It was a wondrous and wild evening for jazz lovers as the Emmy- and two-time Grammy-nominated Kamasi Washington returned to Brisbane for the first time since 2022 at QPAC’s concert hall on Thursday evening (12th June).
What transpired was a journey of a thousand trips: a musical expedition that built up, crescendoed, climaxed, and broke down again multiple times, with high points a-plenty and too many triumphant moments to even try to describe.
For the music of tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington has to be felt as well as heard; his band’s musicianship seen to be believed. This was a show that was such a grand exploration of what music can truly be, that over an hour and 45 minutes containing just a handful of tracks this eight-piece collective seemed to have pulled just about every combination of possible notes out of their respective instruments and voice boxes to leave them exhausted, shot, broken.
Washington, when not letting rip on another scorching sax solo, was a softly spoken frontman, whose love for the power of music and family shone brightly.
“Music is such a powerful and beautiful tool we have as humans,” he said. “It can travel across time and space. Some of my best friends died a hundred years before I was born.”
Before ‘Asha the First’, Washington shared a delightful anecdote about his four-year old daughter learning to play the piano and help him write the song, before a searing keys solo by Brandon Coleman. Similarly, before the slower ‘Together’, Washington jokes about how writing a love song and lighting a vanilla candle meant he ended up fathering a child and trombonist Ryan Porter showed his significant skills throughout the track.
It was during the theme for ‘Lazarus’, the Shinichirō Watanabe’s anime series for which he has written the soundtrack, that Washington let rip with one of several almost unfathomable sax solos that builds and builds, and just when you think he can’t go any more, builds even further. ‘Lie In Memory’ allowed drummer Tony Austin and double bass player Miles Mosley to flex their respective jaw-dropping skills, while vocalist Patrice Quinn starred on ‘Vi Lua Vi Sol’ to close out a special show.
Ultimately, this was as impressive a display of musicianship as you’re likely to see – anywhere, any time. It’s clear to see why Kamasi Washington is considered one of the leading saxophonists of our time and this super-talented band made the show simply smoke.
Jazz has an exhilarating future if these guys are at its heart.
With the memories of a cyclone mostly behind us and Brisbane’s cultural precinct relatively unscathed, it was back to business with the outstanding Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power at QPAC Concert Hall on Wednesday night (12th March).
As part of her ‘Cat Power Sings Dylan’ tour, Marshall performs Bob Dylan’s landmark ‘Live 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert’ in full; a pivotal moment when the folk master was infamously heckled for switching from acoustic to an electric set of songs with backing band The Hawks (later The Band) for the second half of the performance. Dylan took the heckling on the chin and made history in the process.
It’s a milestone Marshall has been re-living for some time, having recorded and released her own version of the album from a performance at the Royal Albert Hall in 2022. It would be easy to roll off clichés to describe tonight’s performance with words like “making the material her own”, “paying homage to a master at the peak of his powers”, “honouring heroes” etc., and each would be entirely pertinent. She is a clear devotee of the music and the man, bringing many subtle interpretations of her own, and is a hugely engrossing performer in her own right.
The lengthy ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘Desolation Row’ allow Marshall to get lost in the material, and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ receives the biggest response of the first half of the set. ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’ is a big highlight of the second half, while Marshall implores us to “get our dancing shoes on” for ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’. There’s no exclamation to play closer ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ “f**kin’ loud”, as Dylan did in 1966, but they do anyway.
Marshall makes adorably rambling small talk between songs, musing on the state of global politics, the joys of young love, and her hilarious failings as a stand-up comedian. It all adds to the charm and the cosiness of the evening’s performance, drawing us closer to her despite the size of the venue.
Ultimately, tonight’s show brings about a revived appreciation of not only Dylan and The Band but, of course, Marshall herself. In this wonderful mix of moments, everyone’s star shines brightly.
Fans of bold pop hooks, lyrical authenticity, and celebratory good times unite: Chappell Roan is set to bring the bangers to Brisbane’s Melt Festival.
Direct from her sold-out North American tour, Roan will land in Australia to play the Brisbane Powerhouse-based festival on Saturday 25th November.
The Missouri native has just released her debut album, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess’, to strong reviews, including it being heralded as “bold and uproarious” by Pitchfork. Her appearance at Melt will see her perform fan favourites alongside brand-new music.
Melt Festival, back for its eighth edition in 2023, is an annual celebration of queer art, artists, allies and ideas. Alongside music acts, the festival will feature theatre, photography exhibitions, textile art and installations.
It will get underway on 15th November with an official opening party in the Powerhouse’s main hall platform including appearances by Nigerian house/dance singer-songwriter Kah-Lo and emerging Wiradjuri and Bundjalung artist Djanaba.
Also appearing at the festival will be UK dance artist Aluna, previously half of AlunaGeorge, electronic producer and songwriter KUČKA, alt-pop collective Alter Boy, Canadian indie-rockers TOPS, and Brisbane’s own Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra, among others.
At 17, Roan (born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz) signed a deal with Atlantic Records after uploading tracks to YouTube and garnering major industry attention, with her early music being described by Interview as a “pop sound infused with a dark and unsettling tone that underscores intense, sombre lyrics”.
Roan’s Brisbane appearance comes eight years after being signed to a major label, but with many career peaks and troughs already behind her, her career has been more colourful than many. Still just 25, she has weathered the emotional storm of being dropped from her record label and moving home to Missouri from Los Angeles to start her career from scratch.
Making the transformation from an introverted midwestern girl growing up on a farm to a glitter-soaked queer icon performing all over the world hasn’t been without its challenges, but in artistic expression Roan found her freedom.
