a window-gazer all along

My favourite Australian records of 2009!

2009-12-04T14:21:18Z

in no particular order.

Ghosts Of Television – Forsaken Empire (Magnetic Recording Council)

Ghosts Of Television continue to sound like nobody else in Sydney/Australia/the world on this, their first and apparently last LP. The sheer breadth of disparate influences evident here has to be heard to be believed. For instance, although GOTV are arguably a post-punk band first and foremost (whatever that means), there's something very black metal about parts of this album, particularly Nic De Jong's inhuman vocals and insistently grim lyrics – images of burned and crumbling flesh and fortresses abound. Yet many tracks are underlined by Adrian Clarke's hip-hop-influenced drumming. Elsewhere, Breathe Red Dawn backs a Joe Zawinul-esque keyboard riff with a menacing mid-tempo stomp. Know Weather's wire-brushed drums and major seventh chords lend its solemn verses (which seem to be about human sacrifices) an almost jazzy inflection. Arthritis sounds like a surf-rock band being burned alive.

It's a uniquely creepy album from which it's difficult to nominate a highlight, but Topsoil's swelling second half is perhaps what swept me up the most. The final track, New Flesh, sounds like an excerpt from a bitter memoir and grows from a lonely dirge to something wide and expansive that manages to evoke that sense of distance and heat that's present in the best work of The Triffids.

With Adrian moving to Berlin early next year, Ghosts Of Television have announced their imminent demise, but with Forsaken Empire they've left us a fitting full stop to their career, one that I think will come to be remembered with the same cult reverence accorded to the 1980s post-punks like Primitive Calculators and Severed Heads today.

Crouching 80s Hidden Acronym – I Just Don't Think It's Funny, Clever, Or In Good Taste (self-released)

Crouching 80s are a wilfully unpredictable quintet of ridiculously talented teenagers from the city of Tamworth, New South Wales. They're a genuine phenomenon in their hometown, where they regularly play to packed all ages crowds and the first few notes of their stomping funk-punk singalong Neo Nazi (I Won't Come To Your Party) are enough to send the audience into raptures.

That track opens their first EP, the self-recorded, self-released I Just Don't Think It's Funny, Or Clever, Or In Good Taste, and that would be worth the price of entry alone, but there's more to it than that. The record is groove-filled, genre-defying and frequently hilarious. On Girls/Ghosts, Nick Levy yelps Star Wars references and tales of awkwardness over the band’s taut funk strut like a neurotic James Brown. K! offers joyful Bloc Party guitar-pop as frenetic as it is romantic. Or take the wonderfully bloopy dance-floor bounce of Experiment, which sounds like Custard's Dave McCormack fronting Hot Chip. Or HSC, a deadpan breakup song about the year 12 exams, set to lush late-afternoon indie rock.

It's testament to their talent that Crouching 80s can make such genre-hopping sound relatively seamless. But I mean, this is a band that can casually drop a cover of Bowie's Let's Dance or the Theme From Mos Eisley Cantina (yes, from Star Wars) into their live set, and fucking nail either one. They match sharp, catchy songwriting with healthy doses of wit and slapstick and this record is held back from being huge only by the limitations of their recording budget and their relative isolation.

Bare Arms – Bare Arms (self-released)

My favourite moment in Australian hardcore this year? The part in Bare Arm's apocalypse-welcoming single, In The End We're All Dead, where Mitzi McKenzie-King screams “Always held back!” with such fury and despair that her voice cracks.

Put simply, Bare Arms' self-titled EP is just really, really good. They're a band so tight that they can effortlessly wrench their songs from lung-crushing, furious intensity to passages that are genuinely quiet, fragile and intricate (I think I've even seen drummer Katrina use wire brushes in the 'quiet bits', although that could be my imagination). They use this dramatic dynamic ability to great effect throughout the six songs on this record, Tom's hyperactive basslines interlocking with Aaron's chunky palm-muted guitar riffs and Kat's heavy, frenetic drumming. And I can virtually guarantee that no other hardcore band referenced French post-structuralist philosophers Deleuze and Guittari (The Refrain), the occupation of Palestine (Permanent Traumatic Stress Disorder), the end of the world (In The End, We're All Dead) and simple homesickness (South Coast Line) all in the one record this year.

