The Brag #507

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New album Picture Show out now Featuring the hit single ‘Everybody Talks’

“Kurt Vile distils thousands of hours spent with classic American guitar music into one very singular and sublime vision.”

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rock music news welcome to the frontline: what’s goin’ on around town... with Nathan Jolly

five things WITH

MAX FROM SONGS first band the next day. I think that mix of Top 40, ’70s type music mixed with a punk spirit kind of sums me up as musician even now.

2.

Inspirations I like so many musicians I couldn’t list them all, but off the top of my head I could say David Byrne – not just because he is completely unique and he played in a great band, but also just because he writes and arranges the best, most imaginative, hooky tunes in contemporary music. I like that with Talking Heads he was so emotionally complex, without ever being angsty or overwrought.

The Music You Make The shows coming up are to promote 4. our latest album Malabar, which we recorded over a year ago. It was recorded in Sydney with Mike Burnham who was out here from England. I don’t know what it sounds like but I know some bands that have been used to describe our music in the past who we definitely don’t sound like – The Go-Betweens and The Clean. Much as I love both those bands there is nothing in our sound now that even vaguely resembles them. It’s not really jangly either. The set is a bit of a mixture from Malabar and our first album and our EP. Plus Ela will be playing a flute. Good times.

Your Band Songs as it is now is me, Ela, Ben and 3.

Music, Right Here, Right Now Cam. Ela and I are still around from the original The music scene in Sydney is a lot more 5. lineup. We met when I was trying to put a band fun than when we started. There’s loads of fun

Growing Up I grew up in the ’70s but I didn’t have any 1. older siblings to point me in the right direction.

There was a lot of Neil Diamond around, and soundtracks like Jesus Christ Superstar. I remember seeing The Bay City Rollers in a big gymnasium somewhere in Auckland. They had

to keep stopping the show because those crazy Kiwi girls were going so nuts. Then just before I left school, Toy Love came to play a lunchtime show in the school hall. Chris Knox wrapped his head in tinfoil, with the mic stuck to his head, and rolled around on the ground before putting his head through the bass drum. I started my

together and I was asking everyone I knew if they knew anyone who could play. A mate knew Ela so I contrived a reason to meet her – she’d never been in a band before, but she was up for the challenge and we started jamming pretty much right away. I think all our musical opinions and interests are different. I don’t even know what she likes because we never talk about it and I’m happy with that. The only thing that’s important is what happens when we get together. I’m always suspicious of bands that sound like they all sit around listening to the same records. It’s like being around people laughing at their own in-jokes.

bands like Bed Wetting Bad Boys, Camperdown And Out, and Day Ravies. From what I can see the obstacles faced by musos are pretty much the same as they’ve ever been, they just look different. I didn’t know any musicians back in the old days who made any money and I don’t know any now. You just have to learn how to get on long enough to make some good music and then get out before it’s too late.

With: The Native Cats and Model Citizen Where: Goodgod Small Club When: Thursday April 11

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You know how you keep writing ‘Get Tickets For San Cisco’ in your diary each morning, promising yourself you’ll get to it once those TPS reports for Johnston are finalised (or whatever it is people who work in real offices do). Well, you left it too long, sport (in your office, everyone calls everyone ‘sport’) because the little Perth indie pop sparks have sold out their May 31 Metro show. It’s not as bad as it seems; they’ve announced a June 9 show, for slow-faces such as yourself.

Now, go tell Johnston.

ANGEL HAZE

We watched The Black Angels’ set when they were out for Harvest last year, and they had a guy sitting cross-legged on the stage, in a paisley shirt, playing a sitar like it was 1967. As wave after wave of their

San Cisco

hypnotically plodding set crashed over us, we thought, “These guys should totally return to Sydney, maybe next June when this acid has worn off?” Turns out they are doing just that, off the back of their fourth album Indigo Meadow which is a sludgier, crunchier album

The Coughin' Nails

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Stop what you are doing, which we assume is reading this while pretending to listen to your significant other tell you about their hilarious work friend Toby, and put on ‘Open My Eyes’

by Nazz. It’s an amazingly trippy beat-pop song, and also marked the start of Todd Rundgren’s storied career, which has weaved through many of the finest genres in music (1973’s A Wizard, A True Star is the high point in our opinion) over the past 40 years to land in Sydney for two shows: July 25 at Bridge Hotel in Rozelle, and July 26 at Revesby Workers.

NORTHLANE

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THE NAZZ

When our favourite western Sydney hardcore band Northlane debuted at number #85 on the ARIA Albums chart 18 months ago, we were all ‘excited-hugs-then-awkwardhandshakes’ about it, so you can only imagine the open-mouthed kissing that occurred when we learned last week their second album Singularity had debuted at #3 on the chart! They have announced a national tour in support of the record, with tickets on sale now through Oztix to two Annandale Hotel shows, June 1 and 2.

EDITORIAL POLICY: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher, editors or staff of The BRAG.

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then 2010’s Phosphene Dream. June 15 at The Enmore. Tickets on sale now.

SMOKESCREEN

And in lighter news, Smokescreen Music Festival have announced their lineup and it’s a real killer, with Stroke, The Coughin’ Nails, Heart Disease, M4 CEMA, Yellow Teeth and numerous other acts rocking the main stage. For more info, check out the clip on our Facebook page... Smokin’!

Sydney-based, Port Mac-raised strummer Patrick James has signed a deal with Create/ Control for his debut EP All About To Change, and considering you guys all bought up tickets to the April 14 Vanguard launch, he now has to announce a second show, and awkwardly place it on April 13, ahead of his first show, which is still being called the first show even though it is, in linear terms, the second show.

Man, showbiz is hard. Yetis and Chris Rose are supporting, and James will almost certainly hunt down anyone who misses his perfectlypicked support acts.

CREATIVE CITY SYDNEY What’s stopping you from getting to the gigs you’re reading about here?

Tell us what creative life you want for Sydney. sydneyyoursay.com.au/creativecity #creativecitysyd

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rock music news

free stuff

welcome to the frontline: what’s goin’ on around town... with Nathan Jolly

FREESTUFF@THEBRAG.COM

five things WITH

BLACK SEEDS

SHANNON FROM KINGFISHA Your Band Two members of Kingfisha met at 3. under-9s soccer practice in 1987. Three of the members went to high school together and have been playing music in different combinations since we were 14. We’ve played lots of different styles together over the years: folk acoustic duos, death metal, drum and bass, funk etc. We all came together as Kingfisha to play reggae and dub-influenced music and this is our focus and connection.

The Music You Make Our current self-titled debut album was 4. produced by Paulie B (George, Beautiful Girls)

Growing Up My grandad was a multi-instrumentalist 1. who played jazz and swing and he

Inspirations My favourite and most inspirational 2. and most influential musicians are my

encouraged my father to play. Dad played drums in covers bands while I was growing up; sometimes the band used to practice at home and Mum would make me a cup of Milo and let me stay up and sit in on the rehearsal.

Dad was playing music by bands like Dire Straits and Fleetwood Mac. We used to have big BBQs and parties and Dad’s band would set up on the back deck. Playing guitar and singing was also a part of family gatherings.

Dad started to teach me guitar when I was 14 and encouraged me to play bass guitar.

friends and bandmates. I also love lots of Jamaican musicians, particularly the drums and bass combinations of players like George “Fully” Fullwood and Carlton “Santa” David (Soul Syndicate), Sly and Robbie (The Revolutionaries) and Aston “Family Man” and Carlton “Carly” Barret (Bob Marley). These guys have played on lots of recordings, their grooves are heavy and deep. The music they made and innovated went on to influence popular music worldwide.

OH, CASSANDRA

Mississippi’s Cassandra Wilson is signed to legendary jazz label Blue Note Records, gets reviewed favourably by publications such as Jazz Times and The New York Times and has won two Grammys for her slinky soulful jazz, which means for Christ’s sake wipe the peanut butter off your face, tuck your shirt in and behave. We are at the Opera House, not a beer barn. On June 15, tickets from $49.

SOSUEUS

SOSUEME turns six, which means they are putting on a massive FREE party on April 17 at the Beach Road Hotel, with live sets from City Riots, Light Giants, Battleships, Nantes, and The Bondi Hipsters who may still be at the stage where they are a parody act. Find out! Turn to Dance News for more about the DJ-ish aspects of the night, too.

Hopefully Dr. Chris Brown (the hot Bondi

and the band at a little studio in West End, Queensland. We recorded song by song and were very pleased with the outcome. The way we play some of our songs live has been influenced by the work we did in the studio.

We strive to play with a groove and vibe at every show.

Music, Right Here, Right Now The music scene in Brisbane is healthy, 5. with places to play, practice and record. There are also great local labels like Vital Signs Records and local record shops like Jet Black Cat. The bands and people around you inspire you and support you and I think this is the most important aspect of a thriving scene.

With: Dubmarine, Kinsky, Foreign Dub Where: Spectrum @ The Exchange Hotel When: Friday April 12

Remember when you were young and naïve and wondered how Nikki Webster wrote the Webster’s dictionary in between kissing strawberries, and then went to buy a copy of The Black Eyed Peas’ first album but pressed play and was instead overwhelmed by the thick reggae and dub bursting out of your Walkman? And then you adjusted your glasses and saw that the album cover actually read The Black Seeds and your life was changed forever? Your favourite eight-piece Kiwi disco-funk stalwarts have sold out shows worldwide and are ready to bring their apocalyptic beats to Selina’s at Coogee on Friday April 26. We have a double pass, a copy of their latest release Dust And Dirt and a band tee up for grabs if you tell us the Black Seeds song that gets you the most excited.

ONE PIG

“In an age of such infinite and brilliant possibilities of technique, combined with the urgent politics of now, why have music and musicians lost the urge to challenge, investigate, invent and unite?” That’s what composer and performance artist Matthew Herbert wants to know. After a career scoring film, dance and theatre, he’s crafted one of his most controversial works ever: One Pig, which tells the life story of a pig from birth through to death and an afterlife on a dinner plate. He does so through an assortment of sounds, instruments made from the pig itself, as well as cooking audio, courtesy of Jesse Gerner (Head Chef of The Aylesbury in Melbourne) who will be cooking live on stage – at the Standard this Wednesday April 10. Sounds weird and wonderful, and we’d like you to get along. To win a double pass, tell us who your favourite fictional pig is.

vet, not the scumbag) will be there. Hopefully he isn’t caught with a tranquiliser needle he forgot to take out of his vet coat – those are hard to explain to very large bouncers.

GOT MILK?

In the ’70s and ’80s in America, when kids went missing their faces would turn up on the side of milk cartons, which must have been a horrific early-morning reminder that life is full of evil, morally bankrupt people, to complement your Froot Loops and coffee nicely. Californian duo Milk Carton Kids aren’t missing, although they do have that breezy throwback country sound which suggests they may go a wanderin’ from time to time, but quit your fussin’. The fact they hail from a town called Eagle Rock also suggests that their entire existence has been building up to their first Australian visit, during which you should catch them live at the Factory Theatre, which happens exactly on June 4.

…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

Neon Trees

NEON BALLROOM

Utah’s Neon Trees has a name that invokes beautiful, concreted-in palm trees lit by tacky casino signs, or maybe the clash between nature and progress, but nope, they just really liked the neon trees on the In-N-Out burger logo near their house and decided to name their entire business after it. Their second album Picture Show continues along that newwave path they seem fond of, and considering ‘Animal’ was the most-played track on Australian radio a few years ago, if you want to squeeze into their May 16 show at The Standard, you should be lining up at your computer from 9am on April 16. No pushing.

INFIDELS!

TRAIL OF DEAD

Pitchfork only give perfect 10s to the following: bleepy, bleak, dystopian records moaned out by Thom Yorke, revisionist cult indie records they forgot to like the first time around, and those records which sound important upon first listen, the ones that sound both of their own world, and of the world that surrounds them, albums like Texan alternative rock band …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead’s influential and amazing 2002 record Source Tags and Codes, which they are performing in full for the first time ever in Australia, doing so on May 23 at the Metro. Tickets (hopefully still) on sale now.

LOVE LIKE HATE

Brisbane’s Love Like Hate do that fractured post-punk thing that PJ Harvey and Patti Smith and Evelyn Evelyn do so well, but when they decided to play some pub gigs in the inner west, the band discovered an old law held over from the mid-’90s which proclaimed that Tim Freedman from The Whitlams must front at least one of the bands, unless special circumstances can be shown. Not wishing to succumb to this fate, the band put together a tour in which ladies front each band, thus trumping any potential Freedman involvement, as well as bypassing the dreaded cockforest. Catch ‘em April 17 at the Sly Fox in Enmore, where they will be joined by Library Siesta (who’ll be launching an EP), King Tears Mortuary and The Bubble Solution, and April 19 at the Townie in Newtown, which features Aimee Francis with A Girl’s A Gun.

xxx

12 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

You know how every now and then, you hear about one of these new Perth acts who cleans up big at the WAMi awards, so you make a note to listen to their music, then quickly put them out of your mind and continue building your papier-mâché tribute to Phil Collins? Well, Timothy Nelson And The Infidels were one of those acts, and when we heard their new single ‘Mary Lou’ (you don’t meet enough Mary Lous in real life, do you?) we literally stopped mid-type to copy/ paste/email it out to everyone we know. It’s produced by Joel Quartermain of Eskimo Joe (since his oppressive deal with the WA Government, he is required to produce everything sonically lush that comes out of the state) and is on track to scoop up a bunch of awards at this year’s not-at-all-fictional Braggies. They launch it April 26 at The Beresford, which is sooo upstairs these days.

“Some of Cold War Kids’ most promising and satisfying music since their debut” All Music Guide Brand New Studio Album 05.04.2013

Features the smash single “Miracle Mile”

“CWK hve gone back to the sort of idiosyncratic weirdness that made us fall for them in the first place.”

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The smash hit single Learn To Love Again out now from debut album ‘Chapman Square’

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 13

The Music Network

themusicnetwork.com

Music Industry News with Christie Eliezer

THINGS WE HEAR

* Among the hoaxes on April Fool’s Day: YouTube announced it was closing shop as it had found the world’s best video after eight years … Twitter said it was introducing a two-tier system, with the cheaper option not to include vowels … Sony launched headphones for cats … Justin Bieber got his revenge on gossip site TMZ – he invited fans to call him and gave them the site’s number … a photo ran in UK magazines of Mick Jagger and Ron Wood caught looking out of a tent while camping to get in shape for their Glastonbury appearance … two Florida radio DJs were suspended after they ran a news items warning that “dihydrogen monoxide” (the chemical name for water) was coming out of taps and

INDEPENDENT AWARDS

Musicoz’s Australian Independent Music Awards have opened for entries. They covers 18 music genres – see musicoz.org or AustralianIndependentMusicAwards.com for details. They will be held on Thursday November 7 at The Star. This year sees HTC, which has over 2 million customers and active social media channels, come in as major sponsor. Musicoz Foundation CEO Tim Dixon said, “It is fabulous to have HTC come on board and recognise the value of the independent music community in Australia.” The awards’ launch at The Star saw appearances by last year’s artist of the year, Kid Mac (who shot a video clip during his set), The Leisure Bandits and DJ Sandi Hotrod. Among guests were Toni Childs, New Empire, Silver Cities, Sophia Hope and Noiseworks’ Steve Balbi.

BIRDS MOST PLAYED

Birds Of Tokyo were the most played Australian act on radio in the first three months of the year, according to Air Check.

Their ‘Lantern’ got 7065 spins, while Samantha Jade’s ‘What You’ve Done To Me’ was a runner-up with 4739 spins. But the biggest playing track was The Lumineers’ ‘Ho Hey’ with 7963 spins, directly before Bruno Mars’ ‘When I Was Your Man’ with

many listeners panicked. * The Temper Trap are among the acts opening for The Rolling Stones when they play London’s Hyde Park on July 5.

Meanwhile, closer to home, they sold out their Sydney and Brisbane shows. * Channel [V]’s flagship The Riff celebrated its 100th show on the weekend, while [V]’s Facebook page has hit 800,000 likes. * A French gold record for AC/DC’s High Voltage, presented to former AC/DC bassist Mark Evans, sold for $4200 on eBay, with the proceeds going to help send the Sydney Secondary College (Balmain campus) girls’ soccer team to compete in Hawaii. * Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ album has gone platinum in Australia. * At Bluesfest, Paul Simon dedicated ‘Slip Slidin’ Away’ to his late producer Phil

7687. According to Air Check, Universal Music had the lion’s share of airplay with 32%, followed by Sony at 26%, Warner at 22%, EMI at 14% and the indies at 5%.

YOUNGER STREAMERS

Younger music fans in America are turning away from traditional radio to Internet radio and streaming services. These accounted for 23% of listening time for listeners aged between 13 and 35 in the fourth quarter, said new figures by the NPD Group. This was 17% a year before. Digital files took up 15% of listening time, while on-demand services such as Spotify accounted for 14% of listening time. Mobile is a key part of the listening experience of the young.

NPD found that more than half of Pandora and iHeartRadio listeners used their mobile phones to access those services. Listeners aged over 35 have different listening habits.

In this group, 41% listened to AM/FM radio while only 13% went for Internet radio.

VALE CHRIS BAILEY

Chris Bailey, bassist with The Angels and GANGgajang, lost his nine-month battle with throat cancer last week. He was 62. Although he stepped back from performing in January, he joined The Angels in the studio for eight tracks for their next album, which now looks

Just Announced

Ramone. Speaking of the festival, official attendance figures are put at over 80,000.

Two new acts to make waves were Grace Potter & The Nocturnals and Melbourne’s Saskwatch. The latter got a further boost when Bluesfest used their music on a video sent to mass media showing snippets of this year’s festival. * 360 and San Cisco will play Lollapalooza in early August alongside The Cure, Mumford & Sons, Nine Inch Nails and Phoenix. * Daniel Johns is finishing up the new Silverchair album, but it won’t feature the other two original members. He told The Music Network it stems from the aborted collaboration with Luke Steele, which was to be four EPs, each representing a season.

Chris Joannou and Ben Gillies excused themselves from the project.

like it will be dedicated to him. Bailey joined The Angels in 1976, left in 1982, and returned in 2002. Drummer Buzz Bidstrup, who visited him in hospital with singer Doc Neeson three days before his death, recalled him as “an intuitive player, a joy to play with.” One of his first bands in Adelaide was Mount Lofty Rangers with Bon Scott. The Angels will play a tribute to Bailey in Adelaide’s Thebarton Theatre on Wed April 17 with Jimmy Barnes, Diesel, GANGgajang, James Reyne and Ian Moss.

HIP HOP’S WEALTHIEST

US business magazine Forbes did the calculations and declared that Sean “Diddy” Combs remains hip hop’s wealthiest mogul for the third year running. #2 was Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter with a net worth of $475 million. Andre “Dr. Dre” Young was #3 with $350 million, mostly due to the top-selling Beats By Dr. Dre headphones. Bryan “Birdman” Williams made $150 million through Cash Money, which signed Drake, Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne as well as his YMCMB clothing line and GT Vodka. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson rounded off the Top 5 with $100 million from an assortment of music, merchandise, video games and books, his SMS Audio headphones brand, SK Energy and his payout from selling his stake in Vitaminwater parent Glacéau to Coca-Cola in 2007.

PURCELL DEPARTS EMI

After 7½ years, EMI’s National Publicity Manager Andy Purcell has left the building. This week he begins at the Sydney office of Mushroom Group/Frontier Touring.

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Viacom’s Colin Blake is the new head of music streaming service Rdio Australia, based in its partner dmg Radio Australia’s office in Sydney.

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Cannabis Corpse (USA) & King Parrot Fri 28 Jun

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As part of Bluesfest, an indigenous showcase was held to herald the arrival of indigenous festival Boomerang. It is held over October 4–6 at the Bluesfest site at Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm, and curated and run by Rhoda Roberts. Bluesfest’s Peter Noble said, “Hosting a significant cultural event on the Bluesfest site which is actually Bundjalung country not only makes sense, but makes me proud. Through the healing of music, the rhythm of language and the power of dance, it’s time to have fun and gather as we recognise the similarities we all share.”

JAMES TO CREATE/CONTROL

Sydney based singer-songwriter Patrick James has been signed to Create/Control.

An EP, All About To Change, is out April 26 in Australia and NZ. James has been selling out shows in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra after touring with The Paper Kites and Tim Hart (Boy & Bear).

Originally from Port Macquarie, James is currently on the road with Emma Louise.

KAY TO PARLOPHONE

New Ivy League Records signing, Perth singer songwriter Georgi Kay, has joined the Parlophone label for UK release. It is the home of The Beatles, as well as Bat For Lashes, Kylie Minogue, Lily Allen, Gorillaz, Babyshambles and Sigur Ros. A limited-edition 7” ‘Ipswich’ is released to coincide with Record Store Day on April 20 with an EP to follow later in the year in Australia and the UK. Kay just won an APRA Professional Development Award

for her writing. She also features on director Jane Campion’s TV mini-series Top Of The Lake on UKTV, playing “troubled” musician Melissa. In the first 30 seconds of her appearance, she’d dropped the F-word and called her old man an arsehole.

CHELSEA JANE WINS HILLTOP INITIATIVE

Emerging hip hop artist Chelsea Jane won the Hilltop Hoods Initiative for 2013. She gets $10,000 in cash to release and promote her first solo album, legal advice from David Vodika and Media Arts lawyers, and a Shure microphone pack. MC Suffa of the Hoods thanked APRA for its support, and added, “I hope the Initiative creates some amazing opportunities for her.”

CULTURAL PRECINCT VOTE

Peak music association MusicNSW applauds moves to set up a live music and cultural precinct on Parramatta Road. Initiated

by Leichhardt mayor Darcy Byrne, the Leichhardt council unanimously voted to investigate setting one up. Byrne wants to turn the stretch of Parramatta Road between Sydney Uni and Taverners Hill into a latenight hub built around live music, comedy and small bars. Byrne now must persuade relevant councils to come on board.

