Zoo Nov 20 JEBEDIAH: The Hi-Fi Nov 25 MUDHONEY: The Zoo Dec 5 FUTURE OF THE LEFT: The Zoo Dec 6 KURT VILE & THE VIOLATORS: Woodland Dec 8 FESTIVAL OF THE SUN: Port Macquarie Dec 9-10 EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY: The Hi-Fi Dec 13 JESSIE J: Brisbane Riverstage Mar 1 off the tantalising Anatomically Correct and then swap instruments to allow drummer Glen Thompson out front for Music Is Crap. It’s clear as they play audience fave Apartment that there’s a mixture of veteran Custard fans and people who have joined during the band’s recent ten-year hiatus, but the band’s chemistry – integral to their appeal – is undiminished and the sound is amazing, except possibly during the audience breakdown amidst Ringo (I Feel Like…). The better-known songs such as Singlette, Hit Song and the eternally cruisy The New Matthew get the same adoring reaction as slightly more obscure fare such as Nice Bird and Pinball Lez. Girls Like That (Don’t Go For guys Like Us) gets temperatures running high, and they finish the effervescent set with Caboolture Speed Lab, which fittingly is cranked to breakneck pace by its conclusion. The band leave suddently and the lights go down – do they do encores at festivals? Of course they do! Custard return to a heroes’ reception and pump through classic early single Bedford before finishing with the cheery Pluto. It’s so good to see this amazing band back together and having fun – let’s hope that the ongoing success of their reunion shows sees them decide to re-embrace Custard as a more permanent endeavour.

STEVEN BAKER

THE GATHERING FESTIVAL

OLD MUSEUM: 17.09.11

It’s an absolutely gorgeous day, and the beautiful surrounds of the Old Museum have been altered dramatically to accommodate the influx of people into its pristine environs. The three back rooms of the

historic building have been converted into individual stages for the day’s proceedings, with the main Concert Hall empty until the crowning performance tonight. The crowd is mainly comprised of folk who’ve been around the block a few times, but everyone is in fine spirits and eager for a good time.

Firing up the day’s proceedings, John Malcolm pours his all to fi ll the Old Museum with an eclectic splash of rock, acid folk and rhythm and blues. Immediately alluring, the guitar virtuoso stands unaccompanied – flanked only by his instruments. Eager to encounter the magic and the stories conjured through his vivid poetry and acoustic prowess, a large crowd witnesses the biting lyricism of Cuts Like A Diamond, then a rearrangement of JJ Cale’s Crazy Mama, before he closes with an abbreviated version of The Journey Itself.

First to hit the Old Cats Stage – Lil’ Fi & The Famous 4 enter to rapturous applause. With a bevy of familiar faces amongst the crowd, Fi acknowledges each in between song, quoting anecdotes of their past revelry. Pink Cadillac proves a particular favourite, while Wang Dang Doodle incorporates band, then audience for additional vocals. An intimate dancefloor session closes the set.

Remember how downright enjoyable the loose, drunken, southern rock of Kings Of Leon was before Only By The Night ruined it all? Bang Bang Boss Kelly have the vibe of KOL’s better times, with a punk attitude and sound creeping in to make the local boys a solid live prospect. New track Damien Barber swings further to the later, showing off a tight band dynamic led by Peter Bosworth on drums and Alex Henriksson who can move to frothing frontman mode when needed.

The Bertie Page Clinic enter the scene before a packed Local Cats Stage – with every audience member surely anticipating the bawdy bash that is to follow. In full Scottish garb, Bertie provides a constant banter, with mean girls, gay boys and tales of the schoolyard as hot topics. The music appears second to the stripping here – and with the set cut short at the sound desk, the female lead takes to playing with her cleavage for the remainder of the show.

Transvaal Diamond Syndicate declare straight up that they’re all about getting their bluesy rock stomp on, which they do in a stop-start manner that becomes tedious as the crowd is continually badgered by frontman Christian X to dance and participate.

When burlesque performer Bertie Page is invited on stage twice, after having just performed next door, their 2010 4ZzZ song of the year Home becomes a disjointed block of sound; concentrating on their own songs rather than stunts to bolster the performance would be a better use of their time.

The Toxic Garden Gnomes appear as a major draw card amongst the festival line-up, uniting a vivacious audience of the day’s youngest and oldest partygoers.

From a cruisey beginning, the trio steadily clicks the set up a notch, track-by-track. Inviting some old friends onstage to provide a little help, the show rapidly escalates to a party rock event, wherein quality riff s, hard lyrics and body moving are the performance core, and they finish with the rousing Far Queue.

The Jim Rockfords are a who’s who of the Brisbane scene way back to the 90s (including members of SixFtHick and Blowhard) playing largely inoffensive rockabilly styled standard riff s and rock tricks. Tail Lights throws in a bit of punk playfulness in the mix as the five-piece clearly enjoy being the centre of attention as much as the audience gets a kick out of watching, while Speed Of Sound and a cover of Radio Birdman’s Murder City Nights really get the room jumping.

The entirely black-clad El Caminos elicit a strong response when they appear onstage, the trio soon proving why with their inspired instrumental rock stylings. Their music has overt surf-overtones but is quite eclectic in dynamic, and some harmonic vocals appear towards the tail-end of the set, and all and sundry seem delighted by the strong performance.

Back on the New Cats stage, William Barton – a last

minute replacement for The Wilson Pickers who had to withdraw due to illness – uses all of his experience to coax some incredible sounds from his didgeridoo, augmenting this with his haunting voice and some samples from his laptop. At times he uses his voice for beats, this blending of a more modern aesthetic with the most traditional sounds that this country has to offer working well in his capable hands.

The Vaudeville Smash are the only interstaters on the line-up and their party-inspired take on soft commercial rock seems good fun, but they just don’t have the familiarity that the other bands have working in their favour, so people seem a little reticent to join in the fun. Th is doesn’t stop the six-piece from giving their all, and they still get some people dancing and admiring their use of trombone and sax.

There’s a lot of love in the room as a massive throng congregates to watch an all-too-rare performance from local folk-rock favourites Toothfaeries. The percussive-heavy six-piece really know how to get a party started, and they have the crowd eating out of the palm of their collective hand from the get-go, and don’t let up until all and sundry are totally exhausted.

Finally it’s time for the headliners to play, and the doors of the Concert Hall are thrown open to make way for fans eager to catch this reformation of the definitive line-up of local rockers The Screaming Tribesmen, playing their first show together in over two decades. The venue reaches capacity immediately and there’s a big line outside as they kick into Casualty Of Love like they’ve never been away. The four-piece look exultant onstage and the sound is incredible, and the light show – augmented by a massive skull mirror ball in the middle of the hall – really takes things to another level as they reel off a seemingly endless string of melodic garage hits such as High Time and the shriek-inducing Ice. Frontman Mick Medew’s voice is as distinctive and powerful as ever, and they seem completely in their element as they fire through Girl Of My Dreams and Infidel. The rhythm section seem still totally in sync during the permanently catchy I’ve Got A Feeling, and guitarist Chris Masuak is in stunning form, shredding incredibly during Top Of The Town. The hits keep coming – songs like Igloo and Date With A Vampyre making one wonder how bands like Hoodoo Gurus got so big while the Tribesmen stayed in the margins – and after they leave the stage the massive crowd coaxes them back for an encore with (I Want To) Mess With You proving that they have plenty left in reserve. The Gathering Festival ends with the Tribesemen leaving the fray in triumph, stopping to get some photos taken with the adoring masses behind them – a perfectly fitting end to a great day of tunes and reminiscence.

CARLIN BEATTIE, TYLER McLOUGHLAN, ANDREW McQUALTER

DZ DEATHRAYS, TAPE/OFF

ALHAMBRA LOUNGE: 17.09.11

In theory, being supported by a karaoke machine sounds like mad fun: people losing their inhibitions, grabbing the mic and belting out a bit of Madonna.

But upon arrival, all thoughts of busting out Like a Virgin are lost when you realise, at 9pm, you’re too sober to remember you actually can’t sing. Not even the beckoning call of Lady GaGa can entice anyone to within a three feet radius of the machine. That is, until lead singer of Tape/Off Nathan Pickels, downs his beer, picks up a mic and starts asking Who Let the Dogs Out? The precedent has been set, the microphone is handed over and Jon Bon Jovi is given a run for his money with someone’s take on You Give Love A Bad Name – complete with pelvic thrusting. But then as abruptly as the karaoke starts, it’s all over.

Our ears are soon bleeding again but this time it’s because Tape/Off are just. so. LOUD. Pavementesque in their sound, the lovers of 90s grunge fi ll the room with fuzzed out bass lines and barely decipherable lyrics (possibly due to the blood welling

up in your ears). Positioned side of stage, drummer Branko Cosic takes up frontman duties on History; his ability to assault his kit with such force while still carrying a tune is actually quite impressive. Smashing through tracks from their latest EP, Tape/Off prove that in reality they are less of the 90s and more of the now, despite what they’re wearing.

Appearing for the last time in Brisbane before they jet off on a whirlwind European tour, DZ Deathrays are intent on making it a memorable night. Th ings are hectic from the start but as the LED strobes become brighter, Simon Ridley’s drumming becomes more frantic, and Shane Parsons’ yells turn into screams, the crowd becomes rowdier in appreciation. Security soon step in, intent on stopping what looks to be a riot about to break out. Not taking this as a sign to calm down though, Parsons jumps from the stage to crowd surf while still unleashing some killer riff s – an impressive feat when the stage is only 20cm off the ground. Tracks like The Mess Up and Gebbie Street are thrown out to the crowd (as are limbs) and in a burst of confetti they end their always-too-short set and disappear off into the night. Party on boys, party on.

RACHEL TINNEY

LEADER CHEETAH, BELLES WILL RING, FOUNDS

ALHAMBRA LOUNGE: 16.09.11

Founds are quite a find (pardon the pun), the Brisbane sextet littering the stage and offering a set that is just as hard to ignore. With respectable song structure providing space for each individual band member to shine, you are left to pick up on the little idiosyncrasies that give the performance the differing points in which to take it from good to great. And more than fair play to a violinist who can rhythmically headbang and not miss a note.

Crystal Lounge has proven to be one of the most cosmopolitan recordings of the year and watching Belles Will Ring bring these tracks and more to life onstage, only solidifies the opinion that they should be a house band on the Vegas state line. Opening with Street Lamp Stamp, the Sydneysiders are full of fi lth and swagger that commands attention, the maraca shaking of Lauren Crew only adding to the dark fun.

The band’s sound lives and dies within the electric relationship between guitarists Liam Judd and Aidan Roberts and tonight they’re on fire, trading riffs like old friends trade jokes while The River is one of many tunes to provide lovely male/female interplay, injecting the set with sexual tension amid the forever tumbling blues.

Even by the time Adelaide sons Leader Cheetah amble from the bar to the stage, it’s still a sadly empty Alhambra, especially considering the quality of the band’s most recent offering Lotus Skies. But the few that have made the effort this evening are rewarded with a mesmerising set from the band; the performance tight and agile, the songs warm and ever giving in texture and tone. Midnight Headlights kicks off the evening and although the well-tailored lads battle with feedback issues, the echoed vocal delay of frontman Dan Crannitch towers over the shrill sounds. Dead In A Dream, So Save Me and Golden Age continue on to see both the band and crowd warming into the set, the songs only punctuated by rousing adulation from a small but passionate fanbase growing at the front of stage. Bloodlines is the sole time the band dip into their back catalogue but rightly so; the song remains as vital and haunting as always, the line “blood is all we have to clean” traded between harmonies by the four members exquisitely. But it’s Lotus Skies they are here to plug, Leader Cheetah finishing with a glut of tracks from the record (Dark Stands Over, Crawling Up A Landslide, Lotus Skies, Our Love, None Shall Pass) before an extended Dan Pash guitar solo down in the crowd signs the set off, more than doing their divine record justice.

