Album Review: tunnel traffic – Age of Convictions
While tunnel traffic is ostensibly the moniker for multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Adam Hachey, the move to bring long time collaborator, singer Jacky Muñoz, to the fore in the new album, ‘Age of Convictions’ pays dividends. In this new album, Hachey has dialed up the intensity of the instrumentation: capturing the quite/loud ethics of the Pixies …
Live Review: Underground Lovers/The Lovetones, The Corner Hotel, Melbourne
There is something special about seeing a band play in their hometown. You just know the audience will be filled with family and friends and there is a special frisson in the air. Indeed, rather appropriately, lots of love pouring all over the place; in the venue, on stage, even after the gig when members …
Album Review: Paul Kelly – Songs from the South (Greatest Hits)
Anyone with even a scintilla of interest in the music scene in Australia needs to know of the golden thread that runs through it in the form of Paul Kelly. He is to Australia what Bruce Springsteen is to the US, Bally Bragg to the UK: a rock’n’roll poet that holds a mirror to society, …
Track: Cloud Tangle – Thinking of Myself
A languorous, charged and alluring dreamy fugue emanates from the new single by Brisbane’s Cloud Tangle in the delicious single ‘Thinking of Myself’. Cloud Tangle is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist and producer Amber Ramsay, who has been releasing music under Cloud Tangle since 2014. Of Cloud Tangle, Ramsay says: My goal with this project …
Album Review: White Lies – Five (Reissue)
Emerging in a crowded field with fellow indie nouveau goth bands like Interpol and Editors, White Lies have been, in my view very underrated over the years. Their 2019 album ‘Five’ has been just re-released with the addition of two new songs, ‘Falling Out Without Me’ and ‘Hurt My Heart’, recorded with US producer Andrew …
Track: Fragile Animals – Waiting
One of the best exponents of the new wave of Australian shoegaze/dream pop, Queensland’s Fragile Animals have followed up their much lauded EP ‘Only Shallow’ earlier this year with a blistering new single ‘Waiting’. Inserting a vibrant sheen of jangling guitars, discordance and harmonies, ‘Waiting’ is a gorgeous shimmering wall of sound, with its dream-like …
Track: Tunnel Traffic – Another Story
The low-fi musings of Adam Hachey have been sorely missed and it’s fantastic to see another creative flourish from him under the moniker Tunnel Traffic. Single ‘Another Story’ heralds a bout of three single releases from Tunnel Traffic in anticipation of a new album due later this year, and, if this single is indicative, we …
Album Review: Youth Group – Australian Halloween
Originating from the inner west of Sydney, Youth Group achieved a modicum of global attention for their exquisite cover of Alphaville’s ‘Forever Young’, a song so steeped in rosy-tinted nostalgia and yearning it made even to most hardened cynic tear up. Yes, I did. But as is often the case, Youth Group are much more …
News: Mallrat embarks on European tour
Brisbane’s fabulous Mallrat has just finished her US tour with an incandescent performance of her song ‘Charlie‘ off her EP ‘Driving Music’ on the Late, Late Show with James Corden. This is on the eve of a European tour throughout November: Such an incredibly beautiful rendition with a live band – it sends chills down …
Track: Flogging a Dead One Horse Town – Flogging a Dead One Horse Town (EP)
I’ll be upfront: Flogging a Dead One Horse Town (FADOHT) are not the dreamy melodic popsters that often typify the kind of band I review. This eponymous EP is muscular, brutal, industrial noise, but filled with highly satisfying aural chemistry. The track titles alone endear me to the band – indicating a duo who don’t …