February Issue | 2020
Brisbane | Free
TA M E I M PA L A “This could be the last good song I ever write�
The responses are getting bigger, better and louder for Polaris
Travels with Jack Whitehall: Comedian, actor, emu scholar
Weyes Blood: Hopefully macabre
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Credits Publisher Handshake Media Pty Ltd Group Managing Editor Andrew Mast National Editor – Magazines Mark Neilsen
There’s a storm brewing
Senior Editor Sam Wall
T
he last time I got excited about upcoming new music here, the release never eventuated (one year on and that ABBA material has still not seen the light of day). So, this time, I got signed stat decs validating the release date. Hopefully by the time you read this, Ben Watt’s album Storm Damage has been out since 31 Jan and is definitely seeing the light of day. I’ve written about Watt’s partner Tracey Thorn here a few times (I’m a big fan of her music, books and Twitter feed). The pair, of course, were once very well known as musical duo Everything But The Girl. Outside of EBTG, both have pursued careers as solo musicians and authors. Watt also became an acclaimed DJ, founded house/techno label Buzzin’ Fly and became an in-demand remixer. Watt’s journey in EBTG took him from the world of indie-folk to club dancefloor domination. His solo career has seen him reverse that journey and slowly move back from the underground techno field into the troubadour realm. While Thorn was generally seen as the voice of EBTG, Watt lent his vocals as well. In fact, one of the most moving songs the duo ever recorded was The Night I Heard Caruso Sing (from 1988’s Idlewild album) with Watt taking the lead. Storm Damage is Watt’s fourth solo album (his first was way back in 1983 and featured a collaboration with iconic folk rocker Robert Wyatt). A collection of ten songs, it finds Watt stripping back his sound for an intense but beautiful excursion through some personal and, at times, intense musical moments. Watt admits that the album was created to channel some “personal anguish and political anger”. While he hasn’t entirely ditched the synths and electronic drums, tracks like Hand emphasise just piano and his, sometimes, fragile-sounding voice. Watt is also planning on returning to Australia in April. On his last visit here he delivered an incredibly intimate set that thankfully, for this fan, included The Night I Heard Caruso Sing (tick that off the bucket list). With Storm Damage tailormade for a live reinterpretation, it would be smart to ready yourself for a night to hear Ben Watt sing. It’s also exciting to have a new Tame Impala record dropping this month. Not only does Kevin Parker grace our cover this month, but (spoiler alert) The Slow Rush is also our Album Of The Month. As longtime fans, we’ve been championing the musical project since we were alerted to an EP that was released in 2008 on indie WA label Hole In The Sky. We rushed to get those responsible on the cover of our then Melbourne-based Inpress magazine. Parker and his two bandmates at the time posed for our cover shoot on the banks of the Yarra and at one point serenaded the crew with an a cappella rendition of Remember Me (their cover of the Blue Boy’s ‘90s dance hit). We were hooked. In 2010, Inpress named Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker as Album Of The Year. Parker scored the title again from us in 2012 (Lonerism) and 2015 (Currents). To celebrate the release of album number four, The Slow Rush, senior contributor Bryget Chrisfield chatted with Parker. Covering a lot of ground, they discussed his fears that things could “grind to a halt”, a love of the Bee Gees, the personal nature of his compositions and that phone call with Mick Jagger.
Editors Daniel Cribb, Neil Griffiths Assistant Editor/Social Media Co-Ordinator Jessica Dale Editorial Assistant Lauren Baxter Arts Editor Hannah Story Gig Guide Henry Gibson gigs@themusic.com.au Senior Contributors Steve Bell, Bryget Chrisfield, Cyclone, Jeff Jenkins Contributors Irene Bell, Emily Blackburn, Joel Burrows, Sean Capel, Anthony Carew, Roshan Clerke, Cameron Colwell, Brendan Crabb, Guy Davis, Joe Dolan, Chris Familton, Guido Farnell, Donald Finlayson, Liz Giuffre, Carley Hall, Tobias Handke, Mark Hebblewhite, Keira Leonard, Joel Lohman, Sean Maroney, Taylor Marshall, Felicity Pickering, Michael Prebeg, Mick Radojkovic, Michaela Vaughn, Rod Whitfield Senior Photographers Cole Bennetts, Kane Hibberd Photographers Rohan Anderson, Andrew Briscoe, Stephen Booth, Pete Dovgan, Simone Fisher, Lucinda Goodwin, Josh Groom, Clare Hawley, Bianca Holderness, Jay Hynes, Dave Kan, Hayden Nixon, Angela Padovan, Markus Ravik, Bobby Rein, Barry Shipplock, Terry Soo Advertising Leigh Treweek, Antony Attridge, Jacob Bourke, Ben Di Donato sales@themusic.com.au Art Dept Felicity Case-Mejia print@themusic.com.au Admin & Accounts accounts@themusic.com.au Distro distro@themusic.com.au Subscriptions store.themusic.com.au Contact Us Mailing address PO Box 87 Surry Hills NSW 2010 Melbourne Ph: 03 9081 9600 26 Napoleon Street Collingwood Vic 3066 Sydney Ph: 02 9331 7077 Level 2, 230 Crown St Darlinghurst NSW 2010 Brisbane Ph: 07 3252 9666 info@themusic.com.au www.theMusic.com.au
Happy reading.
Andrew Mast Managing Editor
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Our contributors
This month 8
Editor’s letter
This month's best binge watching We round up the bushfire benefit shows this month
Belinda is a writer and sound technician
14
Brag, produced afternoon radio at FBi, and
18
Jack Whitehall
20
based in Wollongong. Over the past few years, Bel has worked as a print editor at The
The Arts
collated a series on LGBT+ homelessness for Archer. You can read more of their work at belindaquinn.com.
The best arts of the month
34
Film & TV reviews
36 Flickerfest The touring short film festival provides an unfiltered world view
Re b o o t
ed
How the arts community pulled together to raise funds for bushfire relief
Northeast Party House Making music their job
Belinda Quinn
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16
Tame Impala
30
Album reviews
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37 Deborah Cheetham AO Deborah Cheetham, Yorta Yorta woman, soprano, composer and educator, has been
22
Re b o o t
ed
Weyes Blood, Allah-Las
Best Coast Life had to change for Bethany Cosentino
landscape for more than 25 years. Her list of commissions for major Australian ensembles
Your Town
include works for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Australia String Quartet and The Sydney Philharmonia.
22
The big picture: Deborah Cheetham
24
Polaris
26 Our adpatation wishlist Things we want to see made into film or TV shows
a leader and pioneer in the Australian arts
27
One more day So this is the leap year
40
Your gigs
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This month’s local highlights
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The end
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Madi Titterington Madi is a Sydney-based illustrator and comic artist creating work that draws inspiration from the mundane and the magical found in everyday life. Find her on Instagram @madikarp_ and @wklymadi for weekly
Creed Bratton Touring musician and Dunder Mifflin Scranton’s head of quality assurance
comic updates.
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Gladys Knight
Gone but not forGOTen For nearly ten years the Game Of Thrones theme was inescapable if you wanted to stay abreast of the office water cooler chat. The show may be done and dusted but you can till get your fix at the Game Of Thrones Live Concert Experience from 7 Feb.
Pip pip hooray Legendary singer Gladys Knight starts her first Australian tour in 20 years this month. The multi-Grammy Award winner, Rock & Roll Hall Of Famer and BET Lifetime Achievement Award holder begins her run this 4 Feb.
Storm’s a-comin’
Kate Tempest
As well as playing Perth and Adelaide festivals this month, British poet and performer Kate Tempest is making stops in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney from 18 Feb on the back of 2019 LP The Book Of Traps And Lessons.
Blu blazes
Pinkish Blu
“Feelsy four-piece” Pinkish Blu are taking their polished sad bangers on the road with Sydney pop-gaze duo EGOISM for a co-headline tour this month and the next. Catch the pair of them starting from 28 Feb in Brisbane.
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Stream dreams
Game Of Thrones
Approachable Members Of Your Local Community. Pic: Giulia McGauran
This month’s best binge watching Better Call Saul, Season 5
Three-time Golden Globe nominee Bob Odenkirk returns as Jimmy McGill in the fifth season of Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul. After teasing viewers for the better part of four seasons, McGill has finally adopted his crooked alter ego Saul Goodman and his
Boys next door
complete transformation into a sleazy criminal/lawyer is imminent.
After releasing their latest single Small Change just last month, loveable indie dorks Approachable Members Of Your Local Community are back with a new EP and dates to boot. Love Thy Neighbour drops 14 Feb, with their national run starting on 21 Feb.
Streams from 24 Feb on Stan
Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 7
New B99, and that means more Doug Judy. Toight. Last season the gang foiled corrupt Police Commissioner John Kelly only for longtime antagonist Wuntch to swoop and snag the job while busting Commander Holt down to patrolman. Is the Nine-Nine’s new Commander a drip? Can Holt and Peralta learn to work the beat together? Only time will tell.
One puuuuuuuuunch-ah! How do you build a fighting game around an invincible hero who defeats every enemy with a single punch? While the series sounded dumb at first, One Punch Man turned out awesome. Smash bad guys and genre tropes when One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows drops 27 Feb.
The Lotus Eaters, Emily Clements
One Punch Man: A Hero Nobody Knows
Streams from 7 Feb on SBS On Demand
Doom and bloom After a confrontation leaves her stranded and abandoned in Vietnam, Emily makes a difficult decision — she decides to stay. Equal parts coming-of-age story, sexual awakening, and downfall and redemption epic, Emily Clements’ debut memoir is a map of the pitfalls on the path to personal empowerment. The Lotus Eaters is available from 4 Feb.
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Hunters
It’s 1977 in New York City and, much like today, America has a Nazi problem. Leagues of fascists have escaped to the US post WWII, and it’s up to a ragtag team of ‘hunters’, led by Holocaust surviver Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), to track them down and give them the Inglourious Basterds treatment before they can build the Fourth Reich.
Streams from 21 Feb on Amazon
Look for the helpers: these are the shows lending support to bushfire relief There have been a lot of beautiful, heartbreaking, and furious words written about the bushfire crisis in Australia in recent months. The strongest statement The Music feels it can add to this list at this time is just to say, get out there. There are countless artists putting their time, money and effort behind communities being devastated by bushfires. Buy a ticket, catch a show, get out there and support however you can.
