Alex's opinion and documents of music

TRADITIONALISTS/SECRET CHIEFS 3
Le Mani Destre recise Degli Ultimi Uomini
(Web Of Mimicry/Stomp)

The Secret Chiefs 3 have long been the soundtrack to worlds so mysterious and foreign that cinema couldn’t even come close. Supernatural, surf-infused, yet fully orchestrated music, submersed in ancient cultures that make no sense to the close-minded and instilled intrigue in those already prone to such fringe-dwelling sounds.

Well, this time around, the band – here working under the moniker of the Traditionalists (see the band’s previous excursion ‘Book Of Horizons’ for clues) – Tre Spruence and Co. have indeed made the soundtrack to the cinematic horror that only your imagination can project upon the walls of your skull.

As separate as the two entities are, this album is highly akin to a Fantomas soundtrack (their debut in particular), and takes many stylistic cues from the weird and wonderful 70s cinematic underground – like the Italian ‘Giallo’ films of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci or Mario Bava.

Filled with razor-sharp staccato strings, ominous organs and slices of diced-up melody, these 30 tracks act as an uncompromising episode of oral vertigo. Chimes and flute instil calm in one instance (‘Eros-seed Of The Egregore’) only to hit a bass-filled wall of off-kilter funk (‘Codex Alimentarius’), all this shattered by the spiralling, nightmarish clatter of violin, percussion, harpsichord and droning, choir-like vocals (‘Funeral For What Might Have Been’).

Yes, this is densely formed music that easily sets your mind ablaze even though you might not like what your imagination delivers back to you. Long shadows, rivers of blood, hedonistic moments of pleasure, highly compressed confusion all career across your eyeballs, all inspired by a entirely unique musical journey that is unlike anything the Chiefs have done to date. Now, if only Sophia Coppola and Sam Rami could collaborate on this one the circle would be complete…

KES BAND
Kes Band II
(Mistletone)

Kes is like one of those special dreams you don’t often have where everything is awesome and where even days later you’re still wishing you could go back to that place – so far and foreign from your real world but filled with a mysterious air of distilled emotions.

Well, Kes Band II really truly is the aural manifestation of a dream, one that’s wonderfully different for everyone and on every listen. A leap of sorts for the man behind the acronym, Karl Scullin  has from his early recordings often been defined by the unique and haunting voice that swims from his head. With this, his fourth Kes album, he (and his bandmates Laura Jean, Julian Patterson, Biddy Conner and Lehmann Smith) have left behind the road signs of lyrics and consigned to us 10 instrumental pieces of pure abstract beauty.

Built upon the equally unique and vivid pictures Sculin paints with his guitar, these songs transform themselves as though they were one 40-minute story – ‘Treesfall’ and ‘Patterson’s Curse’ are reminiscent of the lost, transcendent journeys that define The Dirty Three. ‘Doors Open Doors Close’ and the shorter ‘Jessica Braz’ are filled with the shape-shifting guitar of Sculin that sings like a siren’s voice off in the distance, while the effortless gallop of ‘Outs’ and lurch of ‘The Leyden Experiment’ cast long shadows of unease across a dusky landscape.
Kes Band II is filled with all the beauty of previous albums, even though it is unlike anything Kes has done before. It’s a wondrous album that constantly flicks lit matches into the kindling of your imagination and while it’s not telling you what to think or what to feel it will give you an exquisite world to escape to and play within.

THE BATS
The Guilty Office
(Mistletone)

The instant familiarity of the Bats’ jangle is both reassuring and affirming of their place as an institution in the realm of New Zealand pop. For more than 25 years now this Dunedin quartet have been integral in the formation of the savvy indie pop that along with The Clean and The Chills has defined an underground but instantly recognisable sound – moody but carefree, wistful but idiosyncratic and entirely uplifting.

The Guilty Office is the band’s seventh album and is the wellspring from which the songs of singer/guitarist Robert Scott spring forth. His laconic turn of phrase is bolstered by his voice, which is expressive in a dreamy kind of way and says a lot about the music that it sits atop. Add this to the crunky bass, scuffed-up percussion and flourishes of violin (‘Castle Lights’) and it’s not hard to hear this as ingenuous pop perfection.

