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Warpaint: Heads Up

Article originally appeared on The Music Sep 21st 2016

The third album from the LA group, Heads Up is less of a warning than a statement of confidence, charismatic and full of delicate conviction. There are some moments that’ll make you wonder if they’ve exchanged their ponderous electro-folk for something altogether fizzier, but thankfully the band’s indulgence in lengthier tracks means each song has time to play its ideas right to the end. Each fully embraces its own motifs, a trait that sets the album as a string of insular pieces that still tell a whole story, like abandoned pearls on a hotel dresser.

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Freya Josephine Hollick: The Unceremonious Junking Of Me

Article originally appeared on The Music Nov 8th 2016

At first pass, the Melbourne-based country practitioner’s new album feels purpose-built for nostalgia, shaped by the bones of bygone artists and couched in a rustic delivery, but Hollick ultimately follows her own reflective journey. Sprawling and simple, Hollick’s tales shine above the sparsity of instrumentation. The decision to capture the tracks live in Ballarat’s Main Bar brings a raw sense of place to the album and highlights the vital intimacy of the vocals. Darkly saccharine, painful and poignant, The Unceremonious Junking Of Me is a rich and textured release that reshapes the landscape of country to suit itself.

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Tash Sultana: Notion

Article originally appeared on The Music Sep 30th 2016 

Tash Sultana’s Notion is so fully formed that it’s hard to think of it as an EP. Actually, it runs longer than most full-length albums and doesn’t even get winded. Full of lean and layered instrumentation that loops with a silken-psychedelic lilt, vocals that flit from ephemeral drift to beatboxing brash and a core of chords tied tight to a toe-tapping ideal, it’s an immensely impressive outing made even more so by the fact that it’s coming from a single source. Without a doubt, this is a notion worth exploring.

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Thigh Master: Early Times

Article originally appeared on The Music Oct 4th 2016 

After a pair of tantalising EPs and a smattering of singles, Early Times feels a little overdue but strangely immediate. While it teeters on the fringes of shoegaze and dolewave, like an old tourist commercial for Queensland as directed by the disillusioned and destitute, it is at its best exploring rocky terrain. The vocals are slightly more washed than a pair of boyfriend jeans and often operate like an underlying beat rather than an accompaniment, leaving the guitars to take the narrative lead. But what shines through is surprisingly canny, intimately droll, and some of the most quintessentially Brisbane sounds on offer.

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Pleasure Symbols: Pleasure Symbols

Article originally appeared on The Music Aug 29th 2016

This Brisbane doom-gaze duo has been brewing in the shadows for a while now, cultivating a Californian neon sound perfect for standing around while Nicolas Winding Refn throws stones at a moonlit lake. Their debut EP is a sparsely constructed-yet-dank and almost cloying thing, mixing precisely programmed beats, wistful synth and vocals that feel like they haunt the halls an ’80s high school. For fans of the group, it’s a pity that two of the four tracks on offer have been lingering online for year or so, but overall it’s still a great, gloomy 17 minutes.

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King Of The North: Get Out Of Your World

Article originally appeared on The Music Aug 4th 2016

King Of The North nail the classic American rock sound, thick with guitar and formidable presence, which is impressive for an Aussie duo. There’s something a bit off-kilter old-school about it, like Bon Jovi thrashing Shihad riffs at a political rally for The Tea Party. There’s also a bit of a demanding choral theme that nags the front of the album as we’re told to, “Get out,” “Rise up,” “Light it up,” and “Ride like you’re free,” in the space of so many songs. It leans a bit towards motivational hair metal, but there’s real sincerity buried beneath it. Also, that three-from-one guitar sound is a wall worth leaning on.

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Faith No More: Sol Invictus

How many years has it been? Almost a decade between drinks. Eight years since their Album of the Year. It would be easy to list all the things the new Faith No More release is like; there are hints of Peeping Tom, shades of Tomahawk, a dab of Fantomas, and even a little latter days Bungle. But every example boils down to the same substance, Mike Patton. Sol Invictus is exactly the same, and yet it’s more, it’s a Patton who listens, one who shares, a star that leads by letting his band shine around him. Simmered but not reduced, it’s easily the most well behaved of all FNM albums.