TOUR GUIDE Coolangatta Hotel Sep 23, The Hi-Fi Sep 24 KIMBRA: Speigeltent Sep 23 ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI: The Tivoli Sep 25 OWL EYES: Alhambra Lounge Sep 29, The Brewery Sep 30, Sol Bar Oct 1 THE CAT EMPIRE: The Zoo Sep 29 & 30, The Tivoli Oct 1 DEAD LETTER CHORUS: Old Museum Oct 6 THE PANICS: Great Northern Oct 6, The HiFi Oct 7, Coolangatta Hotel Oct 8 TEX PERKINS & THE DARK HORSES: Judith Wright Ctr Oct 7 GOTYE: Brisbane Powerhouse Oct 8 - 9 ESKIMO JOE: The Tivoli Oct 9 THE JEZABELS: Great Northern Oct 12, USQ Club Oct 13, The Tivoli Oct 14 & 16, Coolangatta Hotel Oct 15 JACK LADDER: Alhambra Lounge Oct 14, The Loft Oct 15, Great Northern Oct 16 BIG SCARY: Old Museum Oct 15 FUNKOARS: Spotted Cow Oct 16 FAKER: Great Northern Oct 20, Coolangatta Hotel Oct 21, The Zoo Oct 22, Joe’s Waterhole Oct 23 BENI: Elsewhere Oct 22 TRIAL KENNEDY: Jupiters Casino Oct 21, Woodland Oct 22 LANIE LANE: Old Museum Oct 27 THE DRONES: The Hi-Fi Oct 28 SKIPPING GIRL VINEGAR: Gold Coast Arts Ctr Nov 3, Joe’s Waterhole Nov 4, Beetle Bar Nov 5 GOLD FIELDS: Elsewhere Nov 4, Alhambra Lounge Nov 5 BOY & BEAR: Kings Beach Tavern Nov 9, Coolangatta Hotel Nov 10, Tivoli Nov 11 & 12 HUXTON CREEPERS: The Hi-Fi Nov 11, The Brewery Nov 12 X: Lennox Hotel Nov 11, Beetle Bar Nov 12 GYROSCOPE: The Zoo Nov 16 PHRASE: The Zoo Nov 17, Byron Beach Hotel Nov 18, Coolangatta Hotel Nov 19, Solbar Nov 20 SEEKER LOVER KEEPER: St John’s Cathedral Nov 21 THE GETAWAY PLAN: The Hi-Fi Nov 23 THE TRIFFIDS: Brisbane Powerhouse Nov 24 JEBEDIAH: The Hi-Fi Nov 25 PAUL DEMPSEY: The Zoo Dec 1

FESTIVALS

COUNTER REVOLUTION: Riverstage Sep 24 OPEN FRAME: Powerhouse Sep 28 & 29 PARKLIFE: City Botanical Gardens Oct 1 CALOUNDRA MUSIC FESTIVAL: Kings Beach Park Oct 7 – 9 VALLEY FIESTA: Fortitude Valley Oct 7 – 8 SPRUNG: Riverstage Oct 15 ON THE PULSE FESTIVAL: Fortitude Valley PCYC & The Hive Oct 22 ISLAND VIBE FESTIVAL: Point Lookout, Stradbroke Island Oct 28 – 30 GOLDEN DAYS FESTIVAL: Coolum Beach Nov 19 & 20

BENNY DOYLE

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DO BE CAUGHT NAPPING

SIX PACK DAN ACFIELD HE’S RECENTLY BEEN NAMED RAGE’S INDIE ARTIST OF THE WEEK, AND NOW LOCAL SINGERSONGWRITER DAN ACFIELD IS CLOSING OUT A HUGE YEAR WITH THE RELEASE OF HIS NEW EP, THICK SKIN. TONY MCMAHON TALKS BENCHMARKS.

Even though it’s been a massive year, Acfield emphasises that it was important that he got his latest recording right.

“I put lots of time into it still. Brendan Anthony and I came up with an arrangement where I would go to his studio and record for a day here and a day there, where it suited us both. We took about two to three months to do it all. So we got time to reflect as we went along. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist, so I hate to rush things.”

Thick Skin is being billed as a benchmark for Acfield. This, he explains, is mainly due to how frightening it is to be finally going it alone.

“It’s really my first recording that I’ve done outside of my previous band, Dear April. We released two EPs, but this time I went out on my own and got to do things exactly my way. The EP is also about that partially, about battling with my own expectations and self-esteem to actually make the decision to really go for it as a solo musician, considering how volatile the music industry is.”

As far as the future of his music is concerned, Acfield sees himself performing well into old age.

“I think that I’ll die creating or performing music.

I remember when I was at uni, learning about some 90-year-old guy famous for composing this weird aleatoric music; he didn’t become well known until much later in life. Here was a guy in his 90s travelling the world and creating music. I think and hope that will be me. The ultimate aim at the moment is that I just want to be able to make enough money to pay the rent from music. I don’t need millions, just enough.

I’m sure that most musos are in this boat.”

WHO: Dan Acfield WHAT: Thick Skin (Independent) WHERE & WHEN: X&Y Bar Friday Sept 23

BEST FOOT FORWARD With a brooding tone that recalls the darker end of British rock, The Dead Leaves certainly have a sound that encapsulates a far broader reach than their Melbourne base. On the cusp of releasing their anticipated debut Cities On The Sea, the indie quartet are treating fans to a taste of the LP in the way of first single If The Show Fits, and if it’s any indication of the album to follow, the boys are in for a bumper 2012. You can check out these rather dapper gentlemen when they play Beach Hotel, Byron Bay Thursday Sep 22 and The Brown Bag Social at Tempo Hotel’s Bowler Bar, Friday Sep 23.

Tickets for the Brisbane show are $10 at the door with support from Brisbane boys Young Men Dead.

DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU GOT ‘TIL...

Founded back in 2005, Brisbane’s Nikko have been progressively cultivating a rabid fanbase through quality releases that highlight the dark and haunting qualities imbedded deep within their music. The band are nowhere more comfortable than performing on stage but unfortunately for us in Brisvegas, they are taking their combined talents down south to set-up shop in Melbourne. Come and give them the farewell they deserve when they play Live Spark at Brisbane’s Powerhouse with Dune Rats on Sunday Sep 25. Th is is a free all ages event, giving you no excuse for being absent, and kicks off at 3.30pm.

THIS MODERN LOVE

Touring hard in support of their latest record Descartes, The Moderns are treating their GC brethren to a local show in mark of the single release of Troubled Man. Driven by the sibling backbone chemistry of Levi and Andre Franco, frontman Samuel Rees is free to channel the classic sound of rock music that has been paved the way before them by the likes of Young, Dylan and Reed. Joining the boys on their journey this evening will be everyone’s favourite dirty blues band Transvaal Diamond Syndicate The big night of rawk is happening Friday Sep 30 down at Gold Coast’s always entertaining Shark Bar.

THICKER SKINNED THAN MOST

2011 has proven to be a big year for local troubadour Dan Acfield. He’s only returned to the stage under his own name this year, but has already been super busy playing a whole host of shows spanning both locally and across the country. He is set to cap off an already remarkable year in his performance life with the release of his new EP Thick Skin. Acfield is set to launch his new batch of tunes at X&Y Bar Friday Sep 23, with doors opening at 8pm and entry a measly ten bucks! And for all you GC kids, get to Nobby’s Beach institution The Cave for a free show Monday Oct 3.

THE END IS NIGH

The Doomsday Festival is ready to put any game souls in a stranglehold with a session of brutal tunes covering sludge, doom metal, experimental, and plenty of other niche elements of extreme music that aren’t for the faint-hearted. And headlining the day’s proceedings are none other than Cough, yet another acclaimed merchant of heavy from the city of Richmond, Virginia, home to Lamb Of God, GWAR and Pig Destroyer. The American quartet will play alongside local acts like Clagg, Looking Glass and Fear The Setting Sun at the undisputed home of heavy music in Brisbane, the Jubilee Hotel. Get down on Friday Oct 14 with tickets on sale through Moshtix.

ANCHORING DOWN

No Anchor’s successful third album Real Pain Supernova, released earlier this year, was a milestone for the band. A cacophony of beautiful noise, the eight-track record combines their loud and abrasive nature with wailing vocals and violent thunderbolts of drums, punching you in the face with a sonic force unlike any other. They’re kicking off a national tour this week and finishing it with a bang by anchoring in Brisbane to play seven consecutive nights at The Waiting Room from Saturday Oct 15. You can also catch them supporting Japan’s Mono Wednesday Oct 5 at The Hi-Fi with tickets for that show $45 + bf.

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Boutique music festival Subsonic isn’t ‘til December, but to hold us until then is a festival launch featuring headline act Adultnapper – aka Francis Harris – from New York. The underground electronic talent who DJs, produces and composes, will be at Brews Brothers in Woolloongabba, alongside Tekstyles, Lone Pariah, Robohan, and Marcotix Saturday Oct 1. Th is jam packed night of dance starts at 5pm and the earlier you are, the better! We’re talking free beer from 5-6pm and the early birds will go into the draw to win Subsonic tickets – don’t worry if you already have them, they’ll be redeemed. Only 80 tickets will be available – $35 presale from Resident Advisor or $40 on the door.

SIX PACK THE DETONATORS RECALLING EVERYTHING THAT HAS BEEN GREAT ABOUT ROCK’N’ROLL SINCE THE 60S, THE DETONATORS ARE BLOWING IN FOR ONE SHOW ONLY, READY TO GET YOUR HIPS SHAKING ALL NIGHT LONG. BENNY DOYLE TALKS SHOP WITH THE PERPETUALLY BUSY PAULIE ‘THE KID’ BIGNELL.

“Obsession, maybe?” Bignell, guitarist for rock relics The Detonators, is briefly contemplating his feelings regarding the birth of the band more than ten years ago and the catalyst it stemmed from.

Was it a reaction to current styles that don’t cut it; perhaps an impulse to wind back the clock?

The answer proves to be far more direct and to the point. “I had a vision,” he states, “that it was time for blues to meet rockabilly, our way.”

So what exactly do The Detonators provide Bignell and his fellow rock cats in which his other musical pursuits haven’t before or presently can’t?

“The Detonators have their own sound, more than anything else I’m involved with,” he admits. “It’s a real band; old school, done the hard yards. They also have their own groove but yet it is still somehow familiar to people.

People sing along with Dets tunes. It’s just a bunch of guys that sound good together. We have been doing it together for some time now.

We like it real swinging, jumpin’, rockin’ or just plain old down home blues.” And as for their personal styles. “We all love our roots music whether it be blues, country or rockabilly. But I think you can hear in our music what each of us are about. It gets brewed up from there.”

And although music is constantly progressing down avenues that will continue to keep artists, critics and fans arguing their vitality and importance, Bignell is quite confident to remark that the sort of rock’n’roll The Detonators work with will continue to hold it’s place of importance amongst popular music.

“No problem there,” he retorts, “rock’n’roll will never die. It may not always be on the top but it won’t be far behind.”

IT’S LADIES NIGHT The last Thursday in the month is steadfastly approaching and you know what that means right? Lady Bugs at the Beetle Bar. A monthly event showcasing the best lovely lassies in the Brisbane music scene, the fourth instalment in the series is curated by none other than Kellie Lloyd, pictured, Screamfeeder’s iconic bass player. Joining herself and male (!) drummer Branko Cosic on this special evening of song are lo-fi rockers Keep On Dancin’s, psychlovers Dreamtime and up-and-comers The Maddisons. Tickets for the night will be available on the door for only $10 with bands kicking off at 8pm.

WHO: The Detonators WHAT: Holland Park Bowls Club Friday Sep 23

POP GOES FINLAND

Explosively creative pop duo Oscar + Martin, who’ve emerged from the closure of Psuche, and world-class indie pop wonderkids Mitzi, the pair of whom would be a killer live prospect just on their own, have now been announced as supports for good ole’ Melburnians Architecture in Helsinki at their only Brisbane show!

Oscar + Martin have been crafting beautifully wonky pop outings and their latest album For You is a treat while Mitzi will enjoy the fresh air, currently holed up in the West End working on their debut. A huge night a good vibes, easy attitudes and impeccable music, you can catch all three acts at The Tivoli on Sunday Sep 25 with tickets sure to be snapped up at only $42 + bf through Ticketek.

Q Music is a not for profit organization supporting Queensland music, musicians and industry workers. Th is column will present you with information on grant and export opportunities, conferences and the general low-down on the state’s music industry.

WAXING LYRICAL WITH QUEENSLAND MUSIC AWARD WINNERS Q Music and the Brisbane Powerhouse are pleased to present a special Waxing Lyrical on Saturday Oct 8 featuring winners from the 2011 Queensland Music Awards. Alan Kelly (winner of the World Music Award), Stephen Smith (winner of the School Award) and more will all be featured in this special event held on the Turbine Platform at the Brisbane Powerhouse from 5 – 7pm. Waxing Lyrical gives the audience the opportunity to hear the stories behind the songs and what inspires our songwriters and their art.

Q MUSIC AND VIRGIN AUSTRALIA HONOURED FOR THE HOME INDIGENOUS MUSIC PROJECT A unique initiative to promote Indigenous music artists around the nation and the world has been honoured at the Queensland round of the Australian Business Arts Foundation (AbaF) Awards. Q Music and airline Virgin Australia have collected the State AbaF ‘Partnership Award’ for the successful series of HOME compilation CDs. Produced over the past three years, the compilation releases have showcased the finest Queensland and Australian indigenous music artists to a growing global audience.

CREATIVE SPOTLIGHT NETWORKING EVENTS Artists and arts workers are invited to attend a series of three Creative Spotlight Networking Events to be held across Brisbane on Wednesday Oct 19 at The Old Museum, Wed Oct 26 at the Sherwood Neighbourhood Centre and Wed Nov 2 at the Zillmere PCYC. Presented by Queensland Arts Council, Creative Generator SEQ and Brisbane City Council each of the events, will shine a light on four leading artists who’ll share the story of their creative journey.

BREAKTHROUGH RECORDING INITIATIVE APPLICATIONS OPEN The third round of the Breakthrough: Emerging Indigenous Contemporary Musicians Recording initiative is now open for applications.

The Breakthrough program provides funding to emerging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians and bands to produce a high quality recording of original tracks, suitable for broadcasting and commercial release. The program aims to provide greater exposure for the talent and creativity of Indigenous musicians as well as increase national and international audiences for Australian Indigenous contemporary music.

