Brag#722

WHERE THE SUN RISES

GANG OF YOUTHS

BRING PHILOSOPHY TO POP MUSIC

STARTING AGAIN

JEN CLOHER

FIGHTS AGAINST ‘COMPASSION FATIGUE’

ALSO INSIDE: DAN SULTAN, SYDNEY FRINGE FESTIVAL, HOODOO GURUS, MELVINS, GAME ON AND MORE!

Crooked Colours’ debut album Vera is out now through Sweat It Out! They play Oxford Art Factory on Thursday August 10 and Friday August 11, before playing Yours & Owls Festival on Saturday September 30 – Sunday October 1.

CROOKED

&

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in this issue

free stuff

what you’ll find inside…

head to: thebrag.com/freeshit

The Frontline

5

Back To Business

6-7

Crooked Colours make the move from west to east at the dawn of their recording career

8

8

What Does It Mean To Write A Protest Album In 2017? We ask Dan Sultan

18-19 Live snaps 20-23 Gang Of Youths’ David Le’aupepe aims to enervate by bringing philosophy to pop 24

The Ocean Party

25

FOREVR

10-13

Jen Cloher refuses to succumb to compassion fatigue in her powerful new record

26

Album reviews

27

Can you name every album cover in our rainbow gallery?

28

Sydney Fringe Festival

29

Arts reviews, Dignity Of Risk

30

Food + Drink: Sydney’s Best International Eateries

31

Game On

32

Off The Record + Out & About

Hoodoo Gurus

15

Melvins

16

The Horrors

17

Boo Seeka

(10-13)

33-34 Gig guide

GANG OF YOUTHS Known for their unrelenting honesty, bravado and warmth, Gang Of Youths may just be the closest thing this generation has to a voice. They’re gearing up for the release of their second full-length album Go Farther In Lightness and a national tour to match, backed by folktronica dream Gordi and Bendigo’s own Fountaineer.

We have a double pass to see Gang Of Youths play the Hordern Pavilion on Friday September 8, as well as a copy of the new album and a tour poster signed by the band. For your chance to win, head to thebrag.com/freeshit

Gang Of Youths photo by Maclay Heriot

Five Things with Fountaineer

“If you want to keep your heart open, you’ve got to stay sane.

And that can be a challenge.”

28

“A bank balance does not determine our ability to do great things.” (20-23)

9

14

Dan Sultan photo by Luke Henery

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the frontline with Nathan Jolly and Tyler Jenke ISSUE 722: Wednesday August 9, 2017

The Village People

PRINT & DIGITAL EDITOR: David Molloy david.molloy@seventhstreet.media NEWS DIRECTOR: Nathan Jolly STAFF WRITER: Joseph Earp NEWS: Nathan Jolly, Tyler Jenke, Brandon John

You know you’ve cornered a market when you are referred to as “the ____ guy”, which is exactly what Bill Nye the Science Guy has done, building a fanbase since the late ‘80s with his blend of comedy and science – a mix he is bringing to the Opera House this October. This marks Bill’s first time in Australia, and he is only hitting Sydney and Melbourne, so tickets will probably go rather quickly, especially considering his Netflix series Bill Nye Saves The World has been a breakout hit. Nye performs at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday October 8.

ART DIRECTOR: Sarah Bryant PHOTOGRAPHER: Ashley Mar ADVERTISING: Josh Burrows - 0411 025 674 josh.burrows@seventhstreet.media PUBLISHER: Seventh Street Media CEO, SEVENTH STREET MEDIA: Luke Girgis - luke.girgis@seventhstreet.media MANAGING EDITOR: Poppy Reid poppy.reid@seventhstreet.media THE GODFATHER: BnJ

SURRY HILLS FESTIVAL ROCKS

BEN FOLDS WANTS YOUR REQUESTS

Surry Hills Festival is always a great combination of sunshine, live music, good food, and sensible, sensible drinking. This year’s musical lineup includes brilliant soul singer Thandi Phoenix, triple j’s favourite hip hop duo Coda Conduct, trobadour Joe Mungovan, plus Ungus Ungus Ungus, The Fever Pitch, Borneo, Dweeb City, and DJ Jay Katz. In addition there will also be the AIM pop up stage at Shannon Reserve, showcasing a host of upcoming artists. If you haven’t yet been to a Surry Hills Festival, it totally takes over Ward Park, Devonshire Street, Shannon Reserve, Crown Street, and a lot of the local nooks, bars, and stores.

