Tag: Australia

TRACK | Shrapnel – Catch You Out

5/5 golden merles

New external stimuli, Shrapnel’s “Catch You Out” is the sort of opener that lets you know you are in good hands for the remainder. Tones that mirror the nascent grit of becoming: yolk and seep, the assembled tribunal, that strange pounding as it echoes through the wall of your egg.

There is a community, an archive and an arbiter of it, “they say / you’re stumbling through the dark.” The cadre of informed have determined you are lost. These second person pronouncements casually accrue.

They continue:

“Benevolence / is scratching at the door / how is your innocence / your biggest flaw?” Rhyming door and flaw is something possibly only an Australian could amicably get away with. But we’re in luck. Also glorious: the enjambment as manifest by melody and tempo.

I’ve labeled it lo-fi/garage, but that’s not exactly or even really or even quite true. The textures are nuanced, dense, crinkly and sculpted. To anybody supping from a similar gulch and chewing a similar sediment, the distinction is apparent. There’s a lot of care applied to weighting that sonic range, curating its breadth and character. It’s great.

$10 AUD digital/$35 AUD Vinyl. 300 copies from Tenth Court. That’s cheaper in dollars. As an aside, go and check out “Goodbye Jerome!” by Sillard, Farr and Selnet.

TRACK | Busted Head Racket – Poor no more

5/5 golden merles

Garage Synth / Egg Punk. Newcastle, Australia. I will never in my life make something that sounds this good. Yet the merciless and merciful aspects of our brains are broken in similar if not effectively identical ways with respect to consumption ideals. What can be salvaged from a poisoned music culture and made good again?

We can’t let the bastards entirely have melody. We can’t allow them to curse and butcher the synth that sings, or only allow play for profit. I can’t make what the band has made. I like to hear it. Busted Head Racket are thriving in the new fresh hell.

As far as simulacra that mimic the moment go, it is a course correction. It’s a good interpretation. There’s an adequate amount of noise and degradation applied that substitutes for where it is otherwise extracted in daily, unavoidable consumption. The filth is placed back on the scale, countering the kitsch that sits like a lead balloon upon the other side.

The discordance is like a filter that allows you to see what lingers around you and at all times but is otherwise invisible; They Live sunglasses or Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe quietly mapping all the background radiation. It is encouraging to see. It helps us navigate the world.

What niche allows for such a thing to emerge and inhabit a space and not be smothered or obliterated? I don’t know, there’s not enough, you should probably support it if you are able. Name your price on the band’s bandcamp. Buy the Vinyl on Erste Theke Tontraeger.

TRACK | The Toads – Ex-KGB

5/5 golden merles

The Toads include members of The Shifters, The Living Eyes and Parsnip, each has featured here or in past mixes. In The Wilderness is for me one of the early contenders on the short list for album of the year. Underneath the immaculate cover art there’s a lot of amorphous and sometimes languorous melodic hooks, both grim and rejoicing. All the sonic lanes utilized to converse are corrupted and bleeding together as one sort of agreeably dysfunctional organism.

There’s a consistent sense of dread and foreboding expressed in conversational tones and language, never deprived of humor or fully paralyzed by withdrawal. It’s a nice record, almost akin to being alive. This is something I find some alignment with (“I have a love for what is mine / but it’s slowly disappearing / …wave after wave”).

Reading concurrent to processing the album, I find the tone and grade similar to some work from Louise Glück. These lines seems appropriate by way of comparison (following a bleakly-comedic sequence on forgetting the word for ‘chair’ in old age – just go read it):

“To raise the veil.
To see what you’re saying goodbye to.“

The melodic shift that accompanies the chorus late on is a valuable motion, increasing the scope and adding nuance, growing the world of the thing. There’s plenty of this care manifesting throughout, like the slight variations on the roving bass scale, the abiding horns and the backing vocal thrust bracketing many of the lines. There’s plenty of subtle sophistication that doesn’t reek of lacquer and polish; plenty of humor and a bit of misery in the fabric of it. I’m happy to hear it and to be in alignment with this bleak and pleasant thing.