NSW
VIC
QLD
Fire Fight Australia
We Love The 90s! Bushfire Relief Fundraiser
Bushfire Relief Fundraiser
Who? Queen + Adam Lambert, Alice Cooper, John Farnham, Olivia Newton-John, kd lang, Amy Shark, Hilltop Hoods, Grinspoon, Icehouse, Tina Arena, 5 Seconds Of Summer, Peking Duk and more Where? ANZ Stadium When? 16 Feb
Who? Dylan Lewis, Jane Gazzo, Leigh Whannell Where? The Spotted Mallard When? 5 Feb
Who? Reverie, Hearing Blue Noise Where? The Milk Factory When? 13 Feb
Wildlife VIC / CFA Fundraiser
Brisbane Unites! A Bushfire Fundraiser
Firebanned V — Newcastle Bushfire Benefit Concert
Who? Bitumen, Big Yawn, Premium Fantasy, Synthetics Where? The John Curtin Hotel When? 6 Feb
Who? Like Thieves, Darkcell, From Crisis To Collapse, Massic, Hammers and more Where? Mansfield Entertainment Centre When? 18 Apr
Who? Greg Bryce, Piper Butcher, Rose Carleo Band and more Where? The Wickham Park Hotel When? 1 Mar
Lifting The Vibration Bushfire Fundraiser Who? Andrew De Silva and more Where? The Prince Of Wales When? 8 Feb
WA
Rock The Tavern — Fundraiser For The Fire Fighters
Bushfires Fundraiser Palooza
Where? Wild Hop Brewing Company When? 5 Feb
Who? SPY V SPY, DV8, Urban Guerrillas Where? Jewells Tavern When? 7 Mar
Album Launch — Tooma Bushfire Recovery fundraiser Who? Fanny Lumsden Where? Tooma Hall When? 14 Mar
Prog Aid — A Bushfire Relief Concert
Who? 8Foot Felix, Claudia Jones, Ogopogo, Empat Lima, Electric Toothbrush, Erik Parker Where? The Spotted Mallard When? 9 Feb
Bushfire Appeal — Day Party
Who? Golden Features, Adult Art Club b2b Running Touch (DJ set), Jordan Brando b2b Luke Alessi, Late Nite Tuff Guy, The Velvet Club, Willaris K (DJ set) and more Where? Seaworks When? 9 Feb
Who? The Omnific, Teramaze, Red Sea, I Built The Sky, Hashshashin, Anubis, Hemina, Genetics, Halcyon Reign, The Winter Effect Where? Oxford Art Factory When? 15 Mar
X — Bushfires Benefit
ACT
A Carry 4 Coins
Bushfire Fundraiser Who? The Other Favorites, Reina del Cid Where? The Basement When? 24 Apr
Australian Wildfires Fundraiser
Bushfire Fundraiser Festival
Who? Luke Fox, James Abberley, Blue Child and more Where? The River When? 9 Feb
With Love From WA
Who? Drapht, Katy Steele, Great Gable, The Money War, Demon Days and more Where? Rosemount Hotel When? 16 Feb
Who? X, The Penny Ikinger Band, Hearts & Rockets, Luxury, DOG and more Where? The Spotted Mallard When? 16 Feb Who? Sampa The Great, Kaiit, Ecca Vandal and more Where? Max Watt’s Melbourne When? 26 Feb
Down To Earth: A Fire & Climate Relief Concert
Who? Angus & Julia Stone, Gang Of Youths, Briggs, Tash Sultana, Jack River, Ruby Fields, Thelma Plum Where? Sidney Myer Music Bowl When? 26 Feb
The Bushfire Blues Appeal
Who? Paulie Bignell, Benny Gerrard, Aaron Gillett, Julian James, Ezra Lee, Yuri Pavlinov, TK Reeve, Nardia Rose, Anna Sconti, Johnny Tesoriero, Jesse Valach, Iseula and more Where? The Catfish When? 28 Feb
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This is by no means an exhaustive list of fundraisers, check The Guide on theMusic.com.au for more details.
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Riding the wave Whenever he’s feeling shit about himself in everyday life, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker tells Bryget Chrisfield that writing a new song is the only thing that can restore his confidence. Even if poring over painful childhood memories is what’s required, all he cares about is making “music that’s moving”. Cover and feature photos by Neil Krug.
W
e dare you to attempt to mul-
around the same time and then finish
or something, but it’s really amazing. Mark
something in my life right now to make
titask
Tame
them all around the same time — I kind
Ronson played it to me for the first time,
me feel better,’ and it just so happens that
fourth
of do everything at once. So by February
actually. You’ve gotta check it out.”
coming up with a new song makes me
album, The Slow Rush. Its predeces-
or something last year, I’d started all the
Borderline’s chorus gives the impres-
instantly feel better about myself. In a way,
sor Currents received universal acclaim,
songs that were gonna be on the album,
sion of internal discourse (“Starting to
it’s the only thing that can make me feel
appearing high up in the Best Of 2015 lists
but I didn’t finish writing the songs until
sober up/Has it been long enough?... I’m a
the best that I can. It covers everything for
of many renowned media outlets and con-
a few hours before mastering; it’s kinda
loser/Loosen up”), which makes us wonder
me. It ticks all the boxes. It makes me feel
tains Tame Impala’s highest-selling song to
funny that I do it that way.”
whether Parker sometimes finds it hard to
confident with myself and also that I’ve
while
Impala’s
digesting
magnificent
date: The Less I Know The Better. We can’t
And the version of Borderline that
silence his inner critic. “That part’s sorta
still got it,” he laughs. “That I haven’t lost it,
help but wonder whether experiencing
Tame Impala debuted on Saturday Night
like pretty stream-of-consciousness lyrics.
you know?
that level of chart-topping, award-winning
Live differs from the album version: “It was
But yeah, I am pretty hard on myself, and
“Because after every song that I write
success comes with a side serving of fear
taken out of the oven early, in my opinion,
obviously I wish I wasn’t, but also I reason
there’s always the fear — it’s not like the
of failure. “Yeah, of course,” musical mas-
just because we were trying to get some
that it’s probably something that helps
fear is always there, but every song I write
termind Kevin Parker allows. “I mean, it’s
new music together for SNL and for Coach-
me, in a way.”
could be my last good song. Like, ‘Hey, this
not so much a fear of failure, it’s the fear of
ella.” While listening to either arrangement
You can tell by his compositions that
could be the last good song I ever write!’
not doing something better than the last
of this song, you’ll be overwhelmed by the
Parker is a perfectionist. He’s been quot-
Because maybe one day, surely, that’ll be
thing you did.” Parker then admits this sort
swirling, intersecting layers of synth plus
ed as saying, “Part of the thing about me
the case, you know? Like, Paul McCartney
of pressure, at its worst, “can grind you to
harmonies so paradisiacal that we reckon
starting an album is that I have to feel kind
doesn’t write songs like he used to and
a halt”. “And that’s the time when I don’t
if Parker looked into his ancestry he could
of worthless again to want to make music.”
Stevie Wonder doesn’t write songs like he
really like to think about music,” he contin-
potentially be related to the Bee Gees.
When asked how he gets himself into that
used to so, at some point, that day is gonna
ues, “but when it’s good pressure it’s like a
“That would be a surprise, but hey! I do love
frame of mind, Parker clarifies, “I mean, it’s
come, I feel.”
wave that I just have to ride out so it’s not
the Bee Gees,” he chuckles.
not worthless like some people feel worth-
If you can listen to Posthumous For-
Does Parker have a favourite Bee Gees
less — it’s not like depression or anything;
giveness while reading the lyric sheet
all negative.” Our first taste of The Slow Rush was
song? “I mean I’m tempted to say Stayin’
depression isn’t creative for anyone. It’s just
without welling up, your tear drainage
Borderline, which premiered on Satur-
Alive, just because it’s such a classic, but
feeling shit about yourself in the kind of
system must be on the blink. The deeply
day Night Live. “It was one of the first ones
I also love this song Every Christian Lion
day-to-day ups and downs. When I’m feel-
personal third single to be lifted from The
that I started,” Parker recounts of Border-
Hearted Man [Will Show You]. Have you
ing good, things don’t come to me the way
Slow Rush sees Parker addressing his late
line’s creation, “because I start all of them
ever heard that? I think it’s, like, late-’60s
they do when I’m just feeling like, ‘I need
father, who passed away in 2009 (before
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Check The Guide on theMusic.com.au for more details.
”I just wanna make music that’s moving, whether it’s in a happy way or a darker way or somewhere in between.”
the release of Tame Impala’s debut album).
that, it kind of just felt right to sing about
to witness all that he’s achieved through
Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Kali Uchis, Travis
After his parents divorced when he was
and to sing those lyrics. But, the thing is, I
music. Singing in that trademark crestfall-
Scott and The Flaming Lips. For someone
just four, Parker lived with his mother
don’t want people to think that that’s how
en-yet-hopeful falsetto, Parker sounds like
who has experienced so much success —
while his brother grew up with his father.
I feel about my dad every day. Because
a little lost lamb on an islet torn away from
through Tame Impala, as a collaborator
His mum and dad got back together years
it’s not; it’s how I have felt before for the
the coast, helplessly floating away from his
and also a producer — Parker somehow
later, reuniting the whole family under one
sake of making a song that I feel is mov-
flock: “Wanna tell you about the time/I
manages to avoid public scrutiny and pro-
roof, before breaking up again.
ing, which is all I care about doing at the
was in Abbey Road/Or the time that I
tect his privacy. “I think as an artist you
“And you could store an ocean in the
end of the day — I just wanna make music
had/Mick Jagger on the phone.”
kind of carve out the world you want for
holes/In any of the explanations that you
that’s moving, whether it’s in a happy way
So how did this genuine anecdote,
yourself,” he opines. “If you want your per-
gave/And while you still had time, you
or a darker way or somewhere in between.”
which resulted in Parker remixing Jagger’s
sonal life to be on display and something
had a chance/But you decided to take all
When asked whether this song felt
Gotta Get A Grip, go? “I think he said he
that everyone talks about you can have
your sorrys to the grave” — it’s a devastat-
cathartic to write and helped him find
was a fan, that he liked the music or some-
that. And a side effect from that is that
ing listening experience with harrowing
some sort of peace while reflecting on his
thing. But he was just talkin’ about what
you probably get photographers show-
lyricism offset by elegiac synths, saunter-
relationship with his estranged dad, Parker
he’d been doing; he was just watching the
ing up at your door. But I like to keep it
ing bass and considered drumming.
hesitates, “I mean it’s complicated, obvi-
cricket with his kids or something — I think
pretty mysterious.”
ously, but every little bit helps, you know.”
he was in Paris at the time. We just chatted
On whether this is the most personal
about what he’d been doing with his solo
song he’s ever written, Parker ponders, “All
Probably the section that most affect-
my songs are personal in some way. I guess
ed this scribe goes down in the second half
it’s the most ‘heart on my sleeve’ kinda
of the song, which changes tack and sees
Other artists that have sought Parker
thing [I’ve done]; I didn’t intend for it to be
Parker wishing his father was still around
out for collaborations include Ronson,
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The Slow Rush (Island) is out this month. Tame Impala tour from 18 Apr.
Illustration by Felicity Case-Mejia
Artists unite for bushfire relief
Joel Burrows speaks to Estelle Conley from Griffin Theatre Company, Lucy Feagins from Design Files, YA author Emily Gale, and comedian Gerard McGowan about the bushfire fundraising efforts being led by artistic communities.
T
he ongoing Australian bushfire crisis is overwhelming and beyond words. At the time of writing almost 17 million hectares have burned, leading to the loss of an indescribable amount of local flora and fauna. Over 25 people have died, and countless more have lost their homes. However, in the face of such hopelessness, artistic communities across the country have instigated some incredible fundraising efforts. Artists and arts organisations have been calling on their audiences to donate to those in need. Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney is one such organisation and has coordinated multiple fundraisers for WIRES. They’re hosting a silent auction for an astroturf armchair from the set of last year’s First Love Is The Revolution, as well as a Facebook fundraiser. Everyone who donates to this fundraiser goes into the running to win a five-play subscription for two for Griffin’s 2020 Season. Editor Lucy Feagins and YA author Emily Gale have also organised auctions to help bushfire-affected areas. Feagins ran an art auction called Arts Fight Fire that raised money for Victoria’s Country Fire Association, WIRES and Wildlife Victoria. Archibald
featuring acts like Wil Anderson and Matt Okine, which sold out within two hours. This show helped raise funds for the NSW Rural Fire Service and WIRES. McGowan says the response from his fellow comics has been overwhelmingly positive. “The acts, many of which are very highprofile, were very quick to get in touch and lend their time to the cause.” These artists and arts organisations have created these fundraising initiatives during a very turbulent time for the arts in Australia. Australia Council’s grant funding budget has decreased by 19 percent since 2007, with hundreds of creators and companies losing the money they need to make work. Now many
Prize winners like Guy Maestri donated their work to this event, and the auction made over $160,000. Gale helped start the hashtag #AuthorsforFireys, which saw a myriad of artists sell signed copies of their books, mentorships, and meet and greets. The event raised money for a variety of bushfire services and saw over 900 items go to auction. Feagins was totally blown away by the visual arts community and how they responded to the auction. “The generosity of the artists involved cannot be overstated,” she says. “We have had artists donating works to this fundraiser which are worth up to $12,000. Choosing to donate this work, rath-
“This underfunded sector, made up of people who represent some of the most underpaid professions in the country, are leading the charge. It’s incredibly powerful.” — Lucy Feagins people in the arts industry believe that the Liberal Party doesn’t care about their livelihoods, even as the cultural sector contributes $50 billion the Australia’s GDP. Griffin Theatre Company has been profoundly affected by these budget cuts. “Our operations have been affected in numerous ways,” says Estelle Conley. “We cut our annual mainstage program. We reduced our rehearsal process from five weeks to four. We cut all commissioning and play development programs... While we have managed, our current way of working is not sustainable.”
er than sell it, is a really significant thing. That one painting could be a quarter of an artist’s income for the year.” Gale likewise was blown away by the altruism of the general public. “Several highest bidders upped their highest bid when it came to donating, even though they’d already won!” Another way creators have raised money for the bushfire effort is by organising shows. Gerard McGowan is one such comedian. He coordinated a comedy show called Bushfire Relief at Sydney’s Giant Dwarf in January,
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NEWS
The Australian Government announced in December they would be merging the arts department with transport, infrastructure and regional development. A lot of creators and arts organisations believe that this merger says a great deal about the Liberal Party. “It’s the government’s way of burying us, and we know it,” says Gale. “The kind of people in power at the moment loathe the arts, and this move is the biggest tell of all.” “What does transport have to do with art?” McGowan asks. “Nothing. It’s a clear sign. Just like going on holiday while the country burns is a sign.” Our artistic communities have given their time, money and creative works in order to support bushfire-affected communities — even after the Australian Council had its budget cut and the Government revealed the merger. Conley believes that this is because “the arts community is deeply committed to the wellbeing and positive future of our Australian community”. “It’s knitted into the fabric of everything that we do,” she says. “We are resilient, flexible, and punch well above our weight when it comes to giving back.” Feagins believes that there’s a sense of camaraderie underlying these bushfire fundraising efforts. “No matter what challenges artists and arts organisations face, there’s an... independent spirit, a resilience, and even a sense of defiance within the arts community. This underfunded sector, made up of people who represent some of the most underpaid professions in the country, are leading the charge. It’s incredibly powerful.” McGowan believes that the bushfire fundraising efforts made by artists, creators and arts organisations says a lot about the community. But he is even more impressed with the amount of money the Australian general public has donated. “It has really restored my faith in humanity. If everyone does their part, we might just pull through this. Hopefully this show helps me do some of mine.”