Some crannies, too. Over 60,000 people attended last year, and we can only expect this year to be bigger. Unless it snows. It probably won’t, though. The whole thing happens on Saturday September 23, and as always, all funds raised on the day go to community programs presented by Surry Hills Neighbourhood Centre.

Ben Folds is performing a set at the Sydney Opera House, and he is encouraging audience members to hurl missiles onto the stage.

Granted, he isn’t suggesting you should lob half-glasses of beer at him; rather, he is asking fans to write song requests onto paper planes which are to be thrown onto the stage. He will then sit at his piano, select at random from these planes, and perform whatever request is on the sheet of paper. We have to assume there are some limits, but it’s a great idea for a gig. Even better, the first half of the set will be a catalogue-spanning hits-style set, so you can go all obscure with your request and still be certain you’ll hear ‘Brick’. Folds will perform at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on Tuesday February 6.

Aussie rapper, comedian, actor, and burger artist Briggs has been revealed as one of the writers on Matt Groening’s new Netflix TV show Disenchantment. When news broke that Groening (of The Simpsons and Futurama fame) was set to air next year, the Internet went crazy. Bearing Groening’s trademark animation style, and with a cast that features Billy West, John DiMaggio, Eric Andre and Noel Fielding, fans could hardly contain their excitement. After all, this is coming from the mind of the man who helped pave the course of pop-culture in the ‘90s and ‘00s. And now the dude behind ‘January 26’, as well.

GIG GUIDE COORDINATOR: Anna Wilson gigguide@seventhstreet.media REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS: Arca Bayburt, Lars Brandle, Tanja Brinks Toubro, Alex Chetverikov, Max Jacobson, Emily Gibb, Emily Meller, Adam Norris, Holly Pereira, Daniel Prior, Natalie Rogers, Erin Rooney, Anna Rose, Spencer Scott, Natalie Salvo, Aaron Streatfeild, Augustus Welby, Zanda Wilson, David James Young Please send mail NOT ACCOUNTS direct to this NEW address Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 EDITORIAL POLICY: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher, editors or staff of the BRAG. ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE: Carrie Huang - accounts@seventhstreet.vc (02) 9713 9269 Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 DEADLINES: Editorial: Friday 12pm (no extensions) Ad bookings: Friday 5pm (no extensions) Fishished art: No later than 2pm Monday Ad cancellations: Friday 4pm Deadlines are strictly adhered to.

Published by Seventh Street Media Pty Ltd All content copyrighted to Seventh Street Media 2017 DISTRIBUTION: Wanna get the BRAG? Email george@seventhstreet.vc PRINTED BY SPOTPRESS: spotpress.com.au 24 – 26 Lilian Fowler Place, Marrickville NSW 2204

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IT’S FUN TO SEE THE VILLAGE PEOPLE Three of the disco era’s brightest lights are set to come to Sydney this December as the Village People, KC and the Sunshine Band and Sister Sledge team up for an Australian tour. Village People fans will be overjoyed to hear that original lead singer/ the cop, one Victor Willis, is back in the lineup after leaving the group over 25 years ago. “The biggest initial break in my career was in Australia in 1976 when I starred as the Tin Man in the Australian version of The Wiz,” Willis explains. “So really, it all started for me there. Therefore, it’s fitting that I kick off my return as the lead singer in Australia because the people there loved me first.” The Sydney show is on Thursday December 14 at the Hordern Pavilion.

DRIVERLESS BUS COMING TO SYDNEY If you happen to see a 15-person shuttle navigating around Sydney Olympic Park sans driver in a few weeks, you shouldn’t attempt a heroic rescue, as you’ll basically just be assaulting a robot. Plus, you’ll never pull it off, let’s be honest. The above nonsense regards the start of a two-year trial of automated vehicles at Olympic Park: tests which will soon see commuters travelling in the shuttle to work, events, or simply to bask in the futuristic thrill of riding in a driverless vehicle. The shuttle will drive at around 20km/hr, but can reach peak speeds of 50 km/hr (to our knowledge).