Vinyl from Upset the Rhythm (UK) and Anti Fade Records (AU), $7.90 for the transmittable files.

TRACK | Busted Head Racket – CLOWNING

5/5 golden merles

Writing on Busted Head Racket in December I accused them of crafting “delightful and difficult to kill earworms.” The new work is just as infested and likewise just as rabid and relentless, a prized commotion carved in synths and the probable simulacra of a slide whistle. Or is it the real deal? I would ask you to decide. Asundered with intention and contented in collected the notions, it’s rattling along with conviction and guts.

It finally, mercifully, drove out an alternate jingle from my mind. Lyrics are something to do with everything, or faced with the daily phases of self-reported observations, vacillating in the performance of personhood, bounding between enchantment and disenchantment, mockery and conviction. Coherently capturing ambivalence is sometimes later more akin to the feeling at the moment, and a better document for it. The world will grind you into dust but, if you’re lucky, there’s a stage of becoming a fine paste prior to dehydration. A nice soothing balm.

Look at the video by throat.pasta over at Tremendo Garaje. According to TG, the EP will release around this rotten globe in cassette form from Painscale (AUS), Pogo Til You Puke (UK), Idiotape Records (FR), Spyasola Records(DE), Harry Records(NL), Blä Records (SE), SYF Records (PL) and Painters Tape Records (US). Name your own price on the bandcamp.

TRACK | Punter – A Minute’s Silence

5/5 golden merles

Hardcore punk from Melbourne with great scope, focused on the vast rot. The vocals are appropriately raving in a perpetual alarm propelled by an undercurrent of backing hooks and lead guitar melodies that facilitate agreeable ingurgitation.

You’re not going to get a better opening line than “Chuck a piss-up on a grave site” for awhile. The primary concerns explicit in the text are privacy in an era of unbidden observation, militarized police forces, and the general degradation and abuses of the social contract. It’s also anthemic. And it’s also a lot of fun.

From what I can gleam as am imbecile and outsider, the son and dotard of many hungry ghosts, the angle is relatively anarchic, I hope, to the extent affiliations don’t damn you outright. There are expressed concerns with left disunity benefitting the bastards at the alternate extreme. Historical examples are cited as everyman martyrs who have been sacrificed for a world they would be ashamed to have been affiliated with.

Your revulsion will either be directed outward or eat you alive from the inside. As an agent within a system of organized degradation with a capacity for self reflection, exercising that capacity for critique is imperative if there is any hope of remediation. And (and) there’s a lot of good hooks in it, too. Revel, wallow, examine, admire the monolithic guillotine on the cover… come up against the limitations of the medium and maybe discover a door.

$6.91 USD on Bandcamp or vinyl from Drunken Sailor Records.

TRACK | Tee Vee Repairmann – Bus Stop

5/5 golden merles

From the C:/ of Ishka Edmeades, in the style of garage punk and powerful pop: some new, prolific and defiant portents for the year in death ahead. “Bus Stop” wouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination sound out of place in a Riptides/Numbers set, save maybe for its general state of tightness and refinement. A warmth of tube derived tones coincide with a lament for missed opportunities, experiments wide in the channel with the organ/lead pulsing.

For better or worse it’s a timeless track, at least for the last 50 or 60 years. That’s a lot of influence to synthesize, to reconstitute from constituent parts in some manner that again feels alive. Rest assured, he’ll keep rewiring the available woes into good hooks and relaying them over digital mainframes regardless of your support. But I for one think that it’s nice to have something this reliable that isn’t a bad thing. Most reliable things are bad. but this is good and should be encouraged.

February 10th, 2023, is the arrival of the record, the tapes and vinyls seem destined to quickly diminish. US version out on Total Punk Records in Portland.