FREE LEGAL ADVICE AVAILABLE FOR MUSOS The IP and Technology Law Clinic provides free legal advice sessions to up-and-coming musicians, artists, writers and technology gurus once a month with the next clinic being held Thursday Sep 22.

Interested people from the creative and technology sectors can call 07 3138 2046 (or email cheryl. foong@qut.edu.au) to book a free 45 minute advice session with a lawyer.

WANT TO KNOW MORE? For these stories and more, go to www.qmusic. com.au.

WANT TO BECOME A Q MUSIC MEMBER? For membership details and application forms, go to www.qmusic.com.au.

4ZZZ FM NOW PLAYING Happiness and Surrounding Suburbs BALL PARK MUSIC Trab Rebaited FELINE DOWN ...And Sometimes Gladness TAPE/OFF Sexy Beach DUNE RATS! Work (Work, Work) HTRK I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl (Single) WAVVES The Great Unseen KATE AND MAX No Time (Single) INLAND SEA Some Jerks EP SOME JERKS A Fool Who’ ll LAURA JEAN

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SIX PACK

SIX PACK

GRESHKA

LEGLESS

LOCAL NEO GYPSY OUTFIT GRESHKA DESCRIBE THEIR MUSIC AS EAR ALCOHOL. NATURALLY, TONY MCMAHON WANTS TO KNOW, WHEN HE CHATS TO PERCUSSIONIST AND COMPOSER ANDRE BONETTI, HOW COME THE BAND’S NEW ALBUM, GYPSY TEARS PT1: EXTRACTION, IS MAKING HIS JUG HANDLES SO BLOTTO?

“A SMALL MIRACLE AND A MASSIVE ACHIEVEMENT” IS HOW AMANDA EMBLEM DESCRIBES HER BAND LEGLESS’ SOON-TO-BE-RELEASED THIRD ALBUM DIVA DEMOLITION. SHE TALKS HONESTLY TO BENNY DOYLE ABOUT THE BUMPY CREATION PROCESS.

“Our music is the distillation of party music from Eastern Europe, and we all know how they drink,” explains Bonetti. “Mixed with a dash of popular music from the west: jazz, classical and metal. Music these days is so depressing; I think it’s time we bring light-hearted music back to the spotlight. It’s like that drink your insane neighbour brews; you don’t know what it is, but it sure gets you feelin’ jolly.”

Jazz might be something we could loosely associate with gypsy music, but metal? Not a problem, according to Bonetti, and what he says makes sense when you think about it.

“I’ve always been keen on the concept of genre hopping. In Northern Europe they call it music.

And I always try to make the tunes go in the most unexpected places. We’ve all had a background in jazz, and we listen to some of the more outthere metal (Barons Of Tang, Alamaailman Vasarat to name a couple), so naturally aspects of that go into our tunes, but we try not to limit it to any genre. Calypso is next on my list. Jazz is all about improvisation, and metal is a very dramatic music, gypsy music has a bit of both.”

Besides playing regular gigs, Greshka have also been known to perform while marching the streets. Bonetti says he doesn’t really have a favourite mode.

“I love it when people are either listening closely or going wild to our music. We’ve got tunes to suit sit-down performances or raving, drunken, dancing parties. Nothin’ cooler than having a bunch of (usually inebriated) folk jumping around. So being on stage is best for me. That said, we’ve been working on a completely mobile marching set and I love people’s expression when they see us dancing down the street in a most unexpected manner.”

WHO: Greshka WHAT: Gypsy Tears Pt1: Extraction (Independent) WHERE & WHEN: The Brisbane Jazz Club Friday Sep 23

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(SUR)REALLY GOOD As part of the GoMA Surrealism Up-Late evenings, our kind artistic friends have coupled some mind-bending visual treats with the delectable aural pleasures of Brisbane futuristic synth punks Re:Enactment, which sounds like an absolute match made in heaven. Exquisitely crafted and effortlessly put forward by the fourpiece, they will be soundtracking incredible art pieces over the night which are in the city for a limited time from the world renowned Pompidou modern art museum in Paris, European’s largest of its kind. Th is goes down at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) Friday Sep 23 with tickets available at $20 from the venue.

GROOVE OUT TO THE GOOD VIBES

It has been a big 15 months for Kindread who have been making waves on the national and international scene, touring extensively up and down the east coast.

We’ve heard the five-piece have a ridiculously loose and limber live show that makes you want to freak out on the d-floor. And since they’re celebrating the release of new single Good Vibes , a taste of what’s to come on their forthcoming CD due in 2012, you better go and verify this by getting your groove on down at Ric’s Bar Friday Sep 23 to confirm how epic this live show of theirs is.

BOTTLECOCK ROCK Fresh on the scene after what the band members allege to be an ostracising from the serious musical communities of the daxophone and idiophone (respectively), Bottlecock, pictured, are a humorously mysterious entity indeed.

Indeed, apart from a hankering for obnoxious pop, there isn’t too much that we can reveal about the relatively mythical three-piece. Want to find out more? Yeah you do. So what we can promise is all will be revealed on stage at Ric’s when the band join Monkey Island for a night of inane fun. Check out both bands Wednesday Sep 28 to uncover the truth.

SET YOUR COMPASS TO EPIC

The instrumental rock ensemble Mr Maps will be performing You Are Here as part of Brisbane Festival’s Under the Radar segment. Not an ordinary show, they’ll be combining their angular rhythms, lush sweeping melodies and transcendental soundscapes with a constructed immersive sound, light and spatial show in the hope of enveloping the audience into the fold. You can become part of the night by heading to Metro Arts Thursday Sep 22 at 3.00pm and 8.00pm, Friday Sep 23 at 6.30pm, or on Saturday Sep 24 at 8.00pm. They do have special ticket deals going but separately, adults are $20 and students just $15.

DRIVE THE SLUMBER HIGHWAY

THAT LITTLE VOICE INSIDE YOU If you are one of those people that need a little encouragement to get out on the tiles for a boogie, Blue Mountains hip hop duo Hermitude have the solution for you. Their latest track Speak Of The Devil, featuring the vocals of renowned Sydney artist Chaos Emerald, is a party starter of epic proportions, and they will no doubt be pumping this and other massive tunes from their three previous records when they whip into Brisbane for one special show this summer.

Check out these multi-faceted mic-wielding maniacs at the Valley’s X&Y Bar on Friday Nov 25, tickets through OzTix for $23 with supports for the evening to be announced soon.

Irish-born singer-songwriter Alan Boyle has been riding a wave of critical praise in the last few years, his most recent plaudit coming in the way of a Queensland Music Award nomination for his emotional fable Highway Of Dreams. Presently working with renowned Brisbane producer Magoo on his debut record, Boyle will be test-driving some of these newly-penned tunes no doubt when he motors in to X&Y Bar Friday Sep 23. He’ll be on a bill with local lad Steve Grady as the two supports for the announced Dan Acfield’s Thick Skin EP launch with $10 on the door.

I PREDICT A RIOT

In what will go down as one large night of riffi ng passion, City Riots have just been announced as the support act for the always animalistic Gyroscope.

You’ll be sure to hear plenty of their new EP Matchsticks as well as big singles like She Never Wants To Dance at The Zoo Wednesday Nov 16 with tickets through OzTix for $35. The Adelaide four-piece are also playing their own show tomorrow night, Thursday Sep 22 at Alhambra Lounge’s Lambda Lambda Lambda night. Tickets for this show are $10 with a half-price deal of $5 available for students.

“Oh boy this is a loaded question!” Emblem coyly offers about the idea of a ‘smooth’ formation for the three-piece’s upcoming album. “Creatively we have no trouble coming up with cracker songs. To decide which ones and get them recorded, finished and then paid for was indeed a nightmare.”

Differing recording locations (Adelaide and Brisbane), new singers, management and record company problems and lifestyle changes all made the journey to get to the end of Diva Demolition a messy one. But now the all girl shredders have the fruits of their labour ready for public consumption and a rocking new single in the way of Stunt Girls, a track sure to be a cracker in the live realm. Emblem explains how the template for the song developed.

“Back in the day we used to start every song with a fast punk drum beat to avoid slow boring songs,” she says, “however now days we just wanna suck the audience in from the first bar. How we do that now varies. Stunt Girls is obviously inspired by AC/DC’s Back In Black – it’s attention-seeking. Generally we try to cut to the chase straight up with our more radio-focused tunes, however with some songs we’ve dabbled in the long intro. But I think the starting point is usually the concept. Stunt Girls as subject matter came before the riff.”

But as far as encompassing their name to a degree where it may affect their performance, forget about it.

“To have an endless party would be fun, but after six years of being Legless there comes a time to straighten out and get your shit together. We still have a lot of fun, get pissed, that kinda thing, but the desire to succeed is stronger now.”

WHO: Legless WHAT: Diva Demolition (Legless) WHERE & WHEN: Tempo Hotel Friday Sep 23, Border Bike and Custom Car Show, Wallangarra Football Oval Saturday Sep 24

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GETTIN’ SIX PACK COMFY LOVE LIKE HATE BRISBANE GIRLS LOVE LIKE HATE ARE A BAND HARD TO CONTAIN IN ANY STANDARD GENRE, A POSITIVE THAT WILL ONLY BE EXPLOITED FURTHER UPON THE RELEASE OF THEIR DEBUT EP. FRONTWOMAN HEATHER CHEKETRI LETS BENNY DOYLE IN ON ALL THE LATEST.

MR MAPS

What is it about the venue that makes you want to do a run of shows there?

To be honest, with the team of amazing lighting and set designers who have been nice enough to collaborate with us for this show, we would have said yes to playing a Twilight movie marathon every night. The fact that it’s not (shudder) and it’s in a great space like Metro Arts is well bonus!

Same set every night or mixing it up?

We’ve got some new songs that we’re all really keen to showcase each night, though there are some songs that I know will change a lot every time we play them. It’s great getting to the stage with a song when you can take it where you feel and know that everyone will want to follow you.

Any special guests going to make an appearance during your tenure?

Word is Andrew Stockdale will be passively submitting himself centre stage after he objects to

“As our debut EP [due late 2011] is Love Like Hate’s first professional recording, we spent a lot of time listening to recordings from independent Australian artists who we had seen live. We then sat down and dissected the way their music had been recorded, taking into consideration our own instrument line-up. We loved the way The Jezabels drums and piano were recorded and mixed, as well as the overall quality of the recordings. Th is is what ultimately led me to hunt Lachlan down.”

The ‘Lachlan’ Cheketri speaks of is one Lachlan Mitchell, producer de jour who most recently helmed Prisoner, The Jezabels’ striking debut. It proved to be a deft choice for the band considering the grandiose and gruffed indie they trade in.

“The acoustic shows are only Sonja [Ter Horst – piano] and I, but are not like acoustic solo sets where you can feel pretty exposed,” Cheketri says. “Our acoustic shows are more like inviting the audience into the initial stages of Love Like Hate’s songs. With the full band show, I feel that the songs get picked up and driven to the audience, locking the melodies tighter together. There is just an energy that rears its head instantly when the drums drive home the changes and accent the vocal melody.”

42

Favourite position at the venue when you’re not on stage?

Wherever the band have hidden my bottle of Scotch.

Unfortunately behind an airvent shaft doesn’t usually correlate with good acoustics.

What have you been up to of late?

That’s really nice that you’ve asked! Thank you.

Apart from entertaining men, plant spotting and a spot of badminton from time to time… we’ve been trying to raise funds to press our first-born album, Wire Empire, onto shiny vinyl, coupled with a remix CD, featuring Hunz, Collarbones and Oh Ye Denver Birds. Unfortunately, money doesn’t grow on trees and counterfeiting is a long, complicated and apparently illegal process so we have set up an online crowd-funding facility on Pozible where you can flex your charity bone and get some great rewards in the process. A $20 donation essentially serves as a pre-order for the release (it guarantees you a copy), and things get better from there: $30 gets you the LP and entry to the vinyl launch show, $50 gets you a signed LP, and… well, we’d be remiss just saying the up-for-grabs goodness if you go Rockefeller with this thing. You can get all the info at mr-maps.tumblr. com. No pressure, though.

Mr Maps play The Whitlam Room at Metro Arts on Thursday Sep 22 (3pm and 8pm), Friday Sep 23 (6.30pm) and Saturday Sep 24 (8pm)

SIX PACK TRACKSUIT WITH ARGUABLY THE COOLEST BAND NAME IN MUSIC, WEST AUSTRALIAN VIA AMERICAN OUTFIT TRACKSUIT ARE HANGING TO PLAY BRISBANE. TONY MCMAHON CHATS WITH VOCALIST AND GUITARIST STEVE HENSBY. No matter where you are you are constantly developing live performance, the band sound and songwriting. Coming back home to Australia definitely had some sort of influence because it’s a different scene, different bands and I knew I was staying in the one place for a while. It gave me a sense of purpose to set up something special and take some time to find the right musicians.”

