SONGS-ALBUMS AND SHOWS

by Beth Keating.

I haven't had a chance to go out and buy it yet, but Songs' self-titled debut was released today. In celebration, the four piece will be playing a few shows over the next few weeks. Melbourne's performance at the Workers Club will be supported by Kes Band and Fabulous Diamonds... Well worth the trip on a Sunday night. We posted a fantastic interview with a few of the members a couple of weeks back, which gave a bit of insight into this intriguing group. Highly recommended reading, if you haven't already.

Anyone heading to the Workers Club show, I'll see you there.

REVIEW: THE STABS-DEAD WOOD

by Michael Hartt.

Life can be such a drag sometimes. We’re constantly bombarded with populist, mainstream, easy-to-digest music. Rarely is anything with real feeling given much of a chance by many that prefer the safe options served to them by popular media. It’s brainless, it’s boring and it’s bullshit. It particularly feels magnified in this country; probably because of its distance from anywhere else.

On the flipside, however, the distance from the rest of the world has, over the course of many decades, made for a thriving and inventive underground scene. The Stabs follow a long line of Australian bands that have managed to establish themselves both here and overseas through the underground. They’re also one of those bands that makes it feel good to be an outsider to the mainstream world.

Dead Wood - The Stabs’ second album – is a punchy piece of swampy, aggressive punk rock that carries the flame originally held by the likes of The Scientists and The Birthday Party. The album demonstrates why they’ve been given props by the likes of Nick Cave and the organisers of All Tomorrow’s Parties.

This album encapsulates what it’s like seeing the band live. It’s loud and no-nonsense. Clocking in at just over 35 minutes, it manages to create a dark and desolate atmosphere that few bands are able to pull off without being bogged down by cliches and sounding overly effected.

Of course, there’s quiet a few bands of this ilk around at the moment - most notably in Sydney - but none are able to pull it off as well as The Stabs. Dead Wood is an album that makes it feel alright to be nothing like the majority.

REVIEW: GIRLS-ALBUM

by Sara Brocklesby.

It's hard to review Album without talking about how referential it is. I started off charting all the various references the songs make to 60s pop and to shoegaze, but in the end this just seems to miss the point. I feel like Miss Michelle from 80s kids show Romper Room, when she looked through a fake mirror and observed, "I see Sarah and Peter, and Christopher…". Well, in the new release from Girls, I heard Pulp (particularly This is Hardcore) and The Make-Up and The Beatles, and Phil Spector and The Church and My Bloody Valentine, and mostly, The Beach Boys.

On one level, the ouija-board conversation Girls are having with past heroes makes for a deeply enjoyable record, postmodernist lyrical exercises aside.

I've been listening to a truckload of The Beatles again after quite a long break, and Album's opener 'Lust for Life' is pretty goddamn funny in this context – it could be John Lennon taking the piss out of himself and the band's 'yeah yeah love you hold my, err, hand' early Hamburg period.

'Big Bad Mean Motherfucker' pops in on the Beach Boys for 'California Girls'. Underlining the record's time-travel, its cheeky beginning is the sound of a tape being rewound. The song gets a wee bit creepy and ends a dark fantasy, California girls beware.

'Ghost Mouth' is a knowing and well-executed pastiche of the Spector wall of sound, lovelorn and kind of eerie. But then a sudden clarion Go-Betweens-esque guitar solo drops in. Girls' sound is, at times, a sort of cousin to our own 80s and 90s homages to the sixties (You Am I, The Church, The Hummingbirds, etc).

I got to thinking about a George Harrison story. As The Beatles were awakened to Indian spiritual philosophies, George decided they all 'needed a mantra'. Though they were keen to lead the counterculture adoption of transcendental meditation, they didn't have a bloody mantra, and where would they get one? Luckily they were famous and found the getting of such things relatively simple, so they conveniently got an appearance with the Maharishi and he promptly supplied them with some. In repeating 60s pop, Girls could be looking for a mantra – if you sing about California girls over and over again, maybe an answer will reveal itself.