The first trials will be (obviously) passengerless, as well as driverless.

David Verma, who has the ominous title of Autonomous Vehicles Director at HMI Technologies, told the ABC there are a number of well-monitored and controlled safety measures in place. “It follows a track that is pre-programmed. It has an accuracy of 20 millimetres at the moment, which is pretty extraordinary. We’re using an external GPS

system which also coordinates the shuttle and helps the shuttle remain accurate.” Of course, with such evolution comes the death of the song ‘Hail To The Bus Driver’, and the bittersweet realisation that all things have a natural lifespan. Except Keith Richards.

BRIGGS GETS ANIMATED

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OPERA HOUSE TO HOST BILL NYE THE SCIENCE GUY

Back To Business Head to theindustryobserver.com for more music industry news

HOTTEST 100 FEELS THE BURN

Gender bias, changing the Hottest 100 date and content quotas were just some of the pressing issues Chris Scaddan, triple j’s head of music, tackled on stage during a bruising final day session at the Contemporary Music Roundtable in Sydney on August 4. Just hours after the Corporation launched a poll asking listeners for their thoughts on whether to change the date for its Hottest 100 countdown, Scaddan sat in the hot seat for a timely Q&A with Tracee Hutchison, the veteran broadcaster and academic who enjoyed a 30-year media career with the ABC. There were moments Scaddan probably wished he was back at Ultimo as Hutchison grilled her subject with some expertise. On the issue of triple j’s online poll of listeners about a new Hottest 100 date, Scaddan told the industry gathering: “It’s just part of the way we’re addressing this question for triple j, asking the audience and listeners how they feel about Hottest 100 and how they feel about it being on January 26. The reason that question is coming up is the viewpoints about that day do keep evolving very clearly in part of the Australian community.

The reason that question’s come up is

VALE ANTHONY LYCENKO

Australian producer Anthony Lycenko passed away on Monday August 7, according to numerous sources. His cause of death was unconfirmed at time of printing.

Over his more than two-decade long career, Lycenko helped to create albums for artists including U2, Sinead O’Connor, Elvis Costello, David Bowie, The Pet Shop Boys, Pulp and Suede. Lycenko had worked in London alongside producers and engineers, including Arif Mardin (Aretha Franklin, The Bee Gees, Norah Jones), Geoff Emerick (The Beatles, Elvis Costello), Chris Hughes (Tears For Fears) and Randy Staub (Metalica, Bon Jovi), among others.

STRAIGHT OUTTA TOPLANE Fans of online battle game League Of Legends have propelled a non-existent band to the top of the iTunes metal chart.

Pentakill features characters from the popular multi-player game, with very metal names such as Karthus the Deathsinger and Mordekaiser the Master of Metal. The ‘band’ released their second album II: Grasp Of The Undying on Friday, and it immediately leapt to the top of the U.S. iTunes chart (it’s currently sitting at #4) – and looks likely to debut in the top reaches of the Billboard chart.

The single from the record currently has over 4.3m YouTube views.

Of course, where there is music, there are actual musicians involved. The band features Masterplan vocalist Jørn Lande, Battle Beast’s Noora Louhimo, ex-Nine Inch Nails member Danny Lohner, The

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because we need to address whether it’s appropriate to have a huge musical celebration on that day.”

Chris Scaddan

Over the past ten months, triple j has consulted with musicians, community leaders and representative groups on a date change as public debate ramps up on what many see as a sign of disrespect to the nation’s Indigenous population.

The Hottest 100 has “never been about Australia Day”, he added. “The two things are related but not explicit in that way.”

Scaddan was also probed on how triple j would stay relevant in these rapidly changing times. “That’s the big question really. Trying to please everyone all the time isn’t going to happen. We’re trying new things and stopping old things sometimes, which is hard. We’d rather do everything, really.” Hutchison then hit on the issue of gender inequality, and the dearth of female artists represented in the annual Hottest 100. “The Hottest 100 is a difficult one to work through. It’s a popular vote,” noted Scaddan. “But you can only vote on what you hear (on the station),” Hutchinson responded. Scaddan then tried to defuse the simmering issue by noting the top three songs on the most recent poll featured After moving to Byron Bay in ’98, Lycenko took the role of chief engineer and studio manager at Rockinghorse Studios. His past clients include Pete Murray and Busby Marou. He has been nominated for an ARIA, a Golden Guitar, a Queensland Music and a Music Oz Award for his production, engineering and mixing work.