Aleks And The Ramps – Midnight Believer (Stomp Records)

This is a classic indie-pop album in the best sense: simultaneously joyful, melancholic, funny, childlike (childish?), dorky, silly, sincere, knowing and full of ironic in-jokes. And, most importantly, it's not boring, which is where indie-pop albums sometimes trip up. There's a wide variety of instruments – banjo, acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and various electronic sounds as well as the usual guitar/bass/drums and playful boy/girl vocals. Several hilarious lines are delivered in Aleks' deadpan voice and buried low in the mix; for example: “This is not some elaborate prank/I learned to love like I learned to drive, in Soviet tanks”. Or: “What if you broke his heart/and he died in a car wreck/and then I played his part/in the re-enactment?”

Midnight Believer is worth buying for its three highlight tracks – the three-part let's-go-dancing-while-the-world-ends epic Destroy The Universe With Jazz Hands; Circa 1992 Ideas, which blends a charming, silly Darren Hanlon-style ballad with mutated elevator muzak; and the beautiful album closer Antique Limb, which is probably my favourite pop song of the year. But I'd hasten to add that the other seven songs are very good as well and that this is a proper album album which flows from start to finish very nicely indeed.

Seekae – The Sound Of Trees Falling On People (Rice Is Nice)

Admittedly Seekae released this album themselves in 2008, but the new and very astute Sydney label Rice Is Nice gave it a re-release this year, packaging it with the Remix EP that Seekae put out in winter as a fundraiser for community radio station FBI.

And I know it's been said elsewhere but 2009 is the year that Sydney fell in love with Seekae. They spearheaded the new wave of fairly excellent experimental pop acts that swept the city this year, a scene including Ghoul, megastick fanfare, Parades, Jonathan Boulet, Kyű, et cetera.

Seekae themselves combine arcade-game chiptunes with lush melodica and glitchy electronics in the vein of Boards Of Canada and other Warp Records artists of that ilk. Void and Wool are both lovely quasi-ambient songs with constructed with drama and beauty, where Snax and Herodotus sound more like nerdy hip-hop party jams – I use them to psych myself up before soccer matches. Sound Of Trees somehow sounds organic and futuristic at the same time. It is however over-long: something like 76 minutes of music all up, and that's not including the Remix EP. Think of it as value for money.

Ghoul – A Mouthful Of Gold (self-released)

Again, technically released last year, but I didn't get hold of it 'til this year, and... wow. Ghoul's sound combines inventive percussion with lush guitars and Ivan Vizintin's honeyed voice, an instrument like no other. They're studio perfectionists and it pays off for them here, their diverse reference points (The Smiths, Talking Heads, Animal Collective, Cornelius) reconciled into a completely unique sound. A Mouthful Of Gold is nineteen minutes of stunning experimental pop, spanning Serbian's crooning swing, The Loon's lonely lament, the frustrated, percussive growls of Fuck Math and Fertile Girls, and the thoroughly beautiful Swimming Pool. The latter is the highlight, the kind of perfect, simple song that one only writes once in a lifetime, and it's lovingly arranged and recorded here, soundtracking the hopeful, delicate daydreams you get when you're first infatuated with someone. Dare I dream of you? Dare I breathe the same air you do?

Arrows – Modern Art & Politics (Hobbledehoy Records)

Brisbane four-piece Arrows make slow, intricate and very sincere emo (in the mid-90s sense of the word) that tends towards the self-pitying side, occasionally to the point of being cringe-inducing. Their strength lies in the deftness with which they inject the gravitas of post-rock into what are mostly songs about ill-advised drunken hook-ups. I really enjoyed Arrows at certain times this year but these guys are quite clearly a guilty pleasure of mine, so approach with caution if you don't admit to listening to Sunny Day Real Estate or Death Cab or whoever.

Love Of Diagrams – Nowhere Forever (Remote Control)

Love Of Diagrams' second album colours in the stark post-punk that was previously their stock-in-trade with dense, gauzy layers of guitar. In retrospect “going shoegaze” actually seems like the logical step forward from their earlier work (antecedents can be heard in songs like The Pyramid) but when this was released in August people were, I suppose, pleasantly surprised.