MusicNSW executive officer Kirsty Brown was among music biz folks who attended the public council meeting at Leichhardt Town Hall where the vote was held. She points out that councils can be the bane of venues, with “outdated and overzealous legislation, catastrophically expensive legal action and prohibitive compliance issues.” Among the benefits of a precinct, Brown says, is “an opportunity to get live music right.” She urges councils to adopt the Good Neighbour policy, acknowledge that the link between alcohol-related violence and live music is false, find ways to keep small venues and under-18 gigs going, and put the onus on developers to soundproof new buildings.

Lifelines Ill: McFly drummer Harry Judd diagnosed with an “ectopic heart beat” brought on by his hard training to run the London Marathon.

Ill: DJ and celeb Ruby Rose is taking time off to cope with severe depression.

Ill: The problems that caused Swedish house DJ Avicii to blow out some Aussie dates last month are not solved: he just axed two dates in India.

Ill: Lil Wayne, who was rushed to the hospital after having multiple seizures on a music video set, reveals he suffers from epilepsy.

In Court: a Massachusetts judge dismissed a 2010 defamation lawsuit filed by Boston’s Tom Scholz against the Boston Herald and two of its gossip columnists.

He claimed they implied he had something to do with Boston singer Brad Delp’s 2007 suicide .

Suing: a Kiss fan takes action against a Maryland amphitheatre claiming he was injured by flying debris from a cannon fired during a show last August.

Died: Jeremy Junk, 41, pioneering Perth dance promoter in the late ’90s, in a mining accident in central western NSW. He was a consultant to the mine and was underground when his head collided with a platform.

Died: Paul Williams, US “godfather of rock criticism”, author and founder of Crawdaddy magazine, 64, from complications related to a bike accident in 1995.

Died: Gordon Stoker, member of Elvis Presley’s backing vocal group The Jordanaires, 88.

Died: Robert Zildjian, founder of Canada’s Sabian Cymbals, aged 89, from cancer. He named the company after his three children, Sally, Andy and Bill.

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well-acquainted with a broad range of zombie tropes. Along with new BBC series In The Flesh (set in a civilised post-apocalypse Britain where former zombies, or sufferers of “Partially Deceased Syndrome”, are rehabilitated back into society), Warm Bodies might be part of the next wave in zombie storytelling – one where hope sits alongside the gore, an antidote to relentlessly grim interpretations of the genre, like The Walking Dead.

Night Of The Loving Dead By Caitlin Welsh

T

here’s a scene in Warm Bodies where our protagonist, known only as R, is trying to work out how to strike up a conversation with his new acquaintance, Julie; he hasn’t had a girl over in a while and is kind of struggling for an opening line. In voiceover, we hear him pleading with himself: “Don’t be creepy, don’t be creepy, don’t be creepy.” It’s a scene that’s relatable for anyone over 13 with a pulse – despite R’s lack of one. Talking to girls was hard enough even before the zombie apocalypse.

R (Nicholas Hoult) spends his days shuffling around an airport with a few hundred others, occasionally exchanging grunts with his only “friend” (Rob Corddry) and joining packs to go in search of delicious brains. When they come upon a group of young humans during one of these missions, R sets dead blue eyes on Julie (Teresa Palmer), a girl about the same age he was when he died, and in the amygdala-munching melee that inevitably ensues he manages to save her from being lunch for his undead cohort.

While Julie can’t hear the wry, selfflagellating inner monologue that endears R to the audience from the first scene (“What am I doing with my life? I’m so pale.

I should get out more. I should eat better.

My posture’s horrible. I should stand up straighter. People would respect me more if I stood up straighter.”), the selection of grunted syllables he can manage are enough to show her there’s a little humanity left in him. To complicate matters, her father (John Malkovich) is the uncompromising leader of a large human enclave he’s helped keep safe from the undead hordes for the past eight years.

Based on Isaac Marion’s YA novel, Warm Bodies was adapted for the screen and directed by Jonathan Levine, whose previous films include cult coming-of-age indie The Wackness and 50/50. His next project is adapting Marie Lu’s Hunger Games-esque YA hit Legend, about a pair of teenagers on opposite sides of the law in an oppressive post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. It’s clear that Levine’s drawn to stories about young people trying to find their way through intimidating and strange new worlds. “For some reason I’m very intrigued by that time in someone’s life. Things are so charged, emotionally, and everything is so intense,” he explains. “And that’s what I really like about this movie – it’s a great allegory for the emotions of becoming an adult.”

R might be undead, but his role as our narrator means we’re privy to the thoughts that occupy him as he shuffles through his days, unable to remember what life was like before. Despite the signs of decomposition, he’s presented from the first scene as more human than any other zombie in recent memory. “A guiding light for me throughout

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the movie was just trying to make [R] a regular awkward teenager, and using the zombie thing as a metaphor for that,” says Levine. “And as we got to the post process, we did more and more stuff like that, we crystallised that comparison. And the more we did that, the more it made sense. So for me, I could identify with that character quite a bit because I always felt awkward and creepy around girls. Inarticulate…” he laughs. “And the more neurotic we made him, the more his character came to life.”

While technically Warm Bodies fits under the “young-adult paranormal romance” umbrella, there’s none of the moony moping of Twilight here. Fans of hard-science backstories might be a little disappointed, as Levine acknowledges, but anyone who enjoyed Shaun Of The Dead’s pairing of hilarious one-liners and gory, stumbling spectres of death will find it a welcome addition to the rom-zom-com sub-genre.

The romance between Julie and R, far from being tacked-on, is central to the plot – which is where Hoult’s shy charm and cheekbones come in handy. The former child actor, known as the About A Boy kid in the beanie before starring in UK series Skins, grew up very nicely indeed; he even modelled for Tom Ford after being cast in the designer’s directorial debut, A Single Man. “There was a pretty high barrier to convincing an audience that someone might find him attractive,” admits Levine with a chuckle. “So only someone as overwhelmingly attractive as Nick could pull it off.”

Zombies, as you might have noticed, are having a serious pop-culture revival, meaning audiences now are particularly

“It’s awesome that there’s this zombie renaissance, or whatever you want to call it,” says Levine. “Because I think they’re smart, and that the best zombie movies are better than the best vampire movies.”

In preparation, he adds, he watched “every single zombie movie I could get my hands on” – from George Romero and Lucio Fulci (Zombi 2) to Danny Boyle’s groundbreaking 28 Days Later – “because I knew that hardcore zombie fans were going to beat the shit out of me,” he says with a laugh. “I wanted to be very cognisant of the tropes, and to be aware of the rules even when we were violating them – to know that we were violating them, rather than just ignoring them.”

Apart from a brief poke at humanity’s pre-apocalypse condition as smartphoneobsessed proto-zombies, Warm Bodies doesn’t go all-out on the social commentary.

But Levine feels it’s impossible to make a zombie film that doesn’t contain some sort of message about what makes us human.

“I think with the best ones – and certainly Romero – it was always there,” he says.

“Whether it was Dawn of the Dead in the mall, or Night Of The Living Dead – which is kind of about tolerance, I think – and there’s the individual versus the collective, and all kinds of other stuff, especially in the Romero [films]. And that’s when I think it punches best … But even in Day Of The Dead there’s that [zombie] character who can talk, who is semi-articulate. And in Walking Dead – I haven’t seen all of it, but they certainly play off on the idea that these people were people. There’s a range of emotion. I think that was certainly something that people responded to in our movie, the notion that it wasn’t about a plague, it was about a cure; it was about hope.”

What: Warm Bodies opens on April 11

Tuesday 30 April The Hi Fi Sydney thehifi.com.au

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Tuesday 7 May The Corner Hotel Melbourne Wednesday 8 May The Corner Hotel Melbourne SOLD OUT! cornerhotel.com

SOLD OUT! 9 May Oxford Art Factory Sydney Thursday

moshtix.com.au • oxfordartfactory.com

‘PEDESTRIAN VERSE’ OUT NOW

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Cold War Kids Changing Times By David Wild

“T

here’s a weird struggle, a weird conflict: how can we do something that’s really pure for us at this moment in time when we really want to break through and have a bigger audience?”

This, according to lead singer Nathan Willett, is the question Californian band Cold War Kids asked themselves when making their recently-released fourth album, Dear Miss Lonelyhearts. It continues the expansion of the band’s style from what Willett calls the “blues-based spastic minimalism” of their early singles ‘We Used To Vacation’ and ‘Hang Me Up To Dry’, which announced CWK as serious challengers to The White Stripes’ blues-rock throne in 2006.

At the time of the interview, Willett and his band have just returned home to Los Angeles from a hectic SXSW Festival where they played six shows in four days. “[The material] has been really well-received,” he says. “We’ve [also] been playing a bunch of shows closer to home in smaller venues... just working out how to play the songs live.”

A change of personnel was crucial to the new approach. Gone was guitarist Jonnie Russell (“He wanted to pursue some other stuff ... and we’d run our course. Creatively and with the work we were doing it was time to go our separate ways,” explains Willett) and in came Dann Gallucci, formerly of The Murder City Devils and Modest Mouse. He brought with him plenty of new ideas and

even volunteered himself to produce the entire project.

“When you have a new member you gain somebody in the room to say, ‘What if we used this keyboard?’ and we might look at each other and say, ‘Well, that’s just not something we do,’” says Willett. “When you allow that person the space to question why... If it sounds good and everybody likes it, why not do it? We’re not beholden to being this stripped-down, minimal bluesy band.”

Although he’s pleased with the outcome, Willett hints that the writing and production process was not all plain sailing: “We’d all say what we liked and didn’t like. There is tension in the process of doing that and I think it’s good to make yourself uncomfortable and ask yourself why you’re feeling uncomfortable. There was definitely some of that internally.”

The album’s title is taken from a 1933 book by Nathanael West about an advice columnist who realises he cannot truly help his readers unless he first examines himself, which suggests that some self-examination was on the cards for Cold War Kids. “Yeah, I think there’s a certain amount of that,” admits Willett. “[Four records in] you think about why you’re doing what you’re doing.

In a way you’re not in a place where you’re just writing songs for yourself, obviously.

You’re in a routine, you know the game. So

Billy Bragg B

With evocative lyrics, haunting melodies, and a beautiful warm sound, Tooth And Nail is a brilliant achievement that stands up against Bragg’s best work. rk. It also feels like the belated natural ral follow-up to 1998’s Mermaid Avenue, on which Bragg collaborated aborated with Wilco to put music ic to the lyrics of folk icon Woody dy Guthrie. “I made an album called England, Half English that tried to address the rise of the far-right r-right in my country,” he says.. “It was the album after Mermaid Avenue venue and the Americans didn’t get it, but I couldn’t make any other record. That’s kind of what stopped me from following up Mermaid Avenue. e. Now I’ve found my way back to the pathway that working with h Woody and Wilco opened up.” p.”

18 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

What: Dear Miss Lonelyhearts out now on Downtown/Cooperative

Kill For Love By Sharon Ye

and people will engage with what you’re talking about.”

Tooth And Nail was recorded in five days with producer Joe Henry, in his basement in South Pasadena, California. “The idea that I could make a recording in five days took me a while to get my head around,” Bragg says of their small recording window. “I guess I wasn’t confident enough. But I felt like rolling the dice, so I put my money up and didn’t tell anyone I was making a record. I could’ve come back with the most expensive demos I’ve ever made, or the foundations of a record. I thought the least likely scenario would be a complete record that sounded amazing. But by Wednesday we’d recorded ten tracks, so I thought if I got my arse in gear and wrote a couple more, I’d have a whole album.

“I was amazed when the songs came through the speakers,” Bragg admits, “because I more or less sang as the track went down and we used that ttake.

I just trusted Joe. It was a huge relief reli and a huge confidence builder, just to be the guy who’s got to sing and play.” pl Excluding the Mermaid Avenue Billy’s releases, Tooth And Naill is only Billy fourth album of new material in 22 years. “People aren’t gagging for the t next Billy Bragg record, and when I say people peo the I don’t just mean th general public,” he says.

“Record companies aren’t. aren’t The only person who w is putting any pressure pressu on me to make a new record is my partner.

The response to Tooth And Naill and the last Australian tour proves doing it, that if I commit to doin audience there is still an audien out there that’s interested interes in what I’m doing. It’s just a matter of selfmotivation.”

What: Tooth And Nail is out now through Cooking Vinyl/Universal.

M

ost musicians have a standard answer to the standard interview question, “How would you describe your sound?” But The Delta Riggs’ Michael Tramonte struggles to pigeonhole the kind of music his band makes: “I guess it can be frenetic and energetic, it can also be subtle and subdued.” Citing influences that range from hip hop and garage to blues, Tramonte finally concludes the band is a meld of everything they listen to. “We’re not just, like, a punk band, or we’re not just a garage band we’re not just a blues band, we’re kind of everything that encompasses that. I’d say we’re just like a party mix. That’s what our sound is like – a party mix of lollies.”

Frontman Elliott Hammond (who also plays keys in Wolfmother) coined the title of their latest release, HEX.LOVER.KILLER. Tramonte says the name of their debut is a fairly apt representation of the feeling the band was trying to encapsulate – a tale of two lovers in a struggling relationship, that’s “a bit spooky and mysterious and gets dark in moments.

But then there’s a lot of love themes, and the killer vibe is the dark,” he says. “Hex is like magic and spookiness – spells and spellbound. And you know ‘lover and killer’ is a good paradox. And then hex lovers – like ex lovers. And it all kind of fits well when you say it and when you think about it that way.”

Tramonte says the band has no real formula when it comes to songwriting. If anything, their routine will consist simply of members bringing in tracks for everyone else to flesh out together in beer-laden beach houses (they spent a good amount of time at Corona

Extra’s La Casa Artist Residency). “It was awesome, there was a lot of creativity that came out of that,” says Tramonte. “Throughout the year we’d just go have writing sessions, just in a studio somewhere, or at one of our houses. There’s nothing like, ‘All right, we need to go and write X amount of songs’ – they all just kind of came together.”

Having had a six-month break from touring, Tramonte says the lads are excited to get back on the road. If you don’t love them right away, they’ll win you over with their ’dos. (“I have the best hair in the band – we’ll just get that straight right here,” Tramonte says.) But fantastic hair aside, The Delta Riggs are hard to watch without being lured into participating, and reciprocating all that frantic energy bouncing off the stage. “We do have those fans that just love everything and we have those ones that we kind of coerce and court over the 45 minutes. We kind of reel them in over that time.”

Regardless of audience sizes, Tramonte promises the same ripper of a show every time. “I guess the beauty of what we do is we don’t give a fuck. We don’t really care if there’s ten people in a crowd or if there’s a hundred people or if there’s a thousand people. We’ll play with the same tenacity and the same intensity. We just love doing it.”

With: Stillwater Giants Where: Goodgod Small Club When: Saturday April 27 And: HEX.LOVER.KILLER is out April 12

Billy Bragg photo by Andy Whale

Bragg has been closely connected d with the legacy of Woody Guthrie since recording Mermaid Avenue, e, and last year took his songs on the road to celebrate Guthrie’s 100th birthday. This connection has heavily influenced his own approach.

“Woody made me realise how important tunes are in engaging people with whatt you’re saying. When hen people write a protest song, theyy spend all their time me on the protest. You ou should get a great at song with a huge e hook,

Willett no longer feels the need to use characters to mask autobiographical stories in his songs, as he did most notably on first album Robbers And Cowards, but it seems certain personal topics are still personal.

When asked whether he now feels freer to discuss religion, Willett is hesitant as

he carefully considers his response: “Let me see. I don’t know how much that has changed. You know, the songs, even when they’re character-driven or more abstract, always contain a struggle for meaning and purpose. As far as spirituality is concerned there’s always a seeking there that is on all the records.”

The Delta Riggs

The Personal And Political By Cameron Sundblom illy Bragg is regarded as one of the most enduring protest musicians of our generation, but one fan tweeted in 2011 that he was listening to him to get over a break-up, describing him as ‘The Sherpa of Heartbreak’. Bragg says his new album, Tooth And Nail, had its genesis in that comment. It’s his most poignant album in years, and further evidence that his personal side cannot be undersold. “Because I write political songs and few people do, that becomes my USP [unique selling point],” Bragg says. “Although I don’t mind being labelled a political songwriter, I’m in danger of being dismissed as a political songwriter.”

it’s impossible to be totally private. But at the same time we’re not just writing songs that we hope the people will like. So we’re in the space between...”

The Flaming Lips In The Terror-Dome By Nathan Jolly

“W

e knew that, at the end of 2010, our contract with Warner Bros. was going to be over, and we were going to give ourselves a little bit of time to explore what perhaps our new contract would be all about. It would allow us the freedom to explore the way The Flaming Lips would want to do things in the future,” explains Wayne Coyne. “It was all very helpful and allowed us to really accelerate ourselves, and do, not just a lot of music, but a lot of conceptual art, which is really what being a band is about. We’ve always done that, it’s just that previous to this time we always were limited to how many things we could put out, by contracts and publishing deals and all these things. So I think that freedom made us, just… fucking freak out.”

“Freak out” seems about right. How else could one describe the mad rush of releases that The Flaming Lips have pumped out over the past two years? There was the six-hour single, collaborations with everyone from Yoko Ono through to Ke$ha (the vinyl versions of which were pressed with human blood, naturally), a 24-hour track limited to thirteen copies encased in actual human skulls, a studio re-recording of the entire Dark Side Of the Moon album, a series of USB drive releases embedded in gummy fetuses and brains, Guinness World Record attempts and numerous other off-the-wall experiments which all made it seem as if The Flaming Lips would never again sit still for long enough to record a traditional album.

Part of this exploration included a number of warped pre-Terror collaborations with Erykah Badu, Biz Markie, Yoko Ono (“Absolutely the real deal. I can see why someone like John Lennon would want to be around her”), Bon Iver and Ke$ha. Of course, working with such a motley crew made for wildly differing experiences, but none as divergent as the two Australian artists the band worked with: Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, and Nick Cave.

“Kevin is so gentle and so easy and so fun. He’s so laidback, he probably didn’t care what we did. He knew we were gonna make it good. Nick Cave was a little bit different than that,” Coyne laughs. “You have to do it a little bit on his own time, and he’s not so ‘anything goes’. When I asked if he’d do some music he said, ‘Well, we can only do it if we hurry, ‘cos I’ve got things to do’, so I’d send him a few things: ‘Oh, I don’t like that. Send me something else.’ So, radically different people, but both very cool, very intense.

I love working with intense people. That’s why we do it. We want to be right there with them.”

What: The Terror is out April 12 through Warner Music Australia

Not that they needed to. Across twelve studio albums, the band had traversed every conceivable sonic terrain, with moments of heartbreaking beauty rubbing up against acidinspired noise-jams, folk songs and twisted pop gems. 1999’s transcendent sonic left-turn The Soft Bulletin and 2002’s death-obsessed Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots are routinely placed in the higher reaches of Best Album Ever lists, and 1993’s ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ briefly saw the band enter the world of singles charts and MTV rotation – as well as a cameo on 90210, which they accepted gleefully. “We were like, ‘Fuck yeah, we’ll do it.’ Because it’s retarded, and it can be fun, and we didn’t think that would damage us artistically,” Coyne recalls. 1997’s Zaireeka – four CDs designed to be played simultaneously – quickly stymied such scenarios. So, with such a definitive string of albums and the post-label madness that followed, it came as some surprise to learn that the band had completed their thirteenth full-length record: a dense, intense collection titled The Terror.

“We started to make music this way, which is a bit dissonant...

We’re just exploring other dimensions of our character I think.

When we hear ‘Do You Realize??’ we don’t go, ‘Oh my God, that’s not us’ – we are all that.

Xxx photo by JXxx Xxxx

“We started to make music this way, which is a bit dissonant, even amongst itself,” Coyne explains.

“The music within the song doesn’t always line up and it’s not always in tune and it’s kind of purposefully got this untamed-ness about it. We started doing some of that on the last record [2009’s sprawling, scattershot Embryonic], and there’s been moments of it all along, but we didn’t choose to do it as relentlessly as we are choosing to do it now.” For those more familiar with the joyous strains of ‘Do You Realize??’ or the celestial ceremony of ‘Race For The Prize’, the unsettling rush of The Terror may come as a shock. Coyne insists it’s all part of pushing forward, and none of this experimentation constitutes the band ignoring their past.

“We’re just exploring other dimensions of our character I think. When we hear music like ‘Do You Realize??’ and ‘Yoshimi…’, we don’t go, ‘Oh my God, that’s not us’ – we are all that. That probably goes against what an artist is supposed to be: totally self-absorbed, in the moment, if we love this music, we hate that music. We can easily write the saddest, bleakest, darkest music, then next to it play something very happy and major-chord-sounding. We know that we’ve made records like ‘Do You Realize??’ and we don’t feel like we need to make them anymore. ‘Do You Realize??’ is still part of our character: I’m glad it is, I want it to be. [The Terror] is also part of our character, but we’re still discovering it. We’re still becoming it.”

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 19

Tim Guy

Miss Elm

Bearing Fruit By Simon Topper

Make Like A Tree By Jody Macgregor

M

elbourne singersongwriter Tim Guy has just released his fourth album, but unless you’ve been living in New Zealand, his name will probably be new to you. Guy started his musical career by taking his first homerecorded demo to a Bic Runga soundcheck during an Australian tour. By luck, the demo found its way into Runga’s hand, she signed Guy to her label, and he moved to New Zealand to record his first album. That was more than a decade ago.

A

couple of years ago Miss Elm released a song called ‘2nd Hand’ in which Erin Harrington, the singer, pianist and ukulele player of the band, settles for second best. “You will do for the winter, so I won’t be so cold and grey,” she sings in the highpitched trill of the well-trained, “You will do for tomorrow morning, so we can have breakfast late.” Like many of her songs, it was about a real person, “someone who I didn’t really like who had offended me,” Harrington says. “I do enjoy writing spiteful songs about people who I don’t like. It’s funny actually – he was at a few shows and I did that song as well. I think he knew it was [about] him, but he didn’t say anything.”

Perhaps the blow was softened by the way the song hedges around its central issue.

It’s not quite clear which of the characters in its disposable relationship Harrington actually is, or if she’s actually a dispassionate observer. A lot of her songs are based on truth, but masked and distanced instead of confessional – “real experiences that I put into songs in some cryptic way. I do a lot of it if I can’t say something to a person. I’ll just put it into a song and tell everyone instead.”