Songs such as ‘Satellites’ are altogether enriching like a untroubled warm summer breeze and pass by all too quickly, while ‘Later On That Night’ and ‘The I Specialist’ are songs you’d curl up with to ward off a long cold night. Hidden just before the end is the album’s jewel and title track, an airy and emotive tune that has a looping, plinky guitar line that has to be one of Scott’s best. It’s notable, as well, that such qualities are (like a lot of this album) very reminiscent of Brisbane’s own Go-Betweens, not only grounded in different soil but nowhere near as aloof.

The Bats are an escape hatch to be used when everything else seems just a bit too annoying and complicated. The bobbing of your head or the tapping of your toes along to these 12 pretty ditties should alleviate your cares and really, what more could you want from the melodies on offer here?

THOSE DARLINS
Self-titled
(Oh Wow Dang/Spunk)

Two-toned, shuffle-beat, garage-country – that’s the trio of Those Darlins and in every respect, what you see is what you get. This debut album is made for good times, hard drinkin’ and runnin’ around town – the soundtrack for rowdy nights both remembered and those that remain a blur.

Maybe these three ladies go down a treat out there in America’s honky tonks and bars, but on record they sound like a less than convincing amalgamation of The Dixie Chicks and Holly Golightly. From the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee, the musical combination of guitar, bass, baritone ukulele and a caterwauling chorus line of vocal harmonies hit their mark from the get go, but it’s there that they stay for these remaining 12 songs. Even the addition to their sound of drums, percussion, belly laughs, hoots and hollerin’ doesn’t raise these songs above the flippant, throwaway rabble that first inspired tunes like ‘Red Light Love’, ‘The Whole Damn Thing’ and ‘Glass To You’. Then there are tunes like the album’s blues-stomp closer ‘Keep My Skillet Good And Greasy’, which seems destined to be a last-drinks call that could easily clear out a room.

In fact, if these ladies haven’t purposefully ripped off Miss Golightly’s former trailblazing girl group Thee Headcoatees, then someone needs to tap them on the shoulder and inform them that this exact music’s already been done and… it’s been done a lot better than what’s here on this album.

JAPANDROIDS
Post-Nothing
(Polyvinyl/Stomp)

Vancouver’s Japandroids are two fellas who make a hell of an unhinged racket. Because there’s only two of them hitting the guitar and bangin’ the drums, it’s a sound that crashes to earth somewhere between Garagerockville and Indierocktown – not that locales or categories sound like they’re going to make much difference to these boys given the joyous shrieks, bawls and wails emitted from them both.

These eight tunes that make up the band’s third album are completely cathartic, prime-of-our-lives rock, stylistically similar to other duos like No Age or Japanther but there’s a greater sense of heartfelt abandon to be dug up here. Just take the main catch-cry from ‘Young Hearts Spark Fire’ of “I don’t want to worry about dying, I just want to worry about sunshine ’n’ girls” – that pretty much sums up this whole 36-minute collection of audio escapades.

And you’ve got to hand it to Brian King and David Prowse, they sound as though they have the best lives in the whole universe – running around “French kissing French girls” throughout ‘Wet Hair’ and taking their days by the scruff of the neck and shaking the pocket change out of them with ‘Crazy/Forever’. Jaunty guitar chords burst out like party poppers, the cascading streamers shuddering off cymbals bashed without a hint of restraint or inhibition. Right in the guts of this album is ‘Heart Sweats’, a tune that rumbles like an oncoming swell only to crash upon you like a stage-diving teen – it’s totally glorious so long as you go with it. Japandroids are a torrent of sound that’s not worth fighting – but definitely worth dancing, thrashing and flailing about to, drinks held aloft and good times shared around!

ARBOURETUM
Song Of The Pearl
(Thrill Jockey/Longtime Listener)

There’s a type of rock that has always existed since the dawn of amplified electricity. This music doesn’t make the charts, doesn’t offend or beguile the masses and doesn’t see beyond its all encompassing and burgeoning sense of self. This type of music is Nothing Rock! It’s just there, journeying onward, blind to the fact that it is the least challenging music around and therefore the most irritating.

I’m sorry to say, but by the end of the first mini-epic ‘False Spring’ – with its, not one, but two guitar solo breakdowns – you fast realise that this music exists only to serve itself and is nothing. It just seems such a waste seeing as it’s not ever bad enough to specifically dislike – even though the desolate, desert landscapes are all stage-painted backdrops. At various times it really seems like there’s something here and it’s actually going somewhere – take the start of ‘Another Hiding Place’ with its chiming guitars reminiscent of a classic Built To Spill introduction only for it to, within a few minutes, turn into a shadow of a Credence B-side. ‘Down By The Fall Line’ gets its reverb on, hazy guitars the perfect foundation on which to crack forth a hook, a melody, anything, but no – the song just peters out to, again, nothing.