TRACK | Busted Head Racket – Wouldn’t you like 2 Know

5/5 golden merles

Bedroom lo-fi synth pop from Australia, the release from Idiotape Records (Paris) contains two ounces worth of delightful and difficult to kill earworms. The refinement is pronounced and very much appreciated: layers phasing and melodies shifting in precise sequence, the variance in lyric keeping us sated in the recurrent loops.

There’s great detailing in the margins, like the delicate death rattle production on the vocal lanes or the tinny-washed out drums that splash late on in the dying embers. It has great density to it but the appearance of pure candy and handles like a cartoon mallet: swiftly, against the odds, pleasantly gruesome.

The track features the dogged honing of hooks as previously manifested by so many of our senescent idols, by that I mean maybe it has some golden era le tigre feelings about it, maybe a touch of Metric, or of times new viking; things I like and you likely liked too.

The cost is €2 on the bandcamp for the files or €5 for the tape before shipping. See what you can do.

TRACK | OUZO! – State of Affairs

5/5 golden merles

Australian Garage punk that has become sentient and aware of the existential threats which are damning us to an arbitrary and relatively abrupt end. A dangerous prospect, hopefully. The track contains a litany of discontents, each censure delivered with savor. Racing through the excess offenses of the era, OUZO! continues smashing and grabbing back at the daily gauntlet of inadequate empathy.

And, of course, rightfully so. God damn the status quo, the complacency which empowers it, and the fervor with which its defenders somehow manage to live with themselves. In the fine form the critique holds up and is elevated. Tradition is presently the cancer of culture, by and large, we just hope for the benign kinds cluttering up our chest cavities.

But, also, contradictorily, ritual can reinforce behavior, and maybe with nice, catchy, scathing, fun, fiery tracks like these that tradition can be reinvented, with some small part played as a salving commiseration, consensus building catalyst, or soundtrack for direct action. I don’t know. Adam Curtis would politely laugh in my face for discussing tracks in these terms. But he provides no practical alternative and is himself caught in the indefinite arts feedback loop.

The 7″ is sold out from Weather Vane Records (AU), Polaks Records (EU) but some remain for €7 on the French Wine Records (EU) bandcamp. Or $3 AUD for the digital remains straight from the horses’ mouth.

TRACK | Krul – Moon

5/5 golden merles

Melbourne-based punk rock with Japanese vocals, Krul’s “Moon” arises like an ungodly hour, with drums like a stake through the heart. It’s made for inciting, the riot or the unvarnished reverie. In any case, a recipe for revolt and some finely constructed contents for the small hours.

Having lived under the reign of both the sun and moon, I tell you I prefer the moon: a great curator of the light, and patron saint of less is more. That is much like the instrumentation and production here, everything piled and cutting but not running the cup over.

There’s an old saying where I proport to be from, “He who burns bridges, builds mausoleums.” This is the soundtrack of that sentiment. You can name your price to own the set as we await a work at greater length.

TRACK | SOOKS – U.D.

5/5 golden merles

I’d advise you to at least consider any track that contains the line: I will find my enemies / and crush them in a warm embrace. Or at least this one, who knows what the future brings. “U.D.” is punk rock from Perth, Australia. With righteous anger the track laments the impotence of citizens within modern nation states, navigating the hoops and decoy levers of power, while true power is held through legalized corruption and representatives beholden to special interests.

But far from defeated, the chorus beseeches real organizing and the active deconstruction of unjust hierarchies. All generations seem to eventually sour and amalgamate in the hospice or the home, but hopefully we can productively stagger a few more feet further afield than is traditionally within one eras capacity.

The other good news is that in addition to the smiting and fury it’s a lot of fun and sharply constructed rampage. Seek out the whole set. Physical pulp from Richter Scale Tapes who also put out the superb Rude Television – Distractions, Demo 22 is five lbs for the Cassette while supplies last. These are both listed as free downloads, you ghoulish ingrates. Found through Amber Rambo yt curation.