There are moments throughout the album where the brightness feels melancholic. 'Lauren Marie' explicitly references The Beach Boys' Smile album, adopting Brian Wilson's style of drug-damaged lament. Like Smile, Album is coloured by a confused yearning to be healed, and uncertainty around whether we can find it on our own.

'Hellhole Ratrace' explicitly manifests a sense of generational comedown. The song strays into Spiritualized territory with its backdrop of keening shoegaze. "I don't wanna cryyyyyy…" comes over as an exhausted plea for relief from existence. It doesn't feel cliched to share in this; to be moved. This feat is the most impressive achievement of Album. The emotional weight of spiritual exhaustion locates it in our present and its condition is familiar. For a first album, Album actually feels like a third release – it's like Girls started off jaded, wrestling with lives lived in bad faith and wholeheartedly under the influence.

INTERVIEW: DREAMING OF GHOSTS

by Beth Keating.

Drone talks to Mike, from Melbourne-based psychedelic outfit, Dreaming of Ghosts. If you haven't heard these guys, and dig the primitive psychedelia of acts such as the Black Angels, be sure to take a listen - as soon as possible, preferably. PS. They'll be playing at the Tote this Thursday, supporting the Black Ryder, as part of the Drone Magazine launch.

Give us a brief history of Dreaming of Ghosts. How did you guys come together?

Dreaming of Ghosts came into being in 2005. We had a different line-up back then, and we used to jam at Nick and Emma's house in Eltham. We thought it was kind of cool that we were a 'family band' so to speak, because both Nick (guitar) and Emma (drums) were brother and sister, and Mike (vox) and Kyle (bass) were also brothers. Josh (lead guitar) joined the band not long after, and we began playing small gigs at places like the Empress, and the Great Britain. The formative years were interesting, Nick left the band to hone in on his architecture studies, and Emma stayed with the band until 2008.

How would you describe your music? What kinds of things have influenced your sound?

Our music is psychedelic, but not as much as say Jefferson Airplane, 13th Floor Elevators, the Monks, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Our conception of this category of music is new. We want to create a world with sounds, that might seem unfamiliar or foreign to listeners of commercial music.

We have been developing our sound since we came into being in 2005. Our first few weeks as a band consisted of many attempts to play at least one song well, and we struggled with having 3 guitars in the line-up. Our current line-up consists of Eryn (percussion), Mike (vocals/keys/guitar), Kyle (bass), Josh (lead guitar), Addy (keys), and Zoe (tambourine/vocals). Carl Tomich filled in as drummer for us when Emma left which we are very grateful for. In the beginning we sounded very loud, very grungy, with a bit of Radiohead influence, a bit of Nirvana, Pink Floyd, and some people said it sounded a bit like Marilyn Manson or like Nick Cave. What I'm liking more and more these days is the use of floor toms in percussion and filling in the beat with tambourine, big bass - maybe fuzzed, with reverbed guitar. To me the most important thing is the beat, and the tambourine helps to keep the song moving and adds tension. This is something I like about the Dandy Warhols, and The Black Angels. The tambourine in the Brian Jonestown Massacre is particularly good. I love songs that make you want to clap and stamp your feet. "Around and Around", by the Rolling Stones, for example. Up until now our music has been kind of drawly, droney and cruisy, but we love belting out fast grunge with evil basslines.

As far as band members go, we are always looking for more to add to the sound, but the more people you have in a band, the less you actually get turning up to rehearsal. They usually just turn up to the gigs and try to wing it.


How would you describe your live show?

Our live show is interesting. Sometimes we'll jam for at least 90% of it, depending on how we feel. Sometimes a three minute song will turn into a seven minute song. We love getting lost in the music and it feels more electric when you're playing it by ear and making things up as you go. Even though we jam out most of the songs, we usually bring them back in, but what i really want to do is go off on a tangent and get lost for about two or three minutes. The coolest thing about Led Zeppelin was when Jimmy Page went off on a tangent. It's almost as if he'd forgotten how to play the song, but then remarkably brings it back in. I think that's exciting.