Influences are worn on sleeves (Swervedriver, My Bloody Valentine, etc) and the lyrics can become a bit meaningless if you try to break them down too much, but this album just sounds AMAZING – simultaneously languid, urgent, poignant, paranoid and above all, huge. LoD haven't made anything terribly ground-breaking with Nowhere Forever but they have made something endlessly listenable - my friend Jon and I found it staying in his car stereo and my CD player for weeks. It's just excellent 1990s indie rock, loud and sincere. I first listened to the whole thing through new headphones on the way to work after a huge night out and it was like pouring warm honey on my brain.

thedayisover @ 2009-04-15T23:59:00

2009-04-15T14:00:10Z

so just kiss me slowly / yeah just kiss me with your mouth open

2009-04-12T14:44:44Z

Crouching 80s Hidden Acronym - K.M.W.Y.M.O.
continually amazed at what these kids come up with.
their newest uploaded song, K.M.W.Y.M.O., somehow manages to sound like early bloc party, 90s midwestern emo, minus the bear, a ska band, and the B-52s, all at the same time. an incredibly well put together song. somebody give them some time in a decent studio, i'm pretty sure they'd become one of my favourite indie bands.

thedayisover @ 2009-04-05T20:00:00

2009-04-05T10:03:42Z

thedayisover @ 2009-03-23T22:24:00

2009-03-23T11:37:31Z

thedayisover @ 2009-03-09T11:52:00

2009-03-08T04:22:17Z

thought i'd paid all the medical bills associated with my nose-job (ha).
wrong. $436 for the anaesthetist.
and i expect the ambo's bill to be coming in shortly now i think of it.

really very excited about the band. nothing much else is going on. played lounge room recording of abdicate to a few people and they were impressed, so that's good. am currently trying to rearrange an old Charm Offensive song, Ridley Scott, into an Intentions song. this involves making it sound kind of like To The North. considering doing a cover of Rival Schools' Used For Glue or Jawbox's Savory. or both.

it was good to be home with my family for a few days.

INTENTIONS update

2009-02-28T08:34:08Z

very LOUD excerpt from rehearsals (the outro of our song called Abdicate) up on the micepace here.

umbrella-less muddle

2009-02-14T11:46:57Z

revise previous estimate: i have a broken nose + deviated septum. breathing fine though, so unless the ear nose and throat specialist wants to fix it, i've got a slightly crooked/curved nose now. you can hardly notice.

party at our place last night was fairly rad, especially since it was pouring rain all night. as noted by a fair few people before me, in Sydney people don't go out as much if it's raining.
so for example we had my fave hippies turning up soaking wet and going straight to the dance floor (I love Clare Kelly so fucking much).
bob came up from canberra and scared a good many people, although not too badly i think, ha.

all day i have been wearing a shirt that says "Pizza Slut".

thedayisover @ 2009-02-08T17:43:00

2009-02-08T06:38:56Z

1. we may have found our drummer!
2. my train to BFC's party was 45 minutes late.
3. i got beaten up on Abercrombie Street. mildly concussed, but otherwise no damage - all teeth present and accounted for, no bones broken, etc.

Best of '08, part two!

2008-12-21T14:21:40Z

I guess it goes without saying that all these tracks will stick with me for personal reasons. It's been that kind of year.

Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma

How much you like Vampire Weekend seems to be inversely proportional to how serious you are about your class hatred - that they're rich upper class kids from upstate New York, or something, and make no attempt to hide it, seems to have become their asthetic. But whatever, they make great tunes, and I'd much rather rich people sang stuff like this than songs of misery, or pretended to be poor to look cool. As Ezra Koenig asks on this track, "Why would you lie about how much coal you have? Why would you lie about something dumb like that?"
This is footage of them playing Oxford Comma at a picnic somewhere - lovely.
Vampire Weekend are basically the Strokes playing Paul Simon's Graceland album, but better, and minus Simon's infamously dodgy handling of aparthied-era South African politics.