“After being in that dark studio room with him [Mitchell] for about an hour or two, I knew we had made the right decision. He understood and appreciated Love Like Hate and spent time to help us stylise the sound and did so with a whole heap of patience and experience.”

The three-piece have a pair of upcoming shows in two separate guises, both lending themselves in individual ways to highlight the same result – songwriting prowess and performance quality.

our feigned Beatles cover. Apart from that, no. What you doing on Wednesday night?

“The definite focus is on working on our own sound,” says Hensby, talking about where his band is at now that he’s moved back to Australia after a stint in the US. “It would be awful to do Tracksuit plays 50s rock’n’roll for a tune, Tracksuit plays their Neil Young song, Tracksuit plays polka. We’re all super-excited to play, record, tour. It’s a hectic schedule when you look at it, but we don’t see it that way. It’s just what we do and we are loving it. All three of us are massive Kinks fans so we are all set!”

WHO: Love Like Hate

Besides the obvious difference of having to enlist new members, Hensby says that basing Tracksuit in Australia rather than America has also changed the band in other ways.

WHERE & WHEN: Music Cafe (acoustic duo set) Sunday Sep 25, Club 299 (Hot Gossip) Wednesday Oct 5

“The focus is still on trying to write a good song and put on a good live show and time has influenced the band more than anything.

In closing, Hensby, like everyone else, can’t wait to find out firsthand what all the Queensland musical fuss is about.

“We’re really hanging to play Brisbane. There has been so many good bands come out of there. It seems to be a bit like Perth with it’s own awesome scene. Obviously Sydney and Melbourne are the big towns, but you always hear amazing bands on JJJ or wherever that are from Brisbane.”

WHO: Tracksuit WHAT: Where Have All The Good Times Gone? (Independent) WHERE & WHEN: Alhambra Lounge Thursday Sep 29, The Spotted Cow, Toowoomba Friday September 30, Buddha Bar, Byron Bay Saturday Oct 1

HYH HAVE YOU HEARD?

Punxie & The Poison Pens play Acacia Ridge Tavern on Saturday Oct 22 How did you get together?

Punxie Poison vocals): “A few years ago Matt Day (Scruff the Cat, The Bystanders) and I home recorded some songs and put them up on MySpace; they charted really well so we decided to get into a band room and practice just with Matt on guitar, me singing and using backing tracks for the bass and drums. Brad Coxheard the punk rock sounds coming from the room next door and came in and introduced himself and offered to drum. We went through about three bass players before Steve Whiteley, who was originally with Punxie & The Poison Pens as a rhythm guitarist, came back to us. A bit more than four years down the track we’re back to what’s essentially our original line-up and looking forward to putting out a full-length album soon.”

Sum up your musical sound in four words.

“AC/DC meets outsider art.”

If you could support any band in the world – past or present – who would it be?

“Iggy Pop, The Dandy Warhols, The Who! Too many more to mention…”

You’re being sent into space, you can’t take an iPod and there’s only room to bring one album – which would it be?

“This situation would occasion the biggest band fight in the history of rock. I would like to take something like Urgh! A Music War.” Greatest rock’n’roll moment of your career to date?

“Supporting the Anti-Nowhere League.”

Why should people come and see your band?

“Because we’re the real thing. There’s nothing pretentious about our sound it’s just fast, great rock. And nobody else sounds like we do.”

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Hardcore and punk with Sarah Petchell. Email punk news to wakethedead@timeoff.com.au Sydney’s Dogfight Records have announced that they will be releasing the highly anticipated second album from Baltimore hardcore outfit Trapped Under Ice. Dogfight have secured a licensing deal with New York’s Reaper Records for Big Kiss Goodnight which will drop into Australian stores on Tuesday Oct 11. Trapped Under Ice’s album was recorded with New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert (who also recorded H20’s Nothing To Prove and Terror’s Keepers Of The Faith) and if the two tracks that are floating around the interwebs are anything to go by, then this album is set to be as vicious as 2009’s Secrets Of The World. Stay tuned as an Australian tour in support of the new record is set for early 2012.

Sunday Oct 30 the tour hits Shed 5 on the Gold Coast for another all ages show. Tickets are on sale now through Oztix.

It has been almost four years since The Getaway Plan released their breakout album, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Now, the Melbourne four-piece are preparing to release the follow up (after a period of hiatus). Titled Requiem, this is the result of time apart and then four months spent in Toronto working with producer David Bottril (Muse, Tool, Silverchair) and is set for release on Nov 4 through UNFD/Shock. To coincide with the release, the band will hit the road this November and December with Break Even and Gatherer for the Requiem Tour. You can catch the band on Wednesday Nov 23 at The Hi-Fi Bar for an 18+ show. Tickets go on sale Thursday Sep 22 through Ticketek and select other vendors. However, there is a limited pre-sale ticket and album bundle available from the UNFD webstore already..

STREET PRESS AUSTRALIA SOUNDWAVE REVOLUTION QUICK Q&A’s

Pop punk fans can get psyched as Heroes For Hire have finally announced a tour in support of their excellent record, Take One For The Team. Best of all they’re bringing along for the ride I Call Fives from New Jersey, USA and Brisbane-based quintet I Am Villain. Heroes For Hire are forever on tour, most recently with Short Stack (if you haven’t seen the footage of the pee incident go check out their YouTube account and laugh). But this constant touring has armed the band with an air tight, high energy live show that is just pure fun to watch.

You can catch the tour at Sun Distortion Studios Friday Oct 28 (all ages), Saturday Oct 29 with an 18+ show at Hotel Orient’s Thriller night and on

I got an email during the week about a new punk and hardcore website which was launched just over a week or so ago. It’s called Rest Assured and you can scope it out at www.restassuredzine.com.

As I understand it, the name comes from a print fanzine that operated between 2003 and 2005, which used to cover a broad range of Australian and international bands from across various facets of the genre. The website intends to pick up where the zine left off, and so far they seem to be doing a great job. Check them out.

Answered by Tay Jardine of We Are The In Crowd What are you most looking forward to about heading to Australia for Soundwave Revolution?

Australia’s landscape!

What is something that no-one knows about your band?

The internet does a great job of making this question impossible to answer!

What your earliest memory of a music festival?

I saw Britney Spears when I was about 11 at a festival near my hometown. I had a sprained ankle from soccer and was on crutches. I remember being extremely frustrated about not being able to jump and dance around with my friends.

Do you have any rituals or superstitions that you have to stick to before you go onstage? If so, what...

We seem to find something different everyday.

We’ve done anything from the Mighty Ducks chant, to chanting “Chanting stuff! Chanting stuff!” We’re not very good at rituals.

What is your dream festival line-up?

I’d say The Starting Line, Relient K, Conditions, The Wonder Years and Yellowcard. Those are just bands I’ve been listening to lately. I wouldn’t mind seeing them all in one day!

for their debut album Servitude next month.

Opeth has announced another one of their seemingly countless Australian tours. The Swedish legends will be touring in support of their tenth full-length album, Heritage, and they’ll play Dec 15 at The Tivoli.

This Friday evening at Monstrothic we’ve got Wornaway, Blooddrawn Silence, Vyrion, Scuurvy and Prophets of War playing.

It’s $10 from 8pm. Bit of everything from costume-wearing pirate lovers all the way to progressive black metal fans. Yar! In case you missed it, Every Time I Die, The Acacia Strain and The Word Alive will celebrate the scraps of Soundwave Revolution this Friday at The Hi-Fi. Tickets are still available from thehifi.com.au and will cost you around $40.

Adelaide deathcore group Far West Battlefront will bring it to Queensland next month. The band plays Snitch on Thursday Oct 13 with The Matador and IRONHIDE, as well as at Sun Distortion Studios the next day with Not Unto Us, Hack, Miles and Miles and Asleep In The Light. The band’s debut album, recorded in July

by Roman Koester of The Red Shore, is currently in the hands of Sweden’s Fredrik Nordstrom for mixing and mastering. A new track entitled Brink Of Collapse can be heard on their Facebook page.

German thrash group Destruction will hit Australia as part of their D.E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N tour in January. With the band’s tenth album set to solidify their status as legends of their genre, they’ll be joined on all dates by Sydney’s old school Mortal Sin and Melbourne groove metallers 4Arm. The tour will hit The Hi-Fi on Nov 6.

The hyper-technical Aversions Crown have been announced for the main local support on three out of The Contortionist’s four Queensland shows.

Alongside Newcastle’s The Storm Picturesque, they’ll appear at The Blackbox Theatre in Nambour on Nov 9, at Sun Distortion on Nov 10, and at Shed 5 on the Gold Coast on Nov 11. The band promises to announce the pre-order packs

44

Allen Toussaint

I hope you guys are getting amongst this wonderful weather that we’ve been having; winter can take a long walk off a short pier as far as I’m concerned. You know who else can do the same? Awesome bands who decide not to visit Brisbane. Tuck & Patti will be out here later in the year, but they’re not playing up in our neck of the woods while they’re in the country.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me and I’m hoping some how this will be changed and we’ll get a show. Don’t hold your breath though.

On a far better note, there has been a new date added to the very awesome Legends of New Orleans tour that is getting around the nation next month, which means that those of us who can’t make it to the Caloundra Music Festival will have another chance to see these masters in action.

If you’re unfamiliar with the show, I’d say it is probably the best triple bill of New Orleans music I could imagine being assembled in this particular day and age. Heading it up is the beyond legendary pianist, composer, producer and vocalist Allen Toussaint who makes his way to Australia for the very first time in his illustrious 55-year career. You cannot do this man justice in a mere paragraph he is one of the most influential figures in rock’n’roll and has worked with everyone from The Band to Elvis Costello to Paul McCartney to name a mere few; even Elton John says he was a major influence on his piano playing style. In the modern day you don’t get a more renowned New Orleans pianist than the magnificent Jon Cleary who will be back in Australia (he must love it here) with his power trio The Philthy Phew. Cleary has been the go-to guy for funk piano for a long time

now and he never, ever fails to impress. Rounding out this bill is the band who many say do more for New Orleans music in the modern day than any other group, the incredible Dirty Dozen Brass Band. The injection of funk and bebop into the traditional New Orleans brass band sound has seen them considered as one of the most rousing party bands going around and you can bet you’ll be both gasping for breath and cheering for more when they beat a path through Aussie venues later this year. You can see these three incredible acts at the Mullumbimby Civic Hall on Friday Oct 7. Tickets are available right now for $40.

One of Melbourne’s finest rockin’ roots acts The Detonators are making their way back to Brisbane this weekend. These guys are a hardtouring outfit and they always deliver pretty exciting live shows so it’s always a pleasure to hear of their return to our neck of the woods.

They kick off their Queensland shows with a big old party at the Holland Park Bowls Club on Friday night – tickets are $20 on the door – they then head out to play the Rebel FM Frogs Hollow Bike Show at the Apple Tree Creek Hotel, Bruce Hwy (kicking off at 10am) before they wrap it all up with a show at the Mount Warning Hotel on Kyogle Rd, Uki on Sunday.

The Johnny Cash Tribute Show has become one of the most loved nights of music on the Brisbane country calendar over the past eight years and it is back again this October at a new venue with some old familiar faces paying tribute.

The Mean Eyed Cats will be out in force once again, the gun band playing all your favourite Johnny Cash tunes with some assistance from Doug Wilshire, Paul Hemshall, Michael Pearson, Emma Wilkins, Mitchy Mayhem, Teresa Bernardi, Pony Gleeson, Junior Hickey and Paddy McHugh while DJ Lori Lee plays plenty of classics on the wheels of steel. You can witness it all go down at Morningside RSL on Saturday Oct 8; it’s licensed and open to all ages and tickets will set you back $20 on the door.

Pop culture therapy with Adam Curley

Metal with Lochlan Watt Destruction

Blues ‘n’ roots with Dan Condon rootsdown@timeoff.com.au

The grim line-up for the Evil Invaders IV festival has been announced and will take place in Sydney from Jun 8 to Jun 10 next year. The array of bitter purists features Colombian natives Inquisition, as well as Australian acts Assaulter, Cemetery Urn, Denouncement Pyre, Grenade, Destruktor, Chaotic Impurity, Rituals Of The Oak, Brisbane’s Mongrel’s Cross, Maniaxe, and about ten more bands to be announced. Keep an eye on thecoffinsslave.com for more details as they come.

With members stretched all the way from Brisbane to Byron Bay, mosh metallers Deceiver have just unveiled a track from their forthcoming debut album. Visions features The Acacia Strain’s Vincent Bennett on some guest vocals and can be heard over on the band’s Facebook page or on YouTube. The album is due out on Oct 14 through Dogfight Records.

Melbourne death/black metal group Order Of Orias have unveiled two songs, Bleak One and Irreverence, from their upcoming seven track release on their Facebook page (‘like’ required to hear it – minus ten grim points). The album will be available in the coming months through World Terror Committee as both a CD digipack and gatefold LP. The band describes the seven new songs as “extolling the triumphant virtues of opposition, rebellion and illumination. This album represents a self-apotheosis, a sinister becoming that has only ever been hinted at in our past.”