Queensland band The Short Fall took to Facebook on Monday to pay tribute to Lycenko. “We’ll forever cherish the great times spent in the studio, catching up over a beer at gigs, and our conversations about cricket. You’ll be missed mate,” they wrote.

Lycenko’s passing follows Australia’s loss of Tony Cohen the week prior. The ARIA

Crystal Method producer Scott Kirkland, and one Tommy Lee on drums.

Lande, who voices Karthus, says of the album: “It’s great for a classic heavy rocker like myself to be a part of this modern gaming music world, and I’m excited and grateful for the opportunity to work with such a great team of talented people. This exciting development is not just about creating an original twist to the online gaming industry, but also about pioneering some groundbreaking new metal! My job is to make Karthus the singer he is, and add the classic heavy rock element to his performance. I’m proud that Karthus and his band are back to bring new Pentakill metal your way!”

Here’s hoping Mario and co. get the band back together and make a run at the charts very soon.

female artists. “There’s more Australian artists and more female artists than [there] were in the ’90s,” he noted.

In response to a late question from the audience on whether content quotas

award-winning producer, known for his work with The Birthday Party, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, and The Beasts Of Bourbon, was aged 60.

If you or somebody you care for needs help or information about depression, suicide, anxiety, or mental health issues, contact Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 or Lifeline on 13 11 14.

GOTTA GETAWAY BABY DRIVER Baby Driver might have got away too fast.

Sony Pictures, the studio behind the musicloaded action flick, has been hit with a lawsuit that alleges it “inexplicably” used the T. Rex song ‘Debora’ without permission.

could apply to streaming services, Scaddan had this to say. “I think commercial radio will lobby government on removing content quotas altogether.

But I can’t see Spotify accepting content quotas.”

In the complaint, Feld says he learned of the use of the song when a Sony Music rep contacted his lawyer requesting a license for the movie’s soundtrack. “In other words, at least one division of Sony had no trouble determining [Rolan Feld] was the rightful owner of the U.S. copyright in the composition,” the suit reads.

However, when Feld responded that the use of the song was unauthorised, Sony responded with a “series of conflicting explanations” and radio silence ensued.

The song was used regardless, notes Feld, who is pursuing unspecified damages.

The plaintiff is Rolan Feld, son of T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan, who in 2014 successfully sued for the rights to 144 copyrights connected to the glam rock outfit’s catalogue, including the 1968 song ‘Debora’.

Now, Feld is putting his foot down with Sony, Media Rights Capital, Bambino Films and other parties involved in the film.

‘Debora’ appears in the official soundtrack and is synchronised to the Edgar Wrighthelmed film, which is stacked with 30 tunes and has taken $140 million at the worldwide box office.

“In the six weeks since Feld brought this infringement to Defendant Sony’s attention, Defendants have done little more than point fingers at one another – and they have neither apologized nor offered to pay Feld a reasonable license fee,” the paperwork reads.

FACEBOOK LET SLIP THEIR EURO VISION

East and Africa] ... This role will lead Facebook’s strategy and negotiations with EMEA music publishers and societies, as well as collaborate with our product and media partnerships teams to ensure a coordinated and best-inclass licensing structure,” reads the ad.

Facebook’s music strategy, revealed by way of a handful of interestinglyworded job ads, has been raising a number of red flags of late. Throughout this year Facebook has announced eight new positions to assemble a team of music industry professionals.

Lead by ex-lawyer Tamara Hrivnak, who has worked for Warner/Chappell, Google Play and YouTube, Facebook’s goal to broker deals with the industry is inching closer and closer. Facebook previously advertised for positions such as Legal Director, Music Licensing, a Music Business Development Manager and a North America Music Publishing Business Development Lead. Now, it wants a Londonbased Music Publishing Business Development Manager with more than six years experience in music partner relationship management.

According to the job ad on Facebook, the social network needs someone to “lead music publisher/society licensing strategy and negotiations with rightsholders in EMEA [Europe, the Middle

It’s not a great look for Baby Driver’s producers, who’ve made a big deal about the efforts they’ve made to clear music, notes The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the story.