You've got a bunch of demos up on your website/myspace page. Any plans to release a record in the near future?

Yeah, we will begin recording an album in January 2010. Up until now we have been experimenting with a wide range of different sounds, effects, and instruments. We have a lot of material to work on, about 250 demo tracks, some of them are complete, others are half songs. What I find most intriguing about music is the arrangement of a wide range of different sounds and effecting them (usually with reverb small and large) until they become barely recognisable. I love when you feel like you're in the same room as the artists [on the record], and this kind of thing might even come through in a rough demo where you're able to hear things like cars passing in the street outside, birds chirping, or the tv in the background, or even something really subtle like fingers striking the keys. Alternatively with the use of reverb, the music might sound like it's in a huge hall. These are things that a lot of bands or producers try to eliminate in the recording process, but I really like it, and the rest of the band agrees. It adds texture and ambience. My favourite thing is flicking through the channels of an AM alarm clock radio, and I have one of these sitting on my organ at home for this purpose, and you get a really cool oscillating frequency sound between stations. We use this on stage for samples sometimes.

As far as a release goes, we're liking the idea of releasing on vinyl. There's more room for artwork, and it feels like you're getting something special instead and it suits our D.I.Y, lo-fi kind of attitude. As far as the content goes, it wont be just a series of unrelated tracks. It will be like a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, where the tracks relate thematically to one another, and some tracks might even blend into each other in some way. It will be a dark haunting album, because we like evil music, and we will work to keep our music evil. But having said that there are still avenues for goofy, funny songs that don't take themselves to seriously.

What plans are in the future for Dreaming of Ghosts?

We've nearly finalised our line-up. We are still waiting to do some work with our fiddle player and see what happens when we put that into the mix. We also added another member Zoe, and we'll be working with her on vocals and harmonies, soundscapes etc. But as for the immediate future, we're concentrating on writing new material for our summer gigs.

REVIEW: THE VACANT LOTS-ACCORDING TO THE GOSPEL

by Radhika Takru.

So imagine you're a newly-initiated pirate. Now that you've fearlessly managed to sail across your neighbourhood lakes, ponds, and rivers, you're ready for the big time. However, once plonked in the middle of a vast ocean, you discover that this water body is significantly larger than and not quite as forgiving as your practice playgrounds. You look around and try not whimper as you find yourself surrounded by an infinite expanse of deep, sparkling blue. You drift aimlessly for days and days, until finally – FINALLY – you wake up one morning and see the horizon broken by a dark blob in the distance. So bedazzled are you by this miracle of movement that you.... don't quite know what to do. And so commence the completely unpredictable lyrics of 'Land' - "should I call a doctor?/should I call a nurse?/will it make it
better/or..." you guessed it "will it make it worse?"

It's good to know that you've found "laa-aa-aand", because not too long ago you were pondering your, what seemed inevitable at the time, demise. Gloomily you brooded over the unfeasibility of survival one moonlit evening. After all, when you look at things with a perspective made clear by despair, "ship is a tomb, in the night."

Vermont-based The Vacant Lots are a two-piece, if you'd believe it. They radiate dark, droney psychedelic sounds whose creation you'd expect to involve a lot more than two people. I was expecting a lineup of five, to be honest. Named after a Bob Dylan lyric (if you're going to base a band's name on a lyric, there's no better penman to go to, is there?), they've been attracting some well-deserved local attention and now, thanks to us, they've gone international! Woo!

They're not perpetual pirates either. ‘Memory of You’ is a Mick Jagger-inspired vocal set against auditory wallpaper vaguely reminiscent of a more listener-friendly, less deafening Spacemen 3 essence and has a couple of obvious but unobtrusive keyboard chords smeared over the top. ‘Let Me Out’ is a photographic negative of the Brian Jonestown Massacre's Oh Lord - slower, darker and brandishing a “let me out” lyric in sharp contrast to BJM's “let me in you.”