Local mainstays Lynchmada have finally put forth a track from their new album. Entitled Relic, the seven-and-a-half minute epic is the first taste of the band’s Zeuss mixed and mastered sophomore album, and can be streamed or downloaded from their ReverbNation, Facebook and MySpace accounts. To The Earth is due out through Truth Inc. Records on Oct 14, upon which the band will be kicking off a huge national tour.

She had come out of a period of depression and returned from an interstate stay at her parents’ house when we met up. It was a quiet, sometimes silent, conversation – one of those times when the point is really just to sit together – but then, once she started talking about her latest ravaging by the black dog, out came her dry sense of humour.

It’s how she’s always dealt with this situation; the self-shaming barbs of someone who feels they’ve let everyone down and needs you back onside, or just something to lighten the load. Because there’s nowhere darker left to go.

It was a black dog, in fact, that brought her first smile. Between visits to her parents, they’d bought a black puppy, which had sat outside with her everyday while they’d gone to work and she’d slugged around their backyard with tea and cigarettes. “It could have been so ironic if it had become my only comfort,” she said to me. “But actually I just wanted to shoot the thing.”

The worst part, she said, was that her iPod was broken and she hadn’t had any of her own music to listen to. She’d been through her parents’ rack of CDs and had tried out a ‘best of the 60s’ compilation hoping the sunny melodies would translate to a harrowing juxtaposition of her mood, or at least that The Searchers’ Needles And Pins would do the trick.

It hadn’t. “The problem wasn’t really that I couldn’t find any songs to relate to,” she said.

“I couldn’t even think of any. In my head I was going through the lyrics of every depressing song I could think of and nothing fit.”

In the end, my friend laughed, she’d gone with Adele’s Someone Like You and transferred herself onto the character of both the singer and the lover Adele was letting go. It was obscure and decidedly fucked up, she admitted, but at least she could be certain to hear the song 20 times a day on the radio.

In an op-ed posted on Pitchfork on 9 September, Editor-in-Chief Mark Richardson described a related scenario. Following 9/11, he wrote, he’d

listened to Laurie Anderson sing the line “here come the planes” in the 1981 song O Superman or had played songs referencing the New York skyline and had transferred his own feelings onto the words. The songs would no longer be about New York but about New York in crisis and despair; O Superman would no longer be about the loneliness brought on by technological change (at least that’s what I think it’s supposed to be about) but an eerily accurate prediction of what was to come for America.

It’s nothing new to say that music heightens emotions. It’s why films have soundtracks or why a friend’s video montage of the weekend’s coastal road trip set to some old surf-rock song makes us sentimental (and forget the arguments over directions in the car on the way there).

It also might seem obvious to say that music doesn’t cause emotions. That quote from High Fidelity – “What came first, the music or the misery?” – is a cute but not worthwhile contemplation. Anyone who has looked to music to mirror their emotions knows that the misery came first.

There can be a danger in seeking out lyrics that say back to us how we’re feeling, however.

It was apparent in my friend’s story of not being able to find anything that spoke the way she felt and taking what she could get, and I’d known it before myself, when a break-up or breakdown had happened and I’d done the same. Instead of altering a song’s meaning to suit your own, as Richardson had done after 9/11, or merely using a song to enrich the emotional moment in which you find yourself, there’s a danger of altering your own emotions to suit the song. It can be a subtle difference of feeling and also a subtle process: a bad one-night stand can become a love lost, a small annoyance can become a massive betrayal. In my friend’s case, a bout of depression could become, in her mind, a loving farewell to herself – a sentiment that scared the shit out of me, and one, I promised myself, I wouldn’t seek a soundtrack for.

CLUB GUIDE WED 21

Casa De Salsa Latin Dance Party: Casablanca Jam Club: Alloneword Miss Pit Stop Pet 2011: Brett Allen, Apollo Flex: Shooters Nightclub Ricky: Commercial Hotel

OGFLAVAS With Cyclone Lil Wayne

Earlier this year the iconic Interview mag, which Andy Warhol started, had Paris Hilton probe Lil Wayne (aka Dwayne Carter) for a cover story. They chat about their time in the pen (Carter served time on a weapons possession charge). Hilton asks him about pets. “I like animals, but I only have a few pets,” he replies. “I have a bunch of fish and I have two sharks. Those are my dudes.” In turn, Carter quizzes Hilton on her second album – she’s cut some “bangers”. He hustles for a cameo. Hilton and Carter have something else in common: both are sliding into irrelevance. Hilton is being upstaged by frenemy Kim Kardashian, while in 2010 the incarcerated Carter released not one but two bung albums; the dodgy rock-rap-autotune foray, Rebirth, and then the mix tape-y I Am Not A Human Being.

The New Orleans native had previously dropped 2008’s mega-selling (and Grammy-winning) Tha Carter III, home to Lollipop.

Regardless, Carter is everywhere at the moment, guesting on Kelly Rowland’s Motivation and Cherlise’s Love U Right. And the MC, who debuted as a solo act with 1999’s Tha Block Is Hot, has a facesaving comeback – he’s relaunching his Tha Carter franchise. Carter’s label blurb touts Tha Carter IV as “the most anticipated LP of the past three years”.

Weezy is the nu-skool Southern MC who really transcended “crunk” party music, declaring himself “the best rapper alive”. His flair lies in comic, clever rapping – but he’s grown very hit and miss. If nothing else, Carter’s Young Money Entertainment is hot property, what with Canadian rapper Drake and femcee-cum-singer Nicki Minaj.

He commandeers Drake for two numbers on Tha Carter IV, including the outstanding She Will, T-Minus’ New Romantic beats up there with

anything Kanye West has done in his electro phase.

But Nicki must have been too busy plotting her MTV Video Music Awards outfit – post-ghetto fabulous couture that the fashion police totally misjudged. (It’s apparently okay for a connected white woman like Anna Dello Russo to dress eccentrically, but not a sista.) She’s missed here.

Tha Carter IV offers heaps of epic hip hop, like Blunt Blowin, Abortion and President Carter (sampling Jimmy Carter’s oath-taking!). Carter moves beyond ringtone rap on the hyper-tech Megaman. Bangladesh produced last year’s fierce advance single 6 Foot 7 Foot, which manipulates Harry Belafonte’s Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) to effect. He was also responsible for Carter’s A Milli, not to mention Jessica Mauboy’s Snoop Dogg collab Get ‘Em Girls. Less inspired is the passé How To Hate with T-Pain on (zzz) autotune.

Former correctional officer Rick Ross is on John, a forgettable Polow da Don contribution.

Weezy is introspective on the piano-based Nightmares Of The Bottom. He ventures into sensitive R&B, singing How To Love – it has some unexpected acoustic guitar. (“My creativity knows no boundaries,” Carter flosses in his bio.) Indeed.

John Legend appears on So Special. The most controversial song? It’s Good, again with Drake. It’s a Jay-Z diss. But the best bit about Cool and Dre’s joint is the Alan Parsons sample (alas, not Eye In The Sky). Ironically, Jay-Z stole the show on Tha Carter III’s Mr Carter. Now Carter wants it back.

There’s zero input from Ye. Yes, Carter is everywhere at the moment – but not on two of his own album tracks. Yep, he doesn’t MC on the hard Interlude, featuring a rare (and uncredited) cameo by Andre 3000. He’s likewise absent on the posse-cut Outro with fellow ex-con Shyne, Bun B, Nas and Busta Rhymes. Shyne, the onetime Bad Boy rapper who copped a ten-year bid after that notorious club shooting incident in which Diddy and Jennifer Lopez were embroiled, is now aligned with Cash Money. Is Carter over it? Occasionally he sounds like it on Tha Carter IV – and he’s hinted at retirement. Tha Carter IV is no classic but, then again, OG Flavas was never convinced by III. It’ll do.

SUB DETRITUS

by BRAD SWOB Thom Yorke

No one could have guessed in 1985 when Radiohead formed that they would be at the vanguard of cutting-edge, bass-heavy electronic music. They enjoyed moderate success off the back of their angst-ridden first single Creep from their 1993 debut album Pablo Honey. Two years later they released The Bends, but it wasn’t until 1997 when the band released OK Computer that Radiohead became a household name around the globe. The record’s sweeping, cinematic vibe and lyrical musings on modern alienation were enriched by their first subtle flirtations with electronic music. The album – now often considered one of the best of the decade – topped charts globally and spawned a massive two-year tour.

Upon their return home the band quarrelled over where to take their music next. DJ Shadow’s debut album Endtroducing….. had been in high rotation during the OK Computer recording sessions and Thom Yorke jumped at the chance to write and record a song with him that ended up on the 1998 album Psyence Fiction by UNKLE. Yorke had been a DJ and even dabbled in techno production when he was at university and at this point was almost exclusively listening to electronic music. When Radiohead re-assembled in early 1999 to record a new album, Yorke pushed for a more rhythmic, electronic sound with treated vocals, synths and drum machines. Their next two albums Kid A and Amnesiac were comprised of tracks from these sessions and the radical change in sonic direction caught many off-guard. For every critic and fan that hailed the new material as genius, there were many others left cold by the lack of guitars and traditional rock elements.

In 2006, Thom Yorke unveiled his solo album The

Eraser – a pure electronica album in which is voice was just another element in the uniquely raw, layered textures of the record. The album felt like a fulfilment of Yorke’s infatuation with electronic music and was well-received, nominated for both a Grammy and the Mercury Prize. The Eraser was released in the middle of a groundswell in the UK underground scene. The first wave of dubstep and bass music had blown up and none of this was lost on the Radiohead vocalist. An early champion of ethereal and elusive producer Burial, Yorke decided to commission a remix project for the tracks from his solo album. Across three limited edition 12-inches, bass producers such as The Bug, Various Production, Surgeon, Modeselektor, Four Tet and Burial put their spin on Yorke’s tracks.

THU 22 Eve: Surfer’s Paradise Tavern Karaoke In The Front Bar: Casablanca Love Cats: Alloneword MBar Thursdays: Vita, DJ Climate: Fitzy’s Loganholme Quarterdeck Nightclub: Emerald Memorial Club Too Damn Glam: Brett Allen, Apollo Flex, Tredman: Shooters Nightclub Too Damn Glam: Dezastar, Flo, Otto, MC Fortafy: Republic

FRI 23 Art vs. Science, Abbe May: Kings Beach Tavern Before Going Home: Fox Rooftop Beni: Oh Hello!

Brand Spank’d Presents: Rage Crew, Dr Werewolf, Laces, Noy, Panda, Kayli, Hertz: Family Top Floor DJ Pickles: Heritage Hotel DJ Misqo, DVJ LVEE, Afro Disa: Casablanca Eve: Hamilton Hotel Evolution: Toneshifterz, Hektic, Kazuki, Deeplex, Angus Gibbins, Clone, Jigzee, Khanage & Keni: Family Basement Fans: Matt Joe Gow & The Dead Leaves: Alhambra Lounge Macka: Titanium Bar SubZero: Ilth Colins, Shixa, Kurrupt & Rabbles, Bass Slime, Lincoln: MyBar Stafford Brothers, Bamboo, Mr Sparkle, Bossy, Aydos, Pete Smith: The Met The Brewery Nightclub: Andee J: The Brewery Tristan Garner, DJ Harvey, Murray Brown, Wahoo, Dan Burke, Jayesh Sandhu, James C, Lanky C: Electric Playground Vision Fridays: Brett Allen, Apollo Flex, Tredman: Shooters Nightclub Vision Friday: Masta K, Mister P: Rendezvous Vision Fridays: Mister P, Bluffsta, Flo, Trippa MC: Republic

SAT 24 Arctic, Charlie Hustle, Paul Master: X&Y Bar Art vs. Science, Abbe May: Coolangatta Hotel Baby Gee, Habebe, Danny T, Craig Roberts, Joey Mojo: Platinum Nightclub

SUN 25 Glow Room Party: Craig Obey, Brett Allen, Apollo Flex: Shooters Nightclub Glow Room Party: Masta K: Rendezvous Salsa Seduction: Zouk Lambarda: Casablanca Toyland: Rhys Bobridge, Alexei Paige, Velvet Motion, Harry K, Karma: Family Unlikely Superheroes, Vincent Kemp & The Dead Covers: X&Y Bar

MON 26 Industry Night: Heritage Hotel Singer Songwriter: The Cave

TUES 27 Envyus: DJ Dezastar, Eakut, Bluffsta, Oscar, DJ Owe, DJ Premix, DJ K-Otic: Shooters Nightclub

TIME WARP

Sep 21, 1993 – Nirvana’s final studio album In Utero is released.

Sep 22, 1985 – The first Farm-Aid concert is held in Champaign, Illinois. The show raises US $10 million for US farmers.

Sep 23, 1969 – It is reported by The London Daily Mirror that Paul McCartney was dead. It’s the first (but not last) time the rumour is printed.

Sep 24, 1998 – Elvis Presley is inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Sep 25, 1990 – Dave Grohl, formerly with Washington DC’s Scream, joins Nirvana. Moderate success ensues...