Revivalists, The Black Angels, Black Mountain, originators Crazy Horse and even early Pink Floyd all make music that is hinted at here, but no matter how you mix the folk with the psych and the guitar crunch, it never makes an impact (unless you count the grating ‘Infinite Corridors’). It’s disheartening and ultimately, quite time-consuming to trudge through this plaid and void rehash of so much of alternative rock’s fringe history. Epic Fail!

WILD BIRDS & PEACE DRUMS
The Snake
(Leaf/Inertia)

What look like clouds adorning the cover of The Snake are more like touched up moods swirling around this Swedish duo – tribal, avant-pop in 10 chapters that are chained down to no one sound, but somewhat steeped in the 80s, with overwhelming flashbacks to Kate Bush, This Mortal Coil or The Golden Palominos.

Every moment and facet of these songs is drenched in percussion and overly melodramatic female vocals – often, this is all that makes up the entirety of the songs. An exotic array of instruments is scattered throughout (steelpan, cittra, gu zheng, kalimba, santor and autoharp) but it’s not the sounds themselves that will ensnare you. No, it’s entirely the melodrama that is three-quarters of what’s here. Without those aforementioned dark clouds hanging heavy and full of ostentation (‘There Is No Light’, ‘So Soft So Pink’), there’s nothing much here to love. When a more or less interpretive set of sounds is offered up (‘Places’), it shows that beneath the physical talent there’s not a lot being said and a very confusing set of stories being communicated.

But having something essential to say hasn’t been much of a problem for most of modern popular music and that seems to be the case here, especially seeing as the sounds used are set in such a unique way. But even with just a dramatic array of percussion and cumbersome, operatic vocals, this is simply crooked pop music. It’s not what on the surface seems to be avant garde or fringe, no… it’s Afropimpo-styled shock and awe that should be strange enough to keep your attention for a while, but what ever you do, don’t scratch the surface – you might find Enya or something equally as benign just beneath.

ASOBI SEKSU
Hush
(Polyvinyl/Stomp)

Let’s see how far we can get without saying how goddamn dreamy this group is (not including the fact that I just now said how dreamy they are)!

New York indie shoegazers Asobi Seksu are about all things simplistically child-like – even if it is careering sheets of shimmering guitar. The prettiest rock you could skip along to, the band’s third album is a further continuation on the sounds they have long fostered, only this time around there is a greater light shed upon the band’s poppy, Broadcast-ike hooks and a lot more bombast employed to their overt melodies.

The sounds and the soaring vocal lines of Yuki Chikudate sound new and mesmerising – even with the quirk that a good portion of the album is sung in Japanese. But by the time you make it to ‘Transparence’ or even ‘Risky And Pretty’, you’ll either be giddy with the album’s shape-shifting beauty or left at a loss with the cloudy wall of crescendos that dip and rear themselves dramatically just so you don’t forget that they’re there (‘In The Sky’). In an attempt to fit all their ideas and unfurling melodic stylings into one sound, songs such as ‘I Can’t See’ do head into the prettiest of post-rock territory, but without any real trajectory to aim for.

Ultimately though, the desire to be twee pop (aided by many a synthesiser) and My Bloody Valentine’s offspring doesn’t mesh, with too many of these 12 tunes falling into a dreamy but forgettable void somewhere between the two striking styles.

DON WALKER
We’re All Gonna Die
(Salt/MGM)

This record doesn’t so much sound like the music this country exports or emulates, but music that sounds exactly like our harsh and unforgiving landscape. An album that upon its initial release was lost in the torrents of grunge, Britpop and the popular music of the hour, but now, re-issued 14 years on, recalls the same parched grandeur as albums by The Triffids or Paul Kelly.

A seedy journey seeped in the same blues and rock that informed so much of Walker’s iconic Cold Chisel, this is music that shares the same dank corners of life as Louis Tillett, Spencer P. Jones and Roland S. Howard. Stacked with a fistful of ballad-esque tunes that breathe a heavy air or organ, harmonica, guitar and pedal steel, We’re All Gonna Die is a sobering journey of individuals searching through loss, for love and a little salvation on the side.