“I grew up on Christian rock,” she told The Line of Best Fit. “And I will say, with my whole chest; it’s the worst music I’ve ever heard. But I was a teenager at an incredible time; Lorde had just dropped ‘Pure Heroine’, Lana had just dropped ‘Paradise’ and ‘Born To Die’, Kesha was in full swing, and Gaga had come out with ‘The Fame Monster’. ‘Teenage Dream’ and Drake was just started to gain momentum and I was obsessed with it all.”
It was, ultimately, in pop music that Roan found her sweet spot for songwriting. Her 2020 breakout hit, ‘Pink Pony Club’, tells of a strait-laced Tennessee girl who moves to Los Angeles to become a stripper.
“Pop was shining a light on a part of myself that I was trying to dim,” she told DIY. “But it was always deep down inside. I was just scared to be that version of myself – it seemed too big and loud.”
“I think Chappell’s a drag-queen version of me because it’s very larger-than-life,” she told Vanity Fair. “Kind of tacky, not afraid to say really lewd things. The songs are kind of the fairytale version of what happened in real life. I think that the project has allowed me to be a part of the queer community in a deeper way because I’m not observing from the outside anymore. I feel like I’m in it. I am the queer community – it’s allowed me to just feel queer, feel like a queer person, and feel freedom in that.”
Now comfortable with her sexuality and celebration of glitzy pop, Roan uses her position to support the queer community wherever possible, including booking local drag acts to open for her at every show and encouraging fans to send them tips.
“For me personally, it’s all about giving back and re-distributing money,” she told NME. “Like, a portion of every ticket on my spring tour went to a black trans charity. I told everyone at the show, like, ‘You’re not just coming to have a fun night – you’re here supporting the queer community.’”
As fans here prepare to witness the joy of Roan’s appearance at Melt Festival, one thing to be certain of is the promise of good times and party vibes.
“Like, if I hear Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj on a playlist, it instantly takes me to this place of ‘Yeah, party!’,” she told NME. “And that’s the place I want to take people to as well. I want to give them that emotion of ‘We’re here, bitch; we’re here and we’re queer’”.
Multi-Grammy-winning Texan country-pop juggernauts the Chicks will make a triumphant return to Australia in October alongside special guest Elle King.
The band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, made up of Emily Strayer, Martie Maguire, and Natalie Maines, is making its first appearances in Australia in six years, following sold out 2017 Sydney and Melbourne shows and a headline slot at CMC Rocks in Queensland.
A generous run of arena and winery concerts across Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Geelong, and the Hunter Valley has been lined up, before the group heads to New Zealand.
A recent Guardian review described the Chicks live experience in 2023 as “barn-burning virtuosity and cut-glass vocals”, so come to these concerts ready to party.
“Our fans are fantastic,” Maines told the Houston Chronicle. “It feels awesome to have grandmothers through little kids there. I think we get a little worried at the start of every tour if the crowds are going to be the same, are they going to stand up the whole time and sing every word. And they do.”
Since forming in 1989, the band has had many successes while facing considerable challenges as renegades of country music. The thing that has held them together is the bond the trio has always had, says Maines.
“For me, there’s a comfort and a trust,” she told Elle. “It’s never hard to be around each other. You can really feel free to say, ‘No, that’s not good, but what about this?’ ‘You’re a little out of time.’ ‘Can you re-sing that, you’re a little pitchy?’ Nobody’s getting their egos bruised. You’re never walking on eggshells. That’s what makes working together an easy place to always go back to, and a great place to always go back to.”
The shows will the band’s first in Australia since dropping ‘Dixie’ from its name in 2020. It was a move to extricate themselves of the negative connotations associated with slavery in the former confederate states of America and came in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the intensification of civil rights movements across the US.
An official press release at the time simply stated, “If your voice held no power, they wouldn’t try to silence you”, while 2020 album ‘Gaslighter’, the band’s most recent and their first in 14 years, was critically acclaimed and commercially successful.
This followed years of being outspoken on political and social issues, including an early-2000s critique of George Bush’s push towards war in Iraq which saw the band caught up in a media backlash and receiving death threats.
However, there was a positive side to many notoriously conservative country music fans turning on the band.
“It set us free,” Maines told the LA Times. “It got us out of this box of country music, which we never wanted to be in and never felt like that’s who we were. We didn’t have to do any of that bullshit anymore.”
They may have been one of the first victims of cancel culture before it was even a thing, but the band has learned to take it all in their stride.
“These days, everybody’s saying anything and everything that crosses their mind and people are getting cancelled left and right,” Maines told iNews. “I’m kind of proud to have been the first.”
With the imminent release of his long-awaited fifth studio album, Dan Sultan is healthy, happy, and creatively firing on all cylinders like never before.
A period of personal turbulence culminating in a much-publicised 2018 fall from grace saw the Melbourne singer-songwriter take time to reflect and recharge. Now, five years sober and with the support of a loving family, the 40-year-old is back doing what he does best.
“Lately I’ve been feeling really fulfilled artistically, which is a really beautiful place to be as a writer and artist,” he says. “I’m not subjecting myself to the same expectations that I might have in the past, so I’m pretty chilled. Feeling fulfilled is a result of the peace [that I’ve found]. That peace is something, for me, that comes along from living your life and finding yourself in a good place. Things go up and things come down but finding that serenity and certainty in life is a good place to get to. I’ve still got ambition; I’m a father and I want my record to do well. It’s nice when I hear good things about it but I’m pretty chilled.”
The self-titled album sees Sultan reflecting on life, love, and sobriety, and was a chance for the songwriter to team up with Joel Quartermain, who shared production, songwriting, and playing duties across 11 tracks.
“It’s my favourite album that I’ve done,” Sultan says. “But that being said, anything that I’m working on at the time is always my favourite. At the same time, I can definitely feel the growth and evolution as a writer and as a person in this record. I’m in a really great spot and I feel really good about things. Feeling like that has allowed me to go to places artistically I haven’t been able to go before. A year or so before I started writing this record, I was really focussed on the more positive side of life, and it’s turned out well.”
