BIGSOUND 2016 – Part One
BIGSOUND 2016 Images by Claire Sullivan Bigsound is probably the largest thing I’ve ever covered in the few years I’ve been doing this writing stuff. It’s overwhelming, stressful, terrible, irritating, and at times, utterly life-affirming to be there, be amongst it, scooting around Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley alongside all of the most passionate music supporters and […]
Lucy Roleff – This Paradise (Lost & Lonesome Records)
Rich family estates may be nothing more than signifiers of gratuitous wealth, but there’s still an undeniable beauty to be found in the old structures dotting the countryside of wider Europe. Each contains volumes upon volumes of history – generations of life, death, memory, and dynasty all condensed and soaked into the worn walls and […]
OMNI – Deluxe (Trouble in Mind Records)
“Let’s share champagne in the sand”, invites Omni vocalist Philip Frobos over the choruses of ‘Wire’, the third song off of their playful and strange debut on Trouble in Mind Records, Deluxe. It’s a pretty picture, that lyric. Makes me think of something Tears for Fears might’ve written for Songs from the Big Chair. But […]
Tourist Dollars – Tourist Dollars EP (Deaf Ambitions)
Listening to Melbourne’s Tourist Dollars on their debut EP is like drifting into scenes of a slightly melancholic 1970s romance movie. They’ve got this nostalgic swagger to them, like a band performing to a mostly empty school hall covered with adornments from a local party supply store, with two star-crossed youths swaying beneath a softly […]
Poliça + Jaala @ Melbourne Recital Centre, 31.05.2016
I spent the first few minutes of Polica’s set at the Melbourne Recital Centre wondering whether or not this whole ‘sitting down’ thing was going to work for a band that, as I understood them, thumped and grooved enough in a way that might warrant a little boogie. Sitting down seems so academic, so chin […]
Ciggie Witch – Classic Connection (Lost & Lonesome, Osbourne Again)
If you’re new to Ciggie Witch, Classic Connection will probably leave you feeling slightly torn. On one hand, you’ve got the Ocean Party sensibilities of the Denton brothers, with their deeper-than-most guitar pop and perpetually anxious lyrics. On the other, you’ve got Mitch Clemens, who writes these lulling guitar tunes that might make you doze […]
Zone Out – Transience (Deaf Ambitions)
Ashley Bundang is a busy person. Totally Mild, Ciggie Witch, the live outfit for Sui Zhen; many fingers, many pies; you’d think she’d get burnt out. However, when you’re ultimately presented with Zone Out’s Transience – this new somethin’ somethin’ from Bundang and Scotdrakula’s Dove Bailey – all those origins work together to pull the […]
Gregor – Thoughts and Faults (Chapter Music)
There’s two videos on the YouTube page of Melbourne lo-fi pop fellow Gregor. One of them is him sitting behind a Yamaha keyboard playing a twinkly pop tune, and the other is entitled ‘stylised trout response’, or to use the video’s description, “a romanticised look at how the movement of swimming trout might be translated […]