When the album does crank up, it’s just to remind you of the good times, ‘Party’, ‘My Girl’ and ‘In The End’ revelling in desires that ‘The Wedding’ and ‘I Am The King’ and the album’s title track later reflectively counterpoint. The album’s haunting and nightmarish tome is its 18-minute closer ‘Three Blackbirds’, a bitter tale slowly siphoned from Walker’s weathered voice, painfully highlighting just one episode of our forefathers’ horrid crimes against our country’s Indigenous ancestors.

Don Walker’s solo debut sounds just as displaced in time now as it was upon its release. It sounds like a place you’d go even though you’re pretty sure that place was levelled decades ago. Faded Polaroids of excursions into Kings Cross or somewhere out near Burke filled with serendipitous stories made bigger with the passing of time. But that’s the beauty of the blues and this is the perfect, nostalgic slice of its Aussie, seedy underbelly.

THE NATION BLUE
Rising Waters
(Casadeldisco/Shock)

These songs weren’t created for normal, well adjusted folks, but Melbourne’s Nation Blue have always been a difficult pill to swallow – living on the outskirts of music since their inception more than a decade ago. Breeding a brand of noise-rock that is sexy like Girls Against Boys but punishing like Unsane and as unforgiving as the squalid outskirts of our cities, this trio’s fourth album surpasses their all but perfect Protest Songs of 2007.

Music that’s maligned, bitter and brimming with hurt. Fourteen songs stirring all the murkiness that dwells inside, or simply cutting you clean in two. Their power lies not within any pretence of aggression or muscular heaviness – that’s not The Nation Blue. This music’s heavy like memories of mistakes and regrets you wish you could forget but that continue to burn like fire-stoked brands.

Take the palpitating hooks of ‘I See Colours’, falling into remission only to lurch forth like a hospital needle you didn’t see coming or the last-straw plea of “I need you!” in ‘This Nine’s Mine’. Much of this album soothes (‘Restless’, ‘Trespass’), but it’s in the most powerful moments (‘Uprising’s Off’, ‘Lovers Darkness’ and ‘Warm Water’) where you’re forced to uncouple yourself from the frequencies to save you from being left, even hours later, uncomfortably confused and sobbing.

When rebellion, love and all our dreams go horribly wrong, they’ll often turn to hurt and fester within us. It’s not much of a sales pitch to tell you that this album is amassed under such dark clouds, but no-one can claim not to have felt what’s here, and it’s a powerful force that carries you through dark days and deposits you with an greater sense of kinship, redemption and compassion. Either way, whatever this album makes you feel, it sure as hell won’t let you feel it lightly.

TINARIWEN
Imidiwan: Companions
(Independiente/Shock)

The electric guitar is a wonderful voice, saying what words can’t and telling stories that translate cultures. Well, it’s unique story of displacement, repression, sovereignty, kinship and exile being told by this nomadic group from the southern Sahara of Africa. Tinariwen communicate through their electrified instruments and their native tongue of Tamashek, but none of this is a setback to immersing yourself in the group’s rich and joyous musical explorations.

Made up of three electric guitarists, an acoustic guitarist, bassist and loose collection of male and female singers and various percussionists, they use their modern instrumentation to communicate sounds steeped in an entire culture’s history, making their fourth album Imidiwan such a joy to behold and wonderful cultural bridge. Too often, folks weaned on modern Western music aren’t willing to make the leap to the traditional music of other cultures… it’s just too big a chasm for them. The songs here though, such as ‘Tenhert’ or ‘Tahult In’, are instantly catchy (because wonderful melodies aren’t geographically bound) and without a focus on the lyrics, the choruses of voices simply become another emotive and communicative device through which you can absorb such uniquely and overwhelmingly catchy music.

It’s backhanded to think of these 13 songs as ethnic music from a far off place, rich with emotion, articulated in captivating ways with sounds that sound both familiar and exotic at the same time. Tinariwen do what Fela Kuti, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or even The Buena Vista Social Club have done – they take what is inherent and in their blood and soil and offer it up in ways that anyone from anywhere can enjoy and be enriched by. And once you’ve absorbed this beautiful work then wade into the translated lyrics inside and take in the wonderful DVD film that is also part of this package.