That’s not to say Sol Invictus is tame, and it’s certainly not a problem of old age as there’s not a single twinge of the rheumatic apathy that hovers over some late life bands, rather, there’s a feeling of understanding that permeates the album. It seems like any problems the band had with each other in the past have since been smoothed over. The whetstone friction that honed their previous releases may be absent, but the results are just as sharp, exhibiting a craftsmanship that only comes with time and dedication.

While previewing some of the new songs at recent live shows, the band played with the same fierce passion contained in all their material, delivering their choice of singles with frenetic and immediate energy. The studio cuts of these songs, however, feel almost restrained in comparison. It’s the difference in tone between saying I hate you through clenched teeth and yelling it at someone’s face.

Though the album is missing some of that live furiosity, it draws as much of its strength from what it’s not as it does from who it is. In that way, it’s oddly reflective and even exhibits a certain level of patience, almost a controlled temper. Here, the immediacy of their live performances doesn’t actually acknowledge the heart of the album. Sol Invictus is a seething thing, measured and quietly vicious in its intent. Somehow, in its own subdued way, it articulates itself better than its screaming front man ever could.

Plenty of the tracks are still rife with rage. Superhero, Separation Anxiety, Cone of Shame, there are plenty of moments all throughout that are plenty angry in their own right. Though Faith No More have had their fair share of mellow over the years, the feeling this time is just a little bit softer overall. There doesn’t seem to be a rough edge left to rub between them. Throw some rocks in a tumbler for thirty years, though, and see what happens.

Sol Invictus is softer, yes, but only because it feels refined, white sugar not raw. Though definitely not saccharine, its easily as addictive, equally delicious and was certainly worth the wait.

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Serious Beak: Ankaa

Serious Beak, the djentlemen of progressive math metal, live at the intersection of discord and rhyme. Their latest album Ankaa contains so many moments that weren’t written by other bands, it’s occasionally easy to get confused in the crush and anticipate something that’s never coming, a little Tool maybe or some Battles. It’s like a slalom run that skirts the flags of influence while carving it’s own path through the powder.

It’s going to get billed somewhere as Prog, but strangely, that might be limiting, even if there is a progressive cohesion and sensibility in the way that the tracks interlock and toy with each other’s threads. It’s also entirely possible the whole thing is a joke, with every track sub branded by an ornithological taxonomy that hints at not only each song’s inner themes, but towards the entire species of the album. This is what would happen if a zoologist wrote his thesis with metal.

That kind of concept could make a 4 track release like this into a frivolous aside, but the implementation is so precise and tarrishly invasive, it doesn’t matter. There isn’t any space for that kind of thinking, no restful moments of reflection at even the sparsest of junctures.

Proto (Menura novaehollandiae) builds a frenetic and intensely measured beginning out of a bed of static before laying it down on a crystalline refrain, one of the myriad themes the album involves itself with. Main Sequence (Dacelo novaeguineae) picks it up again and plays with its gentle beginnings before growing into an adult version of video game dungeon music and degenerating into a world where the Joker’s death scene from Burton’s Batman was reenacted by kookaburras.

Red (Laniocera hypopyrra) starts out with a feint shaped like an average rock song but it’s not long before some sharp rhythmic equations are being threaded through the reverb. It’s definitely the climax track and bears the most melodic weight of the lot. Of course, it still finds the time to take a couple of detours through that crystal valley, handling these downhill transitions with upwards velocity.

Heat Death (Teratornithidae) is the coda that ties it all together, a drifting summary illustrated in singularly drawn chords. While it’s the most downbeat of all the tracks it still contains some piercingly djentle moments and plays like a cool down for the criminally insane.

So yeah, Ankaa is a weird ride. It’s discordant prog themed around birds, an ethereal grind with razor timing, a familiar sound like nothing else, and quite possibly a pointless experiment that’s definitely worth consideration.