Opener ‘Story’ is an intensely personal song with an autobiographical tale about the racism Sultan faced growing up as an Aboriginal person in Australia. It’s a story he has been waiting to tell his whole life.
“I’ve worked with really talented producers and writers in the past who know what that song is about,” Sultan says. “And they’ve told me it’s a great song and I’ve got to record it. It just came along with everything else that was happening in my life. A part of that was sobriety, but it was more than that. Through that comes a lot of self-esteem issues, and, if you’re doing good work, you start to feel better. A lot of it comes down to confidence and bravery. You don’t know how it’s going to go or how it’s going to feel but when you’re feeling brave you just do it.”
Another standout is ‘Fortress’ featuring Julia Stone.
“Julia is a good friend of mine; I’ve known her a long time,” Sultan says. “She’s a really great producer, songwriter, and performer. She asked me to be on a record with her at the end of 2019; a record of her friends doing Australian songs to raise money for the bushfire appeal. We were hoping to write a song for this record. Joel and I had this song [‘Fortress’], and we were doing a bit of show and tell in the studio and Julia was like, ‘Well, I wanna be on that!’. She went away and wrote a bridge that wasn’t there before, and we finished it off in the studio.”
A healthy and happy Dan Sultan, with new songs, a tight band, and support act Wilsn in tow, will be hitting the road to play Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne in September and October.
“I’m really proud of all the work I’ve done, and I’ve been able to achieve a lot,” Sultan says. “From where I have been in the past, I’m much happier and much more able to be brave now.”
Australia is, in many ways, a fucking twisted place. Simultaneously a stiflingly conservative quagmire, bewilderingly racist dumpster fire, and a country too often so barren of good ideas that it’s enough to tempt one to move to New Zealand. It’s proudly home to a deeply misguided national identity, inability or unwillingness to come to terms with a history of colonial interaction with Indigenous peoples that has involved treatment up to and including genocide, and ongoing suppression of refugees and asylum seekers that surpasses the sadistic. Who would have thought that the happy-go-lucky sunburnt country Down Under could be so fucking cruel? And yet, as if by some middle finger to the dark and miserable forces that would work both behind the scenes and under our very noses to suppress and misinform those who would seek to soothe the soul of a nation, sometimes sweet, glistening glimmers of light shine through the cracks at the end of the dreary tunnel that make up this weird and wonderful culture. Halle-fucking-lujah. It must have been during one of these rare but glistening moments that the creative force behind Melbourne rock/post-punk quartet RVG was spewed forth. Somehow, several years ago, many billions of atoms and sparks of righteous electrical impulses coalesced in a series of miraculous accidents to form Romy Vager; a songwriter of such unflinching honestly, vulnerability, and uniqueness that you can’t help but be hooked on every lyric that comes straight from the Melburnian’s heart. Pressing PLAY> on the likes of ‘Common Ground’, ‘It’s Not Easy’, and ‘Nothing Really Changes’ simply makes the musical landscape – and the cultural landscape of a nation – an instantly better place. This album, the band’s third, is 100 per cent essential.
It’s been an age between drinks for Tame Impala and Brisbane, and with a sold-out Entertainment Centre clamouring to greet Kevin Parker and the boys, what couldn’t go perfectly right?
First up was local legend-in-the-making Sycco who looked born to do it on a stage this big and received a huge response from an already half-full Entertainment Centre for her efforts, most especially on final track ‘Dribble’.
Sycco
Next came Genesis Owusu and a lesson in owning a stage by sheer presence and force of personality alongside an energetic vocal performance and some killer lyrics. It’s hard to nail down just one thing that makes the Ghanaian-Australian such a powerful act when he seems to have it all; recent track ‘GTFO’ went down particularly well and lyrically could be Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’ for a new generation. There’s absolutely no stopping this guy based on this performance.
Genesis Owusu
The members of Tame Impala saunter onto the stage amid a retina-searing light display, dense dry ice, and reverberating screams of appreciation from a heaving Entertainment Centre, with Parker looking entirely unfazed by the circumstances in which he found himself. This is a band that has grown from its relatively humble WA psych-rock roots to be the international festival headliner it now is, so it’s easy to see why this experience is all in a day’s work for the multi-instrumentalist master. His show takes a simple approach: give the audience what it wants, do it in style, and do it BIG.
Tame Impala
This is the ‘Slow Rush’ tour, so that album’s songs feature heavily at all the big moments, including opener ‘One More Year’ and early tracks ‘Borderline’ and ‘Breathe Deeper’. However, having been around for over 14 years and with a back catalogue that most bands would die for, Parker and the gang can pull from all corners of their varied career and strike a chord with anything they pull out of the bag, as with ‘Nangs’, ‘Apocalypse Dreams’, and ‘Elephant’, before which Parker enquires of the crowd’s willingness to “get a little wild” – which it does in spades.
It was during an extended ‘Let it Happen’ that one of the band’s trademark moments comes with the launch of the confetti cannons at the drop, before a chilled-out ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’ provided a cool counterpoint. This left only the need for a big finish to top off the show, which came in the form of ‘The Less I Know the Better’ and ‘One More Hour’.
It was all a truly mind-melting visual experience; the lighting was simultaneously mesmerising, trippy, and, at times, almost difficult not to turn away from. But in terms of Australian music, this band’s live experience is up with there with the very best. It definitely wasn’t slow; it definitely WAS a rush.
It’s night three of BIGSOUND 2022 – hands up if you can still feel your legs. No, me neither. What else is to be done but get right into it?
The string of Rage Against the Machine tracks that played over the house system at the Loft gave some indication of what’s to follow when The Riot took to the stage. The Gold Coast quartet is made up of four very different musicians stylistically, but when it all comes together it works beautifully and provides the perfect start to another night of outstanding music.