_______________

The Hold Steady – Sequestered In Memphis

Rollickin' good road-trip rock'n'roll as only The Hold Steady can really make you believe in. Crain Finn's character is holed up in some small-town cop-shop being interrogated about a night out that went somehow wrong. "Now they want to know exactly which bathroom - dude, does it make any difference? It can't be important... Yes, sir, I'll tell my story again..."
I wrote a 3000 word essay on this band not that long ago and it only made me love them more. If this song doesn't make you want to drive somewhere far away with the windows down, preferably to a party, I will never understand you.
_______________

Charge Group – Lullaby For The Apocalypse

I first heard Charge Group at the Super 8 Diaries launch at Dirty Shirlows in Marrickville. I had no idea who they were. Vidan, BFC and I got really impatient with them because they seemed to be soundchecking forever... and then they started playing. Breathtakingly beautiful, delicate music that makes you forget where you are. Musically they sit somewhere between the Dirty Three, the Drones and Art Of Fighting.
____________

Snowman – We Are The Plague

Try listening to this song in the dark. To quote this guy who edits this zine I read when he was talking about something else, if there was a scarier song put out this year, I am afraid to hear it.
___________

blog roll

2008-12-11T13:54:01Z

a list of awesome stuff that i've been reading on the internet.

http://polaroidsofandroids.com/
Polaroids Of Androids is Sydney's best music blog. It's across everything that filters into Sydney airwaves and cultural spaces, from scungey Marrickville warehouse shows to the Ox Arts Darlinghurst hipsters to chart-toppers from the USA. It's pretty clear where POA's loyalties lie, but the bands that they charmingly and unashamedly champion usually happen to be the same ones I do, so it's essential reading for me. Apart from that they post winningly excellent podcasts regularly. Polaroids of Androids is unencumbered by cultural studies buzzwords and theories, making it easy to skim over. Conversely though, I suppose if you don't (as I do) share very similar taste with the people who write it, you'd be unimpressed with the dearth of arguments they can sustain to convince you that, for example, Die! Die! Die! are the best band in the world.

(Holy shit, Die! Die! Die! are good though. If you took all the great bits of the Dunedin Sound of 1980s Flying Nun Records bands and combined those bits with an unfailingly, ferociously fun live presence and then thought really hard about Black Flag getting in a fight with Death From Above 1979, you'd still not be close to how great they are. Do not miss the chance to see them live, everything becomes the wickedly degenerate party you always wanted to partake in, the one that The Vines could never in a million years inspire despite what their major-label videos tried to sell.)

http://www.cardboardplacard.blogspot.com/
Cardboard Placard is Shaun Prescott's blog. Shaun Prescott writes about Australian DIY and weird local music generally and throws up interesting angles on DIY, music and critical theory.
http://fangrrrl.blogspot.com/
Emmy Hennings similarly dips into cultural studies and music criticism. She got me loving Ohana before I'd even heard their music. She's that good a writer.

http://www.noseyinnewtown.com/
Nosey In Newtown is basically someone just wandering around Sydney's famously strange and arty suburb of Newtown with a digital camera and a well-stoked sense of 'satiable curiosity. Makes the best case for exploring Newtown that you'll find on the web.

http://ironcurtaincall.blogspot.com/
Politics! Critical theory! The post-Berlin Wall world! Roadside art! Abusing Rupert Murdoch!

thedayisover @ 2008-11-13T10:53:00

2008-11-12T23:54:33Z

Oh, how I wish.

thedayisover @ 2008-10-07T12:22:00

2008-10-07T01:41:55Z

i'm back from the NT
i was only there fleetingly, really
spent most of the time staring out the window of a falling apart bus
at the deserts
(there's so many different ones)
and now i know what they look like from the highway
how it feels to sleep in them
and i understand how people look and see vast earthen hostilities
nothing, nowhere, meaninglessness
but everything means something
unless you replace an entire language with a single lying word:
'desert'
or
'mine'

i also know what alcoholism looks like
and funnily enough, it wasn't Aboriginal people who showed me that
perhaps i should be quarantined?

i am full of words
i don't know if they are valid
or if they will be ordered right
if my experience can mean anything more than what it was
(not much)
if i can use it as a weapon to fight the filthy rich fuckers who mine this continent hollow for all-powerful poisons
or if it just further damns me
in my own mind, or others':
naive
city kid
uni student
useful idiot
ignorant dogmatic do-gooder

i will scrub these meaningful deserts from my skin but not my soul.

salmon & broccoli pasta bake

2008-09-01T14:28:53Z

it's amazing what a proper meal (that you cooked for yourself and shared with yr housies) can do for your mood.

i miss Ruchi though :(

listen to australian music (that isn't shite)

2008-08-07T03:59:20Z

my disco, clann zu, ohana, blueline medic, love of diagrams, staying at home, to the north, talons, dead china doll, ghosts of television, snowman, the drones, the alcoholics, charge group, qua, safe hands, brisk, laura,

thedayisover @ 2008-08-04T16:40:00

2008-08-04T07:15:58Z

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand i'm back to the not taking control of life thing.
i am twenty-one years old, but so often i feel like a kid - inexperienced, immature, unsophisticated. naive, dumb and dumbstruck. dependent.

i think just have to step up to a few things and it'll be fine. or at least that feeling will recede.