The ad follows Facebook’s recent call out for a Music Data Analyst, Media Partnerships based at its HQ in Menlo Park, California, as well as its purchase of copyright identification startup Source3 in late July. It’s a welcome move from the company, which is constantly hit with copyright notices from major labels.

In its effort to take on YouTube, Facebook wants to allow users to add music to their uploaded videos without getting into legal problems – but it needs green lights from all rights holders to do so. Facebook’s path to music has been called nothing more than a vanity project in the past, but looking at its recruitment drive in the past few months alone, the opportunity to connect hundreds of millions of people with licensed music won’t be wasted.

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Crooked Colours:

Crooked Colours bid farewell to Western Australia and summon an easterly change for their debut album, writes David James Young

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s the scene ostensibly recognised as ‘alternative dance’ starts making inroads to mainstream attention, so too do its key components. This, of course, means that Crooked Colours – comprised of longtime friends Philip Slabber, Leon De Baughn and Liam Merrett-Park – are garnering some muchdeserved notice after a few years of pushing the proverbial stone up the hill.

Their debut album Vera was released at the end of June – the end result of a convoluted and oftdelayed process which made the trio had to pack up their entire lives in order to complete. “Leon’s family has a cottage in the south-west of WA, so we went down there for a few months initially to get the ball rolling on the writing of this album,”

says Slabber, who provides vocals, guitar, keyboards and various electronics to the group.

“We always knew that Vera was what we were writing towards, but things kept coming up that delayed us finishing it. We went on tour for awhile and then gradually the three of us made the move over east. Liam moved over to Melbourne, while Leon and I ended up in Sydney. Eventually, we found our rhythm again here in Sydney. We were able to finish the demos of all 20 songs that we’d been working on, and from there we were able to sort through them to get to the ten songs that made it onto the album. It’s a process that should have realistically taken only 12 months, but life kept finding ways of interfering. I’m just glad we got there in the end.” thebrag.com

COVER STORY

Coast to Coast

“In the studio, we really treat it as though the sky’s the limit. We don’t really think about the songs from a live perspective at all.” shows. We all kicked around with normal day-jobs for awhile, though.” He also notes that both he and drummer Merrett-Park were enrolled at university in Perth, while keyboardist De Baughn occupied himself with project management for a building company. “I was doing a Media and Communications degree,” says Slabber, “but when we started touring more I think I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that I wanted to give this music thing a go.”

In tandem with that, Slabber and co. had to properly calibrate their own approach to songwriting to get the very best out of making Vera. Interestingly, this meant that Slabber and De Baughn would write independently of one another, composing and collaborating via correspondence. While this may seem like an unusual approach for a band set-up, Slabber reasons that it’s the most streamlined and beneficial approach that they have developed from years of working together. “When you’re in a band, you have to find a way of working together without stepping on one another’s toes,” he says.

“I think Crooked Colours benefits from having Leon and I working on music separately. Having those two different inputs as writers means that we’re not going to write a whole bunch of songs that sound exactly the same. Leon has a very different background in music than I do, and I think melding those two is really important to how we sound. That way, I’m always being sent something fresh – a new idea, or maybe looking at something I’ve done in a way I wouldn’t have thought to. For us, it’s the most productive way of working.”

August sees Crooked Colours embarking on a national tour in support of Vera. It will be the band’s first headlining run for the year, as well as their first set of shows since opening for Crystal Castles back in March.

“Those were some of the biggest shows we’ve ever played,” says Slabber. “It was definitely a little intimidating walking in and seeing Ethan [Kath], hunched over his synthesizer and working away.” Recently, the band also made the trek out to New Caledonia for a unique experiment involving field recordings. “We travelled all across the island, recording sounds, and now we’re going to make a track out of all of them,” Slabber explains.

“It was really fun – especially considering, previously, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you where it was on a map.”

The tour will also be the first time that the band have had a chance to play most of the songs from Vera live.

Don’t go in expecting some shot-for-shot replica of their recorded material, though – the band want to experiment with their live show, and properly step up the energy from studio output by any means necessary. “In the studio, we really treat it as though the sky’s the limit,” says Slabber.