These songs are all off their new record According to the Gospel - you can give them a listen on MySpace, or if your location is geographically convenient venture aboard one of their 'voyages.' I kid you not, that is how they refer to their live gigs (see official site). Maybe there's something to this pirate thing after all, eh?

DRONE MAGAZINE: ISSUE 0.5

The very first printed issue of Drone Magazine is working its magic right now at the printers, readying itself for release on November 19 - that's right, next week.

Drone Magazine will be launching as part of the momentously awesome Black Ryder, Slight of Build, Killed 2 Birds and Dreaming of Ghosts gig happening at the Tote the same night. For the cost of entry ($12), you can help yourself to your own copy of the magazine.

As you've probably noticed, we've called it Issue 0.5 - a smaller-than-normal teaser of what's to come. Issue 0.5 celebrates the release of the stupendously great debut from the Black Ryder with an exclusive interview with Aimee Nash. There's also a fascinating conversation with Steve Kilbey of the Church, an in depth exploration of the infamous Sydney psychedelic scene - featuring interviews with pivotal players, and much more.

Those who can't attend the Tote show, or who live interstate/overseas, this issue of Drone Magazine will not be available in shops. Stock is very limited, so if you are interested in obtaining a copy please email your interest to editor@dronemagazine.com. We're planning on charging AU $4 for this issue for non-Tote show purchases, to help cover postage and printing costs, which will be payable via PayPal.

INTERVIEW: SONGS

by Beth Keating.

Sydney-based band, Songs, are awaiting the release of their debut self-titled album on November 21. With a steadily growing fan base, and a strong live reputation, Songs encapsulate listless energy through simple, melodic, guitar-based pop, which echoes, drones and shimmers. We're looking forward immensely to hearing the album...

Can you tell us about how Songs came into being, a bit about the different members and what you are hoping to achieve through the music?

Steve: Jeff and I basically grew up together in New Zealand, we have more or less been working together in some form or another since high school. I moved to Australia a while ago so that I could find work that I didn't loathe doing.

Max tells me he grew up in New Zealand, cut his teeth playing in various bands, albeit a decade or two before us. Not dissimilar to Jeff and I, Max took a small hiatus from playing music, found a profession that pays and has spent the latter part of his life in London and then Sydney. He is is pretty handy with a camera these days.

Ela does an admirable job of holding her own as the sole female and Australian citizen in the band. As someone who was unfamiliar with playing in a group she has been thrown into a slightly obscure band dynamic in regards to age and demographic etc. I believe she used the term 'pathetic' to describe her first experience playing music with the three of us. To this day I still find that rather amusing and in many ways sums up her temperament quite well.

The four of us have been playing together for about a year and a half now.

In regards to what we hope to achieve, I have no idea. We don't really sit down and talk about it. It's hard not to respond vaguely, isn't it? I think we work quite hard but we are not terribly ambitious, or at least unrealistic. I guess when expressing yourself in any field there is some innate desire or hope that people appreciate it or at least engage with it on some level as well. It's nice to have an audience. An audience beyond your family and friends who feel sorry for you.


What would you cite as the main influences on the band's sound?

Steve: Rock stupidity and art smarts? That's a Bruce Russell quote Jeff shared with us the other day. I think unknowingly we tend to subscribe to this school of thought. Most references that orbit our band are most probably barefaced and equally comfortable sitting in a vague lineage that leads you to the Velvet Underground. It's pretty simple stuff. Most people can fill in the gaps from there.


On stage, the band gives the impression as being four very articulate musicians, who are very solid in their specific roles. What is the songwriting process generally like for the band? Is it directed by a particular person, or more of a group effort?

Steve: Individually none of us are particularly established on the instruments we choose to play - last time I checked anyway - yet I think you're right. We are probably quite robust, at least in the sense that we know what we are playing, and we know what we are not playing. We are pretty hip to our own limitations and we tend to avoid upsetting a song by recognizing this. If we seem solid it's probably because we don't try to anything to fancy and we like to rehearse.