___

ironically for a post that began with my bemoaning such things, i must report that last week i went out every night from tuesday to saturday (inclusive). you gotta take advantage of this time of year.

band rehearsal didn't happen and is proving a bit of a nightmare to organise, even with only three of us. i jammed with el flood and bina yesterday though, that was tops.

still haven't organised a professional placement or indeed heard back from the ISF about that research job. this bodes ill.

thedayisover @ 2008-07-31T14:55:00

2008-07-31T05:47:27Z

UTS fucked up and I can't study a truly excellent subject which i've wanted to take for a year and a half (with a lecturer who goes to DIY punk shows in Marrickville warehouses, no less).

Saturday: band rehearsal. proposed bandnames from my end include:

Intentions
Intentional
To Hell With Good Intentions
sleep-thrift

It's become a habit, a way to start the day

2008-07-29T06:58:11Z

sing it as a round.

2008-07-25T06:44:29Z

A chorus heard throughout the suburbs - open up your mouth and fake the words
Suddenly they reawaken, snow domes shaken, a kiss on the shoulder.

the children of marx and coca-cola

2008-06-30T09:19:19Z

spent today taking part in the long-awaited first jam for the dan/tim/si punk band.

i am excited. we are sounding complex and dare i say it, bangin' in some parts already.
messy and disorganised and unstructured also, but these things can be sorted. i'm pleasantly shocked at how math-rocky tim L and i can be as a rythm section. dan isn't a shredder which is good. he gets what we're trying to do, and that is to make dirty, complex, melodic guitar music. he is very much of the tim kasher/guy piccioto school of discordant guitarism. rad.

the idea is to be playing shows by the beginning of september.

here's hoping.

leave that wretched colony and fly

2008-06-09T16:07:24Z

so there's this whole family tree of fairly amazing bands, of which we only saw one branch (that being indie-folk outfit Charge Group). they all share roots in Purplene from Newcastle.

Purplene
http://www.myspace.com/purplene

The Instant
http://www.myspace.com/theinstantmusic

Charge Group
http://www.myspace.com/chargegroupmusic

UTS censorship debacle!

2008-05-26T08:23:55Z

The UTS Journalism students' Sydney Writers' Festival newspaper was harshly censored because of a mild poke at the NSW state government's unpopularity.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/festival-in-a-flutter-over-censorship-claim/2008/05/25/1211653846513.html

Note quotes from Amelia :)

Seriously though, censorship in this city is starting to get stupid.

This is Amelia's response (she is Chief Of Staff at the paper):

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=15783930196&ref=mf

thedayisover @ 2008-05-14T20:56:00

2008-05-14T11:40:44Z

21st party was a very very good one.
lots of people in attendence, many good tunes, my favourite beer in the world, dancing, PEOPLE, good times.

it went all night.
tim came down!

i gave my 21st speech right after tim made me scull a beer (by singing the song). marcus said, 'stand on the chair' gesturing to a broken one. "i'm not getting on that!" said i, and so it was that my 21st speech was given atop marcus' shoulders in my backyard.

presents included a tiny harmonica in C from Amrita
a (faux)fur hat from Justin
a notebook and warm fuzzy card from Amelia
vinyl and warm fuzzy speech (on v nice paper) from Beans
etc.

i am staying afloat with uni, too. just. so, er, good.

band practice tomoz. we are playing the USU band comp next week, our heat is on thursday. we are called something awful/awesome like Hedonistic Hangovers.

thedayisover @ 2008-02-22T12:24:00

2008-02-22T01:25:19Z

Oh and i'm joining a book club!
and a theatre society!

thedayisover @ 2008-02-22T12:01:00

2008-02-22T01:09:41Z

I'm going to Soundwave on Sunday (?)
Josh Riley has a spare ticket. Yay!
Who else is going?

Jess is back from climbing trees! Yay.

amelia came over yesterday. yay!

Mel's party tonight.

that is all.