The Riot
Over at the Outpost, Selve laid down some catchy grooves and upbeat vibes before a hugely appreciate audience with the levels of throwaway fun right on the money. Led by Jabbirr Jabbirr man Loki Liddle, the band provided one of the highlights of the evening early on; all killer synths and even more killer basslines, joined by much-loved Auslan interpreter Mikey Webb. A finale of Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’ lifted hearts and spirits – these guys deserve a lot of attention from all the best people.
Selve
In the mall, Blute’s was once again packed to sardine levels as Platonic Sex took to the stage. The buzz around the Brisbane alt-rock four-piece was palpable, and early track ‘Devil’s Advocate’; all about letting go of the ball and chain of toxic masculinity showed why.
Platonic Sex
Wooly Mammoth Mane Stage was similarly rammed for an assured performance from Beckah Amani, who played a clutch of songs from her recently released EP, including the excellent ‘Smoke and Mirrors’, highlighting the singer-songwriter’s passion for ethical fashion choices and tackling climate change. The towering ‘Standards’ elicited enthusiastic audience participation Radio Ga Ga-style as Amani repeated “For a black woman like me / I’m standing up for my needs” alongside some deft guitar licks.
Beckah Amani
At O’Skulligans, up-and-coming folkie Sam Windley performed songs that appear soft and lovely on first listen but are laced with confusion and pain through the lyrics, while over at BLVD, Brisbane’s Yb grinned from ear to ear amid a smooth set of genre-bending indie/pop gems and tight musicianship.
Sam Windley
Dallas Woods promised he was “gonna take you all home to the East Kimberley” amid several audience interactions sprinkled through the Noongar rapper’s set at Summa House. Early track ‘Colorblind’ from the recent ‘Julie’s Boy’ EP hit home hard, and when joined by both members of Fly Boy Jack (who impressively upped the swear count immediately), the set kicked up several gears towards an epic finish.
Dallas Woods
At Sound Garden, bass player turned produced Tentendo described his BIGSOUND experience as “full-on, as I’m pretty introvert”, while producing an instantly classy, instantly catchy, instantly danceable, and instantly generally bloody impressive set of dance tracks alongside his keyboard player and drummer. What a find.
Tentendo
At the Loft, Jerome Farah set about unleashing something particularly special – even among so much bright talent over the past three days. From the second the Melburnian opened his lungs it was a show-stopper; the former dancer moved from smooth soul to soaring strength to rap and back again with ludicrous ease. “When my hair isn’t in braids, it’s in a huge afro,” he explains, mocking the constant requests from people wanting to touch it before ‘Afro’ kicks in. The lyric line “Why you gotta go and do that for? Please, white boy, don’t touch my afro” is delivered with humour and power, and the audience reacted with appreciation in spades. This was one of the best performances of the festival, and the perfect point to call it a day for this reviewer.
Jerome Farah
Now it’s time for that sweet, sweet sleep. Thank you and good night.
It’s BIGSOUND night two of three – are you all hanging in there?
First up at Tomcat was Ok Hotel, who, despite being at only 75% capacity due to the loss of guitarist Lucy to illness (“She’s alive and well – we promise!”), delivered a powerful set of grunge-rock-vibed goodness mixed with some sweet melodies and a ramshackle charm. Their final track ‘Life is Crazy (Like That)’ hit home hard and reassured an appreciative audience that BIGSOUND was alive and kicking for a second night.
Ok Hotel
Over at Summa House Old Mervs delivered a more laid-back, easy-and-breezy vibe, while, at the Zoo, the Andrew Gurruwiwi Band got into some seriously funky jams; proving themselves to be an early highlight of the second night of the festival. The seven-piece Arnhem Land collective took a large and appreciative audience on a winding journey through a set of depth, heart and top-notch musicality; and they only got better as they went on. The maestro Gurruwiwi himself, looking effortlessly cool seated at the front of the stage in dark sunglasses, led the way through a captivating collection of tracks sung in Yolngu Matha.
Andrew Gurruwiwi Band
At Wooly Mammoth Mane Stage, Teenage Dads gathered quite the crowd and set about immediately going down a storm; all hip-wiggling, fist-pumping cringe in only the best ways possible. “It’s just a name. Don’t ask that question. It’s getting stale”, advises singer Jordan, pre-empting the very thought most likely on everyone’s minds.
Teenage Dads
At EC Venue, Flyboy Jack was spitting rhymes to a bouncing audience in what felt like one of those BIGSOUND moments you’ll tell people about in years to come. The quartet operated in perfect harmony, delivering cutting lyrics with a vibe that only drew a bigger crowd the longer the set lasted.
Flyboy Jack
The ebb and flow nature of movement between BIGSOUND venues means you can’t always get where you want as crowds gather and melt away, and the influx of people towards Teenage Joans unfortunately made the Loft unattainable for this reviewer. Based on the fervour for the band they must be doing something special.
Back at the Wooly Mammoth Mane Stage, the Rions seemed to have added even more people to an already heaving crowd left over from Teenage Dads; there was barely enough room to turn around in the cosy upstairs venue. The impossibly-young-looking but musically adept triple j Unearthed High winners delivered a slick set of indie-rock richness and marked themselves as ones to watch – with impressive ’70s-style moustaches to boot.
The Rions
At Prince Consort, Selfish Sons set about treating the pub gig setup almost like a stadium rock affair; all “Hey BIGSOUND, how we feeling?” and “Get your hands in the air, BIGSOUND!” call-outs, and, having already supported acts of the stature of The Kid Laroi, it’s probably clear why. The Brisbane trio worked hard and had a blast and, as a result, the audience had a blast too.