BLACK CAB
Call Signs
(Laughing Outlaw)

Thankfully, the drugs are still kicking in and the instruments are still plugged in. While all this keeps on keeping on, we’ll have bands like Black Cab to enjoy and this well known Velvets-come-Brian Jonestown acid-ripped sound. But this isn’t a dandy rehash of a hazy, dream-like past. No, for their third album, this Melbourne duo has drawn inspiration from a very cold 1970s East Germany.

From the glistening opening of ‘Church In Berlin’ and ‘Rescue’, you’re given a formless but radiant canvas to throw your imagination up against. The mixture of reverb-drenched guitars swelling and surging is instantly familiar but beautifully timeless – the band, fleshed out to a full seven-piece taking that psych-pop sound and making it wholly their own.

A flower in the hair, or maybe poppy, behind-the-ear vibe takes hold for the Judee Sill-inspired ‘Black Angel’ and from here the electronic experimentalism often associated with Germany in the 70s comes to the fore with ‘Dresden Dynamo’, dousing water upon the flickering flames of free love that so often come to be associated with the sounds found here. ‘Lost & Falling’ reeks with sadness and is an ominous and ghostly ode, building and cascading and held aloft, only to be broken down by the pulsing beat of ‘Sonenallee’ and from here the album coasts, drowning itself in the continuous layers of sound until an eerie, lone piano ends it all.

Call Signs is an engrossing crossroad of moods, sounds and textures. Black Cab combine their disparate interests in such seamless ways that you’re left with an inspirational and beautifully foreign landscape of sounds uncomfortably tinged with the burnt fringes of paranoia.

JAY REATARD
Watch Me Fall
(Matador/Remote Control)

This is rock’n’roll that’s all about spirit and even channelling the spirits of glorious rebellion that defined garage rock’s originators. Jay Reatard sounds like the prodigal son of The Sonics, weaned on Joey Ramone’s songwriting sensibilities and dropped smack bang in the middle of the Memphis garage sound. With this kind of make-up, it’s nigh on impossible for these 12 songs not to be anything but gloriously ramshackle pop nuggets.

Reatard’s second album is filled with the same temper as his debut Blood Visions, but this time around he hasn’t tried as hard to smother the bumper crop of hooks that fill his songs. ‘Can’t Do It Anymore’ is overflowing with guitar scree that could flatten a North Shore tidal wave while ‘I’m Watching You’ with its iridescent guitar and echoed moods has enough 60s bubblegum tack to lock tight the jaws of any naysayer.

But the innovation doesn’t end with some stylistic flourishes. ‘Wounded’ is the kind of heart-on-sleeve gem that breaks down Reatards punk aesthetic, guitar caterwauling – and it might just leave a tear on your leather-clad sleeve. ‘Rotten Mind’, ‘Hang Them All’ and so much of what’s here take more than a hint of 80s West Coast punk (Descendents, Screeching Weasel) and makes it sound fresh as a daisy, while ‘My Reality’ could be the epilogue to The Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind’. Watch Me Fall is a punked-up pop album at heart, even if Reatard is rebelling against himself as much as anything else. This is as good an album as most of the Ramones’ catalogue. It would have been the kind of album they’d made if Johnny weren’t at the helm steering them into oblivion – maybe not a Rocket to Russia but definitely a homerun to hardened hearts.

LOVE OF DIAGRAMS
Nowhere Forever
(Unstable Ape)

The first thing that grips you about Love Of Diagrams’ third album is the teeth in their guitars. After the cold and listless minimalism of the band’s last album, it’s refreshing to hear some audible passion and ferment writhe from the speakers and grab you by both ears.

Does anyone here still remember The Falling Joys? Because that’s the stake that these three Melbournians have (unintentionally) tethered themselves to. The densely layered guitar squall of openers ‘Static Information’ and ‘Forever’ instantly recall the dewy, sneaker-gazing pop that the Joys originally ripped off the British and that came to all but define the mid-90s underground. There’s a spark that flickers the song ‘Lookout’ to life and a sound of desperation coming from Antonia Sellbach as she barks those same words that’s well worth grabbing and wrestling with.

But after the initial impact of their music is reduced to minor bruising, you’re left with no confusion between a revitalised sound or anything entirely new. Love Of Diagrams are also a love of paradigms and well established disaffected indie-rock with a side serving of volume and sexy indifference is what’s on the menu here. It’s by far the most cathartic music they’ve made since their initial instrumental sounds some six or so years ago, but the added density and propulsion gives you both more to get wrapped up in and more to meld into one giant background blanket of sound.