Guy’s now back living in Melbourne, and finding himself in the unusual position of releasing Dreaming Of A Night Mango as his first album in his home country.

Finding success in New Zealand, Guy says he was overseas for long enough to feel lonely upon return to the city he had always called home. “That’s what ‘Many People I Know’ was trying to get at,” he says, referring to his current single. “A lot of my friends and some of my family had moved away since I was last here, so I’m getting to know the town again as a stranger. It’s bittersweet, but I’m finding parts of the city that I love, that I never knew about when I had a bigger network.”

Dreaming Of A Night Mango is a dusty, minimalist album; you often need to listen closely to hear more than one man’s voice and his acoustic strumming. Guy says his albums haven’t always been so wilfully sparse. “My previous record was recorded with high fidelity sound and big choruses, and probably 12 or 13 different people.

This record was the complete opposite,” he says.

“I wanted to do as many things as possible myself.

There’s a core group of guys that play [who are] sprinkled over the record, but the majority of it was just myself in the bedroom.”

The album’s obscure title was also inspired by members of Guy’s family moving away from Melbourne, though a generation earlier. “My family was part of the ‘gold rush’ of the early 1980s, when there felt like there was a big push to get people to move up from Melbourne to the Gold Coast, to build it up,” he says. “The album title just stems from touching on my family line, because it’s tropical up there and in summer there are mangoes everywhere.”

The theme of family runs deep through the entire record. “I had people like my father and grandfather in mind. They both served in the military in wartime,” he says. “They weren’t career

Thanks to having a jazz musician for a father, Harrington’s life has always been full of music. “We always went to jazz festivals; Dad was always playing somewhere,” she says.

“It was great. I’ve got a lot of jazz influence in my keys in that sense, I think, because I

just love that old style – ’50s Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra...”

As a kid Harrington’s tastes in music made her pretty unusual – but later, a wave of piano-playing female singer-songwriters came along and gave her more modern idols to be inspired by. “I didn’t really know many other people who were into listening to jazz,” she says. “I was under a rock as far as new music goes, but as soon as I heard Kate MillerHeidke and Sarah Blasko I got more of my direction from them, because I really liked the quirkiness of Kate Miller-Heidke and the classical training that she did with her voice as well. Regina Spektor’s very eclectic with her piano as well, so they were the influences when I was first writing.”

Most creatives have some mortifying juvenilia, whether it’s sad poems or embarrassing novellas about how being dumped is the saddest thing that has happened in the history of sad things happening to people. Someone who has been keeping a kind of musical diary from an early age must have some skeletons in the closet, surely? “I think maybe if I still have a MySpace page?” Harrington suggests.

“They might be there. I don’t even know if it’s operating anymore.” It is and they are, but disappointingly they’re not very cringeworthy.

There’s even a song called ‘See Through Skin’ about baring your soul that discusses the distinction between sharing your thoughts and your feelings in a way that’s remarkably mature.

The less autobiographical and more fanciful side of Miss Elm comes out in their merchandise. Bored by band t-shirts and badges, Harrington and a friend instead chose to make fabric toy ghosts that she sells at their gigs. “Some of them, though, I get quite possessive about. I like them so much it’s hard selling them. Someone’s like, ‘I really like this one!’

And I’m like, ‘Oh. Oh, really? Nah, you don’t really want that one.’ Kids get really excited about them. If we play an all-ages event they’ll just scream and say, ‘I want one!’ and their friends are like, ‘Oh, OK.’ It’s a really good way for us to make money on tour. It pays for petrol.”

soldiers, they just put their hand up when they were needed. It got me thinking – soldiers get trained, then they go into battle. But when they come back, they’re not trained to be a civilian again, so it’s obviously difficult for them. I had that in mind with this album, hoping it might touch on the minds of ex-soldiers everywhere. I just wanted to have a feeling where they would be quite calmed by the music.”

“My dad’s seen the video [for ‘Many People I Know’] that we just made and he really loved it, which is amazing,” he says. “He gave me a call the other day, and I know for a fact that it’s the first time any of my music has connected with him. He’s very straight down the line with music, and he knows what he likes – real old genuine country music guys like Merle Haggard or bush balladeers. Even Johnny Cash is too commercial for him. It’s been something I’ve been working towards forever, to make music that my Dad enjoys, so yeah, it was fantastic.”

With: Warchief and Little Napier Where: Oxford Art Factory When: Friday April 19

Where: The Green Room Lounge / 156 Enmore Rd, Enmore When: Friday April 12 And: Dreaming Of A Night Mango is out now through Lost & Lonesome Records

Ainslie Wills Go Your Own Way By Jody Macgregor

The two of them have been playing music together since they were students, but this marks the first time that they have actually written songs together from the ground up, with Wills providing melodies and lyrics to put skin on the bones Folvig builds. “We fell into it, really,” Wills says. “It wasn’t a defining moment where we thought, ‘Let’s write some fabulous songs together!’ It was more that we struck up a friendship whilst we were in college, studying music at the Victorian College of the Arts and we were playing in various ensembles there, and I think we just shared very similar musical tastes and musical ideas.”

A

inslie Wills’ debut album, You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine, has been a long time coming.

The Melbourne musician has worked on it for four years, so the final product has the polish that comes with unhurried hard work. Whether it’s the Jeff Buckley-ish wistfulness of ‘Mary’ and ‘Satellite’ or the more forceful ‘Fighting Kind’, it all sounds equally confident. What makes these songs different to those from her earlier EPs is that they emerged out of a collaboration with

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songwriter and guitarist Lawrence Folvig, who co-wrote six of them. “When we started writing the album in 2009 we didn’t have an album in mind necessarily,” Wills says. “We thought, ‘We’ll just try writing together and seeing what comes out of that’. Then I think as we got a little bit better at that process, songs started to come out of it that we were really excited about, so then we thought, ‘Let’s do this – let’s make it into an album’.”

The time spent working on these songs were spread between a beach house in Blairgowrie that they soundproofed themselves, Northcote United Church (where they recorded a string section) and a converted studio at a friend’s house where they took one final pass. The temptation to continue tinkering, to obsess over smaller and smaller details, has overwhelmed plenty of artists, but Wills feels she took her hands away from these songs at the right time.

“They sound finished to me,” she says.

“There’s always room for interpretation of those structures that you’ve created. I think that’s

the good thing about playing live, is that even though you do have a set structure it will sound different depending on the environment you’re playing in and what day it is and how the rest of the band’s feeling. I like to change the melody up a little bit, away from what the original versions were. I think that’s more about keeping it interesting for me because I have heard those songs quite a lot.”

Wills has high expectations, and a bit of a family musical tradition to live up to. Opera singer Dame Nellie Melba is part of her family tree, her aunt played piano and sang, and her grandfather was a composer who played the accompaniment to silent films. Was music in her genes? “I think each of us knows things that we’re good at and I felt like music was something that came quite naturally to me. I attribute that to my genes, but also the way in which I was brought up as well. All I can say is I feel quite lucky to be playing music and actually being in a position where people want to hear it. It’s nice!”

Where: FBi Social @ The Kings Cross Hotel When: Thursday April 18 And: You Go Your Way, I’ll Go Mine is out now

for Live and Localsau!

Calling all artistsplay entertainment.com.

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Wednesday 1 May • Oxford Art Factory, Sydney with special guests Jackie Onassis & Citizen Kay www.moshtix.com.au | www.oxfordartfactory.com

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Thursday 9 May • The Zoo, Brisbane with special guests Citizen Kay & Tiger Beams www.oztix.com.au | www.thezoo.com.au *Also appearing at GTM Festivals www.chuggentertainment.com • www.xIIItouring.com

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Tegan And Sara Opening Up By Alasdair Duncan

M

uch has been made in the press of Tegan And Sara’s decision to “turn pop” on their newest album, Heartthrob. The record places a new emphasis on bouncy synth lines and catchy chorus hooks. The truth is that, if you’ve been paying any sort of attention to the duo’s music over the last few years, the sonic shift doesn’t come as that much of a surprise. The incredible harmonies, the canny melodies and the lyrical heartbreak are all still there – they just come in a slightly shinier package than before. “Our previous records had lots of keyboard elements,” Sara Quin says. “The only difference is that on those albums, they were present in the small details, whereas this time, we really wanted to focus more openly on the idea of pop music.”

The songs on Heartthrob tap into a particularly teenage pop sensibility – it’s not that hard to imagine the pair singing a song like ‘Goodbye, Goodbye’ into hairbrushes in front of a big bedroom mirror. Classic Madonna and Cyndi Lauper are obvious touchstones, but the Quin sisters are just as inspired by the pop music of today. “When I was in my 20s, bands like Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade and Peaches

inspired me,” Sara says. “Now I’m in my 30s, I’m finding that pop music inspires and provokes me. I hear things like Katy Perry, Alicia Keys, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, even Justin Bieber, and I think ‘I’m going to go write something like that’. I mean, I’m not saying I want to write a Justin Bieber song, but I want to capture that kind of pop experience through my own lens.”

One of the biggest challenges of making Heartthrob was opening up to the possibility of collaboration. Producer Greg Kurstin, who has worked with everyone from Pink and Kelly Clarkson to indie pop star Sia helped shape the sound and direction of the album, and the pair were greatly inspired by his studio skills. “Greg can make records for anybody and with anybody,” says Sara. “He’s amazing.

When you’re working with someone like that, you feel like you need to step things up, to be accomplished at a certain level. Writing hooks and melodies with someone like Greg is not unlike training with an Olympic coach. It puts you on a different level.”

The biggest lesson that the twins took away from those sessions was that sometimes, it’s okay to open up and share – in life and in music.

“I’m an incredibly snobby and stubborn person,” Sara laughs. “My past songwriting experiences have mostly involved telling people ‘No’. I will say that, over the past couple of years, starting to collaborate with other producers and artists, I’ve learned how to say ‘Yes, I will consider that’, or ‘Yes, I will write two or three more choruses because you don’t think my amazing first chorus was the best one.’ You start to realise that you can do better, and you can always push yourself.

You can always go back to your original idea, but sometimes you realise it wasn’t the best.”

“Now I’m in my 30s, I’m finding that pop music inspires and provokes me. I hear things like Katy Perry, Beyoncé, even Justin Bieber, and I think ‘I’m going to go write something like that’.”

Kurstin’s key trait, according to Sara, is inquisitiveness. “He’ll ask ‘Is there something better?’ or ‘Can we move this part here to give it more impact?’” she says. “I’d never worked like that before, and all of those things have led me to the realisation that, as a songwriter, it’s important to accept change and constructive criticism. Tegan and I were never able to take criticism. Not positive criticism, not ever or at all, at any point in our lives. To get to a point where we’re able to take criticism and thrive, and say ‘Let’s try something better’ or ‘You’re wrong but it’s up to me to prove you wrong’ – that’s incredible. We’ve never experienced that kind of motivation before, and it’s taking us to a better place as songwriters.”

Heartthrob’s poppier new songs have made for a more energetic live show. “We’ve been touring the new album for about a month and a half, integrating the new songs into the set,” Sara says. As an established band, playing new songs for people is tricky – you’re always aware that it’s not exactly what they want to hear, but you still want to blow their minds, and make them want to go listen to the new record. At this point in their careers, Tegan and Sara are well aware of how to approach this challenge.

“It’s 10 new songs and about 15 old ones. It depends on what the audience wants – it’s a tug-of-war between playing the songs we know they want to hear, and spoon-feeding them the things we want them to hear and to like.”

The Quin sisters have been making music together for more than half their lives, and I ask Sara if she sees this collaboration continuing well into the future. She laughs at the thought.

“It changes all the time for me,” she says. “My creative relationship with Tegan will stand as long as we’re both alive, and I look forward to that. I also think that there’s a natural timeline and life cycle for bands, and I don’t want to be around too long. I’m happy as long as we’re saying something new, adding something different to the Tegan And Sara catalogue. As long as I feel excited and creatively challenged, I’m going to keep doing this.”

Where: Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House When: Thursday April 25 & Friday April 26 22 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

THURSDAY APR 11

THE JONES RIVAL + HOLLOW BONES + THE DEAD HEADS + RUFFLEFEATHER 8PM FREE

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NEW DUB CITY + KODAK + DJ SECRET WEAPON 8PM FREE

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DJS OMAR VARTS + RICHIE RYAN 3PM FREE

COMING SOON:

HERMITUDE | PURPLE SNEAKERS DJS | URTHBOY | VAN SHE DJS | THE ASTON SHUFFLE

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 23

arts frontline

free stuff email: freestuff@thebrag.com

arts, theatre and film news... what's goin' on around town and more...

five minutes WITH

CLARK BEAUMONT

How and when did you meet? We officially met in our second year of university when we collaborated on a performance artwork, Undress.

about a week, during which time we were thinking specifically about how we could earnestly and intimately depict our relationship within 13 Rooms’ constructed environment.

Please each describe the other in five words: Sarah on Nicole: Fun, easygoing, wise, positive, confident.

Nicole on Sarah: Determined, intelligent, passionate, friendly, outgoing.

What are the parameters of the performance? We have designated three 10-minute breaks each day. Apart from this half-hour, we will be on the plinth for nine hours a day and for eleven days. Our interactions with the viewers will be limited, but they are undeniably a key element within our artwork.

Their immediate proximity to us performing means that their presence also informs part of the work.

What are your respective artistic backgrounds/training? We both completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art). Separately though, Sarah specified in drama as a minor and Nicole undertook further study in Honours.

F

or their 27th Project, Kaldor Public Art Projects invited curators Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery, London) and Klaus Biesenbach (MoMA PS1) to assemble a lineup of the world’s most exciting, groundbreaking installation and performance artists to present their work as part of a live sculpture exhibition, called 13 Rooms. And they invited Brisbane-based performance duo Clark Beaumont – AKA Sarah Clark and Nicole Beaumont – to make a piece. How do two emerging artists not yet 25 get themselves on the same lineup as Marina Abramovic and Damien Hirst? We took five to find out…

JURASSIC LOUNGE

There are only two weeks left before Jurassic Lounge goes extinct again! This Tuesday April 9 you should hop along for their Black Magic Night, MC’d by the LOLworthy Tom Walker – there will be comedy confessions with Mikey Robins and Terry Serio, live music from Shady Lane and silent disco sets from Cries Wolf DJs, creepy magic from Jackson Aces, and loads more. The Final Night Party on April 16 will be crashed by the Lounge’s pals from the Sydney Comedy Festival, including Canadian comic Ian Bagg, Mickey D and Sticky Feet, plus pin-up burlesque, live tunes from Richie1250 & The Brides of Christ and a DJ set by Jenny Broke The Window. Book online at jurassiclounge.com

NERD COMEDY GALA

Brains are sexy. Funny is sexy. So be prepared to slide off your seat when nerds and comedians join forces for an evening designed to make you laugh AND think. Whoa! While science dudes like research astronomer Simon O’Toole and UNSW professor of evolution Rob Brooks tickle your

Tell us about your first work together: Undress was our first performance work together. Sarah and I began the work wrapped in white thread and throughout the performance we unwrapped ourselves. We didn’t foresee the work as the beginning of a longterm collaboration, especially as we barely knew one another, but the chemistry was undeniable!

What floats your boat, artistically speaking?

We don’t think we can sum it up! It is pretty ineffable, but we are often partial to humour, video and entertainment. It all comes down to if the artwork can connect with its viewer in a meaningful way.

Your piece for 13 Rooms involves plinthsitting for the duration of the festival – what was the inspiration? We brainstormed for

How does the friendship/collaborative relationship survive spending 11 days together on a small plinth? DO YOU HAVE A PLAN? There’s no plan! We would like Coexisting to be as natural as possible and for the performance to progress organically.

Because of this, we consider anything further than the first day of 13 Rooms to be up for grabs. We cannot predict how we will respond and how the artwork will develop over the duration of the exhibition. We only hope ‘we’ survive.

KON-TIKI! WIN! There’s nothing like a story about a bunch of Norwegians sailing across the Pacific on a prehistoric raft that’s falling apart to make you feel like really, your life’s pretty comfortable (although also: less adventurous). If you didn’t read Thor Heyerdahl’s 1948 account of his epic expedition, don’t worry – it arrives on the big screen this week, in all its balsa-wood glory, documenting one man’s obsessive quest to get from South America to the Polynesian islands using only ancient technologies and materials, to prove an anthropological theory. And there’s giant creatures and deadly waves in there.

Kon-Tiki opens in cinemas on April 11; we have ten in-season double passes to check it out – to get your hands on one, tell us your postal address and the capital of Norway…

What: Coexisting by Clark Beaumont, for 13 Rooms When: April 11-21, 11am-7pm daily Where: Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay More: kaldorartprojects.org.au/13rooms

synapses with science facts, comedy dudes like Dan Ilic and Alice Fraser will fire up your funny bone with comedy words. It’s got science, it’s got comedy, we’re pretty sure it will do just what it says on the tin, so head to the Nerd All-Star Comedy Gala at the Factory on May 7, and early bird tickets start from $20 – grab one from Ticketek.

RUFINO & THE COCONUTS

Ever wondered what you would get if you crushed Lykke Li’s tribal tunes and Grace Jones’s new wave rocksteady groove together and added it to Nick Cave-flavoured coconut juice? Sadly, you won’t get the chance, because Rufino the Catalan has collected all the Tropical Jungle Voodoo-Pop mixes for his show at the Oxford Art Factory Gallery Bar on Wednesday April 24. Rufino and his band, The Coconuts, will be supported by eccentric-pop purveyors Jai Pyne (The Paper Scissors) and DJ Goldfoot, with burlesque babes Electric Dreams and Pickled Tink adding some spice. Entry is a blue note, and comes with a free Anzac Day sleep-in.

Shannon in her studio

James Brickwood: Void #2

10X8

New kid on the block 10X8 Gallery launches this week, with a group show featuring one work apiece by William Yang, Alexia Sinclair, Donna Bailey, James Brickwood, Marco Bok, Raul Canibano, Stephen Dupont, Rennie Ellis, and Andrew Quilty. It’s a diverse range of subjects and styles from a lineup that ranges from emerging to award-winning – and curated by owners Meg Hewitt and Paul McDonald. Besides the gallery, 10x8 will operate as a workshop space, hosting masterclasses as part of the Reportage festival in May, with headliners Alex and Rebecca Webb, and award-winning documentary photographer Francesco Zizola. Check out the launch show from April 11-May 11 at Level 5, 56-60 Foster Street, Surry Hills. 10x8gallery.com

EASTER SHOW

Shannon Crees fuses contemporary street methods and fine art on canvas – think extravagant bursts of daringly bright colours, abstract slabs of geometrical imagery and intricately crafted patterns. It’s the kind of thing that has made her artworks internationally coveted. Her eclectic surrealist manifestations will be on display alongside works by her father, Gary, and sister, Janette, in a new exhibition titled Connection, at Fix8 Gallery in Freshwater from Thursday April 11. Fix8 promotes contemporary works by Northern Beaches artists, making art affordable and accessible to the public... oh, and drinks too, of course. fix8gallery.com.au

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POPCORN & SODA

The Soda Factory already won us over with their Tarantino-themed Wednesday night, Pulp Kitchen – now they’re doubling the love with Monday movie nights. They’re starting with Labyrinth tonight (April 8) and upcoming weeks will see Zoolander, Snatch, Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, and Space Jam, just to name a few, on their big screen. The bar will

also be putting on a special popcorn-flavoured cocktail for the occasion, and Tiger beers, house wines, and items on the standard menu (like their killer hawt dawgs) are all just $5. It’s free entry, so why not skip the multiplex and take your babe or buddy along to 16 Wentworth St from 5pm (movies start at 8).

TOD TALKS

Are you a fan of TED talks? Do you like having information said out loud and presented on slides instead of reading it in a “newspaper” or “book” like some kind of Neanderthal? Well, step right up to The World Bar for TOD Talks, where some of Sydney's most creativest brains will spill the answers to questions like “Could Sweet Kickflips Hold The Key To Sustainability?”

Do not tell us you don’t need to know the answer to that. Head along on Wednesday April 10 from 7.30pm to see such mysteries pondered with PowerPoint by triple j’s Lewi McKirdy, Catherine “Catcall” Kelleher, Darrell “CookSuck” Beveridge, Hannah and Eliza Reilly (FBi’s Girls Gone Mild), Tom “Shag from FBi Radio” McMullan, and Max Lavergne from the internet.

Shannon Crees photo by Juliet Taylor

SHANNON CREES

We thought there could be nothing in the world better than a good ol’ tantalising slice of cheesecake, dancing in your mouth to the crunch of crumble. Well, in September 2008, Gallery Burlesque proved us all wrong with the pin up spectacular, Better Than Cheesecake (oh, the scandal!). Since then, they have remained at the vanguard of neo-burlesque, and are set to serve up a slice of post-Easter party with Lillian Starr, Foxtrot India, Baby Blue Bergman, Ms Rachael Rae and Mystique Rose among the stellar lineup of performers on the night. The Easter Show Uncut extravaganza hits The Standard on Sunday April 14 – tickets at galleryburlesque.com

READY TO POP! 5 -16 JUNE 2013

25 FILMS REVEALED! FULL PROGRAM 8 MAY Sydney Film Festival lights up the city with screenings of over 150 films, red-carpet galas, guests, events and forums.

Buy a Flexipass now and save big on ticket prices, then choose your own festival adventure. Share it with friends and family or keep it for yourself – it’s that flexi-ble!

Sydney Film Festival Hub @ Lower Town Hall Grab a drink at the bar and see live music, films and DJs for FREE during the festival.

SFF now at Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace Cremorne!

THE WRON NG SIIDE DE S ST TOKE ER R OF THE ROAD

FA F ALLE EN N CIIT TY

BL B LA AC CKF FIISH

It’s a w welcome returnn to the h big scr creen fo cr f r ann iiconic Australiann feature re – we’re pleased to present the Nat ationa nall Fi Film and Sound Archive’s restor orat atio ioon of Wron ongg Si on Sidde of the Road. d A head ady mi mix of factt and fiction,, th thee fil fim follows tw wo Abbor orig iginal bands, Us U Mob ob,, an a d No Fixed Ad Addresss, aas they ey traveel from oone ne Souuth Austra raliann ggig ig to annot o her. This gaame-chang n ing ng 19980s pr p od oduuction on still pac a ks a ppunch, aannd iss as releva vant nt nnow as the year it wa wass ma m dee.

