record reviews
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0Grand Salvo – Sea Glass
Sea glass. A sharp, human thing worn smooth by nature. A still thing enclosing so much time and tumult. When, six years after I fell hard for Grand Salvo’s sixth album, Slay Me In My Sleep, I saw the name of this follow-up record, the metaphor made sense before I’d even heard the songs. “I listened on the weekend and it gutted me,” said a fellow ...
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0Gregor – Silver Drop
Solo Melbourne artist Gregor makes new-wave pop with a wan exterior and a warm heart. The Durutti Column’s bloodless guitar noodling is an influence but Gregor’s storytelling skill is innate, comparable to The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt – the minimalist miseries of 1995 record, Get Lost, in particular. Despite at first feeling to be peering in on Gregor’s world – a place impervious to hearts so soft ...
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0Laura Jean – Devotion
On Press Play, the first track on Devotion, Melbourne songwriter Laura Jean winds back the clock. “I sat behind you on the bus yesterday / You were staring out the window”. The bus is leaving school and “yesterday” is decades ago, when Jean lived with her family on the NSW central coast. It sets the scene for an album anchored to youth, flowing with a ...
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0Native Cats – John Sharp Toro
Everyone and everything not in the crosshairs of Native Cats singer Chloe Alison Escott should be relieved. Her superpowers of perception lead to lyrics that first encapsulate and second eviscerate, while maintaining their shake-your-head-in-admiration hilarity. It’s no wonder bassist Julian Teakle is so po-faced at gigs. He’s probably trying not to lose it. The Tasmanian duo make precise and zeitgeist-unaware post-punk they call “electronic pub ...
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0Divide and Dissolve – Abomination
On St Patrick’s Day in Austin, in a courtyard sloshing with pints and good moods, Divide and Dissolve struck their first bottom-heavy chord and shamrocks quivered. Some revellers downed beers and bailed, but those who stayed heard guitarist and saxophonist Takiaya Reed declare: “The colonisation of First Nations people has not ended. We will not ignore the genocide of indigenous people around the world and ...
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0Primitive Motion – House In The Wave
Once I lived with a person who played the piano. It would drift down the hall, and in and out of my dreams. House in the Wave has that same distant yet insistent tug, as though the Brisbane duo is playing in a room that, if you enter, will only be dust motes descending on diminuendos. Sourced via a series of improvised sessions, Sandra Selig ...
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0Miss Blanks – Diary Of A Thotaholic
Brisbane rapper Miss Blanks (Sian Vandermuelen) is often compared to Nicki Minaj but Missy Elliot is more on point: fine, filthy and also very funny. At gigs, Vandermuelen’s trademark call for women, trans and non-binary folk to come to the front is an overdue example of how inclusivity in music scenes can be fun not hectoring. Such is her sass and charisma. Vandermuelen is all ...
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0Hypergiant – Father Sky
The metal bros will love this: my gauge for what constitutes great stoner rock is “how big does it make me feel?”. If a band’s got it, I’m super-sized into fuelled, filled-up vastness, even if just for a molten hot moment. Sydney band Hypergiant size me right up with their debut LP of space-slash-stoner metal and its “we gave it all” quality. When an aspect ...
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0Machine Translations – Oh
Machine Translations is singer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Greg Walker, and I’ve used up my ration of the word “underrated” on him. Two decades of only occasional albums still add up to a pretty extraordinary back catalogue of nine LPs. Good luck tracking them down, though. Walker wanted Oh to be “lean and mean”, but his stripped-back is far more layered-up than the next guy. Doom ...
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0Raven – The night is dark, the night is silent, the night is bright, the night is loud
Radiating out from his core instrument – a cello – Raven (Peter Hollo) journeys to meridian points wide and deep in this epic 60-minute album. In addition to his long-running “postfolkrocktronica” program on Sydney’s FBi Radio, Hollo is a fixture in Sydney’s neo-classical and jazz scenes guesting with Lisa Gerrard (Dead Can Dance) and pianist Sophie Hutchings. He plays in experimental jazz band Tangents and string quartet FourPlay. ...
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