Selfish Sons
At Summa House, it was time for a big night two finale, and it came in the form of an epic performance from Butchulla rapper Birdz, accompanied by Fred Leone on vocals and didgeridoo. Opener ‘Aussie Aussie’ hit harder than anything on show so far, as did mid-set highlight ‘Fly’, before an all-conquering ‘Bagi-la-m Bargan’ closed out a punch-to-the-guts set of power, pride, and truth-telling in a BIGSOUND moment up there with the best.
Birdz with Fred Leone
One more day to go: let’s keep the BIGSOUND train a-rollin’ for another 24 hours.
Back in the flesh for the first time since 2019 and celebrating its 21st birthday this year, BIGSOUND is back with a bang and then some in 2022.
With 300 performances over three nights to choose from, it’s impossible to be across all the up-and-coming talent on offer, but when there are so many unknown gems to uncover, the only way to do it is to dive right in.
First up was Brisbane-based Talk Heavy at Wooly Mammoth Mane Stage. The quartet opened with a warmly received Acknowledgement of Country before launching into an unholy racket of pop-punk goodness; all catchy, sardonic, and fun. Despite guitarist Pat jokingly exclaiming, “All our songs are about Bret Hart”, a collection of tracks from their upcoming EP, including ‘I Wanna Skate Again’ prove otherwise in a fine start to the evening.
Talk Heavy
Over at the Prince Consort, Sydney’s Enclave produced an altogether more ominous mood that probably would feel at home in the Road House in Twin Peaks on Halloween. With a darkly engaging frontman whose style and delivery sits somewhere between an intensely brooding Mick Jagger and Brandon Lee’s character in ‘The Crow’, the band is well worth checking out. Single ‘Bloodletting’ is a good entry point for this unique act.
Enclave
“Hello, BIGSOUND, we’re Future Static,” is the call at Ric’s Backyard as a flurry of high-octane, high-energy heavy rock is let loose on a captivated audience. The likely destruction of dozens of sets of eardrums aside, the Melbourne five-piece’s barrage of noise goes down a storm as singer Amariah Cook proved to be one of the most impressive of the night. Third song of the set and new single ‘Venenosa’ was a highlight.
Future Static
At the Zoo, Queen P wasn’t blasting the crowd with noise, but winning them over with charm, humour, and confidence, and proving herself to be a star in the making, if she isn’t one already. The diminutive rapper still managed to cajole the audience to get onboard with lines like, “This is BIGSOUND, not small sound!” and the audience responded in spades; most especially during a fun cover of Missy Elliott’s ‘Work It’.
Queen P
An absolutely rammed Blute’s Bar was the setting for Jem Cassar-Daley’s stylish blend of indie-pop, with the large, buzzing crowd including dad Troy. Opening with ‘Letting Go’ and moving into ‘Like It More’, the singer-songwriter and recent Queensland Music Award winner showed exactly why there’s been so much attention coming her way in recent times.
Jem Cassar-Daley
At Ivory Tusk, the call, “We’re Greatest Hits and we’re here to play them” opens the best performance of the evening based on a vibe of sheer throwaway fun and weirdness alone. The Gold Coast trio blend genres and styles effortlessly, with a sound akin to a synth-drenched sonic scream that puts the hook in you early and doesn’t let go. The vibe of simply wanting to have fun above anything else is a welcome approach at an industry festival, and the discipline of keeping up the schtick for a full 30 minutes is worthy of praise alone. ‘Palm Springs’, a song about “us never going to Palm Springs”, went over particularly nicely. Well played, Greatest Hits.
Greatest Hits
Around the corner at The Loft, Brisbane’s Hallie pulled off a slick pop masterclass with a set of cleverly crafted songs delivered with a powerful voice alongside a stage presence that belied their youth. Based on this performance, it’s easy to see how their fanbase could go from big to massive in no time at all.
Hallie
Back at Ivory Tusk, WILSN delivered arguably the most soulful set of the evening. The Melburnian’s bio opener, ‘Possessing the kind of voice that stops you in your tracks’ couldn’t be more on the money; her vocals provided a genuine ‘wow’ moment towards the end of an already talent-filled night of music.
WILSN
Back at The Loft, the crowd swelled for Noah Dillon, and the Fremantle singer-guitarist delivered in fine style to cap off BIGSOUND night one, with even one or two of the BIGSOUND staff getting side-tracked from their door duties to come in and join in or film the fun. Dillon doesn’t build slowly; opener ‘Alive and Kicking’ got the audience bouncing from the off, following it with ‘Drip Dry’ from the ‘Kill the Dove’ album to keep the party going.
Noah Dillon
Let’s see what the nights two and three have in store.
Hayden Thorpe isn’t one for pondering the simple things in life.
The 35-year-old Englishman, formerly of the now—defunct Kendal indie darlings Wild Beasts, is much more of a big-picture kind of guy.
As keen to explore the wonders of the minutest chemical reactions in the inner wirings of the mind as he is societal-level shifts in thinking and action, and the vast and unknown wonders of the universe and beyond, the multi-instrumentalist is nothing if not intriguing.
Second album Moondust for My Diamond, a smoothly enchanting 12-track collection of cerebral and propulsive pop featuring production by Nathan Jenkins – aka Bullion – is clear evidence of this. Thorpe’s interests, from science, religion, humanity, the cosmos, sex, temptation, and contemplation of the end of days drip from every pore, filling the record with big questions and the wonder and anxiety of the possibilities of the things we don’t know, poised just out of reach.
It’s enough to make one contemplate several aspects of life and existence, albeit set to a slick soundtrack that builds on the sonic palettes of 2019 debut album Diviner and last year’s Aerial Songs EP.
The tunes are charming and understated but it’s Thorpe’s lyrical themes that prove most beguiling. In Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself”, and Thorpe seems to have been on a grand Vonnegutian journey during the making of these songs. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine him locking himself away in a dank library for months on end, devouring all manner of obscure texts on philosophy, science and theology, before channelling it all into something he can set his countertenor vocals to.