Thus began Thom Yorke’s tight relationship with the bass music scene. Among much collaboration, he leant vocals to the 2007 track The White Flash by Modeselektor, sang on …

And The World Laughs With You from Flying Lotus’ 2010 epic Cosmogramma, and earlier this year released a 12 inch record with Four Tet and Burial. Yorke has often confessed his love in interviews of the Los Angeles-centred beat scene – home to Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder collective and beat night Low End Theory, where Yorke has played a couple of surprise DJ sets.

The influence of all this can be felt somewhat in Radiohead’s latest album The King Of Limbs – an experiment in aesthetics and rhythm. Like The Eraser, Thom Yorke commissioned remixes of the new Radiohead album – the fruits of which will be released next month on TKOL RMX 1234567.

Mark Pritchard (aka Harmonic 313), Illum Sphere, Jamie XX, SBTRKT and Caribou have turned in remixes alongside Yorke favourites Modeselektor and Four Tet. Many of these have been aired on Mary Anne Hobbs’ radio show on XFM. Hobbs has long been a fan of Radiohead and Thom Yorke – even more so when his path and that of the bass music underground started going the same way. Last week she featured a brand new DJ mix from Yorke on her show. The mix featured some of the TKOL remixes as well as new bits from Yorke himself and can be streamed on Mixcloud.

Bamboo, Mr Sparkle, Roman, Coco, Mandy Onassis, Malcolm, Scotty R, Nick Galea, Pete Smith, Andee, Disko Diva: The Met Brokenword, The Optimen, Schoolfi ght: The Zoo Geomantra: Palace Hotel DJ Misqo, DVJ LVEE, Afro Disa: Casablanca DJ Pickles, DJ Natural: Heritage Hotel Hey! Hey!: GeeCee, JMac, GenreSlut, Jordan Who?, Dr Rob: Family Top Floor Karma, Brett Allan, Murray Brown, Wahoo Jovito, Kandimann: Electric Playground MBar Saturdays: DJ DC: Fitzy’s Loganholme Midnight Sleaze, Tim Plunkett, Jeremy Iliev, Habebe: Family Basement Quarterdeck Nightclub: Emerald Memorial Club Rushmore: The Newmarket Hotel Sensation Club: Brett Allen, Apollo Flex, Tredman: Shooters Nightclub Sensation Club: Otto, Mister P, Jono, MC Jay Oh: Republic Sensation Saturdays: Masta K, DJ LP: Rendezvous

Sep 26, 1979 – The Clash release their first US single – their remake of Bobby Fuller Four’s I Fought The Law. Sep 27, 2002 – Vince Neil pleads guilty to a misdemeanour battery charge for allegedly attacking a record producer in West Hollywood.

ON THE TIME OFF STEREO You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979 12 Days To Paris HUXTON CREEPERS Megafaun MEGAFAUN Believers AA BONDY Out In The Light WATERS Workhorse CHRIS “KLONDIKE” MASUAK The Year Of Hibernation YOUTH LAGOON Killed By Deaf UNDEAD APES Is It Because I’m Black? SYL JOHNSON I Believe In Love Kid OH YE DENVER BIRDS

CHANNEL [V] VIDEO MUSIC CHART Pumped Up Kicks FOSTER THE PEOPLE Bounce CALVIN HARRIS FT. KELIS Somebody That I Used To Know GOTYE FT. KIMBRA Stereo Hearts GYM CLASS HEROES FT. ADAM LEVINE Cheers (Drink To That) RIHANNA FT. AVRIL LAVIGNE Climbing Walls STRANGE TALK You Make Me Feel COBRA STARSHIP FT. SABI Wish You Were Here AVRIL LAVIGNE Moves Like Jagger MAROON 5 FT. CHRISTINA AGUILERA It Girl JASON DERULO

45

WED 21

Art Vs Science Great Northern Hotel Byron Bay Brisbane Festival, Frente Spiegeltent Bryan Adams QPAC Concert Hall Deejay Gosper & The Hot Flush Blues Band Coolum RSL DJ Redbeard Ric’s Duramata, Erase The Thought, Shotgun Halo, Aso Step Inn Geoff Rayner Fibber Magee’s, Toowoomba Ghost Audio, Bixby Canyon, Subelectric The Zoo Jarrah Thompson, Asha Henfry Railway Bar, Byron Bay Jurassic Penguin, Open Sea, Shackles, Ansieta, The Passenger, Towers Shed 5, Gold Coast Lune, The Chokes, Maggie Collins X&Y Bar Martin Buscaglia, Aline Calixto QPAC Motely Crue Riverstage Open Mic Birdee Num Nums Open Mic The Music Kafe Open Mic Night The Loft Chevron Island Roland Drum Clinic, Steve Fisher Bowler Bar Soula’ Flare Glass Bar & Restaurant The Bowery Hot Five With Mal Wood The Bowery The Quims The Tempo Hotel Tyson Faulkner Fiddlers Green

THU 22

Abby Skye, Craig Kickbush Mick O’Malley’s Alphabeticus, Spider8 The Beetle Bar Art Vs Science Spotted Cow Ballad Boy Loving Hut Ben Salter Sol Bar, Maroochydore Brisbane Festival, Mr Maps Metro Arts Brisbane Festival, Frank Yamma Spiegeltent

46

Craig Scott, Steve Brien Turnaround Jazz Club Dan England b Dave Ritter Logan Diggers Club Dynamic Duo Fibber Magee’s, Toowoomba Enversity, Stoner Pony, Slide Winder, Blind Dog Donny The Music Kafe Go Violets, DJ Valdis Ric’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Satellites The Bowery Ingrid James Quartet Limes Hotel Jazz Night, The Root Note The Loft Chevron Island Josh Pyke, Emma Louise, The Paper Kites Great Northern Hotel Byron Bay Lambda, City Riots Alhambra Lounge London Bureau, Bodywire, Bloom Street Arcade The Zoo Open Mic Qld Irish Club Pirates Alive The Gold Coast Arts Centre Powerplay Gilhooley’s Chermside Sebadoh, Smudge The Hi-Fi Seen: Seen DJs Bowler Bar Snitch, Friends With The Enemy, Sunsets, Out Of The Rain X&Y Bar Suzi Quatro The Events Centre Caloundra The Decoys Duo, Who Is John The Tempo Hotel Turner Treehouse, Byron Bay Tyson Faulkner Broadbeach Tavern Whole Lotta LoveZeppelin Tribute, Jeff Martin, Steve Balbi, Simon Meli, Zkye, Natasha Stuart QPAC Concert Hall Woody Elephant & Wheelbarrow

FRI 23

Alda Rezende QPAC Art Vs Science Kings Beach Tavern Band Of Frequencies, Zac Gunthorpe, Rev Sunday Joe’s Water Hole Eumundi Ben Salter, Texas Tea, Lion Island, Bigstrongbrute The Zoo Bigger Than Texas CBX Brisbane Festival: Mr Maps Metro Arts Brisbane Festival: Kimbra, Mosman Alder Spiegeltent Brown Bag Social, The Dead Leaves Bowler Bar Callum Taylor Horse & Jockey Warwick Dan Acfield, Steve Grady, Alan Boyle, Aniki, Danny Cool X&Y Bar Dan England Kenmore Tavern Deon Powter Meadowbrook Hotel DJ Randyandy Narangba Valley Tavern Dubmarine, The Upsteppers SoundLounge Currumbin Elixir Feat. Katie Noonan, The Tulipwood Quartet Mullumbimby Civic Centre Every Time I Die, The Acacia Strain, The Word Alive The Hi-Fi Flicker Switch, Kyle Wadley, The Gentleman Rambling, Jacob Rohde The Loft Chevron Island Ganggajang, Prefontaine, Unplanned Holiday Mansfield Tavern Glenn Esmond Transcontinental Hotel Green Jam: Josh Tait QPAC, Melbourne St Green Greshka Brisbane Jazz Club Hemi Kingi Trio The Morrison Hotel Hits, Skinwalkers, Bittersweet Kicks, The Chokes The Beetle Bar James Johnston Billy’s James Johnston Victory Hotel Jazz Australis Brisbane Institute of Art

Josh Pyke, Emma Louise, The Paper Kites Coolangatta Hotel Kindread, Dollarbird Drive, DJ Valdis Ric’s Legless, Skindread, Hollywood Undead, Black Whiskey The Tempo Hotel Mace Southern Hotel Toowoomba Macka Titanium Bar Mark Chomyn Cannon Hill Tavern Michelle Brown & The Soul Traders Pacific Paradise Bowls Club Monstrothic: Aeternitas, Scuurvy, Vyrion, Blooddrawn Silence, Prophets Of War Jubilee Hotel Native Aliens Palmwoods Hotel Oh Ye Denver Birds, Megastick Fanfare Sol Bar, Maroochydore Paul Lines Gazebo Restaurant, Hotel Urban PJ Hooker Club Hotel Waterford Ribbons Of Rust The Judith Wright Centre Rob Cini, Ramjet Elephant & Wheelbarrow Rod Christensen Upfront Club Maleny Rushmore Gilhooley’s Chermside Scott Dean The Palace Hotel Sebastian’s Habit Trio, The Geoff Green Trio The Point Restaurant Sink Shit: Naked On The Vague, Blank Realm, Nite Fields, Cobwebbs Mowbray Park Pier Solar Rush Newmarket Hotel Something Whiskey, 25 Bravo, Rear Vision, Triplickit The Music Kafe Stars Of Thursday Locknload West End Stewart Fairhurst Envy Hotel Stu Fisher Waterloo Hotel Surrealism Up Late, Re:Enactment Gallery Of Modern Art Tall Poppy Stadium Bar & Grill The Big Night: The Eggman, Thousand Needles In Red, Helm, The Winnie Coopers,

Drawcard, Planet Fiction Twin Towns The Cavalcade, Collins Class, Miles And Miles, Verusive, Slow Riots Shed 5, Gold The Detonators Holland Park Bowls Club The Febs Fibber Magee’s, Toowoomba The Hoedown Showdown: Dick Desert, The Mayhem County Boys, Midnight Son & The Crime Scene, Brendan (Buzz) Talay & Driftwood Crown Hotel Lutwyche The Jimmy’s Nudgee Beach Hotel The Residents: Mardi Lumsden & The Rising Seas Brisbane Powerhouse Turbine Platform Tom Foolery Pineapple Hotel Turner Queen Street Mall Tyson & Shake Hamilton Hotel Venus Envy Surfers Paradise Beer Garden

SAT 24

7 Deadly Sins Party CBX Abby Skye Full Moon Hotel Sandgate After The Tone, Sunday Sons, Brizband, Connor Cleary The Music Kafe Alice Cooper Brisbane Convention And Exhibition Centre Arctic, Charlie Hustle, Paul Master X&Y Bar Art Vs Science Coolangatta Hotel Ben Salter Spotted Cow Blind Dog Donny, Mojo Webb, Rumble Fish, The Walters, Nye & Friends The Boundary Bowls Club, Bowler Bar DJs Bowler Bar Brisbane Festival, Mr Maps Metro Arts Brisbane Festival - Neon Mountain: Naked On The Vague, Horse MacGyver, Secret Birds, Martyr Privates Metro Arts Outdoor Car Park Brisbane Festival, Eighth Blackbird Spiegeltent

Brokenword, The Optimen, Schoolfight, Kryptamistik, Nick One, One Years Steve The Zoo Chico Mendez Locknload West End Colin’s Class Fibber Magee’s, Toowoomba Counter Revolution: Panic At The Disco, All Time Low, Yellowcard, Story Of The Year, Face To Face, The Damned Things, Set Your Goals, and more Riverstage Dave Spicer Trio, Conversations Brisbane Jazz Club Dean Watkin Hamilton Hotel Elixir Feat. Katie Noonan, The Tulipwood Quartet Usq Arts Theatre, Toowoomba Fat Albert Surfers Paradise Beer Garden Galapogos, Babaganouj, Kellie Lloyd The Beetle Bar Geomantra The Palace Hotel Hemi Kingi Trio The Morrison Hotel Jabba Elephant & Wheelbarrow James Johnston Brothers Ipswich Josh Pyke, Emma Louise, The Paper Kites The Hi-Fi Juzzie Smith The Arts Centre Gold Coast Lee Griffin & The Triple B, Gina Horswood, Jetstream The Tempo Hotel Mal Wood Woombye Pub Moon Ranch Cleveland Sands Hotel Oceanics, The Upskirts, Purple Toes The Loft Chevron Island Oh Ye Denver Birds, Megastick Fanfare Alhambra Lounge Rushmore Newmarket Hotel Second Gear Nudgee Beach Hotel Sheep, Order 66, Deputy Dipshit, Toby And The Rats Crown Hotel Lutwyche Solar Rush Victory Hotel The Big Boy Narangba Valley Tavern

The Kamikaze Thunderkats, The Meaniacs, The Rockefeller Frequency Runaway Bay Tavern The Midnight Prophets Blackstar Coffee The Scabs, Driverside Airbag, Flogging The Goods, Friends With The Enemy, The Theory Of Red, Malibu Stacy Shed 5, Gold Coast The Scrapes Black Bear Lodge Tom Foolery Shafston Hotel Transvaal Diamond Syndicate, Gay Paris, Claude Hay Great Northern Hotel Byron Bay Treva Scobie Southern Hotel Toowoomba Turbine Jazz Brisbane Powerhouse Turbine Platform Tyson & Shake Lansdowne Tavern Vertigo Broadbeach Tavern