As an album, Vera works both as an introduction to the band for those who haven’t yet caught on, and as vindication for the fans that have been following them since the early days. For those in the latter camp, however, it may come as a surprise that Crooked Colours has made such a literal seachange after being proud representatives of Western Australia’s ever-burgeoning music scene.

Slabber wishes to make it clear that the band’s relocation was strictly business – although location was always a niggling issue to begin with. “I think the thing with us was that we were all kind of in the rural, outer part of Perth,” he says. “We were never really based in the city. We kind of knew everyone, but we never really felt like we were in that particular scene, if that makes sense. At the time, we were just doing the band thing for a bit of fun – it was something to do, thebrag.com

y’know? I don’t think we ever really had career goals or aspirations to go with it.”

“Once we signed to a label and got management and stuff like that, it became a bit more of a reality. Part of that reality was most of the people we were working with happened to be living in Sydney. It became clearer that it was going to end up being a lot easier if we relocated to the east coast. I don’t want to reflect badly on the Perth music scene, of course – it’s really, really good. It was entirely a practical decision for the three of us.”

As the profile of Crooked Colours has grown, the nineto-five life has eluded the band – something Slabber is completely fine with. “We pretty much only work outside of the band now when we need to,” he says.

“At the moment, it’s all focused on touring and playing

“We don’t really think about the songs from a live perspective at all. Obviously, once the record’s done and we need to put a show together, it gets kind of hard. We have to look at the songs and start figuring it out – there’s only so much that you can do on your laptop that you can also do playing live. It’s fun, though – the challenge of doing it makes things really interesting for us. We’re manipulating certain songs and sounds, and it’s cool to see how we’re able to make it work. It’s just the three of us on-stage – we don’t have any extra people with us. There’s a bit of multi-tasking, a bit of looping, using triggers and stuff like that... it’ll be the busiest we’ve ever been on stage, but we’re going to make it work.”

What: Vera out now through Sweat It Out! With: Ivan Ooze + Muto Where: Oxford Art Factory When: Thursday August 10 / Friday August 11 And: Playing Yours & Owls Festival with The Presets, Safia, Allday and many more – Stuart Park (Wollongong), Saturday September 30 – Sunday October 1

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FEATURE

What Does It Mean To Write A Protest Album In 2017?

Dan Sultan talks to Joseph Earp about Killer, his quietly furious record of defiance.

T

hey say when things get bad all you can do is laugh. But at present, we seem to be rather laughed out as a species. There is a bitter note of defeat to our jokes; something of a harsh edge to our online jibing. A few months ago, the joke was that you couldn’t joke about how bad things were getting anymore. Now even that one has gone stale, leaving us mirthless; leaving us staring at one another, wide-eyed, toeing a poisoned ground in the process of bucking itself free of us.

Of course, there’s the shadow of that Trump thing spilling over us, killing the joy in our lives, but the Leader Of The Free World is just one of the horsemen of our particular apocalypse. We have that climate change thing to worry about; that mass displacement of the vulnerable in at-risk parts of the world thing to worry about; that international swing to the political far-right thing to worry about; that actual resuscitation of the ideals and beliefs of the fucking Nazi party thing to worry about.

S O W H AT A R E Y O U MEANT TO DO? Which is to say, writing a protest album in 2017 is a losing proposition – mainly because there is nothing left to say anymore; because all roads are worn out. The horrors we face are not new, so there is no way for our music to be, and the words of rage and rebellion we have are the same that our parents had. Rage for too long and you end up doing what this article is already starting to do – to proselytise and to preach; to become that pain in the arse in the corner of the party spelling doom in the hope that it’ll help attract the opposite sex.

Anyway, even if we did manage to put our angst, our pain and our sadness into song – even if we managed to crystallise the ever-growing lists of minute, unbearable grievances enacted against us daily – then what? By selling records and going on tour and doing photoshoots and taking the complex machinery of making music on the road, we are only propping up the very same system that we’re trying to tear down. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but there might also be no ethical creation of art under capitalism, either.

So there it is, the creeping, sub-audible

muttering that underscores even the most fiery protest records, and even the most angry and acidic of art: “Maybe none of this fucking matters”. And the worse things get, the louder that voice will get, till what was once a whisper becomes a roar.