FEBRUARY GIG GUIDE 7th - Hot Potato Band 8th - X Ambassadors 13th - Trophy Eyes 14th - The Beautiful Girls 16th - Creed Bratton 20th - Not On Your Rider 21st - The Angels and Boom Crash Opera 23rd - The Quireboys 25th - The New Pornographers 26th - Brass Against 27th - Sacred Reich 28th - Between The Buried And Me 29th - Melbourne Ska Orchestra www.thetriffid.com.au
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Large flightless bird
J
ack Whitehall has arrived in the country a few weeks ahead of his first Australian tour, Stood Up. While he’s here, he’ll be heading to a Big Bash game in Sydney and visiting an emu farm — the native bird is a subject of fascination for the London comic. “I’m a big cricket fan,” Whitehall gushes. “In fact, I’ve nearly on occasion flown out to English comedian Jack Whitehall watch the Ashes, and have always at the last teaches Hannah Story everything he minute decided against it. And then every time been very pleased that I didn’t, because knows about emus. watching Britain getting thumped would not be a great way of spending time or money.” But Whitehall is quick to point out a match that we lost — the Great Emu War of 1932, a failed attempt to restrain the emu population in Western Australia. “I love the facts about the emu war that you had, that you lost, against the emus. Fucking cool.” That grim — albeit amusing — piece of history is just one of many facts that he can rattle off about the bird, the result of research for a routine about being the emu in a school nativity play: “They’re double-feathered; average land speed: 31 miles per hour [50km/h]; volume of the egg equivalent to eight chicken eggs. You thought I was joking. I know facts. I know my shit,” he brags. When Whitehall toured around the UK last year, the bit didn’t land. “Most of the time people would be looking up at me going, ‘We don’t even know what an emu is, Jack. Why are you banging on about emus?’” But he’s thrilled that all his study of emus will finally land in Australia. “I researched emus so much for this show, and it’s fallen on deaf ears in England — they haven’t got a fucking clue. But here it’s gonna be great. I literally can’t wait to do the emu material.” The emu farm Whitehall will be visiting, run by a couple who make emu oil, offered to serve him the bird as a meal, but he declined. “I think that my journey with emus — that’s not how it ends. It would feel wrong. We have too much history.” While Whitehall has never played in Australia before — “I literally had no idea anyone would bother to come and see me here” — he reckons growing up in Putney, southwest London, known for its Aussie expat community, made for decent training. His “home-turf gig” once every couple of months was at the local Australian-themed pub, Walkabout, run by an Aussie named Pete. “I feel like I’ve played to Australian crowds before, because I did so many shows in Putney and Fulham, which is basically Australia in London. That always seemed to go down well.”
Stood Up is altogether a “big, dumb, fun show”, Whitehall explains, which will see the comedian talk about relationships, travelling, and living alone since his break-up from actor Gemma Chan in late 2017. He filmed the show for Netflix at London’s Wembley Stadium in January: “Just saying, ‘Hello Wembley!’ at the beginning of the night is thrilling and exciting.” He originally thought ‘2020 Vision’ would be a great title for a comedy special — except that’s already the name of Oprah Winfrey’s tour. Now, the streaming platform are asking him to change it. “Aww, fucking Oprah, again, stealing my ideas,” he moans. Whitehall adopts a persona on stage that is pretty true to himself in real life — at least half of the time. The other 50 percent of the time he’s actually “pretty fucking boring”. He admits that he plays “quite approachable” characters, including his breakout roles on shows like Fresh Meat and Bad Education, the latter of which he also wrote and created. Fans buy him drinks, think he’s their friend, and want to make jokes to him. “I much prefer that than being someone that people found unapproachable or didn’t want to have a laugh with. “I definitely think people have a degree of feeling like they know you,” he says. “Maybe I need to play like a really scary character and then people will give me a bit of distance. I’ll play like a serial killer in You and people aren’t gonna come up to me because they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh, he’s scary.’” The aim of Whitehall’s comedy is to distract people from “the rather depressing state of the world for two hours, and make you laugh about dumb stuff”. He doesn’t desire to be a political commentator, engaging with troubling issues. “I prefer looking inwards and making jokes at my own expense,” he says. “Maybe in 20 years I’ll be ready to do a show where I tell people what’s what. But at the moment, I’m just going to stick to some nice, light toilet humour.”
Jack Whitehall tours from 5 Feb.
“At the moment, I’m just going to stick to some nice, light toilet humour.”
Check The Guide on theMusic.com.au for more details.
He’s pleased to be able to do material that centres on the word ‘cunt’. Repeating the word about 100 times for the bit resonates in Scotland, Ireland and Australia, he says, but doesn’t work in England or America. The word can “kill a room” in the States, while swearing in general can turn people off in both countries. “But in Scotland if you don’t swear, if you don’t drop a C-bomb, then they’ll be disappointed.” It’s part of Whitehall’s endeavour to tailor his jokes for his audience, by inserting local references. “I landed in Australia, and after a day I was like, ‘Great, I’m gonna get to do the cunt routine.’” Whitehall travelled to Australia with his entire family — his mother, father, brother and sister. He quips that the Hyatt in Sydney is finally “a hotel my father can’t complain about”; holidays with his wealthy, old-fashioned father, Michael, are the subject of his hit Netflix series, Travels With My Father. Has it become strange to travel without his father? “It’s just a relief when I get to go without him. It’s way less stressful, and I’m reminded of how easy travelling can be,” he laughs. The popularity of the series, and their work together on stand-up-showturned-TV-series Backchat, means people are familiar with Michael Whitehall, retired theatrical agent. It gives Jack Whitehall the opportunity to make jokes at his 79-year-old father’s expense. “Audiences seem to know him now and really enjoy me telling indiscrete stories about him. [It’s] been fun to start slagging him off on a more extensive basis.”
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Top shelf
“When you’re making art, working towards something, there’s always going to be doubts.”
Ten years in Northeast Party House are living the dream. Ahead of the release of their third LP, singer Zach Hamilton-Reeves tells Anthony Carew that they finally feel like musicians.
Check The Guide on theMusic.com.au for more details.
C
alling a record Shelf Life — as Melbourne sextet Northeast Party House have with their third album — seems like it has to be a joke. Some riff on the forever youth-obsessed nature of pop, or the bleak future prospects for a band after a decade together, right? Turns out, it’s a title that carries real meaning for the outfit. “[The name] felt poignant in a club setting, poignant in a dance setting, poignant in being in a band,” says vocalist Zach Hamilton-Reeves. “It wasn’t a tongue-in-cheek thing, it felt like it carried a weight. We’ve matured, and it feels like this certain time in our lives may’ve ended. That’s not something we’re lamenting, that’s just the way things are: things change.” Hamilton-Reeves is about to turn 28, and most of his fellow bandmates — Mitch Ansell, Jack Shoe, Sean Kenihan, Oliver Packard, Malcolm Besley — are, he says, in the midst of “turning 30”. Which makes Northeast Party House, essentially, a band undergoing a collective Saturn Return. “It feels like a real time of change. In the past three years while we’ve been making this album, lots of stuff’s happened,” HamiltonReeves offers. In turn, Shelf Life is an album on which the singer found himself sharing “more of [his] life”, being “more vulnerable than [he has] in the past.” While the music trends towards big, electronic, dancefloor-worthy jams, the lyrics detail relationship blues, break-ups, being lost, and losing your edge. This starts with the title track. The jam finds Hamilton-Reeves recreating his expe-
rience during an all-nighter at Berlin’s notorious Berghain club. While distorted voices exhort the lyrical protagonist to “keep on dancing”, he has to push back. “I think I need some air/My knees are getting wobbly, my face is real sore/I feel like, ‘Fuck this, it’s time,’” Hamilton-Reeves speak-sings. “We were there for 17 hours,” HamiltonReeves recounts, “but it’s more about the aftermath of what happened. The song talks about what happened there, which really messed me up, a little bit, for quite a long time. For, like, six months. It changed me from partying to not partying at all. That’s a change which is interesting when you’re in a ‘party band’.” Since their beginnings in, um, Melbourne’s north-eastern suburbs, Northeast Party House have been a party band; their rep forged not via their studio albums, 2014’s Any Given Weekend and 2016’s Dare, but by their boisterous live shows. Life within a party band hasn’t, however, been one long party. “You can always have heavier times,” says Hamilton-Reeves. “The dynamics always go up and down. When you’re making art, working towards something, there’s always going to be doubts. And doubts lead to fears. And fears make different people feel different things. That sounds like such a broad statement, but what it means is that, when you have a group of people, they will react to the same situation in different ways.” Having formed in 2010 as teenagers, the six members of Northeast Party House find themselves, now, as a band of essentially
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different people. “At the start it was more friendship-based,” Hamilton-Reeves offers. “But, over time, that’s changed, and you become more focused on the work you have to do, like it’s a job. It’s not all just us having a great time together. Of course, they’re not mutually exclusive. We still have heaps of fun, and there’s heaps of love for each other. But, like family, there has to be a lot of space for each other. It’s like any kind of relationship. You learn a lot from each other, and hopefully you can grow together. Because people do change.” When working on Shelf Life, being in Northeast Party House went from being ‘like’ a job, for its members, to just an actual job. The band were hoping that their third album would be a ‘level up’ affair. So, they signed to Sony. They studied production and pop songwriting techniques via online primers from music schools and studio boffins. And, they paid themselves a wage to work on the record. “In that way, it was like a proper job, rather than doing it in out-of-work hours around other work,” Hamilton-Reeves says. “It was very exciting to be able to pay ourselves. To finally be able to feel like, ‘Hey, we are musicians.’ It gave a real air of excitement and enthusiasm to it. You work so hard for so long to be able to get to a moment like that. Before that, we all had day jobs. I used to work at Nudie Jeans, retail. When I got rid of that, it was awesome. It was probably one of my best days ever, quitting. Three years later, not having to go to ‘work’ feels more normal. But it’s still awesome.”
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This kind of financial independence was always something the band was striving for, even if it often went unspoken. It is, Hamilton-Reeves considers, a central belief for any band. “The goal is always ‘We want to be in band forever and we want making music to be our job,’ and everything you do is, in some ways, working towards that,” he says. The positive early feedback they received — winning an Unearthed competition to play Pyramid Rock in 2010, their earliest days, convinced the singer Northeast Party House “were gonna be rock stars” — meant that making music their career always felt tenable, not just in their “very naive” salad days, but as they’ve gone on, and grown up This means that, ten years in, Northeast Party House are officially living the dream. The years have gone on, their lives have changed, members have grown up, and along the way this ‘party band’ has had a blast. “It’s been incredible,” HamiltonReeves says, sufficiently chuffed. “Being able to travel Australia with your friends, travel through Europe on tour, getting to play shows in front of thousands of people, having people sing back to you these words that you wrote in your bedroom at a show — it’s bizarre, and it’s the best.”
