Brisbane group Inland Sea were down in Melbourne to play a few shows. We caught up with them to have a chat about the band and for an acoustic performance.

Interview: Kim Larkin

Camera: Timothy Casten, Shaun Rawlins

Editor: Timothy Casten

Recently returning to Australia, Paul Dempsey talks to DuckDuzz about touring his solo album and working on new Something For Kate material.

Interview: Ruby Ashby-Orr

Camera: Timothy Casten, Nicholas Ling

Editor: Timothy Casten

The up and coming youngsters from Melbourne, The McQueens, took a break from studying for their year 12 exams to talk to DuckDuzz about their thoughts on the new Triple J Unearthed station and about upcoming plans as they finish high school…

Interview: Michael Bird

Camera: Timothy Casten, Justin Sebastian

Editor: Timothy Casten

There’s a sense of trepidation going into Metals. It’s been 4 years since we’ve heard some fresh Feist material and playing through The Reminder had grown weary quite a while back. Though it did contain some sweet, tender and catchy moments, it came and went without much hoorah, due to its sparse and largely empty tracks. Metals, although very demure, is a much fuller release and a step away from the pop of 1,2,3,4 and I Feel It All. It doesn’t depart much further from the suppressed, quietly soulful soundscapes of previous Feist, and instead takes a pensive look at her slow-build style.

Energetic flourishes are an exciting and intermittent thing for her albums. It’s a fairly promising start then, with the simple and syncopated opener, The Bad In Each Other. With its bass drum, clapping, buzzing distortion, soft trumpeting and climactic string arrangement, it feels like something truly fresh. As does the pulsating A Commotion, which builds intensely from quietly throbbing keys to pounding, guttural screams of the track’s title. More exciting still is the rousing climax to the build of Undiscovered First, which ends with wild tambourine trills and charismatic vocals.

Breaking up the action are those bluesy, vocals-driven tracks Feist is well known for. Most familiar is Caught A Long Wind, with the muffled drums and piano combination, culminating in a sweeping finish of violin. The softer moments extend to the rootsy progression of Cicadas and Gulls and the dreamy Get It Wrong, Get It Right; ample provision for any sedate, Feist purist.

Metals marries the best of Feist into an album we can finally, really sink our teeth into. There’s something stirring in hearing distortion and rock-esque grunt from an artist as softly spoken as she is and this album utilises this deftly. It does, through its quieter sections, require some patience, but ultimately, it’s equal parts soulful, sympathetic and electrifying; a generally more accomplished Feist.

Dune Rats were down in Melbourne a few weeks ago. We caught up with Danny and BC from Dune Rats and had a chat with them before heading down to film parts of their show…

Interview: Sean Sebastian

Camera: Timothy Casten, Shaun Rawlins

Editor: Timothy Casten

Buzz for this album has been predicated largely on the strength of lead single ‘Colours’, which is as bouncy as you’d expect from a bunch of twentysomethings who met while on holiday in Crete, so the story goes. Never Trust A Happy Song might sound like a signpost for something self-aware, dark and dreary (sounds like a Mogwai album title to me), but the whole thing plays like a soundtrack for the first sunny weekend of summer, provided you’re spending it with a bunch of rich kids at a nice beach house.

Grouplove do carefree and happy-go-lucky well, but slip too often into juvenile and insipid, unable to stretch their energy sincerely across an entire LP. Part of the problem is structure and instrumentation; many of the songs sound too similar on the first few spins. ‘Itchin On A Photograph’ is one of the stronger cuts on the album, but any section of it could have been a verse of ‘Colours’ such are the similarities between the two. The ingredients of most songs become bland by the middle of the album too, the simplicity and repetition becomes grating.

The low point of the album comes with the saccharine sweet ‘Naked Kids’. Not only is the song largely the same acoustic guitar-based two-chord structure as most of the rest of the album, the lyrics and delivery are cringe-inducingly bad. The sugar rush bubbliness is turned up to eleven for a day ‘Cruisin’ down the highway with my friends’ and ‘lying in the sun when we’re done find a towel now we’re thinkin’ ‘bout where we’re gonna eat’. That’s not a lyric guys, that’s just a string of mundane stuff that happens when you go to the beach. Not every songwriter can be Morrissey, but ‘Naked Kids’ reads like a page torn from Rebecca Black’s notebook.