Fo his firrst Englishh-languag For age film, m, Koreaan mast ster Park rk Cha haan-Wook ((Old Boy, y, Jointt Securit S ty Areaa) has ma m de a hauunting neeo-Goth thic thrilleer filledd with unfoorg rgettable im images. When India Sto toker (JJane Eyyre r ’s Mia Wasikowskka) losses her father inn a car accideent, he ac her idyllicc life is sh shatteredd. Afterr long-loost uncle Chaarlie (Mattthew Goo o de) ar arrives an and move ves in with In India andd her unnstable mother Ev Evie (Nico cole Kidman an), thinggs begin to spirall violentltly out off conttrol.

An ear artthquakee destro royedd the ci cityy of Beic ichhuan in Sicchuan’s mountaainous us north th in 2008, leav avin i g thoussands deadd aand n million ons hom meless.

Thhe Chinesee go g vern rnmeent deciided ed to rebuuild a new, impproved city jus ustt do d wn the road. As thee spacioous moddern ap th apar artm mentss take shhape, director Zhao Qi follows ws threee fam milies, s quake s rvivorss who sttrugggle witth the day-to-dday, su as well as their count ntry ry’s ’s reelenntlless purssuit of p ogresss. pr

Blackkfish, orcaa, killer whhale:: fo for decades thesee awesomee beasts have been captureed, transsferred to sea parkss andd tra rained to perf rfor om for our entertainm nment. In 2010 10, a five-tonnee male le named Tilikkum u killeed onne of his trainerrs at Floorida’s SeaaWo World. Thiis meesm merising docuumentary foolllloows his tr t agicc story and thatt of o h s feellow captive hi vess througgh inteervviews with thee freque u ntly misleed and misinforrme med workers inn this hig ighl h y profita tabl b e indust stry.

THE AC CT OF KILLIN NG

PR RINCE AVAL LANCH HE

WAD DJDA

FRA ANC CES HA

Afterr thee Inndo A done n sian governm nment was ovverthrown in 196 965, 5, smaall-time gangst steer Anwar Con ongo on g , abetted the mi milita tary ta ry regime in the mass sl s augh ghte ter of alleged te coomm m unnissts ts. In this chilllilingly surreal film lm, movieobse ob sesssed Anwar and his collaaboratoors r re-enact their m rdder mu e ous past in thhe style of thee films they love.

Pack Pa ckin i g a visceral and visual puuncch, this awardw nn wi nning festival hit was feted by indie superstars E rol Morris and Er nd Werner Herzzog.

Paul ul Rudd andd Em mile Hi H rsch star in thi hiss absurd buut moviing com medyy ab about a mism mat atcched pair, one straaig on ight h laceed an andd the other irre ressponsible, who sppen end a summ mmer repainting tr traf a fic lines downn tthee cenntr t e of a country higghw hway ravaged by wilildfi dfire. Direct ctor David Gordo donn Green (Geoorge g Washing ngton, Pineapplee EExpress) s has crraf afteed a tendder and humorouus film about an unnlike k ly friends dship.

Thhe first feature film shoot enntireely in the Kiingdom of Saudi Ara rabiia, whhere he cinemas are noot permitted, and byy th t at country’s ou first woman filmmaker,, Haifaa Al Ma Mansoour, Wadjdaa is about a 10-year-ol old girl whoo wannts nothing more than to own a bic i ycle. In her e con onnse servative society, Wadjda has litttlte chance of at attaining her dream, but she sooon comes up wiith th a scheme to do just that.

Gretta Geerwig (Greenb nber e g, To Rom me withh Loove) e starss in and co-wrotte this breezy moderrn fable

by Noa oahh Baumbach (Th The Squid annd the Wh Whal a e, Kick ckin ingg and Screamin ingg). She playss Franccess, a traine neee in a dance com omppany who has yett tto find a cleearr direction in her er llifie. Explorinng Franc n ess’ variou ouss missteps, herr fr friiendships annd her thwaart rteed ambitions, Fr Fran ances Haa is as charm rminng as itt is funny.

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 25

Tom & Alex

[COMEDY] The Best Bits So Far By Chris Martin

A

lex Dyson isn’t used to being interviewed. When the call connecting service puts me through – “You’re on with Alex Dyson” – he pauses for breath. “I’ve heard [that] for other proper musicians with proper CDs. I’m feeling like a celebrity. I’ve sort of imagined in my head that you’re the person I’m interviewing now, so I’m sorry if I accidentally ask you questions.”

After three years doing breakfast radio alongside good mate Tom Ballard, the triple j presenter has found himself on the other side of the fence to talk about the duo’s ‘best of’ compilation disc, The Bits We’re Least Ashamed Of. In the age of the extended daily podcast, Dyson acknowledges that a release like this is an unusual step to take.

“Well, it wasn’t my idea. But I got convinced … and listening back to a few of the things, it does give a pretty good idea of the stuff we’ve done over our time on the breakfast program, whether it is a couple of earlier podcasts or some big ideas that came to fruition.” Sure enough, there are some great laughs – the interview with ‘Dylan, the Only Male Stripper in Launceston’; the listener-sourced dance remixes of triple j music director Richard Kingsmill’s bad Italian accent. But it’s not all finelytuned, razor-edged comedy: the album opens with an excerpt from the original demo tape that a school-aged Tom and Alex recorded for the Js in 2006. “A train wreck,” Dyson call it.

“We were doing a community radio show for fun in Warrnambool, on a station called 3WAY-FM – which we didn’t realise was a funny name until we said it to someone outside of Warrnambool,” Dyson remembers. “We ended up taping an hour of our show, called ‘The Breakfast Show’, which was on a Thursday night at 10 o’clock while I was doing Year 12 and Tom was doing Year 11. … We couldn’t record from the studio, so Tom’s mum was sitting at home listening to the show, and then halfway through, we said, ‘Alright, we’re about to play a song here – Mum, would you mind turning the tape over while we play it and pressing record on the other side?’”

Whatever triple j heard in those cassette tape demos proved enough to land Tom and Alex a gig, starting out on the night-time and weekend shifts before graduating to weekday breakfast in 2010. Thrust before a national audience, they grew up fast. Dyson was a primetime radio DJ long before he’d even learned to drive – his driving lessons with fellow triple j personality Lewi McKirdy even made it on air, and in turn, onto the album.

Young they may be, but unlike many of their competitors, Tom and Alex have managed to avoid the harsh spotlight of controversy that follows a poorly directed gag. To Dyson, it’s simply a matter of “[trying] to be the nice, polite boys that we are off the radio, on the radio.” Though he feels “a bit of sympathy” for the presenters involved in Austereo’s prank call tragedy last December, he points out, “it was a pre-recorded piece of audio … something that can be sat on and talked about with management.”

And while the ‘best of’ compilation so often sounds the death knell for an artist, Dyson isn’t counting on a move to ‘grown-up’ broadcasting any time soon. “No, I don’t think I’d be able to go head-to-head with a few of the faceless men yet … I’ll have to maybe sit in on a few [shock jock] interrogations [first]. But then you’ve got Jonathan Holmes breathing down your neck – so maybe I’ll just hide at triple j for a while.”

Sydney Film Festival 2013 [FILM] Highlights Unpacked

S

ydney Film Festival fl ashed their program bits last week with a teaser lineup of 25 fi lms in their 2013 program. So we did the Smart Thing: we asked the experts what we should see. Here’s what they said…

Rear Window This is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most daring experiments, taking place as it does entirely on one huge studio set. A master of cinema, Hitchcock explores the very nature of cinema. We, the cinemagoers, are voyeurs in the same way that James Stewart – brilliant in the role – is; like him, we’re trapped in our seats, unable to leave, and like him we are fascinated and repelled by what we’re watching. It’s one of the great classics of suspense, and also boasts perhaps the fi nest performance of the luminous Grace Kelly. – David Stratton (At The Movies/ The Australian)

Stories We Tell Sarah Polley’s multi-layered search for the truth within her family is both a refl ection on documentary narrative and an immersion in the process of memory. As she has proved in the past, Polley is an exacting fi lmmaker as she exposes both herself and members of her family to a journey that is truly revelatory. It is an outstanding and moving piece of cinema. – Margaret Pomeranz (At The Movies)

Midnight’s Children Fans of Salman Rushdie’s sprawling Booker Prizewinner will approach a fi lm adaptation with scepticism.

Filmmaker Deepa Mehta certainly did, wisely recruiting Rushdie to help adapt the saga of Indian independence and Partition. Surrender to its melodramatic excesses and whimsical magic realism: it’s an entertaining, colourful waltz through defi ning moments of the last century. – Matt Ravier (Programmer, Sydney Film Festival Hub; Director of The Festivalists)

Frances Ha

What: Tom & Alex: The Bits We’re Least Ashamed Of out now

The Motherf**ker With The Hat [THEATRE] High Fidelity By Alasdair Duncan

After completely stealing the show in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, the impeccable Greta Gerwig has teamed up with him as co-writer and star of a story about a modern dancer in New York, dealing with, well, life. Shot in black-and-white, Frances Ha is the movie I’m most looking forward to this whole damn year. – Kate Jinx (FBi Radio’s Picture Show)

T

he Motherf**ker With The Hat is a play about addictions – the ways in which they can cripple our lives, and the ways in which we try to reinvent ourselves and start again. The central character of this profane and surprisingly moving tale is Jackie, a recovering addict and former drug dealer, fresh from a 26-month stint in prison. Jackie is on parole, he has a new job, and more than anything, he’s excited to get home to his girlfriend Veronica, so they can start a new life together. The discovery of a mysterious hat in her apartment derails this dream, and opens the door to a whole world of problems for Jackie and those around him.

For director Adam Cook, the richness of the dialogue was the main draw. “It’s incredibly colourful – real street talk, but with a tremendous amount of style. It’s heightened – it’s full of profanity and amazing images and shocking statements.

I really like plays that represent real life, but do it in a heightened way, so you’re not just getting the real world, you’re getting a writer’s own particular vision of the way that people interact, and the ways that they try and improve their lives.”

The actors have been working with a dialogue coach to perfect their accents, and Cook says that they took to the New York way of speaking very quickly. “I think Australian actors are very good at accents,” he says.

“There’s a generation of actors now who have grown up with American television and fi lms, and they have a good ear. There’s a music to the dialogue, and through it, you can hear the culture that the play comes from. I feel it’s the right thing to perform it that way. It’s very easy to identify with characters who are in love, or who are disillusioned

26 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

Troy Harrison as Jackie in The Motherf**åker With The Hat with their lives. You don’t have to transport a play to our culture for Australian audiences to connect to its concerns and ideas.”

When The Motherf**ker With The Hat debuted in New York two years ago, its high-profi le cast included Bobby Cannavale, Annabella Sciorra and Chris Rock, making his Broadway debut. Cook, however, was determined not to let these big names infl uence his own production in any way.

“I like that it’s about fidelity,” he says, “be that sexual fidelity, or loyalty to friends. That’s one of the big themes that has really come out in rehearsals – this idea of people being disillusioned by those they thought they could trust. How do you create a new life for yourself when your whole circle of friends are recovering drug addicts?”

What: The Motherf**ker With The Hat, produced by Workhorse Theatre Co Where: TAP Gallery Theatre, Darlinghurst When: Wednesday April 17 – Sunday May 5 More: workhorsetheatreco.com

It’s been many drinks – and average fi lms (we’re looking at you, Your Highness) – between David Gordon Green’s break-out indie hit George Washington in 2000 and his latest fi lm, an adaptation of an Icelandic comedy series that stars Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as feuding highway road workers. Premiering at Berlin Film Festival in January, it won the Silver Bear for Best Director, and is being touted as a return to form for the fi lmmaker.

Here’s hoping… – Dee Jefferson (BRAG Ed) What: Sydney Film Festival When: June 5 – 16 / full program announced May 8 Where: the State Theatre, Event Cinemas George Street, Dendy Opera Quays and more More: For the full teaser lineup of 25 films – and to buy a flexi-pass – see sff.org.au

The Motherfucker With The Hat photo by Michael Randall

Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis set The Motherf**ker With The Hat in his native New York, and Cook says that getting the cadences of his speech just right has been one of the biggest challenges in staging the play. “The story is completely tied to the setting,” he tells me. “I have never in my entire career set a play in Australia when it was originally set in another country. I mean, we don’t speak like Americans.

There are playwrights like David Mamet or Sam Shepard, very different writers who write in very different styles, but both of them are distinctly American. Part of the challenge for actors is to investigate what it’s like to sound like that – to stretch themselves in very culturally specific ways.”

Prince Avalanche

Film & Theatre Reviews Hits and misses on the silver screen and the bareboards around town.

■ Film

IDENTITY THIEF In cinemas now Melissa McCarthy is a funny, likeable actress with perfect comic timing, and Jason Bateman is a funny, likeable mensch – the perfect straight-man foil for the pratfalls of others, in Arrested Development, The Switch, The Change Up, Couples Retreat, Horrible Bosses (director Seth Gordon’s previous film), and many, many other films. Put these two together in a plot that mashes up Planes, Trains & Automobiles and its modern permutation Due Date with The Hangover series, and you have a recipe for success – which accounts for how much money Identity Thief has taken at the US box office. And it’s hard to begrudge either of its stars that success.

Bateman and McCarthy are in fact all that make this paint-by-numbers film bearable – it’s the same old odd-couple road trip jokes we’ve seen before: sharing a double bed; crashing the car; the bad-singingto-the-car-radio medley; the run-in-withcops… all that’s missing is an oops-I-gotstoned episode. It’s remarkably similar to Due Date and Planes, Trains – and adjusts the formula by creating protagonists who are respectively less irritating (than the characters played by John Candy/Zach Galifianakis) and more likable (than those played by Steve Martin/Robert Downey

Arts Snap At the heart of the arts Where you went last week... Photos by Tim Levy

Jr.). The first three scenes of the film set up Bateman’s mensch-y Sandy as a loving father, sensitive, caring husband, and highly competent worker; they establish his nemesis, identity thief Diana (McCarthy), as a criminal asshole who really just wants to be loved. Every time we’re at risk of thinking she’s too much of a bitch, there’s a moment where someone picks on her, and we remember to feel sorry for her – or a moment where her eyes well with tears in a pang of conscience. It’s a lazy script that is saved by its two stars.

So with comedians of this calibre, and such an easy comic target, it’s fairly offensive that the filmmakers still feel like they need to capitalise on obvious fat jokes to hit their marks – jokes about her eating a lot; jokes about her bouncing off the road after being hit by a car – and worst of all, a joke in the final stretch that works from the premise that McCarthy’s character is so grossly unappealing that any suggestion the Bateman’s character might have sexual feelings for her is laughout-loud hilarious.

Regardless of how McCarthy feels about all this, there’s going to be a swathe of cinemagoers who leave with a bad taste in their mouths – and the shitty thing is, it’s totally unnecessary. This recipe is good enough you don't need to sweeten it with low-hanging fruit.

Dee Jefferson

junkee.com launch 27:03:13 :: District 01 :: 7 Randle Ln Surry Hills

Melissa McCarthy and Jason Bateman in Identity Thief

■ Theatre

ONE MAN, TWO GUVNORS

Man=flesh/Woman+flesh – FLAT – Photo by Jamie North/Kaldor Public Art Projects

Until May 11 / Sydney Theatre In the late ’30s, producer Irving Thalberg made the Marx Brothers take their routines on a tour of vaudeville houses, to test them out on live audiences. By so doing, they were able to not only gauge the strength of each joke, but time the average audience reaction precisely – and adjust their film routines to include dialogue-free buffer zones around the big ones. It’s a neat comic trick to ensure the ensuing ‘straight’ lines don’t get lost in audience laughter, and it was picked up by consummate comedy director Billy Wilder, among many other pros.

In the case of the National Theatre’s One Man, Two Guvnors, this issue has already been thoroughly canvassed during eighteen-or-so months of back-to-back seasons in the UK and America. Which all goes to say: leading man Owain Arthur and his fellow cast have the comic timing of One Man, Two Guvnors down to a fine art. Don’t be fooled by their gleeful interactions with the audience, shamefaced mid-scene corpsing, or even that awkward-hilarious bit with the lady in the front row: the odds are that nothing you’re seeing onstage is ever unscripted.

This pretense, so artfully executed, is part of the entertainment value of this madcap show, which debuted in 2011 under National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner, and comes to Australia under the helm of ‘revival director’ Adam Penford.

It’s not an original idea – it’s a style of

rowdy, interactive comedy that borrows from the popular 15th-century theatre genre commedia dell’arte, via British music-hall pantomime and the physical comedy of the aforementioned Marx Brothers, among others.

Content-wise, One Gentleman, Two Guvnors is equally radical: cocks, bums, homosexuals, fat people…Yes, ‘class’ is on the table (it’s a British play, after all), but only to the extent that it allows you to make a joke about boardingschool buggery, plummy accents, sexual proclivities and social faux pas; yes, there’s a joke involving a thinly veiled allusion to Margaret Thatcher (obligatory?) – but that’s as political as it gets. This is theatre for the masses, and it’s been selling like hotcakes.

Adapted by Richard Bean from Carlo Goldoni’s commedia hit The Servant Of Two Masters, and transplanted to 1960s Liverpool (cue colourful costumes, cue sprightly boy band), the plot is a Shakespearean farce of mixed identities and star-crossed lovers – but without the wordplay or wit. Everyone’s a bit annoying and/or a bit of a twat, including our hero – and co-conspirator – Francis Henshall, the man with two guvnors. But Arthur plays him with such sweet-faced schoolboy glee and irrepressible energy that you can’t resist. And in fact, the whole production pumps you for laughs so energetically that you find yourself thoroughly out-gunned; you’ll be resenting the cheap laughs even as you catch yourself chuckling – and wondering when you last saw a cast work this damn hard.

Dee Jefferson

See www.thebrag.com for more arts reviews

deb mansfield & tully simon moore 28:10:12 :: MOP Projects :: 2/39 Abercrombie St Chippendale

Arts Exposed What's in our diary...

Kaldor Projects presents: 13 Rooms April 11-21 / 11am-7pm daily Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay Kaldor Public Art Projects has been giving good art for almost 45 years – most recently via John Baldessari’s installation Your Name In Lights, and Michael Landy’s storytelling installation Acts Of Kindness. They’re basically about making art accessible and fun for the masses. Next up is 13 Rooms – a mini festival of live sculpture that they’re billing as their most expansive project to date. 13 Rooms brings together 13 works, new and old, by a lineup of artists that ranges from emerging to behemoth, local to international – including Damien Hirst, Marina Ambramovic, Baldessari, Joan Jonas, and Simon Fujiwara. And because we can’t have festivals these days without talking/drinking, there’s a concurrent nightly program of public talks, panels, screenings and ‘Parlour Nights’ taking place around the pop-up Grasshopper Bar… For the full program of events, see kaldorartprojects.org.au/13rooms

Laura Lima's Man=flesh/Woman+flesh - FLAT, 1997 BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 27

bread&thread Food & Fashion News

YOUNG & WILD

The newest venture, long months in the making, from the kids at Grandma’s Bar – that oasis of quirky deliciousness in the cultural wasteland of Clarence Street – is The Wild Rover, in Surry Hills, which opened last week. Behind the big green door at 75 Campbell St you’ll find a cosy hideaway where you’ll be spending most of your nights this winter; the Irish theme is endearing without going the full St Paddy’s. The food includes fresh oysters and stickto-yer-ribs Cornish pasties and sausage rolls, which will help soak up glasses of deliciousness like a bramble or Manhattan-flavoured martini, or one of their signature Bloody Marys – choose from the light, subtle Consommé Mary or the more substantial Kilpatrick, made with bacon-washed vodka. If that doesn’t get you down there right this minute, there’s no hope for ye.

Monopole

MUM EATS

Your mum’s probably fed you a decent meal or two in her time, so why not treat her to a fancy one on Sunday May 12, AKA Mother’s Day? Monopole in Potts Point are offering a special lunch menu for $65pp (exclusive of tipples from their incredible wine list); fresh-Mex newcomer Méjico will be serving a special $10 Mama’s Margarita all day (great for when you want to liquor her up so she’ll tell you about her weed-blurred uni days); and the gorgeous Biota Dining in Bowral have a three-course $58 set menu and a Sublime Sunday package that includes a brunch dish, bubbly, tea or coffee, and a one-hour massage or facial from Endota. (Don’t whinge that it’s too early then come crying to us when everything’s booked out the day before – hop to it!)

SECRET POTLUCK

Secret Foodies has been setting food lovers up on big, delicious communal blind dates for three years now, and they’re celebrating with that thing you always hear about on old TV shows – a potluck dinner. Potluck Pop-Up will see the shopfront at 118 Oxford Street taken over by these dinner parties every night from April 18-28. You can join in – buy a ticket for $30 at secretfoodies. iwannaticket.com.au, and cook up a sweet or savoury dish big enough for at least 10 servings to bring on the night. Your ticket includes bread and wine; start practicing your gracious “Oh, this? Just an old family recipe from Uncle Heston” now.

SOULSTICE

HAIL, BLU DOT

BREAD & BUTTER

Blu Dot is an NYC-based furniture and homewares company and store whose aim is “to bring good design to as many people as possible”.

How do they do this? By making it not crazy expensive. Easy as that.

With storage accessories starting from $35 and classic sofas from $1500, Blu Dot’s clean, midcentury modern-style designs are a small step up from IKEA and one giant leap towards making your place look a bit more grown-up. And now they have a Sydney store! Go and covet everything at 69 O’Riordan St, Alexandria – or check out bludot.com.au for all the info (and a link to their fantastic Tumblr).