Shelf Life (Sony) is out this month.
A new hope
Uniting through music
“Growth and change are possible.” So says Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino ahead of the release of the band’s fifth album, Always Tomorrow. Here she talks to Lauren Baxter about learning to feel compassion for yourself. like there’s a resolution in the sense that I’ve learnt how to accept that. “I’m always gonna run into these issues because I’m a human being and I’m not a robot and I’m not a Zen Buddhist monk,” Cosentino laughs. “Like, I can’t achieve that level of acceptance. But what I can achieve is the level of acceptance that’s like the record says: there is always tomorrow.” “Whether it means [a chance] to do things better, whether it means to fuck up again, whether it means to fuck up for the first time”, the promise of ‘tomorrow’ permeates the record. “I think, throughout the last several years, I’ve really learnt how to live in acceptance,” she says. “To live in this place where sometimes I have to just let go of things and be like, ‘Ok, I gotta go to sleep. Hopefully tomorrow, it’ll be better. It’ll be easier. Maybe it’ll be worse. I have no control over what happens then.’” Cosentino concedes “the world is really fucked up still”, and tries not to reside in “cheesy positivity” as a counterpoint. But a message of compassion for oneself is what she hopes people take from the new album. “We are fully capable of becoming the masters of our own mind,” she says emphatically. “We can choose to live in hopefulness or we can choose to live in the darkness. I think this record really shows the journey of a girl who went from living fully in the darkness and living in the black and white to living now in a zone where I try really hard to just accept things for what they are... You know, growth and change are possible. You just have to really be willing to work for it. And it sucks, like doing the work sucks. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. But it’s also like, the results are so very worth it.”
Pic: Tony Accosta
T
here’s always been an openness and relatability to Best Coast’s music. Whether you’re singing “I hate sleeping alone,” in resignation while you drive to that boy’s house (who you swore you’d never see again) or you’re just admitting you’re a little bit crazy for someone, Bethany Cosentino’s honest songwriting conveys the messy, lazy, lovely things in life, endearing the band to so many, for so long. The band’s new album, Always Tomorrow, is their first, for adults, in five years — and the first since Cosentino decided to get sober in 2017, following her break-up with Wavves’ Nathan Williams. “I really had no idea if Best Coast would make another record,” Cosentino tells us from her kitchen in California. “I knew I wanted to, but I didn’t know if it would happen. Or when it would happen. I just knew that in order to keep doing anything I needed to push the pause button and just take care of myself. I was willing to risk a lot of stuff to just be like, ‘Yo, I can’t live this way anymore, and I gotta figure this shit out.’” Cosentino started going to therapy and carving out “a lot of the childhood trauma”: “Just shit that I was dealing with on a daily basis like being an only child and coming from a divorce. A lot of stuff was deep in there and I was writing about it but I wasn’t really hearing my own message,” she says. The resulting album grapples with the concept of second chances. It finds solace in not having your shit together, and “resolution” in acceptance. “This record stands out because I think the last records I wrote very much about how I’d never felt good,” she admits. “It was very, ‘I don’t know how to get out of my own head.’ There was a lot of the same — a lot of the same topics and a lot of the same sort of things because I didn’t know anything else. So I think with this record it feels
Allah-Las vocalist/guitarist Miles Michaud — who went to the same high school as Black Flag and Descendents — tells Bryget Chrisfield he hopes his band’s music has a broad enough appeal to unite people from all walks of life.
Thicker than water Weyes Blood will bring her critically acclaimed album Titanic Rising across the Pacific to Australia this month. Belinda Quinn talks to the artist behind the moniker, Natalie Mering, about the importance of hope as a commodity in 2020.
Always Tomorrow (Concord) is out this month.
A
t 15 years old, LA-based artist Natalie Mering knew she wanted to be “Weyes Blood”. The moniker stems from Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, a dark, satirical
novel about faith and redemption. “It resonated with me, as somebody who had grown up in a very Christian household. There’s some strange, sad poetry to the whole story,” notes Mering. In her earlier albums, you’ll find a similar darkness in Mering’s lyrics and melodies, which became lighter in 2016’s Front Row Seat To Earth and last year’s Titanic Rising. “I think when I was a young woman, I was just kind of goth. I liked the macabre. I liked things that were dark and mysterious, and noisy and lo-fi,” she says. “I think that my message has gotten a little clearer as I get older, and as hope becomes more of an Pic: Eddie Chacon
important commodity.” Spending her formative years in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Mering’s upbringing and time spent harmonising in gospel and madrigal choirs has left a mark on her sound — her choral arrangements often feel reminiscent of church hymns.
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ou can tell by their press shots and Insta page that Allah-Las are effortlessly cool cats. Add the fact that this band was founded while three of its four members worked at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles and Cameron Crowe could direct a movie based on their lives. The band’s aesthetic is undeniably swoonworthy, but it’s this quartet’s collective music fandom that truly elevates AllahLas’ songcraft. On the band’s fourth LP Lahs, which references a common misspelling of their band name (Allah-Lahs, with a rogue ‘h’), intersecting melodies shimmer as listeners become increasingly aware of the breadth of Allah-Las’ musical knowledge. Something about opener Holding Pattern calls to mind Eric Burdon & War’s classic, Spill The Wine. “I’ve certainly heard that [song], but it never occurred to me,” vocalist/ guitarist Miles Michaud ponders. “I’m sure I won’t be able to not think of it now,” he chuckles good-naturedly. And Keeping Dry’s vocal melody evokes Eric Clapton’s Cocaine to this pair of ears... “Oh, yeah, I hear that!” he allows. “I didn’t think of that before; that makes sense.” Harmonies throughout Lahs evoke Simon & Garfunkel, which we sincerely hope Michaud takes as a compliment. He laughs, “That’s great! I’m glad you appreciate
that.” Kind of like falling down a ‘recommended for you’ YouTube rabbit hole, listening to Lahs makes us wanna revisit long-forgotten gems. So what’s one of Michaud’s early memories of hearing a song that stopped him in his tracks? “I remember when I was young and in middle school, the local punk scene was a big deal. I went to the same high school as Black Flag and the Descendents, and all those guys were from the South Bay where I grew up and so that scene was really big,” Michaud explains. “I remember going to the record shop where I’d buy all that stuff and the guy who ran it, his name was Uncle Tim, and he turned me and my friends onto The Stooges’ self-titled record, and that kinda blew our minds. I couldn’t believe that it was music from the ‘60s and that really opened up this idea that there was pretty rough-and-tough music being made a long time before my contemporaries were interested in it. That kinda got me looking back into the past and digging into music that had come a long time before, and trying to figure out what the lineage of all that stuff was.” When asked how he would typically consume music around this time, Michaud offers, “It was all about Discman and, especially being from LA, it was all about listening to music in your car. So you’d get a ride with somebody and they’d have a few CDs and they’d put on something you hadn’t heard before, and it was just a great way to listen to new music at that time. There’s a sense of freedom associated with being 16, 17, and driving around and listening to something new.” Lahs could soundtrack summertime poolside soirõ¿‰es, complete with signature cocktails and canapõ¿‰s. How does Michaud hope this record exists in the lives of listeners? “It would be nice to think that music like ours could have a wide enough appeal that people from different walks of life and with different interests
in different styles of music, and different backgrounds, could come together with this mutual interest. And I think that’s really something that art should always strive for is uniting people across different walks of life.” Michaud estimates it took “two and half years, easy” from when Allah-Las composed the first track that made it onto Lahs, Light Yearly (“That’s one we’ve been playing live for a coupla years now”), to the album’s completion. Of the record’s lengthy gestation period, Michaud reveals, “We built our own studio and spent a lot of time in there just going through ideas and taking our time with them, and we didn’t wanna feel rushed into, you know, having a deadline and finishing the record by a certain time. We wanted to make sure that we had it to the point that we were happy with it. We did a lotta the recording ourselves and I think in the end a lotta that kind of casualness comes through in the overall tone and feeling of the record. We’re all really happy with the way it turned out.”
Allah-Las tour from 20 Feb.
Check The Guide on theMusic.com.au for more details.
As a child though, she was hyperactive, a daydreamer.
lescent self about the loss of natural wonders. “The chords
“I do feel, after the record has been out for a while,
“I have debilitating ADD,” she says. “I don’t take pharmaceu-
are very much like an old-school Gershwin-type song. I
that I’ve seen the kind of groundswelling around people
ticals for it, and I never have.” That’s not to say she’s against
wanted it to be very atemporal,” she says. The melodrama
that feel something about it,” she concludes. “I just know
medication, having seen it help peers in the past. “I’ve
almost lends way to humour, Mering comparing herself to
in my heart that the next step is something a little bit
been making it work, on my own, for years,” she says, with a
“the harlequin” mask — she appreciates the closeness of
closer to the action.”
laugh. “It’s just one of those things that makes it difficult to
comedy and tragedy.
get anything done sometimes. And that is definitely worth diagnosing and acknowledging.”
Now, closing in on a year since the track’s release, Mering wants to work harder to materialise the environmental-
As our exchange on attention deficit disorder contin-
ist messages within her music: “I think we’ve raised enough
ues, she shares, “I can imagine that it is incredibly hard with
awareness. I think everybody is completely aware of what’s
someone with really bad ADD, to deal with the tedium of
going on. And it’s not a matter of trying to convert people’s
modern culture where it’s just endless stimulation, endless
hearts anymore. It’s a matter of trying to sway votes and
email, endless to-do, endless doing one thing that makes
elections and literally volunteer and sign petitions and just
you have to do six other things. I feel particularly lucky that
get involved locally.”
I get to be an artist, and, I think, as much as it still affects
Weyes Blood tours from 23 Feb.
me, I can just play music and do things that come very naturally to me.” Her lyrics are often laced with dreams and ruminations on unrequited love. “I want you mostly in the morning/ When my soul is weak from dreaming,” she sings on Seven Words. “It’s like failure to launch, like every love story in my 20s was always muddled by timing and circumstance, but I think my compass was correct,” she says. Mering’s spoken publicly about her refusal to watch Hollywood movies while going through puberty. “I knew that they were bogus and emotionally manipulative. But in my 20s, I think that my perception of love was honestly pretty spot-on,” she says after being queried if romantic Pic: Eliot Lee Hazel
blockbusters influenced her approach to love. “But the difference was that the men and the people I was loving were not ready for that.” Now, in her early 30, she’s resisting becoming closed off by what she calls the “small-t trauma” of love and loss in your formative years. Embellished with EBow guitar melodies, layered strings and a tape machine warping the mix, A Lot’s Gonna Change feels at once futuristic and like an early-Hollywood musical number, wherein a young woman sings to her ado-
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THE BIG PICTURE
Deborah Cheetham AO Inspired by the Embassy Tapestry Collection – a diverse series of works designed by Indigenous artists and displayed in embassies worldwide – Professor Deborah Cheetham AO has created a new suite of contemporary chamber music. Before she performs it as part of Asia TOPA this month, we speak to the celebrated Yorta Yorta soprano and composer about the art of diplomacy.
Lumpu Lumpu Country
The Woven Song series will be performed across the world over a period of years. How did this project come about? What first sparked your inspiration? The Embassy Tapestries are stunning. They sing to you. Vibrant, powerful and empowering. Together these nine tapestries represent one of Australia’s most interesting and unique collections. I have always been very interested in cultural diplomacy and the role it plays in nurturing and in some cases creating relationships between nations. Of course this is something that is well understood by the Indigenous nations on this continent and practised here longer than anywhere else. The cultural diplomacy practised by Indigenous nations depended upon the art as a way of communication. Diplomatic ceremonies were sung and danced while messages of cultural understanding and authority were painted onto the body. So when I first encountered the Embassy Tapestry Collection I was immediately fascinated by them and wanted to find a way to connect. There were so many layers. The original artists, their stories, cultures and languages and the works which inspired the tapestries combined to provide a varied and rich source of inspiration.