“I’m an obsessive person but I’m also a person who has fads,” he says. “So, if you combine those two things, you get obsessive fads, into which I entirely immerse myself in practice, writing or theory. It becomes almost carnivorous; I need to imbibe it, put it in myself, become it for a while. I think most of the richness of the words come from there. I’m speaking like it’s quite a brutal process, but it is if you go quite deeply.”
Take lead single ‘The Universe is Always Right’. Probably never before or ever again will references to genies escaping bottles, Excalibur being pulled from stone and ‘cosmic arrows’ be made in a pop song. And certainly not one on an album that sounds as necessary as this. It’s clear from almost the get-go that Thorpe’s influences are many and varied, and he has used them to make surely one of the best albums of 2021.
“For this record, I got interested in Eastern mysticism, yoga and alternative practices,” he says. “My other hobby is science and I realised there are a lot of overlaps between the ways Eastern mysticism sees the universe and how science sees the universe. The difference is science medicalises the body and our emotions, but Eastern mysticism doesn’t; it actually incorporates the body, the mind, and the sense of the universe. Perhaps that is what is lacking in our terminology and our language; this sense of something beyond and how to incorporate the beyond into our very being. What goes on in those language spaces are spells; people are casting spells, and I say that in a very functional way. Casting spells is just an alignment of words; it’s just placing things in order. If you put certain words in a certain order, it elicits a chemical response in the body. It’s a very extraordinary thing. I wonder why all our songs are about love and spirit. Well, actually, it’s that invisible matter that stitches everything together; we can’t quantify it, we just know how we build our reality.”
It was exploring this meeting point between science and religion that led Thorpe to investigate the phenomenon of psychedelic therapy and a pioneering project integrating music and psychedelic drugs; an experience which has found its way most clearly into tracks ‘Suspended Animation’ and ‘Metafeeling’.
“Therapists are using this software while someone is in an induced psychedelic state; probably through psilocybin,” he says. “Basically, musicians contributed to a soundscape that the patient is listening to. I sang and contributed vocals and got really interested in both the practice of how I sing for somebody in that state and what would I do and how to contribute. It made me reflect on what singing is and what making music is. I got interested in it through a seminal book by Michael Pollan, ‘How to Change Your Mind’. It’s so interesting because I think you should always judge a civilisation by its drugs. Capitalism is very much the cocaine society, which is really about enlarging the ego. Whereas, in past civilisations the mushroom or other psychedelics have been the central theme of their civilisation. It’s inverse; actually shrinking the ego or dismantling the sense of self. Maybe we’re at a frontier now; we’re realising we’re all going around being encouraged to be warriors in our own way, going forth and it’s a dog-eat-dog-type world. But it’s clear that is creating so much damage, and it’s not sustainable. Secondly, it fucks the natural world when you do that too. Paul Stamets is one of my hero mycologists and he always states that the earth has already provided the operating manual for how we understand the natural world, and he says it’s psilocybin. We think the human point of view is the ultimate point of view, but I really don’t think that’s the case, personally.”
While a cocktail of energies ooze from Moondust for My Diamond, ensuring it sounds like a record put together by an artist with a simple love for the craft of songwriting on one hand, the flip side of Thorpe’s expansive thinking means he’s never far away from tackling the next big topic.
“We’re living through a reckoning,” he says. “There is a grand narrative of our time, where growth, success and aspiration are somehow virtuous qualities, and that is failing us. That is not working, and I’m so excited about what the music sounds like on the other side of that. If you think about it, music has always been co-opted by power; hymns and church music has always been the property of the church and therefore they have the spiritual ownership over peoples’ lives. Now, when big business owns most of music and hedge fund managers are buying up Bob Dylan songs and all the rest of it, you have to ask what is the spiritual value of songs now? I’m so interested in what is the other side of this; what language and what ways can we speak of the world beyond our own inner story. The legend of our time is absolutely our own inner world. We’re all encouraged to broadcast our every emotion. Songwriters especially, we’re meant to wave the flag of our emotions so boldly, and that’s supposed to be our currency. After a while of doing this, I’m thinking I’m getting more interested in the flagpole than the flag. There’s something beyond that’s worth getting it.”
While Thorpe contents himself with pondering many of the existential questions in life, he’s also a realist, and understands that being able to find the time and headspace to write and record new music, never mind release an album, during a global pandemic and in the uncertainty of post-Brexit Britain, is an achievement in itself.
“I think this moment does feel like one of the more extreme frontiers of record-releasing, bearing everything in mind,” he says. “The sheer manpower and force of will to bring music out now is significant, so I’m really proud that the work has emerged as it has. I’m surprised by the album; it’s unlikely. It’s emerged in unexpected ways and brought me unforeseen adventures, and for that I’m grateful. In the UK there’s definitely a kind of crosshair going on with the Brexit situation for musicians and the pandemic; but also, just the cultural landscape; the value system in which music works now. It’s been transformed. The metrics by which people judge value means that it’s nothing other than bold and chaotic to follow your music into that black hole. I believe in songs; their potency, their ability to convert a magical substance within the body. It’s also an extraordinary thing to devote most of your waking hours to obtain a level of beauty. That’s not to be too high-minded; it’s a form of utmost expression and at its fullest realisation, a moment of beauty. The dissonance of a functional human being as well as someone who is entirely entangled with the machinery of making music is probably the challenge, but the more I make music in my life things get even simpler and you don’t need much at all if you have your devotions.”
His live band includes Frank Ocean’s bass player, Ben Reed, drummer Fabian Prynn, and saxophonist Chris Duffin, who, Thorpe says, will allow him to “live out all my Springsteen fantasies”. A tour of Europe and the UK is on the cards for early 2022.