The songwriting process is probably an atypically democratic affair. There are no clearly defined roles in the band, though for the most part we start with a loose melody and lyrical sort of sketch that Max brings in and puts on the table. Sometimes it works straight away, with some others not so much. These tend to go through a 'Songs' blender and come out the other end a little more mutated. We all can play each others instruments as badly as each other so if we have run any of the ideas into the ground we tend to switch instruments, and if that fails, which it usually does, we usually resort to endless dub inspired jams for the rest of the evening. Funny but true.


Most of the band relocated from New Zealand to Sydney, how have you found the local music scene over here? Has the move changed the music you are creating at all?

Jeff: I think there is a lot of great music happening in Sydney, and there are aspects of the music community here that are really incredible. Unfortunately I think that most of the good stuff goes mostly unnoticed without much of an audience. The same situation exists in New Zealand of course, but per capita it all seems a bit better.

If you mean in terms of Sydney music creeping into our sound, I wouldn't say so, no. I don't hear a real localised sound here. You do get the same infiltration of media in New Zealand as you do here, but I think musicians back home, in certain circles, are a bit better at blotting out that kind of stuff. They are isolated in small towns, boarded up in damp rooms, shivering over their crackling amps and are making really amazing, idiosyncratic, honest art because of it. The industry of music is monolithic in Sydney and I think it's helped the band to ignore that side of things as much as we can, to just focus on the music and the three other people we are sharing the room or stage with. I think being here in Sydney definitely made me more aware and critical of our practice. I know for me personally I need to be very clear about what I'm comfortable plaguing the world with. There are a lot of people making albums.

Can you tell us a little about The Spring Press label - are you still producing music through this, or are future releases coming out through Popfrenzy?

Jeff: The Spring Press is something I've been doing in my spare time for a couple years now. Its a project where I get an opportunity to work with artists I really like and put things out that I believe are crucial, or whatever. I wish I could put out more but money gets in the way a lot of the time as I only want to deal in vinyl and hardcover books. It's definitely not a business or anything. I've had the pleasure of working with some really amazing photographers, writers and musicians from all over the world though, and I hope I can keep doing it as it's something I find really rewarding. I have a few things coming up in the next year, but in the near future is a solo LP from Bruce Russell and an LP with American quartet Psychic Ills (which has been quite a while in the works, but I do have the recordings now!). Both of which I'm very excited about it.

As a band we have put out a couple releases through The Spring Press simply because we were in a position to pay for them ourselves and we had time to put into getting it out ourselves. I would rather not release anything I'm personally involved with on the label, and I'm sure we could have found someone else to do the split, but how could you say no to anything involving The Bats?

We started working with Chris and his team at Popfrenzy after he heard the EP we did off our own backs. After the first pressing he did a second run on his label and distributed it through his existing networks. He's since put out our split 7" with Love of Diagrams and has funded and is releasing our upcoming album. It's a good relationship as we're friends, and it's not completely exclusive so we are free to do other releases as we please – which is ideal really. I would imagine the band will do more releases down the line on The Spring Press, but who knows when or what that might be.


What have you got lined up for the future? Are any new releases in the works?

Jeff: Our self titled album that we recorded in March is coming out in November through Popfrenzy. Its 12 tracks and about an hour long. We recorded it live over the course of a week with Casey Rice at BigJesusBurger in Surry Hills. It was really great working with Casey and doing it at BJB where all those great Sun & Oren Ambarchi records were done, where we had access to all their amazing equipment. We are all pretty happy with it how it turned out, so are looking forward to finally releasing it. We will be following it with a brief tour in the last week of November throughout Australia. It's also being released separately in New Zealand so we are looking to go over there again early next year. We want to write and record another EP in the coming months as well as get some material down for a split we are doing with a band from New Zealand called Surf City.