Soulstice claims to be Sydney’s first-ever soul, fashion and live music event, and who are we to argue? To be held across three levels at Bar 100 in The Rocks, the launch night event on Sunday April 21 includes live soul tunes from Madam Parker and her dancers, and an acoustic set by The Voice star Michael Duchesne; DJ sets from Nick Toth, Trey, JC (Funkdafied) and Walter; and a “runway extravaganza” presented

by Westfield Liverpool, featuring looks from Wayne Cooper, G-Star and eight more established and new labels. Individual tickets starts from $30 from Moshtix, and there’s an option for special VIP, birthday and bottle service packages. Bar 100 can be found at 100 George St.

We here at BRAG already rely on Bourke St Bakery for all our carb-y, crumb-y, pie-andpastry needs, but we didn’t know they were total legends with social consciences as well as dab hands with a dough hook. Their initiative The Bread And Butter Project aims to train people in need in how to literally make some bread. Currently focusing on asylum seekers and refugees, the Project provides a year-long, paid, TAFE-accredited training program that allows aspiring bakers to learn on the job and set themselves up for sustainable employment in their new country.

Profits from the bread sold (currently available at the EQ Markets and SMH Grower’s Market, and soon to be sold at the David Jones Food Halls and Thomas Dux Crows Nest) are put straight back into the business to help even more people. What a delicious cycle. thebreadandbutterproject.com

COCO BESPOKE-O

Bespoke – the fashion, luxury and business event being held at Sydney Opera House on May 16 – has added a couple more fashion biz luminaries to their lineup of speakers, which already features designers Karen Walker and Nicky Zimmerman, J Brand founder Jeff Rudes, James Packer and Mr Porter editor Jeremy Langmead. Supermodel, humanitarian and social media queen Coco Rocha and her husband, artist James Conran, will address the well-heeled crowd. Early-bird tickets start at $550, but if you’re currently a student, you can snap one up for just $100, allowing you to justify the purchase with the classic line: “It was on sale!”

EXCELSIOR JONES

SHOP A, 139A QUEEN STREET, ASHFIELD MONDAY – FRIDAY 7.30AM TO 4PM / SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 8AM TO 4PM (KITCHEN CLOSES AT 3PM DAILY)

Flavours: Café fare focusing on good seasonal produce and quality ingredients, with a few vintage favourites thrown in for good measure.

The team: The dynamic duo behind Excelsior Jones are Anthony Svilicich (former owner of Le Monde café in Surry Hills) and James Naylor (former barista at Mecca Espresso, Le Monde, and The Source). Head chef Adrian Borg is formerly of Assiette (Sydney), Maze (Melbourne) and most recently, Michelinstarred restaurant Dabbous in London. Head barista Julian Beresford used to sling beans at Café Shenkin and Le Monde.

28 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

The folks down at The Spice Cellar are carrying their 2-for1 after-work drinks special on into April, because they’re just that awesome. The BOGOF offer runs from 5pm-7pm every night and includes all their signature cocktails (our fave is the I Might: Herradura blanco tequila, basil, vanilla sugar and fresh pineapple juice) which frees up some funds so you can nibble on some tapas as you sip. Alternatively, you could hit up their very reasonable ($55pp) five-course tapas degustation dinner, which is on every Friday and this month is being soundtracked by Jeremy Lloyd (half of Softwar) on the decks. Date night = sorted. thespicecellar.com

café profile Their mission: “Food, coffee and service all done with passion and professionalism – doing high-quality product in an area that is under-serviced, in a beautiful and comfortable environment.”

Eye candy: Local designers Smith & Carmody oversaw the interior design from concept to completion. With loads of natural light, black and white, lived-in timber and vintage touches like classic tiling and copper pendant lights, it’s both airy and cosy enough to settle in for a few hours, no matter the weather outside.

Signature dishes: If you’re in for breakfast, the must-order dish is hash served with housecured smoked salmon or pork hock ($16) or the sourdough pikelets with stewed berries and house-made custard ($13). From noon, you can fend off a hangover with the spectacular Angus beef and gruyère burger served with “fried spuds” ($16) or a slow-roasted lamb sambo ($13). Squeeze in one of the rotating cast of pastries and sweets ($3-$5) at the end, if you can.

And to drink: If the custom coffee blend roasted by Melbourne’s Five Senses doesn’t tempt you, go for the malted milkshakes, with flavours including Jaffa, butterscotch, and lime-coconut ($6.50) or a day-glo green lime spider ($6).

www.facebook.com/ExcelsiorJones www.excelsiorjones.com

Excelsior Jones food photo by Helen Yee grabyourfork.blogspot.com

The basics: Excelsior Jones opened mid-January on the site of an old corner convenience store, and has quickly become the must-do breakfast spot in Ashfield – a suburb dominated by great little Asian restaurants but not renowned for brunch destinations. The name is a reference to local history; it’s on what is now Queen Street, which was originally Excelsior Street and then Jones Street before getting its regal current name.

AUTUMN SPICE

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BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 29

Album Reviews What's been crossing our ears this week...

ALBUM OF THE WEEK XXX THE BLACK ANGELS Cosmogramma

Colors’ is pushed along by a swirling keyboard riff that gives it the feeling of a great lost piece of late-’60s pop-psych.

Indigo Meadow Warp POD/Inertia x

Xxxx Already a mesmerising live act, the idea of The Black Angels adding a big dose of these tracks to the mix is tantalising.

Through the course of their decade-long history, The Black Angels have established themselves as a distinctive and formidable presence in neopsychedelia. While 2010’s Phosphene Dream found them moving away from the heavy-drone workouts of their first two albums and into a more condensed, garage-inflected side of their sound, their fourth album, Indigo Meadow, is a full-blown garage-channelling long player.

Central to the album’s sound is the prominence of organ in the mix on a lot of the tracks. The stabs at the keys during ‘Don’t Play With Guns’ accentuate the sinister vibe of the song. ‘I Hear

Sounds of the late ’60s are prevalent elsewhere on Indigo Meadow. ‘The Day’ and ‘Broken Soldier’ are both very good approximations of The Doors, right down to Alex Maas’ phrasing and deep baritone drawl. The verses of ‘War On Holiday’ channel Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd before the chorus gets far heavier than they ever did on record.

Several songs, including the title track, ‘Evil Things’ and ‘Twisted Light’ pump the band’s signature sound up with a heavy punch of psychotic beats and howls.

a couple of albums due to a limited number of ideas, The Black Angels have continued to undergo a steady musical evolution.

While some acts in this genre tend to falter after

Michael Hartt

COLD WAR KIDS

LAURA MVULA

ATLAS GENIUS

MUDHONEY

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts Downtown/Co-op

Sing To The Moon RCA/Sony

When It Was Now Warner Music Australia

Vanishing Point Sub Pop/Inertia

Cold War Kids release album number four at an interesting point in the life-cycle of the band. Dear Miss Lonelyhearts is a transition record; the band can’t quite decide what it is now, and the album suffers as a result.

Guitarist Jonnie Russell has been replaced by former Modest Mouse player Dann Gallucci, who also produced the album, bringing with him new ideas and a penchant for electronic manipulation. To quote vocalist Nathan Willett, the rest of the band were happy to run with these ideas to escape further from the “blues-based spastic minimalism” of the first two albums.

But they’re not yet ready to rip up the previously successful CWK template entirely. The honky-tonk heavy single and album opener ‘Miracle Mile’ shows as much and sounds great.

In conversation with BRAG Willett admitted that he had, for the first time, taken vocal lessons in preparation for Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, and his curious voice is certainly one of the best things about it, proving most effective when it is left to shine. So it is, backed by a gospel choir, on slow blues number ‘Tuxedos’ – which in Willett’s own opinion features some of his best vocal work to date. If only CWK stuck to what they know; the synth percussion on the otherwise enjoyable ‘Lost That Easy’ is jarring.

On other tracks that heavily feature space-age sound effects, they sound like they’re (unsuccessfully) shooting for The Killers’ stadium audience (‘Loner Phase’) or, worse still, just plain lost, as with the cosmic jazz of ‘Fear And Trembling’.

The highlights are strong but a lack of cohesiveness means that Dear Miss Lonelyhearts mainly misfires. If it ain’t broke...

David Wild

Laura Mvula could be cynically viewed as the major labels’ latest attempt to cash in on radio-friendly soul in a post-Amy Winehouse pop market.

And although she shares similarities with Paloma, Emeli et al, Sing To The Moon gives the impression that Mvula has much more to offer than a stifling need to make her music palatable to the masses.

It’s not a bad album by any means.

Honed in gospel choirs and acapella groups, Mvula’s voice is a cut above, while choral harmonies and prominent celesta and harp create a sound far more beguiling than much of the female-soul-bynumbers fare we’ve become used to. Yet in its quest to please, it feels too safe. The decision to pair Mvula with producer Steve Brown, the man behind easy-listening sensation Rumer’s first album, might have been a mistake.

Take ‘Is There Anybody Out There?’.

Mvula is lonely; she sings “Is there anybody out there? / I won’t make it out here alone”. In the hands of Jill Scott, a stated influence of Mvula, a line like that would be heartwrenching. Here, framed by sweeping strings and The Beach Boys-esque “bah-bah-bahs” it’s less from the soul and more like a soliloquy in a Broadway show-tune.

Mvula hints at attitude on ‘That’s Alright’, a track led by marching band brass and drums. “I will never be what you want and that’s alright / Cause my skin ain’t light,” sings Mvula, and later: “Who made you the centre of the universe?” She needs to get down and dirty more often.

Sing To The Moon announces the arrival of a huge talent, but let’s hope she takes more risks next time.

David Wild

For Australians, the first we heard of Atlas Genius was a couple of weeks back when reports from SxSW tagged the Adelaide four-piece as one of the showcase’s genuine buzzbands. What music are these three brothers and a friend from South Australia making, that they’re turning bigwigs away at the door in the States?

According to When It Was Now, Atlas Genius are fans of classic '80s songwriting formulas. They like to blend guitars with synths to nail that middle ground that lies between rock and pop, in line with contemporaries Neon Trees or latter-day Eskimo Joe. The three-and-a-half minute first single ‘Trojans’ exemplifies the rest of the album, with a catchy one-line chorus (“Oh oh oh / You’re Trojans in my head”) repeated at length, and lyrically vague verses (“Take it off, take it in / Take off all the thoughts of what we’ve been”) that offer little more than the prelude to another chorus.

The album’s most immediately apparent aspect, even before the songs, is that it’s exceptionally wellpolished. From the slick underwater artwork to the sheen of the mastering – applied by veteran Bob Ludwig (Madonna, Foo Fighters, Coldplay), who seems to shape the finished songs as much as the band – there’s no question that this is aimed directly at commercial radio workday playlists everywhere. It turns out that Atlas Genius has been busy building radio success in both the USA and the UK over the past year, explaining why they’re new to our ears, but turning industry heads overseas.

Filthy tricksters Mudhoney gave the world grunge. Nirvana may have made it bigger, yet as Sub Pop celebrates its 25th year, the band who started it all are the great endurance runners who’ve packed in nine studio albums.

‘Slipping Away’ begins with a hoppy drumbeat, not dissimilar to those favoured by manic postwar protopunks – and idols of the Seattle scene – The Monks. Dan Peters’ percussion confuses further as Guy Maddison’s bass slinks into the periphery, before Mark Arm provides familiarity with his stretched-out vocals against Steve Turner’s shredding.

There are some hilarious lyrics about restricting the numbers at orgies on ‘I Like It Small’, while Arm decries ‘Chardonnay’ by telling it to “Get the fuck out of my backstage!” ‘I Don’t Remember You’ carries a relatively mediocre sense of half-arsed fun; the dark humour that’s their trademark grinds them into a position of easy parody as opposed to a product worthy of their godlike reputation.

There’s plenty of thumbing of noses and giving the punk finger to authority and low-hanging fruit on tracks like ‘Douchebags on Parade’.

But are these songs actually interesting? Are Arm & Co. able to make a record that elevates them above their own solidified sense of sneering survivalism? Sure, the band is still incredibly tight, and the production is undoubtedly meatier than 1988’s debut EP Superfuzz Bigmuff. But there’s a marked absence of ideas to elevate them above revelling in their own sense of enduring immaturity and snark.

Don’t go looking for further emotional resonance than you encounter on first listen, but these songs successfully fulfil their prime objective: to get their hooks embedded inside your head.

To be honest, the ratty-little-shits deal feels a little flat, particularly when recent visitors to our shores like New York’s The Men do it innovatively and with actual vigour.

Simon Topper

Benjamin Cooper

INDIE ALBUM OF THE WEEK THE GROWL What Would Christ Do??

Independent/MGM

happens to be the drummer for Pond, another Impala-affiliated outfit.

On their first album, Fremantle six-piece The Growl have undertaken a subterranean exploration of all that is dingy and dark. The result? An incredible, diverse debut.

Songs border on the nightmarish: ‘NIYWTLWOE’, (which from the lyrics, we’re assuming stands for ‘Not If You Were The Last Woman On Earth’) opens with an ominous whistle followed by what could only be described as a walking, loose metal machine. Stuttering beats will make your ears dizzy – and it’s a good thing.

They’ve been cited as one of the Australian acts to watch in 2013 by NME, and have recently come to the end of their USA/Canadian tour supporting the fuzzy goodness of Tame Impala. Cam Avery, the voice you hear over the 11 tracks, also

Using a distorted harmonica in their cover of gospel classic ‘John The Revelator’ seems like the only natural choice for The Growl. (It might also be the only song that comes close to answering the dire question in the album title.)

30 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

‘Cleaver Lever’, their first single, scored a bucketload of community radio airplay in the past and it’s easy to see why. The song oozes an industrial-flavoured cool quite unlike any other track on the album, with its screeching guitars and slimy bass.

Note must be made of Avery’s voice, which suits every song to a T: scratchy and trying very earnestly to be menacing in the more powerful songs, then honest and meltingly imperfect in stripped-back tracks like ‘Sailor’s Song’.

What Would Christ Do?? and its clunky, semi-spooky vibe grows on you.

Definitely deserving of repeat listens.

Katie Davern

WARNING BIRDS Battle Plans EP Independent/MGM

Perth four-piece Warning Birds has spent the past couple of years doing everything a young band should – touring, awards, airplay, and snagging the attention of a major label, and they now have a satisfying debut EP to add to the story. Starting with a piano prologue in ‘View From The Tower’, the six-track recording whisks us through a showcase of chief songwriter, guitarist and co-vocalist Sam Carmody’s impressive skill set. ‘Dark Places’ unsettles, placing vulnerable and frightened lyrics behind a driving jangly beat, while bassist and co-vocalist Carmen Pepper’s breathy croon perfectly suits the lush swell of ‘I’ll Tell The Water Of You’, while still hinting at the shadowy. The title track is perhaps the least effective on the release, soaring as an anthem of regret, but stumbling a little in its lyrical likening of a break-up to a battle.

Each of the six tracks displays a different side of the band, but there are themes that weave throughout, with key words like “dark”, “water” and “battle” echoing through several tracks.

Songs uniformly clock in around the 4 minute mark, and while that’s fine in and of itself, it does speak to the songwriting experimentation that’s still unexplored; it’s frustrating when the brilliant harmonies and horns on closing track ‘Ghost Town’ don’t take the opportunity to expand beyond pretty, into something grander and more compelling.

On this release, Warning Birds haven’t yet honed their emotional and devastating delivery as finely as obvious comparisons like Augie March, Dead Letter Chorus or The Middle East – but as a debut EP, Battle Plans demonstrates that the band has the promise to reach such high bars.

These first-timers from WA create promising guitar rock, weaving between moody and jangly, while still nailing down their own sound.

Simon Topper

OFFICE MIXTAPE And here are the albums that have helped BRAG HQ get through the week...

VARIOUS - Five Years Of Dirtybird CONQUERING ANIMAL SOUND - On Floating Bodies ANDREW WEATHERALL - Sci-Fi Lo-Fi Vol 1.

THE ZOMBIES - Odessey And Oracle KURT VILE - Wakin On A Pretty Daze

snap sn ap

emilie autumn

PICS :: AM

up all night out all week . . .

the lumineers

PICS :: AH

30:03:13 :: The Factory Theatre :: 105 Victoria Rd Marrickville 9550 3666

family

PICS :: KC

28:03:13 :: Enmore Theatre :: 118 -132 Enmore Rd Newtown 9550 3666

30:03:13 :: Brighton Up Bar :: 1/77 Oxford St Darlinghurst 9572 6322 RIE CHO) :: KATRINA CLARKE :: AVE

S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HON OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER :: MAR LEY ASH :: HARVEY

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 31

live reviews What we've been to see...

BYRON BAY BLUESFEST Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm Reviewed March 29, 30 and 31

There are a number of things that immediately stand out to a Bluesfest virgin. There are wide thoroughfares that encourage easy transition between stages, the bars are evenly and conveniently spaced, and the mix at each stage is near perfect. After nearly two days of sheeting rain the site is still highly functional; a benefit that is all the more noticeable after years of standing (and subsequently sinking) in the mud at Byron’s Other Big Festival.

The 24th year of this annual institution has been described as a high water-mark due to the glut of top-notch established acts.

Not that the apparent star power of the golden oldies seemed to bother Irishman Glen Hansard on the Mojo Stage. After burning through powerful tracks from his bands The Swell Season and The Frames – accompanied by the boisterous presence of the latter – he finished things with a new take on Van Morrison’s ‘Astral Weeks’.

Reggae stalwart Jimmy Cliff had hands clappin’ on the same stage. Spirited stuff, but those wanting something a little less affected were gathering at the smaller APRA Stage for Michael Kiwanuka. The Brit has an obvious affection for Byron, having visited twice in the last year, and noted after ‘Home Again’ that the rain drumming down outside couldn’t possibly compare to the

IGGY & THE STOOGES, BEASTS OF BOURBON Hordern Pavillion Tuesday April 2

Though somewhat diminished by age, both these iconic bands acquitted themselves admirably tonight. And although they will never again be able to recapture the ferocity, the danger, the anti-establishment frenzy of their early years, both bands reminded us why we’ve loved them so much for so long.

The Hordern was almost full by the time Beasts Of Bourbon came on, and why wouldn’t you come early when Tex Perkins is on stage?

He’s still completely entrancing, still growling his gravelly growl and suggestively thrusting his mic stand.

And despite closing in on 50, he can still sing songs like ‘(Fits In) Just Right’ and ‘Straight, Hard and Long’ without sounding like a seedy old man. I hope Nick Cave’s rapey moustache was here, taking notes. The Beasts’ set was warmly received even though it was sloppy, with the drummer falling out of time and the guitars less than precise. But to criticise Beasts Of Bourbon for sloppiness is to somewhat miss the point.

cold back in his homeland.

Steve Miller Band ripped into ‘The Joker’ and ‘Jet Airliner’ with a whole lotta bombast, while next door, softly-spoken Detroit survivor (and newly-mintd movie star) Rodriguez was helped on stage by two people to rapturous applause. Backing band The Break knew their place, with Rob Hirst’s drumming obviously restrained throughout a set that was heavy on classics amidst a thick fog of nostalgia.

Day three of the festival was kicked off by triple j favourite Thelma Plum in the (completely indoors and sheltered from the rain!) Lotus Palace. She’s got some pretty rad tunes of her own, but the highlights were covers of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game’ and Jeremih’s ‘Birthday Sex’ (which might have been familiar to listeners of James Blake’s co-hosting of the national broadcaster’s breakfast show days earlier).

Later in the afternoon Wilco played a set that ended far too soon. An aching version of spiteful anthem ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’ led into Mermaid Avenue’s ‘Californian Stars’.

Robert Plant was able to belt out some surprisingly high and sustained anthems, but the dramatics of his Sensational Space Shifters weren’t enough to attract many away from the lure of the creepy skin-father at the Crossroads Stage next door. Iggy & The Stooges’ primal screams

Luka Bloom’s set was inordinately dull, bar his cover of fellow Bluesfester Mark Seymour’s ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’.

He probably wasn’t helped by the ruckus on offer from Melbourne native (and Seth Sentry crewman) Grey Ghost next door on the Mojo Stage. Former Yes frontman Jon Anderson shambled on, before a passably hummable turn – including, of course, ‘Dreamer’ – from Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson.

Rufus Wainwright offered dollops of drama and lush balladry, ahead of Denver’s The Lumineers. The American five-piece’s hype seemed justified during breakout hit ‘Ho Hey’, as they led one of the loudest, somehow tiredest, and final audience singalongs of the weekend.

Benjamin Cooper

That’s What You Said’. There was no style the band hadn’t mastered.

“We’re gonna keep the chit-chat to a minimum,” explained Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, “because we don’t have the fucking time.” Indeed. An Evening With Wilco – or rather just the 90 minutes we were afforded – hardly seemed like long enough in the company of such thrilling musicians.

Tweedy is a beguiling frontman, even though he never seems to welcome the attention. Scruffy in a navy blazer and light jeans, his only aim was to please through the music. His voice could easily go unnoticed given the multitudinous layers of sound that frame it, but it had a comforting quality to it, even when he sang falsetto on ‘Whole Love’. He asked with genuine concern whether Wilco’s sound was filling the hall. It could’ve filled three of them.

Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House Tuesday April 2

Within the first 20 minutes the six-piece band showed us both ends of their lengthy sonic spectrum. Wistful country ballad ‘One Sunday Morning’ segued into the hot-as-hell four-guitar metal onslaught of ‘Art Of Almost’, via ‘Poor People’, which started as country and ended as a feast of industrial noise – all thrashing drum pads and space-age effects. It wouldn’t have been out of place at Soundwave, but it felt just right in the Concert Hall, thank you very much. It was a breathtaking way to begin. From then on we were treated to many styles in between including the ’60s psychedelia of ‘I Might’ and the blues-rock of ‘At Least

But it was the man stood next to Tweedy, guitarist Nels Cline, who proved most captivating. Midway through a stirring rendition of ‘Impossible Germany’ Tweedy took a backwards step and Cline launched into a goosebump-inducing solo. He looked like he was falling into a trance-like state as he squeezed every last drop of tenderness out of his six strings. Complete strangers in the audience turned to each other and acknowledged the wonder of their mutual experience. Epic doesn’t describe it.

David Wild

Metro Theatre Thursday March 28

When reggae is discussed, names like Bob Marley and Peter Tosh and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry are often bandied about without mention of one of the genre’s kings, Jimmy Cliff.