“It’s been four years since I played with a band,” he says. “Our first gig was an extraordinary sensation to feel that music again. I really like the practicality and theoretical way of doing gigs, which is me and a laptop going around, but it doesn’t have that virility that I want. I’m going to go forward with this killer band, which is a fabulous thing to be doing. I really want to live this one out properly.”
If Moondust for My Diamond is any indication, it’s sure to be a hell of a trip.
Four years spent coming to terms with a debilitating illness hasn’t dampened Boy and Bear frontman Dave Hoskings’ lust for life as the band return home for a national tour.
After a much-publicised struggle with chronic dysbiosis – a microbial imbalance in the gut – Hoskings is enjoying playing and touring as much as ever, despite the journey towards fourth album ‘Suck on Light’ being a tough one.
“Life’s really good,” he says. “[The album] felt like a long time coming and when I listen to it, I’m still happy with it. I think we were able to produce something that we’re really proud of it, and it’s nice to be on this end of the cycle with the record, and we’re thinking about touring and travel. It feels good to be back.”
Hoskings’ accompanying diagnosis of anxiety and depression was also overcome as the multi-ARIA-award-winning band got back to business.
“At the back end of the last record I had kind of fallen to pieces,” Hoskings says. “I had to work out what the hell was going on and that took a bit of time. I’ve been a pretty open book about the whole thing and I’ve come a really long way. I’ve still got some challenges and I’ve still got a way to go, but that’s still moving in the right direction and I just have to stay patient and keep seeing the really effective doctors that I’m seeing. The main thing is that I’m much more comfortable and my functionality is much better. I’m up and I’m working and I’m surfing a bit, so that’s really good.”
The Sydney five-piece will play The Drop festival in Noosa, Newcastle, Manly, Coolangatta, Torquay and Busselton, and a slew of regional and metropolitan shows starting 29 February and ending in May with the completion of their 65-date world tour.
“Touring is going really great,” Hoskings says, “We love playing in Australia, but the world is a really big place and we want to embrace the scope of that – being able to travel, play in festivals and try to compete in these markets is really fun. North America has been great. We haven’t been back to Europe for a little while, but sales have been really strong for this tour, which is kind of heartening, I guess. We’ve been out of the game for a while and you never know whether people might have moved on, but it feels like our core fanbase is really solid. It still feels really odd, in a nice way, that people on the other side of the world who speak a different language are still embracing what we do. We get to travel over there, play and sell out some gigs, which is amazing.”
A love for touring regional areas was established early in the indie-rockers’ eleven-year career.
“Our early years were much more ‘adrenaline’, more excitement and much more partying,” Hoskings says. “Now, we want to pace ourselves a bit. We still love getting up on stage and playing, but the difficult part is all the travel and the lack of sleep and things like that. Each one of us has our own routine and we generally know what we’re getting ourselves into. We do a bit of prep and we feel pretty good about it. If you don’t do the regional shows, you’ve only really got five or six gigs in Australia, in terms of capital cities. But right from the start, we had a discussion with our management and it was definitely something we wanted to do. It’s not always easy touring regional Australia. It has its challenges, but it’s been a really rewarding thing making that decision early, so there are crowds and audiences that are used to us coming. That’s been really good for us, and it feels like people are just welcoming and enjoying the fact we’ve made the effort to get out of the major cities, although we’re hitting Brisbane at the Fortitude Music Hall. That should be really cool; I’ve heard so many great things about the venue.”
‘Suck on Light’ was recorded in Nashville and features themes of overcoming hardships and emerging from the other side with a smile.
“We decided we wanted to work with Collin Depuis and he was based in Nashville,” Hoskings says. “So, it was either we head there or we get him to come to us. Nashville is probably just got the edge on a lot of studios around Australia. There are plenty of great players if you need them and really good musical resources – it’s just a really effective place to record. We would definitely succumb to the fact that we’ve got one foot firmly planted in pop music and, I think, with good pop music, when you dig underneath it, there more complicated things going on. I think that some songs take time and certain things can take a while. But you also don’t want to lose that musical instinct and energy that can come. The whole recording took us about six weeks, so not an extremely long time, but not banging it out either. It can be a bit of a time warp in the studio from 10am to 7pm and you don’t know where the day went. We did try to get out of the studio once a week – even to just chuck a Frisbee around or get on the bikes.”
With a new lease on life and his health conditions under control, Hoskings has been productive.
“I’ve been kind of noodling around with stuff,” he says. “I had some demos, so I set up a file on my computer which just said ‘album five’. I took a photo and sent it to the boys just as a little motivation, I guess. I’ll try to build a body of work over a period of time and I’m already thinking about the fifth record.”
Dusting off hangovers, minor/major exhaustion and the shadow of day jobs brings the second night of BIGSOUND back into focus, and with another outstanding line-up of bands to get the teeth into, the appetite is big for night two of the showcase.
First up at Crowbar is Sydney quartet The Buoys, who blast through a high-octane, “emotional rollercoaster” of a set, with frontwoman Zoe Catterall getting among the audience and getting into the mood by snagging a bite from a punter’s Bloody Mary celery stick between bouts of highly impressive shredding.
The Buoys
Over at Ric’s, Egyptian-Australian Mariam Sawires is impressing in a somewhat more serene fashion; her voice on songs like ‘Together’ – inspired by missing her sister when living in Japan – soars high and marks the nomad vocalist as not only one to watch, but probably deserving of a classier setting than the milk-crate-adorned surrounds of the beloved Valley venue.
Mariam Sawires
Meanwhile, at The Wickham, Sydney rap queen Lauren. riles up an enthusiastic audience by getting in their face before claiming, “I only smoked one bong today!” to a huge roar of appreciation.