Max and Ela are both working on or recording solo releases at the moment, and by the sounds they are doing some interesting collaborations, so they should be great. Steve just finished a New Zealand tour with Mild America and will be doing that again early next year. An EP of four guitar pieces I recorded about four years ago is coming out in November on Perth label Farmer Frontier, I'm working on more solo recordings soon as well as recordings with Paul Gough under the name Mandala Trap.

HIATUS

This week could be the worst week for my body to decide to cark it... Issue 1 of Drone Magazine goes off to the printers in a week exact, and the graceful influenza has decided to drop by and infect me with its presence... So excuse the lack of movement in these parts over the next few days...

ADORE US...

by Beth Keating.

I resisted for so long... setting up one of those 'Fan Pages' on Facebook for Drone Magazine. It seems like there's a page for everything on there - and I'm more than happy to 'follow' bands, artists and such that I adore, I wasn't sure if entering this little tiger into that stratosphere was a tad presumptuous...

You can see where this is going though... Last night I caved. And this post isn't an attempt at easing a guilty conscience, but just a note to let you know that Drone Magazine has a page on the 'book. Not sure what exactly what we'll do with it. I thought it could be a great space for the readers to get together - virtually speaking - because my ultimate dream isn't to create some megalomaniac, advertisement-riddled print magazine, but to really emphasise the awesome connected community we have within this pocket of rock and roll. Also, I've met a few of the completely amazing readers through Facebook this year and have to say, it's become a fantastic tool of connection.

So, if it's your thing, please join up to the very humble, meagre Drone Magazine group which you can find here.

REVIEW: MESMER-THE GHOST OF A TENNIS COURT

by Radhika Takru.

I don't quite know what to make of Mesmer.

See, it's a bit tricky because apart from a few reviews and a woefully sparse MySpace I've been dependent on a five line 'bio' on the band's last.fm page for background information.

Said bio goes: 'Mesmer is in a state of constant transformation; balancing between harmony and noise, staggering from violent freak-outs to serene drone rock.'

Well, I wouldn't at any point describe anything on Ghosts of a Tennis Court as 'serene', but yes that's pretty much it. To call them 'versatile' is to understate a point. This doesn't mean, however, that the songs sound completely different from each other. Though they do. This doesn't even mean that there are sudden tempo and chord changes in the course of a track. Though there are. No, the versatility extends beyond such predictability because what Mesmer appear to be doing is taking a variety of musical styles and incorporating them in one song by playing them all simultaneously. So you have 80s Nintendo meeting 00s electropop poking through a layer of surf rock framed by a horn section and pierced by a characteristically post-punky vocal (at this point I throw in the Horrors comparison I used when talking about Spiral 25 earlier).

Despite it's cringingly clichéd name, Teenage Dreams is undoubtedly the highlight of the album. Once your ears accustom themselves to the initially grating 80s blips that subside to form the base of the track, the song settles down and starts sounding comfortingly familiar as it carries within its melody an undercurrent of cheesy 80s rock and the more manufactured grunge sounds of the mid-90s. The lyrics themselves are better avoided in this writer's humble (ok, not really) opinion. A conclusion about meeting in teenage dreams and being 'fucked up with their teenage dreams'. The profanity only really making an appearance in the last line making one wonder if it was perhaps thrown in as an afterthought to establish the band's hardcoreness and don't-give-a-damn-ness.

A disclaimer: I make no guarantees about lyrical accuracy. I have only my ears to trust and they interpret the opening of Some Disney Scene as 'you want to go out with your iPhone' which I am fairly certain is incorrect. I cannot hear it as anything else, though.

Actually, the album highlight might be the 9 minute opus that is Mr. Florida. I have mixed feelings about this track, though, which is why its not 'undoubtedly' the highlight. You see, with all it's progressiveness I am having a hard time deciding if it's an awesome track in its own right or more an extended jam session better suited for a live audience than a passive home listener.

An interesting album from this Finnish fivesome. 'Happy Hardcore' is the ambiguous adjective plastered on their bare MySpace. It's an accurate description.