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Pictured is Lumpu Lumpu Country by celebrated Walmajarri artist Daisy Andrews. Can you share some of the history and meaning behind this tapestry? Like so many nations across this vast continent, the Walmajarri people suffered great loss in the early 20th century as they were dispossessed of their lands. For those unaware of the brutal history attached to its creation, the Canning Stock Route conjures up heroic notions of this more than 2000kmlong pathway for stockmen. Yet from the very beginning of its history the Canning Stock Route was the subject of controversy and division. Like many early colonisers, Canning lacked the necessary skill and knowledge to locate desert water sources. Not to be denied, Canning took hostage several desert men, chained them by the neck, forced them to eat salt, then waited until they got thirsty enough to lead his party to water. The Canning Stock Route crosses many nations including the lands of Daisy Andrews’ ancestors. By the time Daisy was born her family were already displaced from their traditional lands — those who were not massacred fled to safety, most never to return. Stories about the land were narrated to Andrews by her parents and grandparents but she only visited late in life: her family, riven by dispossession, were too traumatised to return. Andrews’ paintings, drawings and prints of Lumpu Lumpu are made as memorials to her homeland.
The Woven Song runs 14 & 15 Feb as part of Asia TOPA.
Check The Guide on theMusic.com.au for more details.
Pole position After a rapturously received debut, Sydney metalcore stars Polaris may soon have to pack in their day jobs, as lead vocalist Jamie Hails tells Brendan Crabb.
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t’s January 2018 and Polaris are special guests on Parkway Drive’s Horizons anniversary trek around Australia. There’s already sizeable fanfare surrounding the Sydney act, who were the buzz band of Australian heavy music following 2017’s debut The Mortal Coil. The passionate singalongs and rabid exchange of energy between the band and their faithful at Sydney’s Metro Theatre reiterates that Polaris have arrived, and already outgrown support band status. Fast-forward two years and The Music is conversing with lead singer Jamie Hails, as the band prepare to issue The Death Of Me. He’s still recovering from a “bloody insane” set at UNIFY Gathering, which seems as appropriate a time as any to take stock of their rapid rise. “It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster, and every tour and show we’ve played and have been playing just keeps getting bigger,” Hails reflects. “The reactions at all these shows, the responses are getting bigger, better and louder. It’s been really awesome to see, and it’s taken us by surprise. We never thought we would be doing the things that we have been doing, and the things that we’ve accomplished we never thought were going to be a thing for us... We’ve already accomplished so much in such a short amount of time. “There’s a lot of moments where we take a step back and [are] just like, ‘Wow, look what we’ve done, and look at what we’re still doing and pushing to be doing.’ We’ve been enjoying the rollercoaster while it’s going, but [we’re] also pushing it to keep seeing how far we can go, how high we can go, how far can we push this band.” Given how swiftly Polaris, who formed in 2012, were elevated to being an upper-tier act in Australia, we question whether the frontman detected any resentment from other
groups. “I don’t believe so,” Hails says. “No one’s ever really said anything in that way negative to our faces or anything. So I don’t really know if there has been anything behind the scenes or behind closed doors that we don’t know about. “The best way I can say it is that it’s been just as surprising for us as it has been for everyone else. We’ve just been five dudes from the Sutherland Shire and South Sydney, just writing music that we want to hear and we think sounds cool... The success we have had and are still having has been absolutely amazing, and I wouldn’t take any of it for granted. “I don’t feel that we’re doing anything different to what other bands have done. Our style of music, let’s be honest, is metalcore. I feel that we’re in a genre of music that has been looked at [as] kind of done and dusted thousands of times over
“It was hard, it was rough, and it made us better people at the end of the day, coming out on the other side.” the years. But for some reason, people seem to be viewing us as a very fresh, new kind of wave of that kind of style of music, which is awesome, because it’s working and it’s going well for us.” After the international acclaim of The Mortal Coil and its world-conquering gigging cycle, the stakes are high for the follow-up. That level of expectation was made more problematic by tight deadlines. “We were having such a busy touring schedule that writing and recording the record were pretty much sandwiched in between a lot of different tours. When the time we had allocated to get the record recorded wasn’t [enough to have it] finished in that time, then there was a lot of
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stress beyond that to finish writing the record while we were on tour, and then come back home and record it in the very little time that we were home. So that didn’t help at all, and added a lot more stress and pressure. “But I’m very happy to be on the other side of it with the finished product, and proud of the product that we have. I’m proud of us as humans, and friends, that we went through what we went through. It was hard, it was rough, and it made us better people at the end of the day, coming out on the other side.” The Death Of Me flaunts the anthemic hooks and beefy breakdowns devotees embraced on the band’s debut, while also delving into more melodic territory. Hails admits that musically he’s not “anywhere near as involved as what all the other guys are”, but did help shape the end result. “We’ve been so busy touring that I’ve pretty much just been trying to work to be able to pay rent when we’re on tour. I’ve been writing when I can be of evenings. I guess with vocals, Dan [Furnari, drums] and Jake [Steinhauser, bassist/ vocalist] meet up a lot to be able to talk over song direction, lyrical meaning and everything, and then I’m involved when I can be as well between all that.” The majority of the members have day jobs while not on the road with Hails working in a factory, “driving a forklift, running machines, packing boxes”. Their ambitious touring plans for 2020 will ensure less time for such endeavours. “The band is becoming a lot more of a full-time thing. A lot of times when I should have been, wanted to be writing, I decided to work to be able to pay for rent, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to tour. “We want to push to tour as many places as we can that we haven’t been to before. But also keep returning to the places we have been, because the way you’re going to grow is to keep hitting back the places you have been, and ideally have new people coming out each time you go back.”
The Death Of Me (Resist) is out this month. Polaris tour from 21 Feb.
P
The film treatment
eople love a good adaption — or love to hate them, depending on how personally insulted they feel about the results. Somebody’s always remaking the classics, of course. A Christmas Carol was first filmed in 1901 and has since stared everyone from Kermit the Frog to Tom Hardy, with a new version helmed by Foxcatcher director Bennett Miller currently in the works. But that doesn’t mean there’s no space for new material, especially with the dragon-sized hole Game Of Thrones has left in people’s viewing schedule. There seem to be more books hitting screens than shelves in 2020, and just last month Sundance celebrated Zola — a film based on a wild twitter thread. If there’s a good yarn in it, folks want to see it in lights, us included.
Regular media consumer Sam Wall pitches some sci-fi/fantasy film and TV adaptions he’d like to see green-lit, please and thank you.
Dead Space,
Gone With The Blastwave,
The Left Hand Of Darkness,
Video games have a famously bad reputation when it comes to film adaptions. The original 1995 Mortal Kombat, to be fair, is a magnificent piece of cinema. Most everything else? Questionable. Uwe Boll, ‘nuff said. Dead Space has the jump on a lot of games though in that it’s already so cinematic, despite two lacklustre, low-budget animated films. The story takes place on a “planet cracker” the USG Ishimura, a crippled interstellar mining ship. A small rescue crew are sent to investigate a distress call from the Ishimura and at first think it’s abandoned. This is quickly and gruesomely proven to be false. It’s the legend of the Roanoke Colony told in the language of Alien and The Thing; a tense, claustrophobic scifi horror that will leave you sleeping with the lights on. John Carpenter even expressed interest in making it into a film back in 2013, saying it was “ready-made” for the big screen.
Webcomic Gone With The Blastwave starts with the apocalyptic ruins of a city turned war zone, takes away any purpose, logic or chain of command, and replaces them with dark, existential humour. A shifting cast of faceless, mostly nameless soldiers rotates around two central idiots who are too numb and bored to be horrified by this setting (which is often teasingly implied in-story to be purgatory or something similar). On the first page, one asks why they’re still fighting when the land is dead and civilisation is dusted and the answer is, “To win the war.” It’s a daft, pointless trudge towards mutual destruction that feels fairly familiar in 2020. Fleshed out by someone like one of the McDonagh brothers (In Bruges, The Guard), it could be a softer, absurdist Apocalypse Now.
There have been attempts to bring The Left Hand Of Darkness into the world of sound and vision - in 2017 there was even series announced with Le Guin attached as consulting producer. Unfortunately the giant of speculative fiction passed not long after and the project’s been silent since. The novel itself takes place on Winter, a frozen planet populated by an androgyne race of people with 62 words for snow and none for war — though they are edging towards conflict on that scale. Genly Ai comes to this world as a lonely envoy to try to persuade and prepare them to join a benevolent confederacy of planets called the Ekumen. Looking back, Le Guin said the slow-moving, complex novel had the feel of “a natural flop”. She’d already been proven wrong when she said it, and her poetic exploration of gender, communication and pride, fear of the Other, and nationalism is timeless.
Murder Of The Universe,
Benito Bonito
Epic Spell Wars
Love, Death & Robots might be the legitimate inheritor of Heavy Metal’s weird legacy, but Murder Of The Universe is the bastard offshoot with an uncanny family resemblance. It’s an album comprised of three distinct chapters; The Tale Of The Altered Beast, The Lord Of Lightning Vs Balrog, and Han-Tyumi And The Murder Of The Universe. Each deals with themes of power and the ways it poisons, warps and tramples humanity. It’s classic sci-fi/fantasy fodder, hitched here to the band’s barrelling prog-rock. And if there was ever a band bold enough to turn a sprawling concept album into an animated anthology, it’s Gizz. Longtime collaborator Jason Galea already has the psychedelic art direction firmly laid down. It’s not a huge stretch to imagine his album and poster art magnified into acid-soaked, Bakshi-esque fantasies and viscous labyrinths of tortured cyborg bio-circuitry.
Benito “Bloody Sword” Bonito was ruthless pirate and slaver. Bonito preyed along the South American coast during the early 1800s, running down unfortunate ships in the Burla Negra (Black Joke). His exact end is disputable, though most agree it involved a gibbet. But before they hanged him, or so the legend goes, Bonito stashed nearly 350 tonnes of looted gold in a cave somewhere near Queenscliff, Victoria. While there are stories of tourists finding 18th-century coins on the beach, and weather-worn markers carved in stone, and even a local man who skipped town after using a bulldozer to dig up his yard, nobody can say what happened to Bonito’s treasure. Turn that into whatever you like. Personally we favour a black dramedy loosely based on The Count Of Monte Cristo, set in contemporary rural Australia and directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse.
Epic Spell Wars is a multi-player card game with a simple concept. A stack of wizards have gathered at Mt Skullzfyre for a massive duel, last spellcaster standing is the winner. Easy. What makes it stand out is Nick Edwards’ artwork. His vibrant character design falls somewhere in between Adventure Time (which he did some work on) and Regular Show, albeit with an element of chaotic, cartoony gore that’s more in line with Superjail!. Focus in on a few of those characters and their quest to be top magic dog then stick them in Best In Show-style mockumentary series. Doc Hammer and Christopher McCulloch do excellent work with complicated ensemble casts, but they already take way too long to put out The Venture Bros. Adam Reed’s said he’s ready to walk away from Archer. It could be time he took a swing at a wizardbased doco parody.
Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
Kimmo Lemetti
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Ursula K Le Guin
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Turning a page
or Creed Bratton, who portrayed a fictionalised version of himself — albeit a twisted one — in The Office, the season’s nine-season success was a kind of long-delayed gratification. Bratton got his start in the music industry as the lead guitarist for rock legends The Grass Roots back in the ‘60s. After recording three albums with the group, he left the band to try and kickstart a solo career. “I kept getting really close to it in my younger, good-looking days,” Bratton says. “Then, as I started losing my hair and getting old, I was thinking, ‘I think this rockstar thing may have passed.’” After numerous false starts, he shifted his creativity to another outlet and began studying the Meisner approach to acting, which “turned out to be a good move”. “There was many times where people would come up to me and look at me like, ‘You had your 15 minutes of fame.’ But I’ve got to tell you, I never bought into it. I always had a mental picture of myself achieving far more,” Bratton says. “So I’d nod at them and say, ‘Yep,’ but deep down
Dunder Mifflin quality assurance director-turned-touring musician Creed Bratton knows a thing or two about resilience. He tells Daniel Cribb about the long and trying path to hit series The Office and his now-successful solo music career.