Also, this is a llloooonnnggg album and unless you can make the many melodies engrossing and seductive like Ride once did, it’s hard to stay engaged for the whole 50-minute-plus duration. These 11 songs ripple the waters, but never create waves and seem to really find Love Of Diagrams after so many years together, really nowhere forever.

YO LA TENGO
Popular Songs
(Matador/Remote Control)

One thing you can rely on Yo La Tengo being is different from what Yo La Tengo were last time around, while still somehow sounding exactly like Yo La Tengo – cool trick, hey? Just step two minutes into the band’s 14th album and you’ll be ushered into a world of free-flowing interstellar keys, a funky bass warble, evocative strings, spluttering percussion and the cool-as-cucumber croon of Ira Kaplan. We could end this here by saying that this trio are effortlessly magnificent! But let’s dig a little deeper…

For years we’ve fallen under the spell of the band’s deft ability to create the sweetest, most jangly (if not slightly mangled) pop music and thankfully they don’t let us down here. ‘Avalon Or Something Very Similar’ and the intimate ‘By Two’s’ are like big, comforting hugs of loveliness and make up an album that finds the band sounding fresh, playful and more laidback than they possibly ever have.

But the world’s not all wine and roses and neither is the music of Hoboken’s finest. Just as soon as you’ve snuggled up to this album’s softer side, they come bursting out with a chunk of raw melody in the form of ‘Nothing To Hide’ – ragged guitars chugging along and burning bright like a struck match. ‘Periodically Double Or Triple’ is all Harlem jazz and strings, while ‘If It’s True’ is so familiar that you’ll believe you heard it on the grapevine.

Even with all the sumptuous, smooth and soulful flourishes, the album’s zenith comes in its final trilogy, spanning 37 minutes and epitomising the hypnotic beauty and expansive rugged eclecticism that puts Popular Songs even above And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out! If these songs were to ever actually become popular in the wider sense, then the world would be such a better place for it.

MODEST MOUSE
No One’s First, And You’re Next
(Epic/Sony)

We want the sun to shine from the pores of their melodies and lift us out of our humdrum with their carefree and cathartic indie-pop wizardry! Why? Because that’s what Isaac Brock’s crew has been capable of with their unique and idiosyncratic, hyper-static music.

There are no envelopes at their feet this time around, no pushing of boundaries, just a fun and pleasant anodyne sound, a familiar jaunt and that mild desperation that wraps up Brock’s voice and his impenetrable little stories. There’s nothing spellbinding about this collection of re-polished outtakes. This is a safe little album where the band seem to have a curiosity about all they’re known for and are simply digging about, raking up lost ideas, stringing them together into extended passages of music and ultimately doing what they do well in ways they’ve always done, but utilising a newfound mastery of their own sense of sound.

Modest Mouse take on a real Built To Spill sense of expanse here – absent are the hits and dancefloor breakdowns that had the kids reeling a few years back. No, this is the band with their collective hair down, tunes like ‘The Whale Song’ letting Johnny Marr totally off the leash to wail the night away. It sounds quirky and carefree when the band gets their carnival on during ‘Perpetual Motion Machine’ and ‘King Rat’, but it’s when they push and pull against their own sense of propulsion (‘Satellite Skin’, ‘History…’) that Modest Mouse embodies all that their contemporaries don’t.

This album of offcuts seems like a kick against the phenomenal opus that was their last two albums and their opulent sense of grandeur and sprawling instrumentation. Then the band was whispering and wailing the meanings of life; with these, it’s as if they’re just saying let’s chill out and enjoy the day.

MIDNIGHT YOUTH
The Brave Don’t Run
(Warner)

New Zealand isn’t a big country but it’s a huge, huge sound that Midnight Youth are delivering to the world. You’d hazard a guess that this five-piece haven’t played to many stadiums in their time since forming in 2006, but the grand chorus of shouting hordes, the breakdowns and all the soaring clichés show that they have every stadium rock rule committed to memory.

In fact, almost every one of the 10 songs that make up this debut album have gold and platinum record stamped all over them… it’s like Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters have left some illegitimate children in the land of the long white cloud (‘All On Our Own’, ‘Dead Flowers’). And just in time to capitalise on everything that is the glorified 80s, the production, gated percussion, long keyboard sweeps, let’s-save-the-world chorus lines and pained emotion mean ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ is possibly the only thing missing from this album. But you do get a good dose of Def Leopard (‘Benjamin’) and The Killers (‘Tijuana’) and ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’-era Poison (‘Golden Love’).

