Melancholy hauntology, like Broadcast and the Focus Group’s Witch Cults or a subdued Boards of Canada. The Spiral was recorded for a video installation in Copenhagen last year but it could have been recorded to soundtrack a 4AD fan slowly drowning.
Loopsel is Elin Engström from Monokultur and Skiftande Enhete, and this is closer to Monokultur’s motorik dub meets early 80s electronic ambience, only it’s less chilled out and more eerily chilled to the bone.
Better still is the 4-track 7”, the first release on Elin and JJ Ulius’s new label Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox, a field recording covered in analogue cobwebs, innocence and creepy organs. Both records are beautifully packaged and will change hands for a small fortune in the future.
Thursday, 28 May 2020
Saturday, 16 May 2020
The Great Divides - Face The World, Again
There’s a side to the Australian underground that gets overlooked: the sense of longing magnified by distance. It’s what happens when the sound of the suburbs is amplified by being nowhere near anything.
It’s the tenets of indie music swelled to bursting, imagining the only way love will ever find you is by washing up in a message in a bottle. But you’re nearer to the desert than the ocean.
It’s why, recently, we’ve had Interstate Forever by Dick Diver, Nullarboor by Lower Plenty and Mainland by Foxy Morons.
And it’s why nature is closer to the Australian songwriter’s spirit. The Great Divides “hear the sound of galahs in the morning”. This feeling never leaves some Australian musicians. Like Grant McLennan, writing Bye Bye Pride in London:
A white moon appears
Like a hole in the sky
The mangroves go quiet
Or David McComb, whose Wide Open Road is a metaphor for the isolation of his now empty bed. The Great Divide’s Let Them In plays a similar musical trick to The Triffids by bending American country rock into Australia’s brutal tropical heat with cavernous resonance.
Mainly, though, The Great Divides play jangly indiepop with strong, playful basslines like Jeanines or The Lucksmiths (you know, their name might be a play on the Luckies song The Great Dividing Range, or riffing on Australian geography and loneliness). Whichever way you look at it, this is a really strong debut and The Great Divides are a band to watch.
It’s the tenets of indie music swelled to bursting, imagining the only way love will ever find you is by washing up in a message in a bottle. But you’re nearer to the desert than the ocean.
It’s why, recently, we’ve had Interstate Forever by Dick Diver, Nullarboor by Lower Plenty and Mainland by Foxy Morons.
And it’s why nature is closer to the Australian songwriter’s spirit. The Great Divides “hear the sound of galahs in the morning”. This feeling never leaves some Australian musicians. Like Grant McLennan, writing Bye Bye Pride in London:
A white moon appears
Like a hole in the sky
The mangroves go quiet
Or David McComb, whose Wide Open Road is a metaphor for the isolation of his now empty bed. The Great Divide’s Let Them In plays a similar musical trick to The Triffids by bending American country rock into Australia’s brutal tropical heat with cavernous resonance.
Mainly, though, The Great Divides play jangly indiepop with strong, playful basslines like Jeanines or The Lucksmiths (you know, their name might be a play on the Luckies song The Great Dividing Range, or riffing on Australian geography and loneliness). Whichever way you look at it, this is a really strong debut and The Great Divides are a band to watch.
Friday, 15 May 2020
Dummy
Angel’s Gear is a swirl of organs and a mess of guitars like when Rocketship stamp their feet on the pedals and set the fx variously to ‘fuzzy’, ‘dreamlike’ and ‘stratospheric’.
Dummy clearly share an aesthetic - and a record collection - with Stereolab: motorik beats, quicksilver keyboards, guitar hypnosis, ultra-styled minimalism.
Some bands have brilliantly taken bits of that aesthetic in recent years - let’s hear it one more time for Le SuperHomard, The Prophet Hens, Ulrika Spacek, Whyte Horses, Small Reactions - but Dummy remind you that Stereolab haven’t made a record in a decade and not one as good as this for longer.
You know the drill, you’ve heard it before, but you haven’t heard it done this well in years.
Dummy clearly share an aesthetic - and a record collection - with Stereolab: motorik beats, quicksilver keyboards, guitar hypnosis, ultra-styled minimalism.
Some bands have brilliantly taken bits of that aesthetic in recent years - let’s hear it one more time for Le SuperHomard, The Prophet Hens, Ulrika Spacek, Whyte Horses, Small Reactions - but Dummy remind you that Stereolab haven’t made a record in a decade and not one as good as this for longer.
You know the drill, you’ve heard it before, but you haven’t heard it done this well in years.
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