Category: Australia

TRACK | Aloha Units – Mate’s Machine

5/5 golden merles

From Sydney at some point in the last decade, Aloha Units “Mates Machine” is off a 4 track tape of the same name. It is post-punk/diy/lo-fi, and a bit of all the things that are nice according to my subjective yammering and murmuring.

It would be hard to find a better example of a phrase I use as a mantra for both the making and assessing: control achieved through a willing proximity to its loss. Guitars scritch in heaping variables of concerted noise and two drum lanes pace the undertone. The squashy sprawl of the track is composed of a gentle thundering.

If you’re acclimated or accustomed to it, there’s a great deal of nuance to the edifice and its architectonics. It’s one a hell of a Hans Sprungfeld of a tune. And what I want to say, what I’m telling you now, is that Jebediah is really great.

In the petty amount of google searching I did for this post I was very excited to find Finley’s more recent work in anti-folk form as VIPP and, alternatively, synthwave focused with Sex Tourists. And really look forward to diving in when there is a moment to breath or look.

TRACK | Possible Humans – The Thumps

5/5 golden merles

The track for me represents music with a broader capacity than is normally assigned or attributed to it, one that is attempting to more properly incorporate doubt or uncertainty into the model.

Lyrically there is a reassessment at work and at the time of delivery we’re privy to some middle-stage in the process of reinvention.

Meanwhile the musical accompaniment is the energy embodied which acts as a catalyst for this effort, itself a spiraling, mechanical whirl.

The persistence fuels the framework, and is, through its action, a kind of enriched ground of possibility for the vocal performance to grow out of. Quietly at first, so as to not draw too much attention. And then later with determination.

It all locks together nicely in the tenuous/tempestuous process. Order the album here.

TRACK | The Rangoons – Two Minds

5/5 golden merles

The Rangoons’ “Two Minds” is an agreeably caustic mélange of noise. A phrase I promise I didn’t use a thesaurus to locate.

It was written peripatetically, on a walk to retrieve $40 worth of burgers (2) in the night. A rate hike commensurate with the corporate greed that cheapens and saddens all of our lives.

Music is innately funny.

What if I were to sing my woes in rhyming couplets to an arbitrary melody?

Music is innately serious.

I have honed my woes into a format most easily consumable by others in the hopes of being understood, of being tolerable while engaged in the act of conveying, and to attempt to whine in a manner that is pleasing, maybe even appealing. It’s an attempt to make entertainment of unease, or anyway of a feeling. It is a reasonable concession when confronted with the void and a limited time in which to be known.

The Rangoons understand the ridiculousness and seriousness involved in this dichotomy. And that this careening, combustible duality can be calibrated and pretty well conveyed.

TRACK | Daughter Bat and the Lip Stings – chrissy dins

5/5 golden merles

More Love Songs was released on New Years Eve, maybe to spite the compulsive year-end-listers, maybe not. I think it’ll still make its way onto my 2022 set because it is deserving of praise. And, though it may try, the Gregorian calendar alone doesn’t dictate when or what we listen to.

Lots of formidable flux here, and it’s a little unnerving in it’s unfaltering shimmer.

Melody and tone are of paramount importance. But also up there in import is the character of the tones themselves, vocally and the instrumental accompaniment, which envelop a delirious kind of defiance, defiant but grotesque.

You can have it both ways, transformative between each line, the grave seriousness and the severed irreverence. It’s more fun that way, in fact, and richer. There’s a lot of value in taking either of these divergent impulses and honing them into a few heightened hooks which share a purpose. In that stylistic choice is a brighter/weirder future that maintains its sense of humor throughout the collapse.

TRACK | Dick Diver – Calendar Days

5/5 golden merles

In Calendar Days, jangly guitars usher the waves of overlapping melodies in the most politely unrelenting pop.

There is here a great raiding with reluctance. Somehow it is all done productively, without mercy, and within the interlocking melodies.

The narration seems almost to take place from an out of body experience, or at least some interval removed from the recollected proceedings.

The tone feels detached and emotionally well processed. The events are still close enough to recount in detail, but there has been a coming to terms.

It is hard to imagine more potent nostalghia outside of Tarkovsky pulling you by the lapels through the mirror. What a fine tribute to an era and stretch of consciousness.

TRACK | DRAGGS – HEARSE

5/5 golden merles

DRAGGS makes reliably filthy lo-fi garage punk from the Australian Gold Coast. In writing about this now I have realized there was a 5th record released in 2019 on Slime Street, surely full of muck that I’m very happy to dive into.

HEARSE is a bludgeoning. It is regularly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerable to most fans of the broader genre. But it is always returning, beat from beat, to it’s foundation, a finely honed structure underneath the apparent liberties taken with form.

TRACK | King Tears Mortuary – Crash Report

5/5 golden merles

From King Tears Mortuary’s 2012 Safe Sex 7″, Crash Report is a track on that very fine EP.

There is a somewhat broadly shared Australian sentiment around lo-fi garage and bedroom rock that I find very agreeable. Or did, of a certain era, maybe it has passed. The internet makes all this seem eternal.

But from a population of 25m (15m less than California) there is a pervasive consensus about what guitar-music should prioritize closer to my own predilections. And the quality dispensed by this culture seems disproportionate in the extreme.

Maybe we are both just defective/mutated in a similar manner.

KTM here deliver some undeniably pointed melodic hooks and fun/inventive lyrically playful phrasing such as “light of my life goes on and off.”

TRACK | cupid and the stupids – Love and Liquor

5/5 golden merles

The controlled chaos on display in Love and Liquor is a great gift. Both the lead and backing vocals are tremendously good. I am desperately indebted to the crescendo of “Breaking my Heart,” the primary melody and it’s various subsystems; it’s carried me through a couple days at least.

A recurring theme here in my myriad appreciations are the pulling together of lo-fi pieces into a coherent and anthemic whole, unabashedly taking the stripped down, dollar-bin components of quasi-functional home recording devices and software and elevating them to an effect most major studios can’t accomplish.

That’s a fundamental part of the glory of the ineffable.

It is more likely found in the efforts of those determined to uncover it through the dedicated pursuit of creative problem solving, passionately preoccupied with honoring truth and the capture of a feeling.

And every time it succeeds another gear-head reinvests in a piece of technology that is the solution to almost certainly nothing, certain that this time it will be different. Alas… that is not what is lacking.

If you’re turned off by the production, I’d beg you to listen to it 3-4 times and push through it. The greatness is there. It’s not even particularly obscured.

TRACK | Terrible Truths – False Hope

5/5 golden merles

Teetering ideally between math and art rock, pop rock and garage rock, the core essence of it is simply good and engaging.

Rarely does it seem a song is written and recorded at such an optimal time for the elements that make up its composition.

This feels bottled at the right moment, excised from the aether more or less intact.


TRACK | Los Tones – What Happened

5/5 golden merles

In Los Tones’ What Happened we have some quintessential fun pop-garage rock. There is an undeniably solid lead riff set atop driving drums and a compelling vocal delivery.

The verses don’t undercut the chorus, they’re stabilizing, though they are ballast for balance. There are no gratuitous asides, fills or solos.

Every aspect combines to serve the core purpose of contributing to the single.

The track pushes slightly past the three minute mark then gracefully exits after one final build in which the band manages to more than muster sufficient intensity required to justify this trek which tacks another minute onto the runtime.