There are enough quality tracks on Never Trust A Happy Song for a very good EP, but enough repetition and banality to suggest that Grouplove have a way to go before they’ll be capable of producing a solid album. Hopefully future releases will involve a little more flexing of the creative muscles and less focus on cashing on what the band can do effortlessly, convey an infectious enthusiasm.

San Francisco band Girls have been lucky enough to hit a raw nerve in the critical community. Their first two albums were well received and allowed the band to make a decent foothold and extend from duo to five-piece for their third offering Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Now, there are rave reviews flying in all directions over what is undeniably an interesting album that competently juggles an odd combination of elements.

Variety is definitely the order of the day. Dramatic tempo changes quickly become the norm and are executed smoothly enough, as are shifts in instrumentation that venture into the seedy world of synthesised flutes and somehow live to tell the tale. When it comes to genre you could swear Owens was trying to recreate a selection from a “Top 50 Bands of All Time” countdown: first there’s surf-rock, then grunge and soon enough you start to hear Led Zepplin here and Pink Floyd there and a big chunk of the Beatles til the whole thing could start to look like a bit of a patchwork. It’s actually one of the triumphs of Father, Son, Holy Ghost that all these styles sit so comfortably together, mostly thanks to the consistency of Owen’s presence at the centre of the songs – he’s nothing if not solid.

Lyrically it’s not complex; in fact sometimes Owen’s words seem almost pointedly simplistic. That’s possibly why, when paired with the trite pop sounds of songs like “Saying I Love You” and “Love Like a River” the whole thing borders on bit of a joke. One problem is that if this tortured soul really is the core of this album – and the subjects are pretty personal so this seems likely – then there’s something unsettling in the lack of variation in Owens’ vocals. He whispers his way through song after (apparently) heartfelt song with a stoicism that can’t but lend an edge of irony to that lyrical childishness.

There’s so many lovable elements to Father, Son, Holy Ghost: the tunes are engaging, the instrumentation is well-executed, there’s fun and variety and a real originality in there somewhere, it’s just missing a certain something. Perhaps it’s sincerity that’s the issue – maybe abit less artifice would do the trick. It brings to mind the icky feeling that crept in when Daniel Johnston’s songs started getting slick production. Owens, like Johnston, has a certain naiveté to his song writing that could be charming in a rawer context but somehow just comes off as a bit weak or false. What’s certain is that with Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Girls definitely had their work cut out for them. There’s a very delicate line being walked here and the slightest falter could send the whole thing crashing down with a big splat. As it is they seem to have made it across, it’s just hard to tell if the whole thing’s been worth it.

…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead were down in Melbourne earlier this month. We had a chat to the guys about their latest album and plans for the future and filmed their show at the Corner Hotel…

Interview: Michael Bird, Sean Sebastian

Camera: Timothy Casten, Anthony Koreny, Dan von Czarnecki, Michael Bird

Editor: Timothy Casten

Neighborhoods affirms a few things that were up in the air during Blink 182’s ‘indefinite’ hiatus. First and foremost, it serves to show that had Mark, Tom and Travis experienced whatever collective epiphany that drove them to produce their genre-bending self-titled/untitled album a little sooner than 2003, they might have been a musical force to be reckoned with. Neighborhoods confirms that the self-titled album wasn’t a fluke in terms of being genuinely respectable beyond power chords and fart jokes, even if it falls short of being amazing.

Secondly (and this is more of a reinforcement than a surprise) Blink’s latest release reaffirms that Tom DeLonge possesses one of the most grating voices in modern music. A mix of West Coast drawl and the syllable warping forced affectation singers tend towards when they’re struggling to hit notes, DeLonge has only gotten more nasal and off-key as time has worn on, something not even an arsenal of studio effects can hide. His verse sections in ‘Up All Night’ are painful.

