Month: June 2013

Live review: The Mercy Beat + The Strums + The Grand Scheme + Snakes and Daggers – The Tempo, Brisbane – 14th June 2013

/ Paul McBride / 1 Comment

Our Band Could Be Your Life #3: The Rock Edition is part of a regular showcase put on by Brisbane music warlords Footstomp Music, in order to get local bands on a stage. Tonight, we will be treated to four of the finest and most hard-working rock bands from Brisbane: Snakes and Daggers, The Grand Scheme, The Strums, and headliners The Mercy Beat, who are here to launch their new single ‘Fishbowl’ in the spacious, beer-y environment of Fortitude Valley’s The Tempo Hotel.

A small but dedicated has gathered in front of the stage as openers Snakes and Daggers get the show on the road with some quality hard rock. Named Guns ‘N’ Roses-style after singer Dick Dagger and guitarist James Snake, the band run through a short but sweet set of high-octane rock riffage, with Snake putting out the most energy as he gets amongst the audience for his solo.

Next up is The Grand Scheme, who should have played in this venue a few months ago, but were kicked off bonehead Bam Margera’s bill in contentious circumstances. Opening with ‘Kings of Youth’, the quartet play a tight set of hard rock with plenty of scream-y vocals and dual guitars. ‘Kink Kink’ is introduced as “the first song we ever wrote” and another is described as “going out to all the sexy beasts.”

The Grand Scheme

The Grand Scheme

Following The Grand Scheme is The Strums, who have been slogging away on pub and support circuits around Brisbane for some time now, and they provide the best set of the night so far. With a shout of “How ya doin’, alright?” and the words “love is rad” painted on his guitar, frontman Jai Sparks leads the widely-grinning quartet through a set of upbeat rock and punk tunes, including the catchy ‘Passive Smoke’ and call and response of ‘Fuck Yeah’.

The Strums

The Strums

And so, to our headliners for this evening: The Mercy Beat. The Brisbane rock trio are here to launch their single ‘Fishbowl’, and it appears in second slot in the set after opener ‘The Mercy Blues’, and gives The Tempo audience probably the best riffs of the night. Without pausing to introduce their songs or address the audience, the band rock through an hour-long set of top-notch rock ‘n’ roll and punk tracks, including ‘No Crown’, ‘Eagle Throws Goat Off Cliff’, and ‘Born Yesterday’ from their How To Shampoo A Yak album in a thunderous climax to the evening.

The Mercy Beat

The Mercy Beat

All in all, Footstomp have put together a damn good show tonight, and getting four kick-ass rock bands for $10 entry is a pretty good deal. While each of these bands deserved a bigger crowd this evening, it’s great to see people out supporting local acts and for them to be promoted in this way. Here’s hoping for many more nights like this.

Record review: Eden Mulholland – Feed The Beast (2013, LP)

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Eden Mulholland

Feed The Beast is the debut solo album from Motocade singer Eden Mulholland, and follows his 2012 Jesus Don’t You Get My Jokes EP. Listing influences like Bill Bryson, contemporary dance, smokes, and sex (probably not at the same time), New Zealander Mulholland effortlessly skips between genres with aplomb on this assured effort. Recorded and mixed by Neil Baldock (Crowded House, Sarah Blasko) in Auckland, Feed The Beast features elements of pop, rock, folk, tribal rhythms, and electronica packed into twelve three-minute tracks. The fact that the opening trio of songs are a catchy stomp (‘Cry Cry Cry’), a gently-ambling number (‘Mekong Delta’) and soaring pop song that starts as a maudlin piano ballad (‘Where Is My Jealousy’) probably says a lot about the variety of sounds on show, and Mulholland’s defiance of classification in general. Single ‘I Will Echo’ is a mid-album high point; a deceptively simple synth-pop song with a sing-along chorus and neat keyboard breaks. The 86-second acoustic title track certainly isn’t the centrepiece, and almost goes unnoticed between the shimmering electronica of ‘Body Double’ and the sound of science fiction nightmares on ‘Beside Itself’. ‘Such A Shame You Must Die’ is by far the most haunting track here, with soaring, ghost-like vocal harmonies and ominous lyrics like “I’m going to find you, I’m going to kill you; you will suffer tonight.” (Mental note: don’t get on Mulholland’s bad side.) Describing Feed The Beast is tricky, as there’s so much going on in such a small space, but the quality and variety of tunes makes this an album worthy of repeated listens. (Mushroom Music)

Record review: Jagwar Ma – Howlin (2013, LP)