SUN 25

A French Butler Called Smith Bond University Acoustics On Sunday: Susanna Carman, Loren Brisbane Square Library Adrian Keys, Loose Elephant & Wheelbarrow Architecture In Helsinki, Oscar + Martin, Mitzi The Tivoli Band Of Frequencies, Haldanes Daughters Byron Cultural & Community Centre Beauty and The Beats Locknload West End Bob Mouat Southern Hotel Toowoomba Brisbane Contemporary Jazz Orchestra Brisbane Jazz Club Dave Ritter, Chris Ramsay Fibber Magee’s, Toowoomba DC3, Abby Skye Waterloo Hotel Dean Watkin Eatons Hill Hotel Halls Of Justice, Lovecraft, Main Street Brats, Robert Lee Crown Hotel Lutwyche Hemi Kingi Trio Boardwalk Tavern, Hope Island

Jeremy Hunter Dowse Bar Live Spark: Nikko, Dune Rats Brisbane Powerhouse Turbine Platform Mama Juju, Jodie Flangipani, Canadian Embassy, Sandy Beats, Love Like Hate The Music Mark Chomyn Oxford 152 Michelle Brown Noosa Yacht Club Scott Geary Narangba Valley Tavern Stu Barry Era Bistro Sunday Bloody Sabbath Sessions The Beetle Bar Take The Sun Down: Bity Booker, Harley Young, Orphan Ann, Sneaky Mojo The Tempo Transvaal Diamond Syndicate, Claude Hay, Cleveland Blues Royal Mail Hotel Goodna Unlikely Superheroes, Vincent Kemp And The Dead Covers X&Y Bar Venus Envy Victory Hotel

MON 26 Cannon Browning Street Studios Trilby Dogz, Mo’s Religion, Distance To Planets The Music Kafe

TUE 27

Best Of Escalate: Steamhorse, Black As Blue, Way Of Mercy, Allied March The Tempo Casey Fogg Elephant & Wheelbarrow Lauren Lucille Locknload West End Mark Sheils Woodford Hotel Red Velvet Blonde, Go Go Fish, Kristian Mizzi & The Sirans, The Heminway Collective, The Verge The Music Kafe Rose Water, Pirate Brides The Bug Tyson Faulkner Fiddlers Green

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BEHIND THE LINES BEHIND THE LINES WITH MICHAEL SMITH BTL@STREETPRESS.COM.AU

TAKE-HOME STEVE VAI MASTERCLASS

As you should all be well aware by now, Steve Vai is coming to Brisbane’s Conservatorium Theatre in South Bank 7.30pm Thursday Oct 13 to present one of his always popular masterclasses, and there are still a few seats available, so check into the Thump Music website to book a place. If you can’t make it though, you can pick up a Steve Vai DVD to study at leisure at home. Released by Omnibus Media, Steve Vai: Master Session presents noteby-note lessons on how to play all the classic Steve Vai songs and comes with a 24-page booklet of examples in notation with a Tab shorthand.

RECORDING RAPSKALLION

Brunswick bohemian seven-piece Rapskallion recorded their latest album, Vagabond King, at Museagency in Byron Bay with live audio engineer and producer Simon Greaves, which the band’s accordionist, guitarist, mandolin player and co-singer Fingal Capaldi describes as “really good old equipment, 50s microphones and that kind of thing. We really wanted to go with a lot of analogue gear but it does really fit the material much better.” You can expect the album in December.

THE YNGWIE MARSHALL

Joe Satriani has been road-testing a signature Marshall, but before that hit’s the production line, another iconic guitarist has also been getting the Marshall love – Yngwie Malmsteen. Based on Marshall’s 1959 model 100 watt ‘Plexi’, the UK-manufactured JYM100 incorporates not only the classic all-tone of the original amp but a host of contemporary features including Booster, Noise Gate, an effects loop and Marshall’s new Electronic Power Attenuation (EPA) technology. Four ECC83s provide the initial front-end tone while four EL34s drive the power stage. Like all Marshall Signature Amps, the JYM100 is being manufactured in limited numbers so you may have to ask your local stockist to get one in for a test drive.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY

CHICKENFOOT GOIN’ AT IT Guitarist JOE SATRIANI is very pleased with the second album, Chickenfoot III, from the supergroup of sorts by that name. He talks to MICHAEL SMITH about making the album.

C

An Ibanez endorsee – they have a JS Signature Series of guitars in his name – Satriani usually uses Peavey JSX amps, but not this time.

hickenfoot is the unlikely name former Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar and bass player Michael Anthony, guitarist Joe Satriani and Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith gave their ‘bit of fun on the side’, and it’s now spawned a second album, perversely titled Chickenfoot III, which, as was part of their eponymous 2009 debut, was recorded at Hagar’s The Foot Locker studio.

“I was lobbying to bring this recording back to Skywalker,” Satriani admits – much of that first Chickenfoot album was cut at Skywalker Sound Studios in Marin County, California – “but Sam had this sort of inspired vision that it was gonna work in his studio, which is kind of a small recording studio, and I have to admit he was right because that studio captured Chad in all his glory and even the guitar sounds are far better on this one than on the first record so I’m really happy with the way the whole thing sounds.”

With four such strong high profile artists in the one unit, it would be easy for Chickenfoot to be overwhelmed by the sum of its parts rather than presenting something greater and identifiably Chickenfoot, but they’ve managed to do just that.

“I think the challenge really was to stop ourselves from over-thinking and just to do what we experienced on tour here, which was just to go out there and be natural. It’s funny, we don’t discuss that much when we go in and play; we would learn a song, people would throw out odd arrangements and we would very quickly record it and everybody would just try and get their foot in the door with every part that they felt like playing [laughs], and that has become the Chickenfoot approach, that’s become our sound, the sound of four guys just goin’ at it.”

That debut album was produced by veteran Brit Andy Johns, whose credits include classic albums by Blodwyn Pig, Humble Pie and Free among many, while much of its recording was done by Canadian Mike Fraser, who also mixed the album. This time around, Fraser, whose credits include AC/DC, Metallica and several Joe Satriani

albums as well as Van Halen’s Balance album, took over co-production, engineering and mixing duties.

“I think we’ve worked on over ten projects together since ’96 and I knew that Mike had the ears and the engineering chops to record anybody, and I really felt that his personality and his creativity was gonna be perfectly matched with the other guys. I don’t know how he does it but he never gets flustered and he could control all four of us… which is pretty difficult [laughs], ‘cause we’re all completely different and always goin’ in different directions.

“I think that Andy [Johns] is a very passionate engineer and producer, and musician himself, and I’ve not only made a record or two with Andy but also his brother Glyn Johns – the two of them have made so many of the greatest classic rock recordings of all time, it’s pretty frightening – but those two guys are totally different, and Andy is so different than just about anybody else, but I think we needed somebody with more stability. With Andy, perhaps we got a lot more fire than we needed at the time, and he got ill towards the second half of the last record and we had to do carry on without him. So this time around we thought, let’s see if we can find someone who was unbreakable, and Mike, besides all the other good stuff, I knew he was unbreakable – he could stand up to anybody.”

The Chickenfoot recording was done on an API 1608 console through ProTools, pushing the guitars and bass through a rack of API 550b four-band EQs.

“I was coming off a record and a tour where I was using a new Marshall amp that was a prototype for a signature amp I’m doing, and I was so happy using this amp – I used it on my [2010] Black Swan And Wormhole Wizards record and the subsequent tour and the live movie that’s coming out in a couple of months – so I brought that into the sessions and it sounded great from the very first day. And we used it on every song for just about everything. It’s got four channels in it and three modes per channel, so it pretty much has the history of Marshall amplification all built into one head and we would just go for different channels for different sounds.

“I used mainly my Ibanez JS-2400s, which is a change.

Usually I’m using the 1000s or the 1200s on the records.

This time I went with a 24-fret and did just about everything on it, but had a couple of vintage guitars; a 1959 Gibson 335, a ’58 Fender Telecaster, my Gibson banjo, my Ibanez JS-A acoustic and a Rickenbacker 12-string I used on one song, but it always sounds like Spinal Tap right? [laughs] But I swear, every record, there’s always a place for a 12-string somewhere. And then I borrowed Sam’s Ovation 12-string acoustic for the last track on the record [Something Going Wrong].”

Fraser also took care of the band’s Live In Phoenix DVD, with Satriani’s regular live sound man Russell Jarreau running the front of house for the gig. “Mike and I were wondering what we would do with the guitar on it – were we going to keep it in mono or should we try and ‘stereoise’ it and give the people at home something of the experience of being there? So we wound up putting the main guitar off to the left a little and using a slight delay to regenerate the same performance on the right.”

Chickenfoot III is out Monday Sep 26 through Liberator Music.

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Suit professional or home player. VG cond. $1,200. Contact Rex on mob 0431 035 158 or rexcoleman1@bigpond.com iFlogID: 15339

SINGER SEEKING DUO PARTNER Male singer/ rhythum accoustic guitarist seeking duo partner with quality backing tracks. Briz south side 0404494740 iFlogID: 14611

STAGE AND SOUND HIRE We at the Music Cavern supply equipment such as P.A Systems, Stages, Microphones, Speakers, Lights and more. If needed we also provide our services with our Stage and Sound crew. For any more information call us on 3807 5688 iFlogID: 14686

VIA STUDIOS has 10 spacious, airconditioned, soundproof studios with 500w PA’s. Central location, flat load, fully equiped shop, backline for hire and lockable storage makes it a pleasure for all! Book now Ph: (07) 3252 1127. Come see what the fuss is all about. www.viastudios.com iFlogID: 13689

WAVELENGTH RECORDING. $350/day (BYOE) $550/day (Eng inc). Best Value for money. Guaranteed international quality. SSL console. Acoustically acurate mixing and recording. Freelance Engineers & Producers welcome. Free Assistance. Ph 0404066645 iFlogID: 15602

ENTERTAINMENT A ACTORS EXTRAS & MODELS WANTED FOR FILM & TV WORK, NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED,ALL AGES AND SIZES WELCOME,NO JOINING FEES, CALL NK MODELS PH:02 9281 8108 M:0406 900 600 www.nkmodels.com iFlogID: 15258

SALES & MARKETING Looking for fun, ethical, paid work?

Love meeting great people? Looking for a little more out of your career?

Check out www.funwaysing.com iFlogID: 13785

People needed to send eMails offering a new music Book for sale. Must have own computer - payment by commission via Paypal. Contact Bill on (02) 9807-3137 or eMail: nadipa1@ yahoo.com.au iFlogID: 13289

FILM & STAGE

STUDIO GEAR

PRODUCTION

CAD M9 - CARDIOID SINGLE TUBE CONDENSER MICROPHONE.

MAKE YOUR NEXT MUSIC VIDEO AT QPIX: Fantastic film studio/equipment/crew - all under one roof in Annerley. Special Rates for local artists plus FREE initial consultation from experienced producer. barry@qpix.org.au iFlogID: 15357

FOR SALE

Included: 1x30 ft. microphone cable, MV200 analog power supply, carrying case & suspension shock mount.

Great working condition, regretful sale. $430 beckcains@gmail.com

LANEY GH120 GUITAR HEAD 120 watt.2 channel.f/switchable.reverb.direct out.very punchy. great tone.UK made.VGC.$350.

Ph.0428744963.Cooroy iFlogID: 13021

PEAVEY BANDIT 80WATT 12” GUITAR COMBO 2 channel.footswitchable.great fat tone.reverb/saturation etc.USA made.

VGC.$350. Ph.0428744963. Cooroy iFlogID: 13019

BASS GIBSON EPIPHONE SG BASS GUITAR. solid mahogany.great fat tone.

VGC.$400.Ph.0428744963.Cooroy. iFlogID: 13029

CD / DVD Attention Musicians, Record Collectors, Universities, Libraries - new Book (print/cdROM/direct download) compiling 100 years of popular music. GO TO www.plattersaurus.com web-site on how to buy. Enquiries: (02) 98073137 eMail: nadipa1@yahoo.com.au iFlogID: 13287

DRUMS WANTED VINTAGE DRUM KIT, old Ludwig, Gretsch etc. Also want vintage snare drums etc. Sydney based but will pay top $ and arrange courier. Ph 0419760940 iFlogID: 13234

GUITARS FENDER PINK PAISLEY STRAT. genuine 1980’s.all original.in case. great tone/action/condition.very rare.$2000 ono.Ph.0428744963.

Cooroy iFlogID: 13027

GODIN MIDI GUITAR ACS SA Nylon string semi-solid body with piezo and 13-pin MIDI output plus the Terratec Axon AX100 Synth controller & AX101 MIDI pickup. $2,400 including delivery.

THE001Music@hotmail.com iFlogID: 13086

KEYBOARDS KORG TRITON Extreme88 synthesizer in new condition with keyboard stand and damper pedal. Worth over $7,000 sell for $4,295 including delivery. Currently in Perth. Phone 0439301165 Email: THE001Music@hotmail.com iFlogID: 13084

GOLD COAST & NORTHERN NSW Poster distribution for Music & Arts.