A flagbearer for both ska and reggae, Cliff has been musically active for nearly half a century, had a proper dash as an actor, and wrote a song for an ad in this year’s Super Bowl. So, he’s done some things.

PHOTOGRAPHER :: TIM LEVY

XXYYXX, POLOGRAPHIA, ASTRAL DJS The Standard Wednesday March 27

Marcel Everett – boy wonder behind xxyyxx – is still too young to get into bars and clubs even in Australia, let alone back in the States. But rather than using his older brother’s ID or pashing a bouncer, he gets into clubs by being the headline act.

The always-snazzy Astral DJs got the vibes flowing, followed by Polographia, who showcased some instrumentalbased new material. Their brand of lush electronica benefited from the absence of vocals, as their singer’s unsuited vocal style can detract from the beauty of their soundscapes (in songs like ‘Righteous Hit’ and ‘With You’). xxyyxx’s style is experimental, sleepy and lo-fi, and I was interested to see how he’d bring it to a live setting, in a venue where a large sample of the crowd looked to be on that molly and k e e n 2 r a i s e d a r o o f. He obliged, playing more to his ClamsCasino-cum-Star-Slinger inclinations – snarey, speedy BPM electronica with glitchy vocal samples and gluttonous synths.

Washed with blue and purplish lighting and backlit by a honeycomb-shaped pastel glow, xxyyxx let his sonic mastery do the talking, calmly nodding his head with the occasional sleight of hand visible over his intricate live setup. Any doubts held about how he’d go in a club show were quelled by the 17-year-old, who performed according to his environment – selecting broody dancefloor cuts ‘Set It Off’ and the TLCsampling ‘Good Enough’, and omitting his more lo-fi compositions like ‘Lay Down’ and ‘You Are Why I Am Invisible’.

‘Witching Hour’ slowed the crowd’s tempo, showing everyone how something can be both sexy and scary at the same time, much like the standout single ‘About You’. ‘Fields’ was awesome, the vocal loop breaking through and hitting you on the frontal lobe whilst the space-cave beat pinged and popped around the venue’s walls and high ceiling.

The body-engulfing experience of listening to xxyyxx through headphones was validated in a live setting too. With ingenious sampling, technically brilliant beats and extrasensory soundscapes, this kid’s got way too much maturity and skill at an age where most of us were still mastering the fine art of masturbation.

Rachitha Seneviratne

JIMMY CLIFF

This was the third time they’ve toured Australia since their reunion in 2003, and while the banter and the stage invasion have become predictable and slightly dull, the songs are never less than scintillating. Tonight was more ‘great fun’ than ‘great’, but you’d still go see Iggy over just about anyone else in the world.

32 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

The festival’s second last day bore the scars of sustained meteorological and cultural drenching. Easter Sunday’s traditional signalling of new life was skewed slightly as proceedings evolved slowly on the stages.

WILCO

And what can you say about The Stooges, about Iggy Pop? I suspect he knows that his drug use in the ’70s and ’80s should probably have killed him, and now he attacks every show with a manic, frenzied energy that puts frontpersons half his age to shame. Inevitably these shows become all about Iggy, which does disservice to bassist Mike Watt and guitarist James Williamson – legends in their own right. They tore through tracks from every Stooges album, as well as Kill City, the underrated record Iggy and Williamson made together, and even though the energy was high the whole time it lifted to a whole other level during ‘No Fun’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ and ‘Search and Destroy’.

Hugh Robertson

threatened to scatter the chairs of the scowling pensioners at the rear of the tent.

Detroit’s favourite son wasn’t interested in adhering to any sense of decency: the shirt was off almost immediately, and as ‘Funhouse’ ripped into life Iggy started hauling fans up on stage for some dirty dancing.

Now 65, Jimmy Cliff is older than most of your dads, but he’s got more pizzazz and groin flexibility than a teenage gymnast. Performing for over two hours, the sprightly Jamaican took us on a nostalgic odyssey through his rich discography. Playing ‘Treat The Youths Right’ in the first ten minutes, Cliff showed that there was no harm in dropping hits early, as he has a truckload of them. Flanked by stellar backing vocalists-slash-dancers, horns, guitars, and a four-man percussion section, Cliff showed off his big-band attitude to reggae. To him, reggae is the foundation for stadium-sized music that can unite people the world over. He never aligned his personal beliefs with that of the Rastafarian spiritual

movement, and as a result his music took on a life far different to that of Marley’s.

Jimmy Cliff embraces the cultural fusion of Jamaican music with Western pop. His cover of Cat Steven’s ‘Wild World’ yielded a deafening crowd sing-along, as did his famous cover of Johnny Nash’s ‘I Can See Clearly Now’, announcing: “You guys know THIS one from Cool Runnings.” He’s a shade of the muso-political activist he once was, but still appropriated his protest song ‘Vietnam’ to be relevant: “We don’t want another Vietnam in Afghanistan!”

The entire crowd danced with the reckless abandon of the ’70s, but Cliff – being the seasoned professional he is – broke it up with a sit-down bongo interlude (which included ‘Rivers Of Babylon’) and several lighters-in-theair classics including ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, a Jimmy Cliff masterpiece that’s been covered by everyone (UB40, Seal, Jimmy fucking Barnes).

The delightful encore revolved around his song ‘One More’, where the crowd was spurred on to stamp and chant “ONE MORE!” continuously until the band re-emerged. This happened four times – and this is why Jimmy Cliff and reggae rule so hard.

Rachitha Seneviratne

snap sn ap

up all night out all week . . .

fred wesley & the new jbs

PICS :: TL

WED 10 APR THU 11 APR LITTLE CASINO TRAIN ROBBERS NORTHERN TOWN FONTAYNES

27:03:13 :: Upstairs Beresford :: 1/354 Bourke St Surry Hills 8313 5000

FRI 12 APR SAT 13 APR SUPPORT: MIND OVER MATTER

SUN 14 APR THU 18 APR PICS :: KC

major raiser

CIVILIANS ELLIOT THE BULL GANG OF YOUTHS LOVE PARADE

30:03:13 :: The Standard :: 3/383 Bourke St Surry Hills 9660 7953

DECLAN KELLY & THE RISING SUN DUBARRAY

Coming Up

IN APRIL 19th BUCKCHERRY 20th DOC HOLIDAY TAKES THE SHOTGUN, VAN HOORN...

25th LO-FI COLLECTIVE: NIC BEZZINA

pvt

PICS :: PX

OPEN TIL 3AM 26:03:13 :: Oxford Art Factory :: 38-46 Oxford St Darlinghurst 9332 3711 RIE CHO) :: KATRINA CLARKE :: AVE

S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HON OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER :: MAR LEY ASH :: HARVEY

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 33

g g guide gig g

send your listings to : gigguide@thebrag.com

Nantes

Angelene Harris, Matt McGowen, Stafford Sanders Cat & Fiddle Hotel, Balmain free 7pm Charlie A’Court, Dylan & Co. The Vanguard, Newtown $15.80 8pm Daniel Champagne, Max Savage The Basement, Circular Quay $20 (+ bf) 7.30pm The Folk Informal: We Are The Birdcage, The Understudy, Declan Kelly, Shane Burden FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel $10 7pm Helmut Uhlmann, Sally Coleman, Kieran Smith UTs Loft, Broadway, Ultimo free 6pm TAOS, John Chesher, Gavin Fitzgerald, Paul McGowan Coach & Horses Hotel, Randwick free 7pm

THURSDAY APRIL 11 ROCK & POP

SATURDAY APRIL 13

Goodgod Small Club, Sydney

Nantes, Battleships, Light Giant $15 (+ bf) 8pm MONDAY APRIL 8 ROCK & POP

Liverpool Idol: Wunderground, Hot Teas, Nest, Raseth, Karmic Dirt, The Catalyst, Mangrove Jack Collingwood Hotel, Liverpool $10 7pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Helmut Uhlmann, Chris Brookes, Massimo Presti, Chich, Frankie Francis, Jon Jobbagy, Tracy R, Mark Mcfarlyn, Rose Kellys On King, Newtown free 7pm

TUESDAY APRIL 9 ROCK & POP

34 :: BRAG :: 507 : 08:04:13

JAZZ

Sean MacKenzie’s Brasil Project Blue Beat, Double Bay $15 (+ bf) 9pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Angelene Harris Tea Garden Hotel, Bondi Junction free 7pm Darren Bennett George IV Inn, Picton free 7.30pm Greg Sita, Starr Witness Five Dock Hotel free 7.30pm Peach Montgomery Newington Inn, Petersham free 7pm

WEDNESDAY APRIL 10 ROCK & POP

Counting Crows (USA) Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay $101.90-$122.40 (+ bf) 8pm Daybreak Band Competition Final Valve Bar & Venue, Tempe

7pm Hard Rock Rising 2013 Finals Hard Rock Café, Sydney 9pm all-ages The Khanz, We Are The Brave Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $5 8pm Mark Travers Orient Hotel, The Rocks free 9pm Matthew Herbert (UK) The Standard, Surry Hills $50 (+ bf) 8.30pm Melodie Nelson Front Bar, Goodgod Small Club free 8pm Musos Club Jam Night Bald Faced Stag Hotel, Leichhardt free 8pm Nantes, Battleships, Light Giant, Isbjorn, Devola, Bernie Dingo Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm One Wild Night Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket free 11pm Public Image Ltd (UK) Enmore Theatre $79.10 7pm Stephanie Jansen Beach Bar, Coogee Bay Hotel free 9pm Vice Presents – The Spring Breakers Issue: Alex Cameron (Seekae), Golden Blonde, Dave Miller DJ (PVT) Goodgod Small Club, Sydney free (rsvp) 8pm

JAZZ

Judenn Lassiter Mars Hill Café, Parramatta 7.30pm

The Guppies

JAZZ

Waldo Fabian, The Gypsy Dub Sound System The Basement, Circular Quay $25 (+ bf) 7.30pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Daniel Hopkins Olympic Hotel, Paddington free 7.30pm Peach Montgomery Forest Lodge Hotel, Glebe free 7.30pm PJ Neverland Mars Hill Café, Parramatta 9.30pm A Tribute To Tsitsanis: Rebetiki The Factory Theatre, Marrickville $27 (conc)-$30 (+ bf) 7pm

FRIDAY APRIL 12 ROCK & POP

Bareback Titty Squad, King Colour Candys Apartment, Kings Cross $10-$15 8pm Birdy Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House $59.90-$93 (+ bf) 8pm Calling Mayday, Scarlet’s Revenge, Joint Venture The Vanguard, Newtown $13.80 8pm Circle Jerk #5: Sweet Teeth, The Wesley Snipers, Hell Setzer, Milkmaids Sly Fox Hotel, Enmore free 8pm Craig Thommo, The Trav & Rosci Show Beach Bar, Coogee Bay Hotel free 7.30pm Declaration, Mark My Words, Battletruk, Clipped Wings, Hostile Objects Valve Bar & Venue, Tempe 7pm Beat Club, Orca Straight Ahead, The Black Zeros FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel $10 8pm Dune Rats, Drunk Mums,

Food Court Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $15 8pm Emergenza: Exposure, Hematic, Into The Fireplace, Kill Appeal, Nudist Colonies Of The World, River Stone Haze, The Fixators, The Net Of Being, Wooden Tongue The Lair, Metro Theatre, Sydney $20 7pm Fingertips, Lectricity, 1Chain DJ Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst free 8pm The Hadron Colliders, Sundown Shamans, Fields Of Mars, The Belle Havens, Peach Mongomery Cat & Fiddle Hotel, Balmain $10 8pm Hand Games 1st Birthday: No Zu, Holy Balm, Oisima, MC Gaff E, Pelvis Goodgod Small Club, Sydney $16 (+ bf) 8pm Harbour Masters St George Leagues free 9pm Jconnexion Engadine Tavern free 9.30pm Jimmy Rigg & The Crow Bars, Andy Golledge The Basement, Circular Quay $25-$30 7.30pm John Vella Berowra RSL free 8pm Justine Whalin, Tempus Falls, The Brothers Punch, Tiger Dragon Roxbury Hotel, Glebe $12 8pm Kirin J Callinan The Crypt, St. James Church, Sydney $20 (+ bf) 7pm allages Lowrider Annandale Hotel $21.45 7pm Marsapalooza: Hillside Theory, Creeper, Kingfisher Mars Hill Café, Parramatta 7.30pm The Project: Whiterun Massacre, Resonance, Absolution, At World’s End, DJ Swinder Bull ‘n’ Bush Hotel, Baulkham Hills free 8pm Quini Figtree Hotel free 8pm Reckless, Jonathan Jones Orient Hotel, The Rocks free (early bird)-$5 5pm Renae Stone Customs House Bar, Circular Quay free 7pm Rihanna Show Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket free 10pm Riz Hallowes Chatswood RSL free 5.30pm RÜFÜS Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst $17 (+ bf) 8pm Scattered Order, Dead China Doll, Nhomea, Pimmon, DJ Octopus Pi The Red Rattler, Marrickville 8pm Silent Knight, Avarin, Metreya, Abacination, Lethal Vendetta The Wall @ Bald Faced Stag Hotel, Leichhardt $10 8pm The Sphinxes Vineyard Hotel free 9.30pm Strange Karma, Hot Angel, Sylvain, Er Among The Ether Sydney Livehouse @ Lewisham Hotel $25 8pm Taylor & The Makers, Little Casino, Iluka, Devola Upstairs Beresford, Surry Hills free 6pm Wards Xpress, Bryce Cohen Brass Monkey, Cronulla $23.50 7pm

JAZZ

Bungaribee The Sound Lounge, Seymour Centre, Chippendale $10-$20 8.30pm Marsala Camelot Lounge, Marrickville $25 (+ bf) 7.30pm SACE: Sydney’s Afro Cuban Elite Blue Beat, Double Bay $20 (+ bf) 7pm

Xxx photo by xxx

Chris Isaak (USA), Jon Stevens Enmore Theatre $99-$139 6pm Co Pilot Orient Hotel, The Rocks free 9pm Counting Crows (USA) Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay $101.90-$122.40 (+ bf) 8pm Goon Squad Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket free 10pm Jonathan Devoy

Botany View Hotel, Newtown free 7.30pm Newton Faulkner (UK), Morgal Joanel, Jolan Metro Theatre, Sydney $54.20 8pm Rotten Sound (FIN), Roadside Burial, Ether Rag, The Holiday Project The Wall @ Bald Faced Stag Hotel, Leichhardt $24.50 7pm

Aluka Camelot Lounge, Marrickville $15 (+ bf) 7pm Balmain Blitz: Dirty Nice, Malvina Parade, Tom Eliot, D. Minor & Tyler, Highroads, Rocco, Headrush, Joe Dabron Bridge Hotel, Rozelle $15 7pm Bayharbour, Hand Of The Architect, Paradise Found, Friend Or Foe, Alaska Valve Bar & Venue, Tempe 7pm Ben Gunn Newport Arms Hotel free 8pm Dead Letter Circus, Breaking Orbit Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst $25 (+ bf) 8pm Dlinkwnt, Tommy M & The Mastersounds, Brotherfunk The Vanguard, Newtown $28.80 8pm Dune Rats, Sures, Pro Vita Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst sold out 8pm The Friendsters, Destiny 3000, DJ Jay The Ripper The Green Room Lounge, Enmore free 8pm Glenn Shorrock, Hein Brass Monkey, Cronulla $44.90 7pm The Guppies, The Ivory Drips Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst free 8pm Hang The DJ: The Jones Rival, Hollow Bones, The Dead Heads, Rufflefeather Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm Hit Machine Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket free 10pm Hot Damn: In Hearts Wake, Stories, The Lane Cove, Interview With An Escape, Hot Damn DJs Spectrum, Darlinghurst $15$20 8pm

Klay Beach Bar, Coogee Bay Hotel free 10pm La Mancha Negra Moonshine, Hotel Steyne, Manly free 5pm Mary Gunn, Spookyland The Newsagency, Enmore $10 8pm Neighbourhood Watch: Little Casino, Train Robbers, Northern Town The Standard, Surry Hills $10 8pm Optus RockCorps: The Script (IRE), Tinie Tempah (UK), Guy Sebastian Hordenr Pavilion, Moore Park 7pm all-ages Songs, The Native Cats, Model Citizen Goodgod Small Club, Sydney $12 (+ bf) 8pm Spencer Ray Duo Orient Hotel, The Rocks free 9pm Staff Picks: Thieves, Greta Mob, The Well Alrights, Found At Sea Annandale Hotel $5 7pm

Nantes photo by Mikey Pozarik

pick of the week

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

g g guide gig g

send your listings to : gigguide@thebrag.com

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Dragon

Thomas Jones Mars Hill Café, Parramatta 6.30pm

SATURDAY APRIL 13 ROCK & POP

2 Fold, Jimmy Bear Orient Hotel, The Rocks free (early)-$5 4.30pm Acoustic Dave, Singled Out Beach Bar, Coogee Bay Hotel free 7.30pm The Archaic Revival, 400kw, Johnny Roadkill, Howl The Square, Haymarket $12 8pm Bareback Titty Squad, The Spitfires, The Ivory Drips Roxbury Hotel, Glebe $15 8pm Bears With Guns, OXBLVD, Betty & Oswald FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel $10 8pm Birdy Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House $59.90-$93 (+ bf) 8pm British India Metro Theatre, Sydney $28.70 8pm Civilians, Elliot The Bull, Gang Of Youths, Love Parade The Standard, Surry Hills $10 (+ bf) 8pm The Colors Tribute Band Sydney Brewhouse (The Mac), Surry Hills free 9pm Dave Tice & Mark Evans Marrickville Bowling Club free 4.30pm

Souled Out Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket free 10pm The Sphinxes Riverwood Inn free 8pm Suburban Movement Screening: Cryptic Scorn, Civility Lost, Steel Swarm, Evil Ugly Valve Bar & Venue, Tempe 7pm The Upskirts, The Tsars Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst free 8pm

JAZZ Dragon Studio, Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay $60$75 (+ bf) 8pm Emergenza: Binjuice, Cicada, Edema Ruh, Flick The Bean, Nothing But Jam, Tiffany Britchford, Tiger & The Rogues, U:Codia The Lair, Metro Theatre, Sydney $20 7pm Ev’rything’s Coming Up Dusty – A Tribute To Dusty Springfield: Justin Shouler, Lady Sings It Better, Dicky & Dicky, Anita Douche & Liver Ouchie, Liez A’Plenty, Corky Poindexter, Luna Luk, Lucy Hall The Red Rattler, Marrickville $15 (conc)-$20 (+ bf) 8pm Eymaze Valve Bar & Venue, Tempe 12pm Furnace & The Fundamentals Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm Katie Noonan, Brian Campeau

The Basement, Circular Quay $40 (+ bf) 7.30pm Nantes, Battleships, Light Giant Goodgod Small Club, Sydney $15 (+ bf) 8pm Nathan Cole Abbotts Hotel, Redfern free 7.30pm Nudist Colonies Of The World, Rat In A Blanket, 51 Percent, Love Child Sydney Livehouse @ Lewisham Hotel $12 8pm Pat O’Grady Duo Carousel Inn free 8pm Replika Moorebank Sports Club free 9.30pm Riley Beech Bexley RSL free 7.30pm Robongia, Insidious 6ix, Miss Little Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $10 8pm Secret Act, Tales In Space, Bhavani, Hobophonics Upstairs Beresford, Surry Hills free 6pm Skyscraper Engadine Tavern free 9.30pm

El Orqueston Camelot Lounge, Marrickville $17-$22 (+ bf) 7.30pm Emma Pask Brass Monkey, Cronulla $25.50 7pm Phillip Johnston Quartet The Sound Lounge, Seymour Centre, Chippendale $10-$20 8.30pm Takadimi, Gypsey Dub Sound System, Telegraph Tower The Cat & Fiddle Hotel, Balmain $10 7.30pm Yuki Kumagai, John Mackie Well Co. Café / Wine Bar, Leichhardt free 7.15pm

SUNDAY APRIL 14 ROCK & POP

Andy Mammers Duo Orient Hotel, The Rocks free 8.30pm Bec Plath, Sea Of Mountains, Renee Jonas Café Lounge, Surry Hills 7pm Birdy Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House $59.90-$93 (+ bf) 8pm The Creedence Clearwater Revival Tribute: Proud Mary Brass Monkey, Cronulla 7pm Highways, Call The Shots, Divide & Conquer, The Reprize, 3 Way Lane, Upside Sydney Livehouse @ Lewisham Hotel $15 2pm all-ages Hue Williams, FenderBenders Gosford RSL free 12pm Mangrove Boogie Kings,

50 Million Beers Botany View Hotel free 5.30pm Rock Solid Beach Bar, Coogee Bay Hotel free 7.30pm ScOrChErFeSt Valve Bar & Venue, Tempe 12pm The Strides Moonshine, Hotel Steyne, Manly free 3pm

JAZZ

Edwina Blush Camelot Lounge, Marrickville $18-$25 (+ bf) 6.30pm

ACOUSTIC & FOLK

Elevation U2 Acoustic Orient Hotel, The Rocks free 4.30pm Patrick James, Yetis, Achoo! Bless You The Vanguard, Newtown sold out 8pm Peach Montgomery, Chich, Frankie Francis Salisbury Hotel, Stanmore free 2pm Edwina Blush

ACOUSTIC & FOLK Blonde Baggage Mars Hill Café, Parramatta 6.30pm Muddy Feet The Belvedere Hotel, Sydney free 9pm Patrick James, Yetis, Chris Rose The Vanguard, Newtown $13.80 8pm

Production Manager tue

09 Apr

The USU is looking for an experienced production manager.

This is a full time permanent role.

Salary is $60,000 per Annum, plus super, plus benefits.

(9:00PM - 12:00AM)

wed

thu

10

11

Apr

Apr

(9:00PM - 12:00AM)

(9:00PM - 12:00AM)

fri

Suitably qualified and experienced candidates should provide a resume and separate written statements against each of the selection criteria listed below:

12 Apr

(4:30PM - 7:30PM)

(9:30PM - 1:30AM)

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

SATURDAY AFTERNOON (4:30PM - 7:30PM)

sat

13

The primary focus is to manage the production requirements for the USU venues in particular Manning and Hermanns Bar. The production manager will also assist with the production requirements for events through the Clubs and Societies office, Programs Department and special events across campus. As required they will also be involved with special projects.