Lauded by INXS and with a sleeved heart so big it’s actually a little sickening, it’s hard to see how this band could put a foot wrong. But there’s a niggling feeling that hides beneath the wall of manufactured gold – and that’s that this is merely pulp without a shred of originality. If you’re stupid enough (or young enough) to think that the 80s was some kind of pop pantheon of history and culture, then you’re going to lap this up so fast you’ll choke.

Inane, inane, inane, inane, inane, inane, inane, inane, inane, inane, inane, inane audio wrapped in some really cool artwork care of Sam Yong.

TEX PERKINS
The Best Of… (Songs From My Black Cattle Dog)
(Universal)

It’s an interesting equation to proclaim “The Best Of” and rather than re-writing history, let’s just say that this collection of 18 songs spanning 1993 to present is a case of selective memory.

You won’t find the wild and woolly Perkins here, none of the heady Beasts Of Bourbon or even early avant guard. No what’s here is the soft, tender singer-songwriter crooning his reassuring ballads of love found and squandered. Still, Perkins continues to find himself surrounded by exceptional talent (as has always been the case), Charlie Owen, Don Walker, Jim White, Tim Rogers, Warren Ellis, Joel Silbersher and many more cohorts helping to take Perkins embers and stoke them up.

Not to downplay Perkins’ notable talent as a wordsmith as it’s a foreboding darkness that he emanates, but as he so eloquently admits himself, he’s just “The singer of the song”. He’s been in possession of an inescapable voice for neigh on 30 years and in almost every case here, were it not for the musicians Perkins has brought into the fold, the songs here wouldn’t be half as memorable. But he’s a smart man and subsequently there’s a lot of laconic music to warmly soak up and kick back to – Tex sounding every bit like Australia, from the Tex, Don and Charlie tunes ‘Fake That Emotion’ to the Cruel Sea’s ‘She Speaks A Different Language’ and his Dark Horse solo tunes.

Sure he may not have composed the music to every tune he’s sung and barked over but a man who has made such an indelible impact on Australian music and who is such a looming (and somewhat intimidating) character really needs something a bit better and definitely more comprehensive than this abridged collection of ballads to celebrate his impressive career.

PETER BRODERICK
Home
(Bella Union/Shock)

Some artists would be content with excelling at a chosen instrument or amaze in one field of music… Peter Broderick isn’t that kind of fellow. The Portland native has, already at the age of 22 shown a virtuosity with the piano, violin and guitar and subsequently contributed to albums by M. Ward and others as well as touring the world.

Broderick’s unique talent led him to Europe, spending time in EfterKlang – the shared spaces, concert halls, studios and friends culminating in his first contemporary album Home. The 10 songs here would be eloquent folk music were they not filled with such an array of splendid musical layers  and inquisitive sounds. Orbiting a calming voice and intricately plucked acoustic guitar, Broderick also lays his deft hand to various percussion, organs, banjo, lap steel and saw. While some songs are achingly intimate (‘Esbern Snares Gade 11, 2tv’), others majestically swoop and soar (‘Sickness Bury’).

Hayden lost in Skyscraper National Park might hear these distant yearning sounds. Aphex Twin channelled through British folk music might sound this elegant. But it’s not notation or even interpretation that’s at the core of this music, there’s a purity and immense beauty here – whilst not parting waters, it’s not too much to claim these songs strong enough to calm rough seas.

Shifting the focus from studio artistry to stage honesty, there’s a limited bonus disc of nine extra songs that reconstruct the multi-layered magic down to one man and his music, on his own. Gone are the choruses of voices and replaced is piano, violin and guitar, layered, looped and entwined with samples that spark memories of Sylvain Chauveau or Tape. It’s confounding to be given something so remarkably original by someone so young but Broderick seems unconstrained by such concerns – Home filled with an unblemished beauty.

BOWERBIRDS
Upper Air
(Dead Oceans/Longtime Listener)

When you live in a trailer out in the forest, there’s still plenty to do and plenty of time to enjoy doing it. The duo of Phil Moore and Beth Tacular clearly appreciate their surrounds and have made an album that perfectly reflects the rural freedom that they obviously feel.