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The Frightnrs: Nothing More To Say

After a pair of EP’s released some years previously, The Frightnrs (who sadly hold no connection to the seminal film) have dropped their fist full studio album, Nothing More To Say, an eleven track trek into a trio of categories: irie, love, and the irie trouble with love.

This Queen’s quartet are renowned for their low-slung reggae vibes, deceptive falsetto vocality, and an avoidance of the clichés that (arguably) hallmark the genre. While the group does sidestep many of the regular trappings, like herbal etiquette for example, they seem to have taken that step into one confined direction. Sure, there are derivations here and there, a tempo change or chittering harmonica, an ambiguous duet or harmonic stack, but none of it ever really explodes. It’s almost as though the tracks had their vibe levels capped at Sunday afternoon beer garden.

In a dip dapping nod in Daptone’s direction, there are a couple of cheeky covers thrown in for good measure, Bob & Gene’s ’67 classic Gotta Find a Way and Saun and Starr’s more recent Gonna Make Time, but both are so fully indoctrinated into the irie proceedings that they feel indistinguishable from the rest. Good or bad, it’s certain to spark something in eagle-eared fans, and it definitely speaks to the organ-grinding mastery they have over the material.

The Frightnrs are clearly a tight and harmonious outfit, their dedication to a certain style of sound is admirable and on-point, almost to a fault, but this is undoubtedly a record that should be treasured by lovers of reggae, soul seekers, and anyone else that might simply enjoy a mild to moderate afternoon of decanted calypso chemistry. The rest of us can just sit back and wonder if naming a debut Nothing More To Say was a literal mistake or an allegoric accident.

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Beck: Morning Phase

Breaking out of the fringes during the grunge revolution of the nineties, Beck came to the fore with a style full of incisive anti-folk sentiment and satirical experimentation. Raised by avant-garde parents in the aftermath of the pop-art movement, his was a voice that was sharp, clear and easily heard among the forefathers of the indie uprising.

Beck’s new album, Morning phase, was built as a companion piece to the now twelve year old Sea Change, an album that was deeply personal yet culturally irreverent in a relevant way. Unfortunately, the companionship offered by Morning Phase is largely empty, like a conversation with an old friend who just waits for their turn to talk and then has nothing to say. In fact, by anchoring it to the past so explicitly it’s easier to see how little progress has been made. It becomes a way of emulating what has gone before without having to gain anything from it.

There’s a pervasive feeling that nothing has been able to make Beck happy in the time that has gone by. Passively clingy, the voices of indie pioneers echo out of each track as if from some deep backwater canyon. The compositions are littered with limpid string arrangements, banjo and piano melodies that are pleasantly mellow, if not a little maudlin, it actually feels quite unfortunately shallow. It could simply be the direction of the thing, being a more inward facing undertaking than we’re used to receiving, but there’s a sad sense of surrender throughout the album, an aged acquiescence living inside  it that feels a little selfish.

The problem is that most of it feels too intimate to be connected with. The songs seem to be written exclusively for him or for someone dear departed, a message created specifically for someone other than you and then delivered with frustratingly consistent insularity. There’s no room made for engagement and no hint that it might even be welcome.

Morning Phase might be a great love letter for it’s intended, but for everyone else there’s not even the perverse satisfaction of reading a strangers diary, just empty sentiment without calibration.

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Sampa The Great: Weapon Chosen

Sampa The Great is pretty darn good. Straight outta Sydney by way of Zambia, she dropped her first mixtape, The Great Mixtape, back in September and since then she’s been getting all the right kinds of attention from the boys in the biz. She deserves it too, ‘cause that thing is legitimate dope.

Her latest release, Weapon Chosen, is a direct response to Hiatus Kaiyote’s request for a remix, like they heard what she was putting down and said, do you reckon you can make us better? Well, she probably could, but instead of taking what they laid out and adding a little R’n’B wah wah, or just spitting rhymes all over it, she’s created a diacritical response that completely negates the original meaning in the best possible way.