Lauren
At the Brightside, Brisbane’s First Beige have packed out the room and melt into an instantly engaging jam, including a guest trumpeter, while at the Elephant’s crammed back bar, English quartet The Amazons run through a set of polished pop tunes on their first ever Australian gig, and Ainsley Farrell is winning hearts and minds with a classy, lilting and uplifting set at Black Bear Lodge, including new track ‘Dark Spell’.
First Beige
Downstairs at Crowbar, Melbourne metallers Outright are loudly-and-proudly anything but polished, with powerhouse singer Jelena Goluza taking the classic foot-on-monitor stance between explosions of noise, before Sydney post-punk outfit 100 put in a solid and loose shift in front of an appreciative audience.
100
Seeing Mambali – from Numbulwar in the Northern Territory – is the perfect way to finish the evening; the Indigenous collective play an exciting, captivating show to a wildly engaged crowd as the evening draws to a close.
The Brisbane duo going international with the help of one of America’s most well-regarded record labels.
Glitter Veils wasn’t always Glitter Veils. Most recently plugging away on the Brisbane dream-pop scene under the moniker YOU, it was in July last year that Luke Zahnleiter and Michael Whitney (also of The Rational Academy and Nite Fields, respectively) were presented with a persuasive argument to change their band name.
Terrible Records got in touch. It was co-founded by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor and is home to Solange, Twin Shadow, Blood Orange, Moses Sumney and Australia’s Kirin J. Callinan, among many others. Terrible suggested the switch to the more memorable and SEO-friendly moniker. It then went on to release Glitter Veils’ album, Figures in Sight, on its Flexible imprint, which focuses on unique debut releases.
After listening to the album it’s easy to see why. Raw, abrasive, deep and mesmeric, the layers of sound play out like an experiment that may or may not reach a conclusion but will be a hell of a ride either way.
Zahnleiter and Whitney, champions of the album format, explain their processes and how they ended up on Terrible.
Was putting Figures in Sight together a complex process?
Michael Whitney: It started off as a bedroom project for me, and then I wanted to play it live. Then Luke came along and we became really good friends. I guess from that initial period it was about two years of writing, recording, restructuring and going back and forth to the studio.
Luke Zahnleiter: We were pretty fastidious and got a bit obsessive in parts of it, but, overall, we’re happy with how it came out and happy that the overall sound has been getting a good response. We’re kind of relieved in a way.
Was it important the album had an overall sound or feel?
LZ: Michael and I listen to similar music and we have quite a varied taste. I think it’s about the feeling and mood we can create in the music. We could attempt to make a style of music, but [the album is] essentially what came out at that period in time. Whatever was impacting our life was funnelled through that.
MW: Luke and I come from pretty different spectrums of how we play instruments, and I think that is reflected in certain ways. The guitar has a similar sound over the whole album. I tend to like a lot of older pop music and stuff like [American composer] Angelo Badalamenti [best known for his work scoring David Lynch’s films].
David Lynch is often mentioned in your reviews. How does that sit with you?
LZ: I’m happy with that. When people say “David Lynch”, I think they mean the Twin Peaks [theme] song [Falling]. I think it’s more of a mood thing.
MW: That kind of tragic beauty.
Describe the moment you heard Terrible was interested.
LZ: When we finished the album we had no idea what we were going to do from that stage. It’s not like we had been playing live. We just got so involved in making the record that we didn’t have a plan of attack afterwards. We just sent it to a bunch of labels – mainly international labels – and kind of hoped for the best. I emailed quite a few with some early mixes. Then Ethan [Silverman] from Terrible emailed. It was very vague – I think it was a one-line response, something like: “This is cool, I’ll sit on this …”. Then three months later we heard from them again, and he got back to us with another vague message saying they wanted to put out two songs on the Flexible imprint, then we figured out a way to put everything out. We wanted to bypass plugging away at the local scene and getting on a local label.
Why bypass the local route?
LZ: We wanted as many people as possible to hear the album – that’s my main goal.
MW: We were sending it to labels that were probably above our heads, but we tried anyway. I just want to make really great albums. The live thing has almost been an afterthought with this last record.
LZ: We’ve both played in bands before and done local gigs and touring, and it’s exhausting to do that, and you’re not really getting much exposure. It’s usually the same people who come to shows locally, and we just wanted to get a broader audience.
How does it feel to have Solange, Twin Shadow and Blood Orange as labelmates?
MW: It’s a great roster and I love Blood Orange and Solange’s album. It’s something to aspire to – to make albums in a certain way and to push us even further.
LZ: We’re definitely in good company and it’s a great label. I remember that Twin Shadow album from 2010 or 2011 – their first full-length. I used to love that album. To think we’re now with the same company is a really good feeling. There are some great artists on Flexible, too.
Any international touring plans?
LZ: We’ve got a few Melbourne shows coming up, but internationally, we’ll see how it pans out. It’s definitely something we’d both like to do, especially in America. Having Terrible on our side to help is a good position to be in.
It’s been four long years since Jen Cloher’s last solo album, and while she’s been far from idle or out of our collective eyeline in that time, it’s bloody good to have her back putting out new material of her own. That’s because 2017, and everybody involved with it, needs a healthy dose of Jen Cloher’s fire, and if you don’t feel like you’ve had a savage, if eloquently-delivered, kick to the pants after a run-through of these excellent 11 songs, then you’re probably not wearing any pants and you should do something about that immediately. When she’s not using Rolling Stones lyrics to weave tales of missing her partner while she’s on tour on lead single ‘Forget Myself’ or meandering in perfectly off-kilter fashion while questioning the Australian dream on ‘Regional Echo’, she’s raining blows on the “feral right” on ‘Analysis Paralysis’, and the over-privileged and (gasp!) music critics on ‘Shoegazers’. It’s all well and truly called-for, and Cloher delivers on every track, while her other half is pretty damn handy on lead gee-tar, too. We should be happy Jen Cloher is on our side. What an outstanding album.
Paul McBride 