There’s something undeniably honest by the harmonised call of “you are free, you are already free” in ‘House Of Diamonds’, it’s believable and encased in accordion, piano, violin, acoustic guitar and percussion, it’s an honest and intoxicating message. Building upon the ephemeral narratives of their debut, Upper Air is definitely a more personable and intimate affair – more warming campfire than lifecycle bushfire.

With the aid of Mark Paulson’s third set of hands, Bowerbirds have created a 10 full-bodied tunes that stagger their country, folk and rural roots – delivering an album that converges in the woodlands between Joanna Newsom, Andrew Bird and Will Oldham. The stories here are what makes this album so uplifting, using the oceans, mountains, deserts, sky and canyons dark depths all as various metaphors for one another’s love, lust and desires, the ensuing indelible bond sketched out and vividly coloured in with melodies and harmonies.

In others hands, this music could sound prudish or quaint with some kind of hippy vibe but that’s never the case here, this trio have delivered up music that’s stumbles unknowingly into sincerity, proclaiming a hard fort wisdom without thwacking you over the head with it. Rustic musings that are refreshing and forward thinking, you just might think that all is right with the world as Upper Air ambles from your speakers.

THROW ME THE STATUE
Creaturesque
(Secretly Canadian/Pop Frenzy)

It’s a nonchalant, shimmering celebration of sound that encompasses this Seattle quartet’s debut album. Delivered with a quirky urgency the handclapping bop of opener ‘Waving At The Shore’ recalls a ‘Why Can’t I Be You’ pop kind of candour that made The Cure a heady mix of fun and ferment. But you’ve got to steer clear of comparisons cause these lads have a truly eclectic mix of muses that morph and materialise throughout these 12 tunes.

Indie-pop it is but replicas and reconstructions it is not. Moodiness simmers throughout ‘Pistols’ but it’s never dower, crescendoing falsettos embolden ‘Tag’ but its feet are firmly grounded, acoustic guitars flick the ears of drum machines while whistling melodies skip around maudlin memories retold with artful candour. When Throw Me The Statue converge on the same idea at the same time, its’ combustible – ‘Ancestors’ a rallying around shimmering guitars and sombre timbres only to bombdive into a chorus that is gleefully groovy while ‘Hi-Fi Goon’ is so full of sunshine that it’s like a 12-year olds trampoline festival.

At various point throughout this album, you can almost hear the telephone ringing in the background, it’s probably Ray Davies wanting his melodies back – even though he’s not going to use them so who the hell cares where they now crop up. It’s this classic grasp of pop melodies, keyboards countered against jangly guitars, like the secret parts of the 80s that were actually really good, that sit this group outside of the current musical rehash that fills the airwaves. Go see your doctor if you find yourself sitting still throughout Creaturesque, cause you’re legs might have inadvertently fallen off such is the infectious nature of this fun and insouciant musical merry-go-round.

THE FEATURES
Some Kind Of Salvation
(429/Universal)

Five years between albums might seem like a long time but when it took you a decade to get your debut out, well I guess no one’s in a rush. This Tennessee quartet have resurfaced with another 13 tunes full of pop bombast, more refined and embellished than their 2004 debut Exhibit A.

Blazing horns herald the bands return and a heady mix of Britpop and Sloan styled Indie-rock go to define the frequencies that these boys are transmitting. Songs such as ‘GMF’ (Genetically Modified Fable) or ‘Lions’ have double, triple and quadruple hooks laden throughout, so much so that you might feel yourself being bashed over the brow with melody. The main key to The Features is a duelling guitar and keyboards that sit out front, making the songs seem overly celebratory even when they might have more serious or personal narratives (‘Temporary Blues’, ‘Wooden Heart’).

The Features recall a sound not heard for decades, not since The Faces or even The Jam and it’s this creative reinvention of that sound that makes them a unique proposition in 2009. With these songs obliviously so long in the gestation, the band’s been given time to fill every last pocket of air with a melody or instrument. In fact they’ve cherry-picked what they want from the last 40 years of pop, glistening synthesizers throughout ‘Concrete’, proto-punk guitar-crunch in ‘Off Track’ and all-consuming brass in ‘All I Ask’. When the band do temper their sound, ballads like ‘The Gates Of Hell’ sound as soft as satin.

This is an indie-pop record made for the sheer fun of having a catchy tune to sing along to, saunter along to and soundtrack your days – music so demanding of your attention that it will wipe away anything else you’re doing at the time.