Running over six tracks and one literal second past eleven minutes, the EP, mixtape, rework or whatever, is sort of like grappling with one side of an academic conversation, like a physics professor explaining string theory with bananas. It probably shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does, and forms a measured, intelligent retort to stimuli outside of the usual fieldwork.

Sampa’s style is something like neo-tribalism infused with the kind of 3030 future beats that dub drivers have been piloting in circles for years. Yet, she’s not beholden to any of it. That’s what’s really great here. Everything that should be pastiche or passé is positively unique and seamlessly produced. Despite the samples and the origin, the sound here is absolutely her own, and that’s even better than the fact that we get to claim her as Australian, because individuality is becoming an increasingly rarefied creature in the modern age.

If you have eleven minutes in your day, you should listen to this release. If you don’t, well then you should reprioritise some shit and still listen to it. This side of autoerotica, it’s the best use of that time you’re likely to find.

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State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition

I’d long since run out of food and drink. I was bruised, beaten, and exhausted to the point of near collapse. My ute was packed with a days worth of salvage; medicine, materials, fuel, ammunition, supplies we desperately needed. The community was counting on me, but more than anything I just wanted to get home. I decided to take a shortcut. It didn’t go well.

Smoke billowed ominously from the overturned ute. I stood at a distance, shocked into stillness, and debated my options. Should I ferry the goods back to base one at a time? Could I find another vehicle nearby? Would I make it either way? Before I could decide fate did it for me, turning my efforts, ute and supplies into a giant fireball. Everything was wasted and there I was with a field full of zombies still between me and my base.

Despite the overwhelming and unexpected loss, it’s moments like these that make State of Decay special; emergence, the holy grail of the sandbox genre. At its core SOD is a pure loop of RPG feedback. It drops you straight into its world with zero exposition and asks you to fend for your life. Though it seems initially daunting, the interplay of systems open up in a very rewarding and organic way. After more than a dozen hours I was still finding new ways to scavenge, refining my tactics, expanding and relishing every killing stroke.

Whether choosing a base or crushing a skull, all of your actions feel appropriately weighty, and permadeath for characters means that a narrow focus and attachment to any single character can be swiftly punished. Even the most well equipped character can be quickly overwhelmed by an unexpected horde. Fortunately there are plenty of heroes to level up and experiment with, all with their own quirks and personality. Sadly, most of that personality is absent from the story, but the loop and grind embedded in the mechanics are so compelling that it simply doesn’t matter. I wasn’t running to an objective to further the plot, I was in it for the community, my community.

The Year One Survival Edition comes bundled with two pieces of DLC; Lifeline is a story driven endeavour, this time with a military focus and the benefit of a new city centric map; Breakdown is a pure distillation of the core SOD loop, essentially survival mode for a survival game. In addition to the added content, the new edition has purportedly seen a slew of upgrades, including “Improved lighting, textures, animations and combat mechanics… In Stunning HD,” however, calling it an HD remake is about as accurate as the panicked machine gun fire that saw one of my survivors torn literally in half.

Many of the bugs that plagued the last gen version are just as persistent as the Z virus that inhabits its world. In fact, my very first play-through saw a glitch that disabled all controls and left me helpless and completely dismembered. The glitch persisted even after spawning a new hero and forced a total system restart. It was gruelling in a way I’m sure the developers never intended. Despite this and numerous other instances of pop-in, clipping, slowdown and general jankiness, I was never truly frustrated. I would survive.

Though it may not  be as shiny as some other recent rereleases which came out dripping in glorious HD, (like a certain stunning survival shooter made a misbehaving canine), the  underlying mechanics, coupled expansions, and sheer compelling joy of survival more than make up for any technical shortcomings.

For anyone that has already clawed their way through all of Trumbull County’s thriving zombie community, the State of Decay: Year One Survival Edition probably won’t provide you with any fresh meat, but if you skipped either of the rewarding add-ons, or if you simply didn’t make it to the apocalypse last time around, SOD is a grippingly delicious no-brainer.

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