Check The Guide on theMusic.com.au for more details.
stealing all this stuff. It was a great character to play.” Flash-forward to the show’s emotional finale in 2013 and Bratton plays a pivotal role in its final minutes, performing a song he had written right after leaving The Grassroots in the 1970s, All The Faces, in a beautiful full-circle moment. “It was an out-of-body experience,” Bratton recalls. “We couldn’t find where to put the microphone for the guitar because I had an acoustic guitar and we had to mic it. [John Krasinski] held the shotgun mic under his arm. You can’t see it, he’s got his arms crossed. Underneath his arm is a microphone pointed right at the soundhole of my guitar. “I remember singing the song. I’m singing the song and looking around and everybody is there. Phyllis is crying, Angela’s crying, Jen is crying. The song does it, it touches the heartstrings. At the time I felt it was special, but I didn’t even know until I saw the finale how special it was, how well it worked. It works so well and lucky me, you know?”
“I always had a mental picture of myself achieving far more.”
I was going, ‘No, I’m not done yet.’ I knew I wasn’t. I didn’t know how, I just felt it. So when the opportunity arose to get on The Office, I jumped on it. I was not letting that one slip by.” Even after he booked the gig as Dunder Mifflin Scranton’s head of quality assurance in 2005, Bratton wasn’t out of the woods — the show was almost cancelled in its early days. “Everyone went back to their day jobs,” he tells. “Then they came to give us a few more episodes and a second season. Then all of a sudden that lightning in a bottle hit with streaming. When people started streaming the show that was enough for them to order more episodes.” The show quickly set itself apart from its UK counterpart headed by Ricky Gervais, and Creed Bratton swiftly became a fan favourite after his first major role in the show during season two’s Halloween episode, where Steve Carell’s Michael Scott tries to fire him. “When they gave me the Halloween episode, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, I better dust off my acting chops.’ No. I’d been in class. I was ready to go,” he explains. “Working with Steve Carell, who is just brilliant, he made it easy for me. That was it. When I did the Halloween episode I was in. “A lot of that is ad-libbing. I never really ad-libbed after that because they started writing all this amazing stuff. Then the Creed character got really dark. Pretty soon I’m murdering people for God’s sakes and
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The Office can be compared to a wellwritten album in many ways; fans can relate to the story and characters in the same way they can relate to lyrics and musicians, they quote the show as opposed to singing along, and can watch it over and over again. “I think that’s very astute,” Bratton enthuses. “It’s got heart. It’s a love story surrounded by these characters that toward the end got all fleshed out. We knew each person’s story and we had great writers. Who knew that these people would become these iconic characters?” Bratton certainly wasn’t expecting it to be as big as it was in the beginning, certainly not to the point where he’d be able to tour the world with his music and visit Australia in his 70s. “It’s pretty darn great,” he says. “I’m a happy camper. I’m currently recording my ninth studio album as we speak, Slightly Altered,” he says. “I’m hoping to have it by my birthday in February when I come down [to Australia]. “I’m doing songs now from the new album live when I perform. I always go out on tour, play the songs and judge the audience response. So I tweak the song every night to get it to where I think it’s recordable. That’ll be the case with this one. I’m pretty sure it’ll be ready to go. That’s the plan.”
Creed Bratton tours from 14 Feb.
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN AUSTRALIA
SUN FEB 23 THE TRIFFID TICKETS AVAILABLE ON-LINE AND DROM QUIREBOYS.COM NEW STUDIO ALBUM ‘AMAZING DISGRACE’ AVAILABLE NOW THE MUSIC
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Album Reviews
Five years on from previous release Currents, Kevin Parker’s Tame Impala project brings psych-rock back to the foreground with The Slow Rush. At the top, One More Year navigates the feeling of being stuck in the same place, year after year (“We’re on a rollercoaster stuck on its loop-de-loop”). Its muffled bassline provides a thick body of sound as the stuttering vocal whirs across the track. A sense of ambience continues across Instant Destiny before it’s dialled back for the deeper pop-based single Borderline. Lyrically, the track asks many questions — “Will I be known and loved?/Is there one that I trust?” — referencing a panicked state of wonder one might fall into when life speeds by. Parker addresses a longing to speak to his late father in the more sombre Posthumous Forgiveness. The latter part of the song is soft and vulnerable. “Wanna tell you ‘ bout my life/Wanna play you all my songs/And hear your voice sing along,” Parker sings over a wave of synths and muddled beats — it’s purely emotive and raw. Parker stands his own ground during the defiant Breathe Deeper — “If you think I couldn’t hold my own/Believe me I can” — propelled forward by the drums and scattered orbiting vocal effects. A heavy guitar synth powers through before the track flickers into the soft, summery mix of coastal Tomorrow’s Dust. It seems the number of instruments and sounds utilised in this release may be endless, yet somehow everything owns its place perfectly. Laser synths and a compelling bassline take over Lost In Yesterday as it navigates the tasteful temptations that
Tame Impala
The Slow Rush Island/Universal
HHHH½
Jeremy Neale
The Amity Affliction
Dot Dash/Remote Control
Warner
We Were Trying To Make It Out
Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them
HHHH
HH½
Tracing back to a songwriting sabbatical in New York City, the album displays a definite maturity in both Neale’s songwriting and his suave pop aesthetic, a new stylistic depth and emotional heft now augmenting his trademark ability to conjure hooks and melodies at will. There’s a world-weary resignation in the vocals and some weighty subject matter but it’s couched in such an upbeat setting that the overall vibe is more succour than disconsolate, with making the best of our situation all we can really aspire to.
Prolific if nothing else, The Amity Affliction are already on album number seven. But there’s pedestrian fare littered throughout this, at times going through the motions, and others where the formula seems not so much tired as asleep on the couch, snoring loudly. The attempts to stray from the familiar don’t really hit the mark either. Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them will see some new fan favourites vie for long-term set-list inclusion, but it’s unlikely to be viewed as a landmark release within Amity’s catalogue.
Steve Bell
Brendan Crabb
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coincide with nostalgia and the push-and-pull of finding euphoria within both the past and the future. The Slow Rush sees Parker doing more of what Parker does well: the musically deep, intricate soundscapes tell a story through funky riffs and unique effects, tones and instrumentation. Harmoniously partnered with Parker’s soulful and smooth vocal stylings, the album provides a cloud to float away on. Piercing guitar leads take centre stage during Is It True and are accompanied by a funky disco melody that is sure to bring a solid groove to live shows. Heavily distorted drums and bass power through It Might Be Time proving that Parker fits into no mould. Ending with One More Hour sees us transcend from being stuck in the “ loop-de-loop” to being alright with moving forward, hopeful about the future and finding bliss over time. As the contrasting title suggests, The Slow Rush lyrically encapsulates everyday anxieties, pressures and fears within a slow-burning pool of synth waves, thick basslines and dynamic vocals. Emily Blackburn
Grimes
Sepultura
4AD/Remote Control
Nuclear Blast
Miss Anthropocene
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Quadra
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It feels like Claire Boucher has been teasing this release for an eternity. Given everything that has made the news recently, it’s timely that she should kick start this new decade with what has been described as a concept album about an “anthropomorphic goddess of climate change”. After the sweet pop fizz of Art Angels, Grimes finds her way back to our ears with darker and dreamier atmospherics adding a veil of mystery to her undoubtedly unique synth-pop visions. Featuring some of Grimes’ best work, Miss Anthropocene takes us to the party that’s sure to happen at the end of the world.
Quadra isn’t exactly wall-to-wall bangers, although tracks such as Last Time fall into that category. But it does contain some of their best and most urgent material in eons, referencing the past while also heading into new (ahem) territory. The album distills elements that longtime fans have embraced, while adding fresh ingredients to the mix. They look further beyond the familiar parameters, adding flourishes like choirs, incisive melodies, clean vocals and acoustic guitars. The naysayers may not acknowledge it, but Sepultura’s dogged determination and conviction keeps propelling them forward.
Guido Farnell
Brendan Crabb
ALBUM REVIEWS
For more album reviews, go to www.theMusic.com.au
King Krule
Slowly Slowly
XL/Remote Control
UNFD
No One Else Can Wear Your Crown
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Dew Process/Universal
King Krule’s latest dials up the cynicism and expands the space around his musings so he can speak more directly about his bleak experiences while tempering them with loping but pretty melodies. Man Alive! feels like reading riddles and dark admissions in a left-open diary. Having said that, there are a few slightly more upbeat tracks which offer snapshots into the everyday life of a young family man facing a post-Brexit UK. Aptly titled closer Please Complete Thee is a wrenching finish and it serves as the perfect therapeutic ending after so much deep reflection.
Melbourne four-piece Slowly Slowly have held nothing back, musically and emotionally, in the 12 tracks that make up their third album, Race Car Blues. From soul-searching to find one’s purpose in life to navigating self-doubt, the album floats between triumphant moments of inspiration and slower, intimate moments of honest reflection all the while maintaining the poetic, rough-and-ready energy Slowly Slowly are loved for. As Race Car Blues ends with Stewart’s shaky breathing, it’s as if the last 40 minutes were a cathartic release of emotional energy leaving us tired but free.
Man Alive!
Oh Wonder
Race Car Blues
Polaris
The Death Of Me Resist
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Carley Hall
Emily Blackburn
Oh Wonder have created a compelling collection with their third studio album, providing a clashing sense of both tranquillity and chaos. The album is a love child of The 1975 and Taylor Swift; the playful yet petty Happy a good example. Think the former’s Somebody Else mixed with the latter’s I Forgot That You Existed. The unique sounds and stories throughout the record all piece together to create an electro-pop tale about passion, vulnerability and liberation.
There is one major factor that makes Sydney five-piece Polaris distinct from many of their peers in an extraordinarily healthy scene. Yes, the songs on this are very strong, memorable and dynamic, the musicianship is tight and the production is punchy as hell. But what sets Polaris apart is their sheer commitment to the cause. You can tell they’ve given their absolute all and bled themselves dry in the creation and performance of this record. It veritably drips from every musical pore. The Aussie metalcore scene continues to go from strength to even greater strength.
Keira Leonard
Rod Whitfield
Best Coast
LOSER
Tracy McNeil & The GoodLife
Asgeir
Concord
Domestic La La
Cooking Vinyl
Pod/Inertia
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There’s no translation barrier when it comes to surfy indie-rock, and that’s what makes Best Coast’s new album as enjoyable and breezy for Australian fans as it would for their own LA locality. Different Light opens the album with fun, lightly fuzzed guitars before Everything Has Changed switches to ‘00s punk (ironically given its name).For The First Time takes the album to what sounds like a lyrically personal place for Cosentino. Seeing Red and Make It Last reach an upbeat peak — the sound of taking out your board in blissful conditions. Used To Be closes the album on a grungier tone and ends what is truly one of Best Coast’s best.
LOSER’s debut is a great starting point but it’s still far from what they can achieve. It begins as a beautiful cross of Foo Fighters and Smashing Pumpkins, mixing melancholic guitars with powerfully adamant vocals, and the first two songs, the title track and Get It All Out, are an excellent introduction. Along with lyrics tackling issues of sobriety, Erase Me’s instrumentation is beautifully balanced. The next few tracks, however, feel slightly repetitive. It’s a fair release, but a little more variation throughout the album would go a considerably long way.
Across four albums, Melbourne’s Tracy McNeil has woven a wistful tapestry of Americana that references both US west coast country-rock and Australian east coast sun-kissed FM pop. You Be The Lightning is her most realised and well-executed release to date. So many of these songs sound familiar, steeped in a sound that references Fleetwood Mac, Gram Parsons and that point on the highway where country meets soul. The whole album is pure McNeil though, and songs like Not Like A Brother, Stars, Golden Age and Postcards are further proof of her standing as a world-class songwriter.
Set to be released in both English and Asgeir’s native Icelandic, the folksy swirl of Bury The Moon offers up a reflective collection of tunes born from heartbreak and the breakdown of a long-term relationship. Lush orchestral arrangements ebb and flow under Asgeir’s dreamy vocals in a way that brings to mind primetime Bon Iver. Asgeir apparently absconded to the country and wrote this album under self-imposed isolation. While the lyrics are now more of a collaboration with his father and poet Einar Georg Einarsson, Asgeir delivers an album that juggles themes of memory, nostalgia and heartbreak with great sincerity.
