Live: Dark Mofo Festival 2018 – Tanya Tagaq, Soundtrack to Nanook of the North
The extraordinary fare served up in Hobart’s annual Dark Mofo Festival continues to astound and delight. Set in the dark mid-winter Hobart, the southernmost point in Australia, the Festival must be one of the most unique and eclectic festivals in the world, both in terms of its setting, its motifs and its events that deliberately …
Track: Everything by Electricity – Place to Call My Own
The gorgeous, thick-layered textures of Everything by Electricity‘s new single ‘Place To Call My Own’ is synth pop at its most alluring: a steady pulse, a superglue-melody and an addictive, bitter-sweet taste. While recalling bands such as New Order and M83, the song has an unconventional arrangement that catches you off guard: a percussive beginning …
Track: A. Wesley Chung – Restless
A. Wesley Chung hails from California but has made his home in Glasgow. He has just released his debut album, ‘Neon Coast’ as a solo artist on 18th May via Glasgow’s own LP Records. ‘Neon Coast’ is an homage to the US West Coast, where Chung grew up, and the three most pronounced emotions that …
Track: The Essex Green – Sloan Ranger/The 701 plus album and touring news
Formed in the late nineties, The Essex Green became part of the legendary Elephant 6 Collective that included bands such as the Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, Beulah, Elf Power, of Montreal, The Minders, and Circulatory System, all which shared a passion for 60’s pop music. After a twelve year …
Track: A Shoreline Dream – Waitout plus EP news
A Shoreline Dream epitomise shoegaze dream pop at it’s most vibrant. Their new single ‘Waitout’ mixes a Ride-like vocal layers over an instrumentation that recalls The Stone Roses – rolling waves of shimmering guitar over a solid rhythm track. Waitout induces a dream-like reverie with shards of crystalline guitars weaving wave after wave of melody-infused …
Track: BATZ – Save Us
With wafts of the heady aroma of eighties greats like Martha and the Muffins or The Passions or even early Duran Duran, the new single from Melbourne’s BATZ is a vibrant poptastic blast of neon-lit joy, bursting with a catchy melody and cheeky refrain. BATZ aka Melbourne artist Chrissie Aubry says of the song: I …
Album Review: Courtney Barnett – Tell Me How You really Feel
Courtney Barnett is swiftly developing global adulation for her low-fi, heartfelt vignettes of life which capture with great honesty her trials and tribulations and insecurities. Like Jonathan Richman, there is a brutal honesty in her lyrics that reveal a bruised innocence, backed with an increasingly muscular instrumentation that creeps up and surprises. Themes reflect her …
Track: Barrie – Tal Uno
There is something about melancholic dream pop that seduces me. It is the bittersweet nature of the music – layers of beautiful bright often upbeat sounds sometimes contrasting and at times augmenting wistful downbeat vocal refrains filled with a sense of longing. Barrie, a band based in New York but with an international mix of …
Track: Luvia – For You
With an extraordinary voice that ranges across styles from Elizabeth Fraser from The Cocteau Twins to Mazzy Star vocalist Hope Sandoval, Brighton’s Luvia‘s new track ‘For You’ is a gorgeous, sparse and haunting song filled with reverb and shimmering guitar. The instrumentation is deceptively simple – layers of sound hide behind the delicate guitar providing …
Live: Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds – Brisbane Hotel, Hobart 13/05/2018
The carpets at the iconic Brisbane Hotel in, confusingly, Hobart, Australia are so sticky that if you stand still on the one spot for too long, you might get never get out alive. Luckily, when a band like Kid Congo and the Pink Monkey Birds play, there is no risk of that. Opening with their …