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Jagwar Ma

Manchester in 1990 must have been a pretty cool place to be. Bands like The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays, and The Inspiral Carpets were kick-starting a new musical revolution good enough to see off the manufactured crap-pop that dominated the charts in the ’80s. But for such an iconic group of bands to have so few direct descendants taking on the legacy of ‘Madchester’ music is a little strange. Enter Sydney indie-dance duo Jagwar Ma. Howlin – the band’s debut album – comes complete with the sort of ecstasy-fuelled beats you might expect to see on the dance-floor of The Haçienda nightclub in its heyday; all that’s needed is a few hundred wide-eyed party kids and Bez flailing his arms around on a stage somewhere. Jono Ma and Gabriel Winterfield manage to cross genres and eras with apparent ease throughout the album; going from dance, acid-house, indie-rock, and back again from song to song. Every DJ and dance producer knows not to blow their wad too early, so opener ‘What Love’ is a chilled-out start, easing us into the more up-tempo tunes to come, and ‘Uncertainty’ is surely the brother-of-another-mother of The Happy Mondays’ ‘Hallelujah’, with a dangerously catchy chorus and plenty of synths. The excellent ‘The Throw’ and ‘Come Save Me’ will be well-known to radio listeners and possess perhaps the best hooks, and later track ‘Exercise’ could have been lifted from a Stone Roses album, and ‘Let Her Go’ has shades of cult indie band The Las. Keep an eye on these guys – they’re doing something more than a little special. (Future Classic)

Event review: Opal Vapour – Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse – 5th June 2013

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Opal_Vapour

No, it’s not an upstart new-world band you haven’t heard of. Opal Vapour is a contemporary dance work with roots in Indonesian ancestral dance, and is brought to the stage with an Australian twist. Drawing on themes such as cleansing, purification, and belonging to a place of birth, and taking elements from Javanese shadow puppetry, the show is a stunning, haunting, and ultimately very impressive piece of work.

The Powerhouse’s Visy Theatre is a suitably dark and snug venue for a performance of this kind, and a perfectly-sized space for the three-person show. Consisting of the powerful physical moves of dancer Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal, the soaring voice and musicianship of Ria Soemardjo, and the lightning of Paula van Beek, the fifty-minute show is captivating from start to finish.

As the audience files into the theatre and takes to their seats, each and every person present slowly realises that the object on the stage, an oblong-shaped box perhaps six feet in length, has upon it a drape-covered shape that looks suspiciously like a person. It is only around ten minutes later when the show starts, that this is confirmed. Ria Soemardjo slowly circles the stage, chanting in a haunting fashion and ringing hand-held bells, before slowly removing the layers of drapes from what soon is revealed to be Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal’s body, and the show begins. The stamina to stay so still under hot spotlights and several layers of drapes is only the start of Tunggal’s physical exertion for this evening.

For the next forty minutes or so, the trio hold the audience in the palm of their hands, with a series of moves, postures, shades, and sounds that evoke strong images of trance, reawakening, and court dance. Visuals from an overhead camera are projected onto a screen behind the dancer to add a dual effect, and the box on which the performer spends the entire performance is lit from below and covered in a thick layer of sand; all of which ends up on the Visy floor by the end of the performance. Something else that happened at the end of the performance is the audience being so impressed that the performers were called back onto the stage four times for rounds of bows to the sound of thunderous applause; all richly deserved.

After being fairly spellbound for the duration of the performance, it’s a harsh reality that awaits the audience as they come blinking back into the light of the Powerhouse’s foyer, and while a dance performance needs to be seen to be fully appreciated, take it from me: this one was pretty damn great.

Record review: Jen Cloher – In Blood Memory (2013, LP)

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Back with her third record after four years tending to ailing parents in New Zealand, Melbourne singer-songwriter Jen Cloher is moving away from her indie-folk roots, towards a sound that is rockier, more immediate, and ultimately better than anything she has done before. Recorded in six days and with a title taken from the autobiography of dance choreographer Martha Graham, the crowd-funded In Blood Memory sees her dabble in lo-fi guitar distortion, single-mindedness, and stark honesty throughout, and showcases an artist who has returned to recording with a fresh, energetic approach to her music. Opener ‘Mount Beauty’ wastes no time getting among the riffs, with rough and raw production evident from the start, and the seven-minute ‘Name In Lights’ burns more slowly before building to a big finish. The country-rock lead lines of ‘David Bowie Eyes’ and ‘Toothless Tiger’ are a charming match to Cloher’s voice, which flits between coarse and gentle throughout the album, depending on the mood. ‘Needs’ is dark and brooding, and closer ‘Hold My Hand’ directly references Cloher’s mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease, and the confusion and pain that comes with it. Despite the often heavy subject matter, this is a triumphant return for a singer-songwriter who must be considered one of the best in the country at what she does. While it seems like forever ago, Cloher’s 2006 debut was nominated for an ARIA award, and the quality of In Blood Memory surely makes it worthy of the same. (Milk! Records)

Interview: Sonny Chin of A Cartoon Graveyard

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a cartoon graveyard
Hi Sonny, you’ve just released your debut album, The Men Who Stole Your Horse Are In The Woods With My Friend. How would you describe the songs on the album?