Chris Familton
Guido Farnell
Always Tomorrow
Taylor Marshall
Mindless Joy
You Be The Lightning
Taylor Marshall
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Bury The Moon
Established 2015
FEATURED February RELEASES
14TH
14TH
TAME IMPALA The Slow Push
(Island/Universal) Fourth album by WA wunderkind Kevin Parker was recorded between LA and Fremantle and is a an existential batch of songs delving into creation and destruction and the unending cycle of life.
14TH
TRACY McNEIL & THE GOODLIFE
NATHANIEL RATELIFF And It’s Still Alright
You Be The Lightning
(Stax/Concord)
An uncompromising and raw batch of heartfelt Americana from the Melbourne-based Canadian singer-songwriter and her powerful band, her songs exploring the human condition and its myriad contradictions.
Soulful US frontman abandons his band The Night Sweats to return to the solo realm but still retains his trademark swagger even amidst personal tunes examining loss from a number of perspectives.
(Cooking Vinyl)
UPCOMING INSTORES 21ST
28TH
THE AMITY AFFLICTION Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them (Warner)
Seventh album from local metalcore legends follows on the back for four consecutive #1s and reaffirms the band’s lifelong love of heavy music, the perfect blend of Amity new and old.
SUN 9 FEB THIGH MASTER
SOCCER MOMMY Color Theory
(Loma Vista/Caroline) Sophomore effort from young Nashville singer-songwriter Sophie Allison - aka Soccer Mommy -aspires to be like finding a dusty old cassette tape that’s been messed up over time, an ode to degradation.
OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK 12/360 Logan Rd Stones Corner (In car park of Stones Corner Hotel)
SUN 22 MAR ADELE & THE CHANDELIERS SAT 28 MAR TRACY MCNEIL & THE GOODLIFE
(07) 3397 0180 sonicsherpa.com.au THE MUSIC
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Jonathan Van Ness: Road To Beijing Queer Eye fave Jonathan Van Ness, the show’s grooming expert, visits Australia this month, as part of his Road To Beijing comedy world tour. Starting out in Brisbane before going on to Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, the super loveable personality is sure to make you “struggs to func” from all the laughter. These are Van Ness’s first stand-up shows Down Under, which will see him chart his ongoing attempt to become a figure skating star in time for the 2022 Winter Olympics. A lofty goal, but one Van Ness is pursuing with all his signature joie de vivre. As someone open about his history with drug addiction, childhood sexual abuse and a HIV positive diagnosis at age 25, we can expect more of the candour and insight we uncovered in his 2019 memoir, Over The Top: A Raw Journey To SelfLove, from his live dates. And he just might make you cry (mostly with laughter).
Jonathan Van Ness tours from 20 Feb.
The best of The Arts in February
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Emerald City Queensland Theatre and Melbourne Theatre Company co-present David Williamson’s 1987 classic Emerald City, an excoriating depiction of Sydney in the 1980s, and the conflict between making art and making a living, starring Jason Klarwein and Nadine Garner. From 8 Feb at Playhouse, QPAC
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Russell Brand: Recovery Live Veteran British comic Russell Brand brings his new show, Recovery Live, Down Under this month, which will show punters the system that Brand credits with saving his life, helping him to recover from drug addiction and commit to his spiritual side.
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27 Feb at Concert Hall, QPAC
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The Blindboy Podcast Live Dave Chambers, aka Blindboy, one half of Irish rappers The Rubberbandits, will tour The Blindboy Podcast Live across Australia this month, which will see him explore topics ranging from mental health to gun control to feminism. 4 Feb at Cremorne Theatre, QPAC
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The Happy Prince The Australian Ballet open their 2020 season in Brisbane with The Happy Prince, an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s famed children’s story, by choreographer Graeme Murphy and designer Kim Carpenter, with a score from Christopher Gordon. Pic by Justin Ridler. From 25 Feb at Lyric Theatre, QPAC
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Iliza Shlesinger: Forever The extremely busy New York comedian, podcaster and writer Iliza Shlesinger returns to Australia this month, for the first time since her latest Netflix special, UnVeiled, dropped last year. She’s not slowing down anytime soon, with a sketch show due to premiere in 2020.
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14 Feb at Concert Hall, QPAC
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Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi If you didn’t get enough Star Wars with The Rise Of Skywalker, head along to hear the Queensland Symphony Orchestra perform John Williams’ iconic soundtrack to the classic finale to the original Star Wars trilogy. 15 Feb at Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre
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AN AUSTRALIAN HIP HOP DOCUMENTARY
“A candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long...”
T HTEHM I CS I C• E UMSU
I LLY • A P JRU
Film & TV Locke & Key
HHH½ Streams from 7 Feb on Netflix
Reviewed by Guy Davis
E
arly on in his career, Joe Hill would play down his connection with father and fellow writer Stephen King in a bid to differentiate and distinguish his own work. It appears to have paid off — Hill’s not quite a brand name phenomenon like his dad, but he’s widely read and respected, and Hollywood has come calling to adapt his stuff for screens big and small. As is also often the case with King, however, Hill’s projects sometimes get muddled in translation. But the new Netflix series Locke & Key may be the most successful Hill adaptation to date — it’s an engaging horror-fantasy that constantly tempts the viewer into watching just one more episode. Reeling after a family tragedy, the Locke siblings — Tyler (Connor Jessup), Kinsey (Emilia Jones) and Bode ( Jackson Robert Scott) — and their mother, Nina (Darby Stanchfield), have returned to their former home, the stately but rundown Keyhouse Manor, to recover and regroup.
But the ghosts of the family’s past — some metaphorical, some literal — have unfinished business in the real world and set about manipulating the Lockes to their own malevolent ends, most of which involve magical keys. These keys offer access to worlds, dimensions and other states of being, and in the wrong hands they’re deadly. It’s a pretty neat, high-concept hook, and it’s easy to see why there has been more than one stab at bringing the comic book series, written by Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, to the screen. Based on what’s been made available of this ten-episode run, the Locke & Key showrunners are carefully walking the line between character study and haunted-house chiller, and with mixed results. The healing process of the Locke kids is sensitively rendered but sometimes a tad soapy, while the supernatural aspects vary from kind of tepid to genuinely imaginative and spooky (the fine performance of Laysla De Oliveira as the seductive but untrustworthy spirit Dodge is a big plus in this regard).
The Lighthouse
HHHH In cinemas 6 Feb
Reviewed by Anthony Carew
T
he set-up is so simple it sounds like a one-room, two-hander stage play: Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe play “wickies” — old-timey lighthouse keepers — stranded on an isolated island. Beset by storms, paranoia, and the effects of ad hoc hooch made from kerosene and honey, they slowly turn on each other, descending into a shared madness. It’s the work of Robert Eggers, last seen scaring the fuck out of audiences with his debut, and modern horror classic, The Witch (shouts to Black Phillip). Again, he’s tapping into New England history, moving from 17th-century Puritanism to 19th-century seadoggery. His ear for, and researcher’s devotion to, idiomatic language is once more on show. And never does this language sound better than coming out of Dafoe’s mouth, The Lighthouse’s greatest monologue (“Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your
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organs ‘til ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine, and can scream no more!”) a glorious marriage of fury, comedy and delight. While witnessing two great actors playing with language plays to its simple set-up, The Lighthouse is also a defiant work of cinema. The production built a 70-foot lighthouse on the rocky Nova Scotia coast, upon which Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke stage both many memorable compositions and a singular, sustained mise-en-scõ¿‰ne. Shooting on black-and-white celluloid, with vintage lenses, in an archaic aspect-ratio (a box-like 1.19:1) out to summon the Movietone era, they’ve fashioned something that looks vintage, but plays as vicious. The mood is unrelenting, Mark Korven’s score is full of menace, and the strangeness of its madness — behold a manic masturbation scene involving imagined mermaids and memories of manslaughter — makes it memorable. The Lighthouse isn’t a play put on screen, but a work of big-screen daring; a film that’s ready to swallow you whole.
A flicker of light
Felicity Pickering talks Flickerfest with festival director Bronwyn Kidd, 2020 festival entrant Michael Shanks, and Jake Nielsen, the 2018 winner for Best Australian Short Film.
Rebooted
A
ussie short film festival Flickerfest has embedded itself in the Australian film calendar as a welcoming and unpretentious yearly milestone, taking place at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, before a national tour. The festival has been running for 29 years now. In those 29 years, it has launched the careers of many Australian writers, director and actors, from Rachel Griffiths to Nash Edgerton, Jennifer Kent to Wayne Blair. Being featured in Flickerfest can lead to great things, which 2018 Best Australian Short Film winner, Jake Nielsen can attest to. Nielsen’s film On Hold had its world premiere at Flickerfest in 2018 and was awarded the Academy-accredited Flickerfest Award for Best Australian Short Film, and toured Australia with Flickerfest. The musical short, On Hold, focused on a young woman working at a call centre while pursuing her dream of becoming a composer. “We were absolutely blown away by the reception,” Nielsen says. “The response was so overwhelmingly positive throughout the tour that it gave me a bit of faith, ‘cause I really didn’t think the message of the film would go down so well. It’s basically about irresponsibly pursuing art, leaving your bootlicker job on a whim, rejecting the idea of family, and doing what you want. “We’ve had the opportunity to screen the film all over the country from huge cinemas to drive-ins, and see it appreciated by such different audiences, which has been the best thing. “We also got to do some good press and TV when we were Academy Award-qualifying, which gave me the opportunity to just prattle on about musicals constantly.”
Writer and director Michael Shanks’ film Rebooted will have its Australian premiere at Flickerfest this year, competing for Best Australian Short Film. The short uses a mixture of live action and traditional animation techniques to tell the tale of an ageing movie star, who just happens to be a stop-motion animated skeleton. He describes the film as “a love letter to the history of Hollywood special and visual effects creations”. “Not only is the story of Rebooted a
The film went on to be a finalist at the Short Film Awards at Sydney Film Festival, and is now preserved in the National Film And Sound Archive Of Australia. Nielsen, whose new stage musical Miss Westralia tours around WA this year, came on to direct the Flickerfest trailer for 2020. He describes the trailer as “a kind of classic musical, a big chorus number, a bite-size spectacle”. Flickerfest has a youthful and exciting feel, thanks to the calibre of its emerging and established filmmakers, many of
“We’ve had the opportunity to screen the film all over the country from huge cinemas to drive-ins, and see it appreciated by such different audiences, which has been the best thing” — Jake Nielsen
fun way of showcasing a bunch of crazy non-human characters, but it’s also the perfect story to show off the methods by which these characters used to be created. Our skeleton monster? Stop-motion animated. Our dinosaur? Animatronic. Our retro black-and-white animation? 2D. Our mid-’90s liquid metal man? Appropriately crappy.”
whom will be present at the screenings and will introduce their work. Kidd tells audiences heading to Flickerfest for the first time to be ready to be “totally engaged by the passion of our filmmakers who are present to introduce their films and are super excited to be sharing their films with you, the audience, on the big screen”.
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While animation can often be synonymous with big budgets and huge teams, Shanks made the film “on the smell of an oily rag, but an oily rag soaked in love — the best kind of love you can think of: oily rag love”. Other highlights of the program include Chicken, a delightful cross-cultural comedy by Papuan New Guinean-Australian writer-director Alana Hicks. For those looking to laugh, Kidd recommends Division Series, “a kooky Korean animation featuring Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump and a host of other world leaders all battling it out across a bucket of fried chicken”. There’s a special place in Kidd’s heart for documentary shorts. She recommends Patrick Fileti’s Inferno, set in Mexico in a town immersed in the culture of pyrotechnics, and Mateo’s Story, by GermanAmerican director Malona Badelt, “an incredibly heart-wrenching and insightful story about the current immigration situation in America”. With the Sydney leg of the festival over, a selection of the Flickerfest films will tour around the country. “We have been touring for over 25 years now and we are a much anticipated cultural event in over 50 towns across the country that we visit,” Kidd explains. “The fresh new short cinema that Flickerfest screens provides an unfiltered world view and the ability to connect with people’s lives and experiences across the world and at home, representing a real diversity — and this is truly what Flickerfest is about.”