Lastly, and sadly, Neighborhoods is one on a list of recent albums (COUGH Chili Peppers) that signposts just how far beyond relevant some artists have become. There’s nothing on this album that feels at all necessary or urgent, nothing that wasn’t exorcised in the bands’ last LP. There’s no real sense of adventure of experimentation on most tracks, and the first half of the album especially is just too busy to be very interesting. Part of what made their self-titled effort exhilarating was slowing down and giving new textures and moods room to breathe. Everything here up to ‘Snake Charmer’ blows by without making much of an impact, all drum fills and ho-hum vocals.

Having said all that though, there are redeeming moments in Neighborhoods. ‘Snake Charmer’ is the first noteworthy cut on the album, with a healthy chunk of dissonance and a beat that actually kicks instead of simply keeping time. ‘Kaleidoscope’ and ‘This Is Home’ throw some musical curveballs in the same way that songs like ‘Always’ and ‘I Miss You’ did, piano and synth tones sneaking into the mix. In that sense Neighborhoods is worth a few spins and, had Blink been closer to the start (or even middle) of their career, it might have been suggestive of a bright future. As it stands though, the band are surely almost at the end of their rope, prone to self-indulgence (Angels & Airwaves/anything that comes out of Tom DeLonge’s mouth) and so-so rehashes of past successes (+44/anything that Mark Hoppus does). There’s too much of these things and not enough substance on Neighborhoods, and the future doesn’t look bright.

]]> http://duckduzz.com/index.php/blink-182-neighborhoods/feed 0 http://duckduzz.com/index.php/neon-indian-era-extrana http://duckduzz.com/index.php/neon-indian-era-extrana#comments Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:41:45 +0000 Sean Sebastian http://duckduzz.com/?p=65

With cult respectability and Pitchfork kudos, Alan Polomo’s Neon Indian have carved a comfortable niche for themselves in the electro market. Their debut release, Psychic Chasms, was a joy-inducing and lively listen that was hard to categorise; full of textures and soundscapes that resembled something from early 90’s videogame soundtracks overlaid with an aural distance akin to Air. The only problem was that the entire experience was a bit of a shambles. The individual sections of the album were a genuinely good time: the shamelessly upbeat “Deadbeat Summer”, or the complete trip that is “I Should Have Taken Acid With You”. But with these tracks placed side-by-side, Psychic Chasms was klunky, misshapen and difficult to commit to.

With Era Extraña, their sophomore LP, they’ve taken a more straightforward approach, rectifying the beautiful mess of their previous release. They’ve retained a plethora of those nostalgic sounds, featuring similar uses of Vangelis-esque strings and intermittent electronic gobbledygook. But that’s not to say they aren’t moving in a new direction. For Psychic Chasms, the group’s experimental tendencies were channeled into instrumental textures, creating those exotic and foreign atmospheres. On Era Extraña, they’re toned down and contained within fleeting moments of playfulness. In “Arcade Blues”, for example, oscillating, high-pitched chimes, distorted male grunting and a wobbly whine, all of which sporadically strike a generally conventional beat.

Tantalisingly, the focus lies more heavily on vocals, immediately grafting more conventional structures onto the tracks. Palomo’s voice has been polished up and stripped back, allowing the listener to actually distinguish lyrics and melodies. “Polish Girl”, arguably the more radio-friendly track, muses on an unrequited love, “Do I still cross your mind? Your face still distorts the time”. The lyrics are top-notch. “The Blindside Kiss” tenderly explores the depths of debilitating shyness while “Future Sick” makes dreamy predictions of a period, “ten years from now”.

Era Extraña seems like an album they should’ve released first, allowing listeners to get a taste for the experimental complexities of Neon Indian, before descending completely into the ethereal abyss of Psychic Chasms. That being said, the LP is a more accomplished release and genuinely more rewarding. The elements are balanced perfectly and the tracks are consistent and varied. This album is sure to cement the group’s fan base and build on a much wider one.

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