I think the songs really need to be described as part of the album. And the album I might describe as manically nostalgic. The songs for me really reflect off each other and have a certain completeness when heard together on the album. Its kind of like how without Data’s inventions or Chunk’s big-heart the Goonies would never have found the hidden treasure. And that can only lead to evil developers destroying small sea-side towns. So yeah, in a way they’re good enough.

I’ve always been an albums person and for me there was no other way to put out these songs. Singles seem to be becoming more popular these days but I think eventually people will come back around to the album as the way to listen to music. Or maybe not, whatever.

Tell me about your writing and recording process – is it something you enjoy or something that can prove difficult?

I love writing music which makes it a pretty easy thing to do. I don’t really think about the process too much. The recording process is a completely different animal. Its a self-produced album, so we were doing all the mixing ourselves and you can end up getting quite self-conscious when you’re mixing tracks that you also play on. I think we ended up getting the hang of it and the last few songs we recorded were done in a fraction of the time that it took to do the others.

How does it feel to have your album finished and in the public domain?

Its great having it done and its good to know that our music is somewhere out there in the sub-ether. Although since finishing the album most of my life has been taken up with promoting it, which is a bit up the hill backwards, but its good to know the songs are now on ‘record’ in the literal sense so that we can look forward in a way and perhaps start branching out from what we have been doing for a while now in our live show.

What has the reaction to your album been like so far?

The reaction so far has been good from the people who have heard it, although it would be nice if more people did hear it. The great thing is that these days there’s this under-current of people searching for music that isn’t necessarily heard through major media and so we’re slowly building an audience there, which is cool.

You know, its like those jazz or Cuban music albums that used to be made as short-run pressings for small fan bases. The guys who made those albums were doing it on a small budget and were basically doing it for the love of playing music. So from the outset I felt like that was the sort of album we were making, except with rock music.

Which artists have had an influence on your music, and which do you currently rate?

As a band and as individuals we’re influenced by a whole range of artists and hopefully that comes through in our music. The Ventures are one of those great surf guitar bands that I think heavily influence our sound. Again, I’m into bands that have created great and diverse albums. The Beatles, Bowie, Big Star… and that’s just the B’s. My favourite current artists are probably Dirty Projectors and Okkervil River.

You are playing an album launch show at Black Bear Lodge on 19th June. What can fans expect from your show?

Wow, well for starters I’ve organised a massive LED stage for the audience to dance on, there’s gonna be some pyrotechnics and the whole club is going to be moved to a remote country town for the evening. In fact, we may not even be there, but if we are we will be in robot helmets. I just hope it hasn’t been done before.

If you could share a stage with one artist, living or dead, who would it be?

I’d probably go with a living artist, because you can almost guarantee that things would get a bit messy with a dead one. I did once have an idea of forming a tribute band called The Zombie Beatles, and we were going to play covers like “With a little help from my friends’ brains” and “While my re-animated flesh gently weeps”, so maybe Zombie John Lennon. I think he went vegetarian so we wouldn’t have to worry about the whole ‘eating brains’ issue as long as we kept a few heads of lettuce around the stage. We’d play ‘Rain’ so he could join in on the harmonies in the chorus. Actually, how about dead Bieber?

How do you rate the current scene in Brisbane for bands like yourself? What could be done to improve it, if anything?

There’s definitely a scene. But unfortunately there are only a handful of venues that will actually play original bands which makes it difficult. Hopefully more venues will open up under small bar liquor licences and give bands that have modest followings more places to play. Venues and bands alike need to take more risks. Doing what everyone else is doing is an easy way to guarantee numbers, but nothing great was ever created by maintaining the status quo. Other than ‘Rockin’ all over the World’. People also need to get out and support local music, and see a band they haven’t heard of. It’s also becoming more important for bands to be well organised and plan gigs and releases well in advance.

What are the band’s plans for the rest of 2013?

We haven’t really thought past the 19th June. You can over plan these things.

A CARTOON GRAVEYARD PLAY BLACK BEAR LODGE JUNE 19. THE MEN WHO STOLE YOUR HORSE ARE IN THE WOODS WITH MY FRIEND IS OUT NOW.