Flickerfest is on 20 Feb at Palace James Street Cinemas
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Mountain Goat Valley Crawl The beloved Mountain Goat Valley Crawl returns to Brisbane this month to shine a light on some of the hottest acts buzzing across Australia. The line-up, which features the likes of Clea (pictured), Chakra Efendi, BLUSSH, Tia Gostelow and Arno Faraji, will be shepherded into music venues across Fortitude Valley on 15 Feb for a day of free musical shenanigans. Get crawling.
Jump it
Hop to it
That’s right, it’s a leap year. Dust off the old nursery rhyme, February has 29 days this year and we’ve got some thoughts on what you should do with the extra 24 hours.
Take a personal day
Try something new
February will have an extra day in 2020. Resident time-waster Lauren Baxter has come up with five ways you should spend it. Illustration by Felicity Case-Mejia.
Already broken your new year’s resolutions? Don’t worry, us too. That’s why we’re using the calendar’s realignment as a personal reset. It’s time to forgive yourself and exercise some self-care. Do some meditation or maybe try deep breathing. Run a bath. Forget about the fact our planet is dying, and humans are the cause, and our political leaders are useless, and oh god everything is awful.
Don’t ask us why the leap year comes every four years. Time is a construct, man. But you know what else only happens once every four years? The Olympics! Get inspired ahead of Tokyo 2020 and use the Leap Day to try something new. Karate, skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing will all make their Olympic debut this year so who knows what could be added by 2024. Go out and get that gold medal, girl.
Take yourself on a date
Go op-shopping
Throw a leapers party
There’s an old tradition that says women are supposedly “allowed” to bend the knee in a leap year, taking proposal duties into their own hands. Horse shit. If you want to propose, propose. If you want to be single, be single. And no matter your status, this Leap Day shun tired, old patriarchal beliefs and take yourself on a date. Being by yourself can be scary, we get it. But once you’ve taken yourself to the movies and not had to share your popcorn you’ll never look back.
Lore also says if a woman’s proposal was rejected, she would receive a silk gown, fur coat or gloves as compensation, depending on what specific tradition you subscribe to. Now we’ve already fucked the proposal idea off (see above) but we aren’t going to turn our noses up to the potential of receiving gifts. And if you are feeling particularly giving, instead of buying into consumerism it’s as good a day as any to go op-shopping.
Know someone born on 29 Feb? Throw a leapers party! Don’t know someone born on 29 Feb? Throw a leapers party! The Leap Day is the perfect excuse for a once-every-fouryears style shindig. And a chance to celebrate your mate who never actually gets a birthday. Poor, sad Johnny. Maybe you could even get into the theme: play leapfrog, mix a Leap Year Martini, score a hangover bad enough to swear off drinking for another four years. Fun times.
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Take the leap The leap year is a realignment, a four-year reset button. One-man pep squad Sam Wall proposes that it’s also a chance take a risk.
I
t’s right there in the name. You don’t need to turn your life upside down or anything, just think of something you’ve always wanted to do but would normally shy away from. It could be as simple as wearing the very loud shirt you bought a year ago but have been too self-conscious to rock outside, or ignoring your nerves and belting out some Kesha at karaoke, or finally getting that discreet back tatt of Vegas-era Elvis. Hawt. Still, even small excursions from routine can be tough. If leaving your comfort zone was easy you wouldn’t have one. To help cushion your exit, we went to ask Reddit users about their best experiences taking a leap of their own. Turns out it’s been asked a million times already, so instead we scoured some extremely wholesome threads about people who pushed through their doubt and discomfort and had a delightful time. Be inspired.
Leap and learn Just because they don’t come with a lot of fanfare or presents or even a public holiday doesn’t mean leap days aren’t interesting.
Bet_Somewhere_ween “Spoke at my grandmother’s funeral. Never really been comfortable speaking in front of crowds but it was something I felt that I really needed to do to help me move on.”
Facerless
“I’ve spent the last year trying all the drinks and foods I ‘don’t like’. Basically I’m revisiting things that I decided were bad ten years ago and have found some are really delicious.”
Facthanshotfirst
“Rollercoasters. I’ve been terrified of rollercoasters and heights since I was a kid. I’m 26 and went to Six Flags for the first time this past October. I had an absolute blast!”
Cudavlied
“Got soaking wet up a mountain. Cold, soggy, miserable, hungry, thirsty, far from home. Had a spiffing time.”
Drefvelin
“Made out with someone at a party. First and only time I’ve done this and I felt really good afterwards.”
Capital
Argentum86 Two_in_the_hand “Weightlifting. As a girl I had always been terrified of the weightlifting half of the gym. It was filled with totally ripped guys and it was super intimidating. After watching a lot of form videos I finally got up the courage to start.”
“Started knitting at the yarn shop sometimes instead of at home. Always get comments on how I’m the only guy they ever see knit there and compliments on my work. It was really helpful.”
There’s three things we’d like you to know about the town of Anthony: it’s on the border of Texas and New Mexico; it has a people name; and it is the leap year capital of the world. The town’s Leap Year Birthday Cele-
TomatoSaucy
“Created solid boundaries for people who’ve been a very potent negative force in my life.”
bration debuted in ’88 and takes place every four years. Their postmaster even dresses up as “Leap Year William” and hands out candy.
Anon
“I hit on really attractive people that I think are out of my league. I scored a boyfriend that way. It felt like Christmas morning.” “I moved to England. I’m going [home], it didn’t go so well. But I still did it.”
“I suck at swimming but I try when possible. I also hate heights [but] I signed up to go skydiving soon.”
We don’t just use leap years to keep the calendar in check, we also have leap seconds.
Oh_okay_
LazursGoPewPew
Just a second
The time you know and love is actually Coordinated Universal Time, which is measured by atomic clocks with an uncertainty of about one second in 30 million years. But the
KiwiCat14
“I’m in the DEP with the Navy (the period of time before you ship off) and today at group PT, I led the sustained run. I would have never volunteered to do that a few months ago. I was scared that I was going to get too tired and make a fool of myself but I kept a good pace and we had a good run!”
universe is wonky AF, so a 61-second minute is implemented every few years to keep both UTC and solar time in step.
Lucky 13 Makaylaj044 “Singing in public. I used to lip-sync in choir because I didn’t want people to hear me. After getting over that, I love singing any- and everywhere.”
“My girlfriend (now wife) was (is still) in a fire circus. They needed an extra safety one night. That was three years ago. I’ve since made some great friends, learned how to juggle, and am walking on stilts frequently.”
year is 365 days long but the solar year is 365.242. You gotta even that out. The Jewish year is actually measured by the phases of the moon though, which makes it about 11
Humanefly Skeetronic
29 Feb exists because a Gregorian calendar
“Motorcycle riding. The amount of joy it brings to my life is just insanely silly.”
days shorter. To tune up, Judaism follows the Metonic cycle. Seven times during the 19-year cycle there is a shanah me’uberet, or pregnant year, with 13 months instead of 12.
Responses have been edited for both grammar and clarity.
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Chillinit
For the latest live reviews go to theMusic.com.au
FOMO Festival @ Brisbane Showgrounds. Photos by Bianca Holderness.
Lizzo
FOMO Festival returned with its one stage, no clashes mantra, so Brisbane enjoyed a cruisy day, not having to run all over the venue to catch all the action. While there might have been quibbles about an ebb and flow with the running order (who knew from the time the festival was announced to when it happened that Lizzo would be one of the hottest acts in the world?), there was enough to keep the party going all day with highlight sets from Rico Nasty, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Brockhampton, Madeon and of course Lizzo to keep everyone feeling, yes, good as hell.
“Lizzo shows us exactly why the world loves her.”
Rico Nasty
A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie
Brockhampton
- Georgia Maclaren
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PPSSHHHH!
THE SOUND OF SUMMER @goatbeer goatbeer.com.au
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This month’s highlights
Revel revel After a four-year hiatus, MIKA is officially back with a new album and his first Australian tour in over a decade. He plays The Tivoli as part of the Revelation tour on 24 Feb. Ka-ching.
Join the club Cry Club. Pic: Giulia McGauran
We expect big things from Cry Club in 2020, starting with the Robert Smith tour on the back of their latest single. It’ll be a different kind of cry club if you miss the band at The Northern on 7 Feb or in Brisbane on 8 Feb for the latest Spill City party.
Chin-chin
MIKA
Brisbane Beer Fest
Spending the day sampling over 130 beers and ciders is an idea we can get behind. And with food trucks, live entertainment and pop-up installations, the Brisbane Beer Fest at Eatons Hill Hotel is where we’ll be on 15 Feb. First to try all 130 wins... a trip to the hospital — drink responsibly.
Ivey league
Lydia Lunch
Canadian indie-rock staples The New Pornographers return to Australia this month for the first time in over a decade. They’re bringing new record In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights and powerpop riffs to The Triffid on 25 Feb.
Calling all lovers — Gold Coast indie-pop band Ivey are hitting the east coast this month. The five-piece wrap The Lovers tour at Woolly Mammoth’s Mane Stage on 21 Feb and they’re bringing Coconut Cream along for good times. Ivey. Pic by Zennieshia Butts
Crack the code
The New Pornographers
Power lunch The iconic no-wave progenitor Lydia Lunch will say goodbye to Australia with her final ever shows this month. Lydia Lunch Retrovirus hits The Foundry on 26 Feb.
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the best and the worst of the month’s zeitgeist
The lashes Front
Back
Pic via NSW RFS’s Facebook
Snag a room
Drink to that
Pluck off
Tick tock
Duff luck
As useless and as infuriat-
‘Ken oath we’re booking into
After close to six years,
If you saw the news about
Since the two things world
If there was one thing to
ing as ScoMo and co are, it’s
the Bunnings hotel. Your
Sydney’s ridiculous lockout
emus overrunning Nannup
leaders love doing right now
distract us from the crush-
been deeply humbling to
new home away from home
laws have finally been
last month you might have
are ignoring climate change
ing psychological weight of
see the effort and sacrifice
is being built in Melbourne
shitcanned. Rejoice, human
shrugged it off as some
and reneging on major arms
being alive it was the Lizzie
from everyday Australians
and will have all the normal
adults with free will and self-
cute fluff content. Just
control treaties, the Dooms-
McGuire reboot, but creator
in the face of the bushfire
hotel stuff, plus you’ll be
agency, you can now pick
remember that we lost the
day Clock is currently at 100
Terri Minsky has gone and
crisis — from the fireys on
able to grab some U-bends
up a six-pack after 11pm.
Great Emu War of ’36. Those
seconds to midnight — the
left the series and now
the frontline to volunteer
and maybe a ficus. Belinda
Time to party like it’s 2014.
knock-kneed peckerheads
closest it’s ever been. On the
there’s reports the whole
truckers making supply runs
Carlisle was right, heaven is
want seconds and we need
plus side, there’s probably
show is in trouble. This is
to affected areas.
a place on Earth.
to be ready.
not much point in skip-
not what dreams are made
ping dessert.
of Disney+.
1.
Who did Dolly Parton refuse to sign the publishing rights of I Will Always Love You over to?
2. What did Stevie Wonder just call to say? 3. In Simple Mind’s 1981 hit Love Song, who are the referenced ‘lovers’ believed to be?
Cartoon by Madi Titterington. Curated by Chris Neill.
4. Which Irish musician wrote a love song to his wife as an apology after missing her birthday due to working in the studio? 5. Despite having a multitude of love ballads, which rock act also has the song This Ain’t A Love Song? 6. Which iconic Australian singer’s first solo hit was a cover of ‘60s Italian love ballad Il Mio Mondo?
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Test your love song knowledge. 7. Pickles From The Jar is a song reflecting the differing personalities of which then couple? 8. What did Amiel say she made in her 2003 hit? 9. In how many places will Hunters & Collectors kiss you when you throw your arms around them? 10. Who did Bon Scott serenade on Love Song from AC/DC’s 1975 debut High Voltage?
Answers:
The Quiz
1. Elvis Presley 2. I love you 3. Europe and America 4. Bono 5. Bon Jovi 6. Daryl Braithwaite, You’re My World, 1974 7. Courtney Barnett and Jen Cloher 8. “Another stupid love song” 9. Four 10. Jean
Big relief
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