SATURDAY NIGHT

Apr

(4:30PM - 7:30PM)

sun

14 Apr

(9:00PM - 12:00AM)

SUNDAY NIGHT

(8:30PM - 12:00AM)

• Experience in managing the production requirements and schedules for large events • Knowledge of the latest technology available in sound and lighting • Proven management of key suppliers and good industry contacts • At least three years experience as a sound technician • Ability to manage a team of sound engineers If you feel this might be the role for you, please obtain a position description before applying from jobs@usu.usyd.edu.au or telephone 9563 6223.

Your application letter should respond to the requirements we seek and should accompany your up-to-date resume. Applications should be emailed to: jobs@usu.usyd.edu.au quoting reference no.33/13.

Applications close: COB Monday 15th April USU promotes healthy living and aims to protect the health and safety of staff, members and visitors to the University by providing a Smoke-Free Workplace

USU is committed to promoting a workplace of equal opportunities BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 35

gig picks

up all night out all week...

TUESDAY APRIL 9 Chris Isaak (USA), Jon Stevens Enmore Theatre $99-$139 6pm Counting Crows (USA) Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay $101.90-$122.40 (+ bf) 8pm

WEDNESDAY APRIL 10 The Khanz, We Are The Brave Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst $5 8pm Matthew Herbert (UK) The Standard, Surry Hills $50 (+ bf) 8.30pm

Matthew Herbert Pubic Image Ltd.

Nantes, Battleships, Light Giant, Isbjorn, Devola, Bernie Dingo Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm

Public Image Ltd (UK) Enmore Theatre $79.10 7pm Vice Presents â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Spring Breakers Issue: Alex Cameron (Seekae), Golden Blonde, Dave Miller DJ (PVT) Goodgod Small Club, Sydney free (rsvp) 8pm

THURSDAY APRIL 11 Dead Letter Circus, Breaking Orbit Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst $25 (+ bf) 8pm Dune Rats, Sures, Pro Vita Brighton Up Bar, Darlinghurst sold out 8pm The Guppies, The Ivory Drips Gallery Bar, Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst free 8pm Hang The DJ: The Jones Rival, Hollow Bones, The Dead Heads, Rufflefeather Beach Road Hotel, Bondi free 8pm Neighbourhood Watch: Little Casino, Train Robbers, Northern Town The Standard, Surry Hills $10 8pm Optus RockCorps: The Script (IRE), Tinie Tempah (UK), Guy Sebastian Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park 7pm all-ages Songs, The Native Cats, Model Citizen Goodgod Small Club, Sydney $12 (+ bf) 8pm

36 :: BRAG :: 507 : 08:04:13

British India

FRIDAY APRIL 12

Casino, Iluka, Devola Upstairs Beresford, Surry Hills free 6pm

Beat Club, Orca Straight Ahead, The Black Zeros FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel $10 8pm

SATURDAY APRIL 13

Hand Games 1st Birthday: No Zu, Holy Balm, Oisima, MC Gaff E, Pelvis Goodgod Small Club, Sydney $16 (+ bf) 8pm Kirin J Callinan The Crypt, St. James Church, Sydney $20 (+ bf) 7pm all-ages Lowrider Annandale Hotel $21.45 7pm Scattered Order, Dead China Doll, Nhomea, Pimmon, DJ Octopus Pi The Red Rattler, Marrickville 8pm Taylor & The Makers, Little

Bareback Titty Squad, The Spitfires, The Ivory Drips Roxbury Hotel, Glebe $15 8pm Bears With Guns, OXBLVD, Betty & Oswald FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel $10 8pm British India Metro Theatre, Sydney $28.70 8pm Civilians, Elliot The Bull, Gang Of Youths, Love Parade The Standard, Surry Hills $10 (+ bf) 8pm Dragon Studio, Sydney Opera House, Circular Quay $60-$75 (+ bf) 8pm

BRAG’s guide to dance, hip hop and club culture

brag beats

pez

inside

fresh flavour

chance waters

also: + club guid + club snape s + weekly column

bilal

rüfüs

We has internets!

www.thebrag.com Extra bits and moving bits without the papercuts BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 37

dance music news

free stuff

club, dance and hip hop in brief... with Chris Honnery

FREESTUFF@THEBRAG.COM

five things WITH

Major Lazer

JOZIF to it and my younger brother kind of educated me. I’ve been fortunate enough to hang around with some really great people that have opened my eyes to different styles and forms of electronic music – people like Howie B, Craig Richards and Andrew Weatherall.

The Music You Make The next few things I have out 3. are an EP release on Dame-Music

Growing Up Growing up for me was lots 1. and lots of fun. Both parents were in show business, so we always had lots of cool people around and lots of amazing music. My mother was in The Royal Ballet so she and I would often work out dance routines to Michael Jackson or Prince and dance around the

house like lunatics. My father was a drummer so music was always blaring out of his little studio at the end of the hallway.

Your Crew It was a combination of my 2. older and younger brothers that got me into electronic music...

My older brother introduced me

(Bloody Mary’s label), a thing for Leftroom and a track for Silicone Soul’s 10-year anniversary CD. When I DJ I believe it’s important to try and gauge where the crowd’s at rather than just bang out the same thing over and over again. This sometimes means you get it totally wrong and other times you blow the roof off, but I kind of like that uncertainty...

The Last Record I Bought I bought the amazing Rhye 4.

LP yesterday and Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew ’cause the album artwork is just as mental and amazing as the music! It’s an amazing double pack where they

THE POTBELLEEZ

just pressed record and played one track each side. The last electronic record I bought was Rick Wade’s Berlin Days. I’ve probably been playing his records since 2001 – I absolutely love them!

Music, Right Here, Right Now 5.

I guess the scene is quite tricky now because of the sheer volume of stuff but I don’t think that’s necessarily exclusive to the music scene – I think that’s probably the same wherever you go: video, photography, literature, most forms of art really. Technology has opened up the door for so many people, so to have a go at anything kind of makes it more difficult to stand out; I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing because for far too long it has been quite elitist in certain scenes. At least now everybody gets a go, but the cream will always rise to the top.

Where: S.A.S.H @ Abercrombie Hotel When: Sunday April 21

SOSUEME TURN 6

The Potbelleez have been added to the bill for the inaugural Optus RockCorps concert, joining The Script, Tinie Tempah and Guy Sebastian for the event at the Hordern Pavilion this Thursday April 11. One of Australia’s most successful electronic dance music acts, The Potbelleez are best known for their breakthrough cut ‘Don’t Hold Back’, and have recently released a new single ‘Saved In A Bottle’. For further info about the event head to optusrockcorps.com.au

Iggy Azalea

KLP

Sosueme celebrates its half-dozenth anniversary on Wednesday April 17 with a free birthday romp featuring the likes of Urthboy, Hermitude, Alison Wonderland – and of course Sosueme DJs. The presser suggests that you “expect the usual birthday tomfoolery vis-à-vis jelly shots, popcorn in your face, pillow fights – after six years we think you know the drill!” The birthday celebrations will go down at the same place where Sosueme holds weekly Wednesday parties: the Beach Road Hotel in Bondi, which is also hosting Furnace & The Fundamentals, New Dub City and Kodak for free shows over the coming week.

FLATBUSH ZOMBIES

NYC’s Flatbush Zombies will make their Sydney debut on Wednesday May 29 at Oxford Art Factory, courtesy of the Niche crew. The Zombies rose out of obscurity on the back of their synth-heavy, weed-laced cut ‘Thug Waffle,’ an ode to marijuana and breakfast foods. Their first full length mixtape, D.R.U.G.S. – there’s a clear theme emerging here – was released in July last year, and received over

MAJOR LAZER

It is a known and proven scientific fact that everything Diplo touches turns to gold.

Not solid gold, though – hollow gold, filled with coke and booties and sweat and large men bellowing BRRRRA BRRRA! and dancehall-based sci-fi universes where intergalactic commandos must save the world with LAZERS. Yes, Major Lazer (excuse us: MEHJA LEYZA) is back with a new album, Free The Universe. It has ‘Get Free’ on it, and also the new track ‘Jah No Partial’, and other songs featuring pretty much everyone, from Bruno Mars and Tyga to Wyclef and Shaggy and also Ezra from Vampire Weekend and yeah, this is going to soundtrack every party you have this year. We have five copies to give away – just email freestuff@thebrag.com and tell us your postal address, and the name of the other producer who makes up Major Lazer.

50,000 downloads in its first week on the interweb. It will provide the backbone for their hypnotically abrasive and off-the-wall live show.

NINA KRAVIZ

On May 4, Muscovite DJ and producer Nina Kraviz will headline a pop-up event by SPICE and the Red Bull Music Academy, commencing in the afternoon on the rooftop terrace atop Red Bull HQ, within the Grounds precinct in Alexandria. Kraviz announced herself via a number of luscious deep house EPs via Underground Quality, BPitch Control and Efdemin’s Naïf imprint, among others. As a solo producer she’s also had her fair share of highlights, including her debut EP Breaking Through, featuring the barnstorming ‘Pain In The Ass’, and her self-titled debut LP, released last year. The upcoming event, dubbed SPICE Black, is billed as a celebration in the style of the Japanese cherry blossom festival, Sakura, and will bring together “fine food, forward-thinking music, premium drinks and contemporary art”.

Tickets – limited to 350, and inclusive of food, drinks, transport and entry to the after-party at Spice Cellar – are on sale from Monday April 8.

IGGY AZALEA

KLP

Having built up a rep over the past two years as a respected DJ and guest vocalist, KLP (AKA Kristy Lee Peters) will perform at Goodgod Small Club on Thursday May 9 in support of her debut EP Revolution.

KLP has collaborated with the likes of Pnau, Infusion and Tonight Only, and worked with the likes of Chairlift, Lykke Li, 12th Planet and Gina Turner in her role as a key facilitator for Heaps Decent, the local initiative that facilitates music workshops around NSW for disadvantaged kids. Revolution will be released through Chookie, a new Sydney-born and internationally-based indie label fronted by local producer Dcup (of Yolanda Be Cool fame).

KLP will be joined by fellow Heaps Decent collaborators Charlie Chux and Stu Turner, as well as rising act Moonbase Commander, with all proceeds from the show to be donated to the not-for-profit organisation.

38 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

Due to her recording commitments working on her debut LP, Angel Haze will no longer be performing as part of the Movement festival national tour this April. However it’s not all doom and gloom – organisers have arranged for Australian-born MC and model Iggy Azalea to step into the gap. Azalea was the first non-American to be featured on XXL mag’s annual Freshman Class cover, and her debut studio LP The New Classic is set to be released later this year. Movement is slated for Friday April 26 at the Hordern Pavilion, with Bliss N Eso, 2 Chainz, Joey Bada$$, Chiddy Bang and Thundamentals all set to perform.

JACKIE ONASSIS

Off the back of their national tour supporting Spit Syndicate, highly-touted Sydney hip hop duo Jackie Onassis, comprising of MC Kai and DJ/producer Raph, will play a series of shows in support of their latest single ‘Smoke Trails,’ including a performance at Oxford Art Factory on Wednesday May 1, opening for Matt & Kim. The duo broke out with a set at the Sydney edition of Big Day Out, courtesy of triple j Unearthed, and have since been booked to perform the Great Escape Festival in the UK and three London club shows – including a show at NME. Any readers unacquainted with Jackie Onassis can change that by checking out their free-to-download Holiday EP, which features the party-starting ‘Crystal Balling’.

dOP

TERMINAL PROJEKT

Finely Tuned has announced the local lineup for Terminal Projekt, which will be held at Sydney’s Overseas Passenger Terminal at Circular Quay this June long weekend, as part of Vivid Sydney. French trio dOP, New York pair Sepalcure, and Detroit’s Jimmy Edgar will be supported by Mad Racket’s Simon Caldwell, Morgan and Astral People DJs on Saturday June 8, while Tensnake, Hot Creations’ HNQO and Scotland’s Graeme Clark, better known for his house and disco influenced output as The Revenge, will be joined by the Co-Op DJs and Sam Roberts on Sunday June 9. Presale tickets can be procured through the Pulse Radio website. More info at vividsydney.com/terminal-projekt

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 39

Bilal

RÜFÜS

Still Standing By David Wild

A Different Shade By Alasdair Duncan

Stints with various bands at high school followed before Oliver met many of the musicians who were carrying the torch for soul in the 21st century and eventually became part of their loose collective, The Soulquarians. “I met Ahmir [‘Questlove’ Thompson, of The Roots] through jam sessions in New York City. Ahmir used to come to that jam session – Erykah Badu.

Everybody. Common, Mos Def. I would go up and sing. I just kept showing up to all of them,” he says with a laugh.

After the commercial and critical success of his first album, Oliver was eager to experiment further and self-produce his next, something that people at his label Interscope were not so keen on. A series of drawn-out rows ensued. Interscope eventually rejected the album, Love For Sale, which was subsequently leaked online.

A

t the turn of the millennium, US soul music was in a state of rude health.

The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill had switched everyone on to ‘neo-soul’, and D’Angelo was at the peak of his powers.

Then in 2001, along came an artist whose debut album, 1st Born Second, expanded the boundaries of this recently-labelled genre, and threatened to blow the too-small box into which he was being forced to smithereens.

Bilal Oliver did cut his teeth singing in the church, but was also a classically-trained performer capable of singing opera in seven languages who loved freeform jazz.

In the 12 years since, Bilal hasn’t managed to capitalise on that early promise and not much has been heard of him. But Australian fans will soon get to hear his exceptional voice in person, as he visits the country for the first time to showcase material from new album A Love Surreal.

For a brief time Oliver wondered whether he would ever release his own material again, which made the completion of his 2010 LP Airtight’s Revenge all the more satisfying – particularly when it earned him a Grammy nomination. “It really just fuelled me to do what I wanted to do because there was no filter for the music on that album,” he says.

Now he’s back to somewhere near where he feels he should be at this point in a difficult career, with a third album he’s pleased with and that he hopes will open him up to more fans. “I wanted to make an album that was more accessible,” Oliver says. “On Airtight I got a lot out. So, on this record I was in a warmer place and in a different kind of vibe. On this record I’m still speaking about passion and I’ve just focused a lot of it on love stories.”

Looking back on a decade and a half as a recording artist, Bilal makes no secret of the fact that he has spent much of it frustrated at the industry’s focus on making money. But he’s matter-of-fact, even philosophical about his experience: “It’s the story of an artist.”

Where: The Hi-Fi / Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park When: Saturday May 4

Xxx photo by Xxx

Speaking from his home in Brooklyn, the laidback Oliver remembers how his love for music was formed when his father used to sneak him inside the jazz clubs of his childhood home, Philadelphia. “I used to have to sit in the back watching all of these different bands who really intrigued me a lot. I liked the way the cats dressed, the way they talked. I got to see Terence Blanchard, Kenny Kirkland, Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts. I was 13 years old – I made up my mind then that I wanted to be in music in some kind of way.”

I

t has been a big year for Sydney lads RÜFÜS – the young band have been to New York and played in front of their heroes, had great success at home with their single ‘This Summer’, and toured with the likes of Röyksopp.

That last one may have been a foregone conclusion, given the bands’ shared love of umlauts, but RÜFÜS were still terribly excited at the chance to share a stage with Norway’s finest electronic producers.

According to keyboard player Jon George, the band have learned a lot from playing live. “It’s awesome touring with such big acts,” he says, “and it’s helped us refine our own sound. I mean, I think we’ve always had our own distinct sound based on shared influences, but playing with an act like Röyksopp allowed us to refine it even further. It’s awesome to see your favourite bands and figure out what you want to be doing like them, as well as what you want to do differently.”

For the last several months, the band have been hard at work on their debut album, due to arrive around the middle of this year. “We packed up all our gear in July of last year, and went down to the South Coast,” George says.

“We rented a house in Berry for a month, and came out with a bunch of tracks we liked. When we went back to Sydney, we renovated an old water tank at my parents’ place and turned it into a studio – we put some acoustic panelling in there, and some cabling, and we kitted out our own little studio.”

Their set-up is something like a bunker, an escape from the outside world, and the guys have been spending hours in there, polishing their new tracks to perfection. “We’re in the studio pretty much every day,” George says. “It’s turned into a massive project. The studio’s great,

though – we’re protected from the elements, and we feel like we’re sheltered from the outside world. We can go in there and work all night if we want to – I’m really happy with what’s come out.”

The first single to come from the album, ‘Take Me’, is just the kind of track you’d want from RÜFÜS – slick, sleek and danceable, with a decidedly sinister edge. “We were tossing up the first single for quite a while,” George explains. “‘Take Me’ is the most poppy song on there, but we decided we wanted to lead with something like that. There are a lot of deep tones, a lot of round tones through the album, as well as a lot of soulful vocals. We still have all our bells and whistles, so you can expect to hear all of that and more.”

RÜFÜS are all set to hit the road in support of ‘Take Me’, and promise that fans will be hearing at least four or five songs from their upcoming album. “We’re figuring out how to play them all right now,” George says. “It’s fun adding new stuff to the show. With the old tracks, we’ve revamped them in different ways – we’re not straying too far from the originals, but we want to give people something they haven’t seen before.”

George is confident that the band’s next single will come out on the tour, even if it doesn’t have a name just yet. “We’re tossing up between two at the moment, so I’d better not say anything just yet,” he laughs. “You’ll find out soon enough!

I’m very excited for people to hear songs they haven’t heard before, to hear another side of us, or at least a different shade.”

Where: Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst When: Friday April 12

Chance Waters Definitely Maybe By Krissi Weiss

S

growing audience, progress was only being made on the hard road for a long time. “I think ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ was just the right song and I was finally at the right point at my career and ready to take any sign of interest and run with it,” he says. “We were willing to do anything to turn it into a hit. I toured four times last year, doing everything to get the triple j fanbase interested and engaged.”

ydney-based hip hop artist and producer Chance Waters is tidying up from an exhausting and exciting 2012, and while his second album Infinity was only released late last year, he knows he needs to take full advantage of the successes he’s enjoyed so far. After moving on from Phatchance, the name under which he released his debut album, his music has evolved and his place in the Australian music scene seems a lot more certain.

While Infinity may seem to be still cooling on the windowsill, Waters is halfway through writing his third album, with a new single on the way shortly. Collaborations are sure to be a feature, although the specifics aren’t ready to be announced just yet. “The next record is coming along really well and we’re looking at dropping the first single from that around June this year,” he says. “Once the radio play starts to dry up and your best singles are exhausted, I don’t see the point in not getting out there and making better songs. The last album was a breakthrough album for me but God, I’m not a platinum-selling artist and there’s still a really long way for me to go so it’s all about maintaining momentum.

Infinity had legs on it but people have short attention spans so I’ve got to keep moving forward.”

A number of collaborations, as well as some nifty songwriting, earned him two spots on this year’s Hottest 100, with ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ (featuring Lilian Blue) and ‘Young And Dumb’ (featuring Bertie Blackman) coming in at 89 and 45 respectively. His brand of hip hop is drenched in summertime and heavy on the catchy hooks – bordering more on a pop sound than the frenetic rhymes of The Tongue or Hilltop Hoods – and Waters believes that stepping away from Phatchance has helped him reach an even larger audience.

“There wasn’t any deliberate reinvention but I took it as an opportunity to reboot everything,” Waters says. “I had to ditch that moniker, I hated it so much and my music had evolved a whole lot from when I started. I was making these really personal songs and pouring my heart into it and then I had this gimmicky, Golden Era, mid-’90s name that didn’t suit anything. It’s just a terrible, terrible name, kind of amusing – but like The B Sharps in The Simpsons, it’s funny the first time you hear it and gets progressively worse and worse. I

40 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

really doubt I would’ve been earmarked for The J Award if I was still rolling under the same name.”

Timing is everything in music. With so many talented artists making tasty tunes – from big name stars to the kid at the local open mic

night – Waters realised that knowing when to take a chance and run with something was going to make all the difference to his career.

He had supported most of hip hop’s local stalwarts – Bliss N Eso, Drapht, 360 and The Herd – and although he’d received smatterings of attention from the media and had a steadily

With: Mind Over Matter Where: The Standard / Lvl 3, 383 Bourke St, Surry Hills When: Friday April 12 And: Infinity out now through I Forget, Sorry!

Pez Paranoid Thyroid By Simon Topper

W

hen Melbourne hip hop artist Pez turned heads with his laidback hit ‘The Festival Song’ in 2008, Australian hip hop was just starting its historic commercial breakthrough. While plenty of acts have flourished in the years since, Pez has been notable by his absence. With his second album finally getting the final touches, he’s now embarking upon the aptly titled Back In The Game tour. However, for the man known to his postman as Perry Chapman – who talks faster in conversation than when he’s MCing – this extended break was due to far more than the usual sophomore album blues.

“It was pretty dark at times, man,” Chapman says of the last few years. “‘Festival Song’ kind of took off out of nowhere really quickly, which was exciting for a bit but also pretty overwhelming and unexpected and shit, and then I probably got a bit carried away with all the people I was hanging out with and was partying a lot. But in amongst that I started getting some weird symptoms. Eventually I got to this point where my eyes looked really weird like they were bulging out of my head, and I thought ‘what’s going on?’ so they diagnosed me with that thing and said ‘You know, your thyroid’s gone really haywire’.”

very excited, because I feel that we both wrote something pretty genuine.”

Chapman feels the Australian hip hop scene has reached a new peak, higher even than when he started out. “Most people still didn’t particularly give a shit about it then, unless it was the Hilltop Hoods, so to watch that finally become this accepted, it’s weird, man,” he says.

“I feel like the music is getting better and better and it’s finally found its direction. The quality’s finally hit a point where you’re very proud to be a part of it. In the past it’s gone from trying to copy American stuff to then doing real blatantly Aussie stuff to make a point, and then stuff that was pretty good, like people would say ‘That’s good, for Australian hip hop’, rather than it was good for hip hop. … [Now] people are making music with a purpose. It feels like a bit of a blessing. If ever there was a time to want to get back out there, I’m starting to realise it’s a really lucky place to be in.”