Fast, efficient and reliable service at a competitive price www.thatposterguy. com.au iFlogID: 14678

RECORDING STUDIOS

iFlogID: 15335

CUBASE AND REASON Music Production systems Cubase and Reason iFlogID: 15545

AMPS

POSTERS

SAMSON 8 PIECE DRUM MICROPHONE SET. INCLUDED - 2X C01 LCDS 3x Q-Toms with rim mount clips, Q-Snare with rim mount clip, Q-Kick, C02H Mini Pencil Condenser $400 beckcains@gmail.com iFlogID: 15337

MUSIC SERVICES DUPLICATION/ MASTERING CD MANUFACTURING:Acme is Australias best price CD manufacturer.

500 CD package = $765.05: 1000 CD package = $1320.00 Short run also available. www.AcmeMusic.com.au KevinW@AcmeMusic.com.au iFlogID: 13117

HIRE SERVICES For as low as $100, you get a professional sound/pa mixer system with operator for the evening. Suitable for weddings, pub/clubs band gigs, private parties etc. Infovision@yayabings. com.au. Contact Chris 0419272196

ALCHEMIX RECORDING STUDIOS Inner Brisbane city Recording Studio. Record, mix, mastering, duplicate. Established 1998.

Large studio with lots of Vintage Gear & the latest in Digital Technology. Obligation free studio tours available,. PH: 0407 630 770 E-Mail: sound@alchemix. com.au WEB: www.alchemix. com.au iFlogID: 15600

ARE YOU PROUD OF YOUR MUSIC?

Too embarrassed to play your latest recordings to your friends? Had your demos rejected? Want the Record you are proud of? Don’t waste money on Demos. Bradshaw Music Productions. We can make the Record that could help you open doors. Contact kate 0426972300 kate@bradshawmusicproductions.com iFlogID: 15314

ON LOCATION AUDIO RECORDING

iFlogID: 15173

TUITION ATTENTION: MUSIC CREATORS Contact me for your free chapter of my book “ Chord Voicing for Composers, Arrangers, Songwriters and Pianists”. The complete guide to advance harmony. jdmuspub@gmail.com iFlogID: 15062

DRUMMER AND DRUM LESSONS Drum Lessons avaliable in Gladesville Teach all Levels, ages and experience.

Played for 16 years. I studied at Billy Hydes Drumcraft, Obtained Dipolma in Drummming Mob: 0402 663 469 Michael iFlogID: 13703

GUITAR LESSONS BEGINNERS$25HR 1xFREE-LESSON guarantied guitar playing in days not years taking the frustration out of learning. Music CD’s teaching tools supplied. Teaching guitar 10years + SMS 0405 044 513 iFlogID: 13973

Guitar Lessons. Rock, Blues, Jazz, Folk. Teaching studios in the Brisbane area at The Gap and Samford. Rob’s Guitar School. Ph 3289 8020. www. robsguitarschool.com iFlogID: 14011

Music tuition, classical / flamenco guitar, celtic harp, theory & harmony, arranging. 9am - 9pm, 7 days. Parramatta area. $40 hr, $30 half hr.

Mature & patient. Harps for hire.

Ph: 02 98905578 iFlogID: 15154

Music tuition, classical / flamenco guitar, celtic harp, theory & harmony, arranging. 9am - 9pm, 7 days. Parramatta area. $40 hr, $30 half hr.

Mature & patient. Harps for hire. Ph: 02 98905578 iFlogID: 15158

MASTERING

PRIVATE PROTOOLS TUITION

Audio Mastering, mixing, recording.

CD-R music & data duplication, cover artwork, colour disc printing, online global distribution. Full studio package deal for EP or full album projects.

Enquiries ph: 02 98905578

iFlogID: 15162

OTHER ++ play more chinese music - love, tenzenmen ++ www.tenzenmen.com iFlogID: 14468

Get your Band or Business Online Cost effectively and PROFESSIONALLY - from $299 including Hosting and email addresses! Contact info@ bizwebsites.com.au or see www. bizwebsites.com.au. iFlogID: 15452

PA / AUDIO / ENGINEERING Sydney PA Hire: Best quality equipment, small to large 2, 3 and 4 way systems, packages for all occasions, competitive prices servicing Sydney and environs. Details; http://www.sydneypa.biz, Chris 0432 513 479 iFlogID: 13943

iFlogID: 13827

MUSIC VIDEOS offer a great way to gain exposure. Immersion Imagery has worked with a variety or artists and strives to offer quality & creative Music Videos. Visit www.immersionimagery.com email info@immersionimagery.com iFlogID: 13825

NEED A LIVE VIDEO? Get your band filmed and recorded live in High Definition! Put it on YouTube, Facebook, a DVD. Undeniably the best deal in Australia! visit www. smackfacerecords.com.au iFlogID: 15482

MUSICIANS AVAILABLE DRUMMER A1 PRO DRUMMER AVAILABLE for freelance gigs, tours etc. Extensive touring experience, gret time/tempo/ groove, great drum gear and pro attitude. Sydney based but will travel.

More info, ph 0419760940. www. mikehague.com iFlogID: 13230

TOP INTERNATIONAL DRUMMER available, great backing vocals, harmonica player and percussionist. Gigs, tours and recording always desired. www.reubenalexander.net iFlogID: 14261

GUITARIST 18 year old guitar player looking to form Rock N’ Roll band. Influences: Guns N’ Roses, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, New York Dolls. Preferably in South. Call Tom on 0401722767. iFlogID: 13358

OTHER

iFlogID: 15156

Audio Mastering, mixing, recording.

CD-R music & data duplication, cover artwork, colour disc printing, online global distribution. Full studio package deal for EP or full album projects.

Enquiries ph: 02 98905578

Kontrol Productions is a highly professional production company that specializes in the production of music video’s. We ensure that our products are of the highest industry standards.

For enquiries www.kontrolproductions.com

Colab Audio specializing in and studio on location recording.

Record your gig live professionally, or track your next EP/Album on location. Register your interest at colabaudiobrisbane@ gmail.com. See; facebook.com/ colabaudiobrisbane iFlogID: 15106

Recording Studio, Parramatta, $30hr casual rate. No kits! Singers, songwriters, instrumentalists for acoustic, world, classical genres specialist. 25+yrs exp, multi instrumentalist, arranger, composer, producer. Ph: 02 98905578, 7 days.

Private one on one tuition with an experienced and trained ProTools engineer. Home studio set up consultations also available. visit www. smackfacerecords.com.au iFlogID: 15480

Professional bass lessons, rock, funk, slap, groove, blues, walking, theory, scales, chords, riffs. Nudgee Rd, Hamilton. All levels, kids to adults (Blue Card Holder) jakefehres@gmail.com or 0405 483 058.

iFlogID: 15152

iFlogID: 14622

Recording Studio, Parramatta, $30hr casual rate. No kits! Singers, songwriters, instrumentalists for acoustic, world, classical genres specialist. 25+yrs exp, multi instrumentalist, arranger, composer, producer. Ph: 02 98905578, 7 days.

Professional bass lessons, teach rock, funk, slap, groove, blues, walking, picking, theory. $50 one hour, $70 hour and half, $90 two hours. Blue Card Holder, jakefehres@gmail.com or 0405483058. Hamilton, Brisbane. iFlogID: 15474

iFlogID: 15160

REPAIRS Drum-In-Tensions - your local mobile Drum and Percussion service and repairs for Brisbane, Gold Coast and Northern NSW. Free quotes available.

Call Timo now on 0402 980 602. iFlogID: 14888

VIDEO / PRODUCTION

Percussionist - Professional Freelance Percussionist with 20 years professional experience playing both nationally & internationally. Looking to perform with professional musicians on a freelance basis. Very reliable. Call Timo on 0402980602.

BASS PLAYER Bass Player wanted - Must have good gear, transport and be a solid player. Gigs waiting. Infl: Paramore, All time low etc www.myspace.com/ thestellaraffect Ph: 04326321495 for an audition. iFlogID: 15282

DJ

iFlogID: 14052

DRUMMER Can you groove? Guitarist and bassist looking for determined drummer to form a heavy rock, funk blues driven jam band in the Bondi area.

Preferred age: 16-24. Call Andrew: 0414399413. iFlogID: 14410

Energetic drummer needed to form a progressive heavy rock band in Bondi area. Are you serious, determined and able to drive the rhythm section whilst still keeping a groove?

Call:0414399413. iFlogID: 14934

Experienced Drummed wanted for Covers/Originals Band in the Brisbane/ Ipswich area. Influences include Hendrix , Acdc , The Divinyls etc .Please contact Mark Ph 0409758286 for more info . iFlogID: 15296

WHO ARE YOU? Are you a reliable Metal Head into Conspiracies who plays Drums or Guitar?

CONTROL NEEDS YOU... Contact: 0423 350 259 iFlogID: 15071

GUITARIST 18 year old guitar player looking for another guitar player. Influences: GN’R, Aerosmith, Zeppelin, New York Dolls.

Preferrably someone in the south (Shire). Call Tom on 0401722767 iFlogID: 13407

Guitarist wanted - Must have good gear, transport and be a solid player.

Gigs waiting. Infl: Paramore, All time low etc www.myspace.com/thestellaraffect Ph: 04326321495 for an audition. iFlogID: 15280

NOEL GALLAGHER required for SYDNEY based OASIS cover band.

Must have good gear, transport and band experience. Lead ability not essential. Good vocals. Call karl 0415 877 918 iFlogID: 13432

iFlogID: 15177

SINGER

MUSICIANS WANTED BANDS indie humstrum and drum open mic night. every wednesday night from 8pm at the manly hotel drums p.a. provided just bring your guitars and sticks. call chris for details 0414340954. cambridge parade Manly iFlogID: 15254

D7 STUDIO MUSIC VID FROM $250 music vid $250. Live gig edits, multiple angles, from $150 or 1 live track from $80. All shot in full HD. d7studio@iinet. net.au ph:0404716770

open mic jam night. @ hogans wellington point every thursday night from 8pm. solo or bands welcome p.a. and drums provided bring your guitars and sticks call chris for details 0414340954.

iFlogID: 13368

iFlogID: 15256

GOSPEL SINGERS WANTED for nondenominational music ministry to record triple-CD in Perth. World-class, passionate and devotional vocalists sought. View www.THE001Music.com for details. Jesus is KIng! Reverend Eslam. God Bless You! iFlogID: 13088

SERVICES GRAPHIC DESIGN Get your Band or Business Online Cost effectively and PROFESSIONALLY - from $299 including Hosting and email addresses! Contact info@ bizwebsites.com.au or see www bizwebsites.com.au. iFlogID: 15450

Free online and print classifieds Book now, visit iflog.com.au 50

iFlogID: 13864

Looking for a cool DJ to work with in forming a killer club act with live drums/percussion. Call Al on 0400 909 633 drumpercuss@hotmail.com

iFlogID: 14923

We are a friendly jazz band playing music to any style for romantic situations, weddings, anniversaries, small cozy clubs - very affordable. contact Chris 0419 272 196 ventura@yayabings.com.au

Get your Band or Business Online Cost effectively and PROFESSIONALLY- from $399 including UNLIMITED pages, Logos, Hosting and 5xemail addresses and much more! Contact info@bizwebsites.com.au or see www.bizwebsites.com.au

Graphic Design for the music industry. Work to your budget and needs for your next logo, flyer, album art or merch design. Contact design@dillonashcroft.com or head to dillonashcroft. com iFlogID: 15606

Limited Edition mens tees and hoodies with a sense of humour. All hand-screened and numbered. monstrositystore.com iFlogID: 13611

OTHER Get your Band or Business Online Cost effectively and PROFESSIONALLY - from $299 including Hosting and email addresses! Contact info@ bizwebsites.com.au or see www. bizwebsites.com.au. iFlogID: 15454

Get your Band or Business Online Cost effectively and PROFESSIONALLY- from $399 including UNLIMITED pages, Hosting and 5xemail addresses and much more! Contact info@ bizwebsites.com.au or see www. bizwebsites.com.au. iFlogID: 13862

Need to promote your restaurant, club and make it the place to go?

Contact us now, because providing good entertainment is a personal skill.

Chris 0419 272 196 ventura@yayabings.com.au iFlogID: 15175

TATTOO Monstrosity Dreadlocks, Sydney.

Dreads and maintenance special: All service $30 per hour. Professional, guaranteed service. Kings Cross. Call 0421356410 iFlogID: 13613

TUITION GUITAR LESSONS BEGINNERS$25HR 1xFREE-LESSON guarantied guitar playing in days not years taking the frustration out of learning. Music CD’s teaching tools supplied. teaching guitar 10years + SMS 0405 044 513 iFlogID: 13975

GUITAR TUITION. Bris. 30 yrs experience. Beginners a specialty.

0406017022 iFlogID: 13494

MUSIC TUITION- Guitar, Bass, Drums, 5 String Banjo. Catering for all ages, private one on one lessons. Rock, Blues, Country, Jazz, Slide, Finger Picking. Sutherland Shire. Contact Terry- 0402 993 268 iFlogID: 15166