Where: The Glasshouse, UTS / The Roxy Hotel, Parramatta When: Wednesday April 17 / Friday April 26

‘That thing’ the doctors diagnosed him with was Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition. Chapman says that after talking to other people who’d been treated with drugs and had their thyroid removed, he decided to treat his disease naturally. “It took a lot longer to get under control, but I’m really glad that I did,” he says. “It felt like a reflection of where I was at to some degree, to have an autoimmune thing. It brought to light a lot of the pretty dark and paranoid and horrible things that you think about yourself. It made me get my shit together and say ‘Man, I think there’s some things I need to address’. It made me step back from writing music for maybe two years.”

“It felt like a refl ection of where I was at, to have an autoimmune thing. It brought to light a lot of the pretty dark and paranoid and horrible things that you think about yourself. It made me get my shit together” With the new album finally recorded and out later this year, for the first time in his life Chapman is looking forward to performing live.

“When it happened back then, it all happened so quickly, there was a lot of fear attached to it. I pretty much dreaded performing live. It’s meant to be this dream for most people ‘Hey, I’m performing live in front of people, I’ve made it!’, but I was terrified, like having an anxiety attack. I worked through that and I’ve started getting to this point [where] I just love it! I’m starting to understand what it’s all about to give that energy out and to get that back from the fans and actually connect and play off them a lot more. … A lot of hip hop acts come out and it’s all ‘RAAARGH!’ and everything’s in your face, and it’s energy the whole time.

I get a headache after five songs! So I feel this is a chance to show some different levels and to connect to people on different levels to everyone else.”

Chapman is also applying that idea – of bringing different levels to hip hop – to some upcoming collaborations, particularly a song he’s recorded with his childhood hero, Paul Kelly. He says he met the icon at a friend’s dad’s birthday party, having no idea that Kelly would be in attendance. “That first time I met him he said ‘Man, I just bought your album’ and it was frigging bizarre, ’cause I grew up listening to him with my parents. So I said ‘If you ever wanna do a song with a rapper just let me know, ’cause I’m down for it’ and he said ‘I’ll hold you to that’. I got his number and went to his house a couple of times.

“We just jammed out and it all seemed to come together really quickly,” Chapman explains. “I was overwhelmed, so I just procrastinated for about two years. I just kept thinking ‘Shit, man, this is Paul Kelly, my lyrics have got to be good’ so I just kept putting it off, putting it off. I finally ran into him again and we got him in the studio and it sounds pretty amazing, man. I’m

'R \RX XVH (FVWDV\ W\SH VXEVWDQFHV" Researchers from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre would like to speak to people who use drugs when they are out. Face to face interviews will be conducted between April and May. The interview takes around one hour and is held at a convenient location for you. Interviews are anonymous and confidential.

You will be reimbursed $40 for your time.

Contact Joe on (02) 9385 0301, email nswedrs@unsw.edu.au or SMS details to 0405 142 787 (you do not have to use your real name).

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 41

club guide send your listings to : clubguide@thebrag.com

club pick of the week SATURDAY APRIL 13

Pharoahe Monch

FRIDAY APRIL 12

Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst

Pharoahe Monch (USA),

Peace, NTSC, DJ Victor Lopez $40 (+ bf) 8pm MONDAY APRIL 8 Manly Library Futureskool DJ Workshop Meem, Morphingaz free 5pm Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket Mother Of A Monday DJ Smokin’ Joe free 7pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Latin Jazz DJs free 7pm

TUESDAY APRIL 9 Establishment, Sydney Rumba Motel Salsa DJ Willie Sabor free 8pm Scruffy Murphy’s, Haymarket I Love Goon Resident DJs free 7pm Trademark Hotel, Kings Cross 42 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

Cross Take Over Thursdays Resident DJs free-$10 9pm Whaat Club, Potts Point Chakra Robust, Brizz free 9.30pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Propaganda Propaganda DJs free (student)-$5 9pm

Coyote Tuesday Resident DJs 9pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Chu Resident DJs free 8pm

WEDNESDAY APRIL 10 Goodgod Small Club, Sydney Vice Presents: The Spring Breakers Issue Alex Cameron (Seekae), Golden Blonde, Dave Miller DJ (PVT) free (rsvp) 8pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross KIT Wednesdays Resident DJs 10pm The Lewisham Hotel Garbage 90s Nights Resident DJs free 7pm Manly Library Futureskool DJ Workshop Meem, Morphingaz free 5pm The Ranch Hotel, Epping Hump Wednesdays Resident

DJs 8pm Whaat Club, Potts Point Whip It Wednesdays Vertigo DJs free 9pm The World Bar, Kings Cross The Wall Deckhead, Pablo Calamari, E-Cats $10 9pm

THURSDAY APRIL 11 The Cool Room, The Australian Brewery, Rouse Hill Playboy Mobile Model Comp Dan Absent 8pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Resident DJs 10pm Q Bar, Darlinghurst Hot Damn Hot Damn DJs $15-$20 8pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross Rewind Resident DJs 8pm Trademark Hotel, Kings

Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Fresh Fridays Reggae & Hip Hop Party New Dub City, Kodak, DJ Secret Weapon free 8pm Candys Apartment, Kings Cross Something Wicked Harper, Prolifix, Oh Dear $10-$15 8pm Chinese Laundry, Sydney Bass Mafia Doctor Werewolf, Phetsta, LDRU, Empress You, Ra Bazaar, Oceans, Big Deal Gillespe $15-$25 10pm Cohibar, Darling Harbour Toby Neal, Mike Silver free 5pm Goodgod Front Bar, Sydney Yo Grito! Yo Grito! DJs free 9pm Home Nightclub, Darling Harbour The Guestlist Resident DJs 9pm Jacksons On George, Sydney $5 @ 5 On Fridays Resident DJs free 5pm Kaya Sydney, Darlinghurst Haiku Boom Boom DJs, No Fixed Abode DJs free 10pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Fridays Resident DJs 10pm Marquee, The Star, Pyrmont The Faders, Tenzin $20 10pm Oatley Hotel We Luv Oatley Hotel Fridays Resident DJ free 8pm Omega Lounge, City Tattersalls Club, Sydney Unwind Fridays DJ Greg Summerfield free 5.30pm One22, Sydney Double Up?: Drum And Bass // Jungle Reload, Kool Ade, Kleva 1, FKNA, Billy Green, MC Antic free (early bird)-$10 9pm Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst RÜFÜS $17 (+ bf) 8pm Oxford Art Factory - Gallery Bar, Darlinghurst Fingertips, Lectricity, 1Chain DJ free 8pm Phoenix Bar, Darlinghurst Banjee DJ Sveta, Sex Azza Weapon, DJ Smithers $10 10pm Q Bar, Darlinghurst Girlthing: Snatch & Grab NatNoiz, Cunningpants, Tigerlily, Kristy Lee, Twincest, Sinead Ni Mhorda $20 10pm The Ranch Hotel, Epping Retro Fridays Resident DJs 9.30pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross MILF – Man I Love Fridays!

Resident DJs 8pm Soho, Potts Point Soho Fridays The Twins free 8pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Soft & Slow - House Of Disco Label Night Rocco Raimundo, David Maslen (UK), Pink Lloyd, Dream CATCHer $10 11.59pm The Standard, Surry Hills Chance Waters $12 (+ bf) 8pm Tatler, Darlinghurst Pineapple Republic Shantan Wantan Ichiban, Mike Who, Senor Bolivar, Tropicante, Huwston $5 10pm Trademark Hotel, Kings Cross Trademark Fridays Resident DJs free (early bird) 10pm The Watershed Hotel, Darling Harbour Bring On The Weekend! DJ Matt Roberts free 6pm

Whaat Club, Potts Point Think Fridays Jamie Lyn, KittKatt, Peeping Tom $10$15 8pm The World Bar, Kings Cross MUM MUM DJs $10-$15 8pm

SATURDAY APRIL 13

SUNDAY JUNE 24

Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Tai Daniels, Andy free 8pm Candys Apartment, Kings Cross Disco! Disco! Sherlock Bones, Fresh To Death, Robust, Stalker, Intheory vs Beatz Me vs Hitterswitch, Oh Dear, Twissted, DJ Fabio, Daddy Long Legs $20 8pm Chinese Laundry, Sydney Ellen Allien (GER), Pixl, A-Tonez, Fingers, E-Cats, Tigerstyle, FT Mode, Ra Bazaar, Bounce Crew DJs, Josh Riley $15-$25 9pm Civic Underground, Sydney Jimpster (UK), Gemma Van D, Tom Harwood, Ryan Kenna, Andy Myatt $25 10pm Club 77, Darlinghurst Starfuckers Starfuckers DJs 10pm Cohibar, Darling Harbour Yellow Sox DJ Matt Roberts free 8pm Coogee Bay Hotel – Beer Garden Coopers On The Green DJ Sessions Resident DJs free 4pm The Factory Theatre, Marrickville A Night Of Trance 10th Birthday MaRLo feat. Chloe, Scott Richardson, Steve Strangis, Pato De Gomah, Rossco, Toby Matrix, Zac Slade, Adriano Giorgi, Nathan Cryptic, Duress, Alex (Chico) Arias, Jay Kaos, Brendon Metrix, Matt Dawson, Avian, Nexus, Costa Mappis, Transience DJ Comp Winner $35 (+ bf) 7pm FBi Social @ Kings Cross Hotel Hands Up! Clockwerk free $11.30pm Gladstone Hotel, Chippendale .darkroom: The Red’s Back Shepz, Emass, Andrew Wowk, Qu-Zen, Dave Rogers, Gav Whalan, Asger Jorn, James Walsh, Jordan Peters, Gareth Psaltis $10$15 7pm Goodgod Small Club, Sydney Compound Aaron Andrew, Ben Fester, Community, Subaske, Zeus $10 11pm Home Nightclub, Darling Harbour Homemade Saturdays Resident DJs $20-$25 9pm The Imperial Hotel, Erskinville Bear Pit George Roussos, Charles Fenech, Richard Bolt $10-$20 9pm Ivy, Sydney Pacha Denzal Park, Minx, SCNDL, Ben Morris, Devola, Spenda C, Fingers, Pat Ward, Pablo Calamari, Hansom, Trent Rackus, Deckhead, Kid Crookes, Polina, Lola Siren, Program $40 6.30pm Ellen Allien

Jacksons On George, Sydney Resident DJs free 9pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Kitty Kitty Bang Bang Resident DJs 10pm Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst Pharaohe Monch (USA), Peace, NTSC, DJ Victor Lopez $45 (+ bf) 8pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross The Suite Resident DJs 8pm Secret Frontier Location, Sydney Los Paradiso! James Bucknell, Long John Saliva, Manky, Mr Webster, JMS & Harry Sounds $15 10pm Soho, Potts Point Usual Suspects J-Trick, Genie, Kitsch, Mike Ruckus, Rated R, Heke, Rain, Here’s Trouble 8pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Spice Move D (GER), Simon Caldwell, Morgan, Murat Kilic, Robbie Lowe, Morgan $20 10pm Trademark Hotel, Kings Cross Trademark Saturdays I Am Sam, Nacho Pop, Damn, Jason K, Troy T, MC Deekay free (guestlist) 9pm The Watershed Hotel, Darling Harbour Skybar Saturdays Resident DJ $20 9.30pm Whaat Club, Potts Point After Dark Robust, Camo, Sampy $10-$15 8pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Cakes Resident DJs $15-$20 8pm

SUNDAY APRIL 14 Abercrombie Hotel, Broadway S.A.S.H. Sundays Secret Guest, Inexc, Barem, Michal Zietara, Kerry Wallace, Matt Weir $10 2pm Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Clockwerk, Richie Ryan, Andy Glitre free 3pm The Beresford Hotel, Surry Hills Beresford Sundays Resident DJs free 3pm Jacksons On George, Sydney Aphrodisiac Industry Night Resident DJ free 9pm Kit & Kaboodle, Kings Cross Easy Sundays Resident DJs free 10pm Oatley Hotel Sunday Sessions DJ Tone free 7pm Sapphire Lounge, Kings Cross Sapphire Sundays Resident DJs 8pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Spice After Hours Robbie Lowe, Murat Kilic $25 4am The Watershed Hotel, Darling Harbour DJ Matt Roberts free 2pm The World Bar, Kings Cross Soup Kitchen Resident DJs free 7pm

club picks up all night out all week...

Chance Waters

SATURDAY APRIL 13 Chinese Laundry, Sydney Ellen Allien (GER), Pixl, A-Tonez, Fingers, E-Cats, Tigerstyle, FT Mode, Ra Bazaar, Bounce Crew DJs, Josh Riley $15-$25 9pm Civic Underground, Sydney Jimpster (UK), Gemma Van D, Tom Harwood, Ryan Kenna, Andy Myatt $25 10pm Goodgod Small Club, Sydney Compound Aaron Andrew, Ben Fester, Community, Subaske, Zeus $10 11pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Spice Move D (GER), Simon Caldwell, Morgan, Murat Kilic, Robbie Lowe, Morgan $20 10pm

FRIDAY APRIL 12

SUNDAY APRIL 14

Beach Road Hotel, Bondi Fresh Fridays Reggae & Hip Hop Party New Dub City, Kodak, DJ Secret Weapon free 8pm

Abercrombie Hotel, Broadway S.A.S.H Sundays Secret Guest, Inexc, Barem, Michal Zietara, Kerry Wallace, Matt Weir $10 2pm

Chinese Laundry, Sydney Bass Mafia Doctor Werewolf, Phetsta, LDRU, Empress You, Ra Bazaar, Oceans, Big Deal Gillespe $15-$25 10pm

The Faders

Marquee, The Star, Pyrmont The Faders, Tenzin $20 10pm Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst RÜFÜS $17 (+ bf) 8pm The Spice Cellar, Sydney Soft & Slow - House Of Disco Label Night Rocco Raimundo, David Maslen (UK), Pink Lloyd, Dream CATCHer $10 11.59pm

xxx

The Standard, Surry Hills Chance Waters $12 (+ bf) 8pm

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 43

Deep Impressions Underground Dance And Electronica with Chris Honnery

Vakula

Sundays 14 APRIL

Special Guest Inxec Barem Michael Zietara & Edbert Matt Weir Kerry Wallace

ABSTRACT ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS

Midge Ure THE VOICE OF ULTRAVOX

VIENNA/LAMENT/BREATH/ONE SMALL DAY/ HYMN/LOVES GREAT ADVENTURE/DANCING WITH TEARS IN MY EYES/ IF I WAS/FADE TO GREY

DIRECT FROM THE UK

F

ast-rising Ukrainian DJ and producer Vakula, real name Mikhaylo Vityk, returns Down Under to headline the next Mad Racket party on Saturday May 11.

Vakula initially showcased his jazz-influenced take on deep house with releases on labels like Uzuri, Quintessentials and Doppelschall, before ramping things up over the past few years, prompting plenty of the more discerning folk in clubland to sing his praises.

Following a prolific 2011 that included an EP on Pheek’s Archipel label, Vakula released two artist albums last year, both of which were under alternate monikers – the first under the name V through Seattle’s Nuearth Kitchen, the second, under the name Vedomir, followed shortly after, and offered more left-field sounds when compared to the classic deep house feel of V. In recent times, Vakula has reworked Trus’me’s ‘Need A Job’ into a visceral slab of acid house, a remix that will arouse the appetite of technophiles for his forthcoming album, You’ve Never Been To Konotop, which will be his maiden LP as Vakula. In terms of what to expect from his Sydney performance, Vakula elucidates, “I like the old era DJs – Joe Claussell, Theo Parrish, Francois K, DJ Harvey…” If that’s any indication, you can anticipate a broad sonic banquet at Marrickville Bowling Club next month.

Inimitable Canadian producer Mathew Jonson will release his next album, Her Blurry Pictures, in June. The twist is that the Wagon Repair main man will release the album not on his own label, but rather on Damian Lazarus’ Crosstown Rebels, through which Jonson released his ‘Dayz’ single back in 2011. Never a fellow short of creative juices, Jonson has a growing discography that comprises classic cuts such as ‘Marionette’ and ‘Followed By Angels’. He’s also worked as part of the experimental acid techno/jazz troupe Cobblestone Jazz and Midnight Operator, while remixing the likes of Tiga, Swayzak and Hiem. Surprisingly, despite his prolific output, Her Blurry Pictures is only Jonson’s second solo album, following 2010’s Agents of Time, and is a mixture of recent

songs recorded in his current home of Berlin as well as older tracks that date back to his time in Vancouver. Jonson has been quoted as saying the album signifies “a transition from darker states into something filled with light” in his life. What kind of ‘something’ that is remains to be seen/heard.

As part of its 20th anniversary celebrations, Cologne label Kompakt Records will release a compilation with a twist next month: a collection of some of the label’s most memorable dancefloor anthems will be rearranged into chamber music by Colognebased composer Gregor Schwellenbach.

All of Kompakt’s poster boys will be put through the classical wringer, with the tracklist featuring classical refashionings of Gui Boratto, Michael Mayer, Voigt & Voigt and Superpitcher. The presser explains that Schwellenbach aimed to give each song “a new voice” while maintaining “the core of the experience – the melody, the hook, the feeling” of the original tracks. Forget about synthesisers and samples – this will be a more ‘refined’ listening experience featuring flutes, guitars and harps, and it will probably be the only time you could get your mother to listen to a barnstorming techno anthem such as Supermayer’s ‘Two Of Us’ in its entirety (and like it). Surely that alone is a reason to procure this release.

Staying on Kompakt, the forthcoming debut LP In Technicolor, from Cologne-based duo Coma (Georg Conrad and Marius Bubat) will be released on the label later this month.

Coma announced themselves a few years back with the serene ‘Raindrops’, which sampled Erlend “Whitest Boy Alive” Øye’s cover of ‘Fine Day’, originally lifted off Øye’s classic DJ-Kicks compilation. In Technicolor aims to transcend “the boring club conventions restricting the expressiveness of the music”, and features playful and melodic tracks that straddle pop and club sounds, such as lead-off singles ‘Hooray’ and the catchy ‘My Orbit’, which popped up on Michael Mayer’s Resident Advisor podcast from late last year.

LOOKING DEEPER

saturday

Nina Kraviz

20 april

105 VICTORIA ROAD, ENMORE

SATURDAY APRIL 27

SATURDAY MAY 11

SATURDAY MAY 4

MONDAY MAY 27

Rodriguez Jr The Burdekin

Nina Kraviz The Grounds Alexandria

Ticketek 132 849 www.ticketek.com.au www.abstractentertainment.com.au 44 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

Vakula Marrickville Bowling Club

Karl Hyde Sydney Opera House

Deep Impressions: electronica manifesto and occasional club brand. Contact through deep.impressions@yahoo.com

snap up all night out all week . . .

It’s called: Compound Sydney It sounds like: Outlandish grooves for your body...

Who’s playing: Community, Subaske and Zeus, plus our regular brotherhood who join us every now and then.

Three songs you’ll hear on the night: Delroy Edwards – ‘Hear t and Soul’; Erot – ‘A Song For Annie’; Skream – ‘Summer Dream s’ And one you definitely won’t: Scatman – ‘Scatman’.

Sell it to us: If you’ve got an open mind for new sounds and you’re not afraid to have a dance then Compound is where you need to be! Whether you’re a headnodder, finger-snapper, shoulder-shrugger or jackmaster – if you can groove with any part of your body then you were made for this dancefloor.

The bit we’ll remember in the AM: That it’s time to go home. :( Crowd specs: Friendly, open-minded and, most impor tantly, up for an all-night party!

Wallet damage: $10 on the door.

Where: Goodgod Small Club When: Saturday April 13 (our first birthday!)

harbourfest 2013

PICS :: AM

party profile

compound sydney

prosumer

PICS :: TL

31:03:13 :: Cargo / Bungalow 8 / The Loft :: Darling Harbour

s.a.s.h

PICS :: AM

09:03:13 :: Goodgod Small Club :: 53-55 Liverpool St Chinatown 8084 0587

circoloco

PICS :: AM

far too loud 31:03:13 :: The Greenwood Hotel :: 36 Blue St North Sydney 9964 9477

PICS :: AM

31:03:13 :: The Abercrombie Hotel :: 100 Broadway Ultimo 9280 2178

30:03:13 :: Chinese Laundry :: 111 Sussex St Sydney 8295 9999 S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HONCHO)

OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER HARVEY :: ASHLEY MAR ::

:: KATRINA CLARKE :: AVERIE

BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13 :: 45

snap

ivan smagghe & pachanga boys

PICS :: TL

up all night out all week . . .

28:03:13 :: The Abercrombie Hotel :: 100 Broadway Ultimo 9280 2178

PICS :: KC

spit syndicate

30:03:13 :: Oxford Art Factory :: 38-46 Oxford St Darlinghurst 9332 3711

magic dance III

PICS :: TL

xxyyxx

party profile

It’s called: Magic Dance III

27:03:13 :: The Standard :: 3/383 Bourke St Surry Hills 9660 7953

It sounds like: Reach-for-the-roof, make-it-las t-forever super-house.

Who’s playing: Tunnel Signs (Ash Le Rouge ), Mirror Mirror, Andy Webb, ROOF. Three songs you will hear on the night: Tunne l signs – ‘Sun’; Mark E – ‘Oranges’; DJ Hell – ‘U Can Dance' (any remix).

One you won’t: Nothing is off limits in ze house of ze danse magique.

The bit you’ll remember in the AM: Mirror signs controlling the late-night lifeaffirming ecstasy opuses…

Crowd specs: Smiles all round.

Wallet damage: Just $5.

Where: An abandoned club – 113-115 William Street.

luke hess 29:03:13 :: Marquee :: The Star Sydney 9657 7737

46 :: BRAG :: 507 :: 08:04:13

28:03:13 :: Goodgod Small Club :: 53-55 Liverpool St Chinatown 8084 0587

PICS :: AM

marquee one year anniversary

PICS :: TL

When: Saturday April 13, 10pm

RIE CHO) :: KATRINA CLARKE :: AVE

S : TIM LEVY (HEAD HON OUR LOVELY PHOTOGRAPHER :: MAR LEY ASH :: HARVEY

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