T H E W AY F O R W A R D Last week, Dan Sultan released his new record. It is an album called Killer, and it is the sound of an immensely talented musician finally at ease with his instruments, and with himself. But more than that, it is a thoroughly modern protest record – a protest record that doesn’t ignore its own hypocrisy; that thoroughly embraces the potential that maybe, at the heart of it, none of this fucking matters.

As a result, Killer is a brutally honest listen. Sultan might have a popsmith’s ear for hooks, but he lays out his lyrics like bear traps: everyone is a target, and the album trembles with its own very particular form of rage.

But Sultan did not plan for the record to unfold itself in that way, and he asked nothing of his material going into the project. He didn’t want to make a protest record, nor even necessarily to get political; he just wanted to follow the songs, tracing his art as though it were a dotted line.

“It just happens,” Sultan says, simply.

“Everyone’s different, and they approach songwriting in different ways. There’s no right or wrong way to go about it. But for me personally, the song just kind of presents itself to me.” He laughs.

“I mean, the song will always show you what it wants to be. The song always decides, so it’s just about keeping your ear close to the ground and making sure that you’re able to hear it, and then just to go with it.”

“The horrors we face are not new … and the words of rage and rebellion we have are the same that our parents had.”

Of course that means sometimes Sultan surprised himself, and there were moments when writing the record that rubbed him raw. And if that sounds kind of nerve-wracking, that’s because occasionally, it was. “It doesn’t always work,” Sultan says. “You can spend the whole day trying to nut something out, and if nothing happens, well then, nothing happens. But then there are other days you go in and it just kind of explodes.”

Clearly then, for Sultan, music is a kind of impulse. And maybe that is the way protest music is meant to be written. Maybe it is meant to be less an academic statement and more the beating of a heart – maybe it is meant to come as naturally as an exhale, and maybe, just maybe, that is how it stays relevant.

But anyway, for his part, Sultan isn’t playing that kind of long game. “At the end of the day, I’d be making records if people were interested or not,” he says, his voice rich. “That’s what it’s like, being a writer or a songwriter: it’s just something that you are.”

What: Killer out now through Liberation Music

“The song will always show you what it wants to be.

The song always decides.”

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Dan Sultan photo by Luke Henery

“[It’s] a protest record that doesn’t ignore its own hypocrisy; that thoroughly embraces the potential that maybe ... none of this fucking matters.”

And we’re not immune here in Australia, either. We like to poke fun at the still raging garbage fire that is the US political system, but who are we to judge anyone?

We are a country riddled with racism; a country where murderers of children can walk free and bile-filled senators can build an entire political platform off the back of years of colonial oppression. We are not exempt. We are, when it comes down to it, one more symptom of that illness called late capitalism: a sick country founded on blood, too desperately proud to accept our past but too underdeveloped to move forward without doing so.

five things WITH TONY WHITE FROM

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ell us about ‘The Cricketers’ and what’s on the horizon for Fountaineer.

‘The Cricketers’ is a beguiling image which was painted

by Aussie artist Russell Drysdale in 1948. It still hangs in the hallway of our parents’ house. It feels like our lives have been played out in the shadows of that painting, and it’s watched us grow into men. We’ll have our album launch later in the year, and I’ve also got the side way of the house to fix up. Thinking fake grass or pebbles, something very low maintenance. I don’t want to be on my hands and knees all day.

You’re supporting Gang Of Youths nationally – tell us a bit about the Gang and what you expect to get up to together?

I’m hoping we get to have a game of cricket in every city, seeing as Max (GOY bass player) is from NZ. We’ll pack the electrical tape, they can bring the balls (and the hair ties). I’m absolutely confident we will kick their arse – so much so they won’t want to play after the first Fountain Of Youths Test Series. I’ve also recently bought a thermos for the trip, and got a new book for my birthday by Hanya Yanagihara called A Little Life (it’s 900 pages!), so some downtime and walks

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FOUNTAINEER

off the beaten track and a few adventures in the great outdoors would be delightful.

We’ll probably carry their bags for them, too. And we might steal some merch.

What is it about Bendigo that’s bled into your sound?

‘Bled’, I like that. Fountaineer is the sound of us going against everything in town.

When locals question why you have a laptop on stage, you know you’re doing something right. The lyrics definitely have blood dripping off them. They’re critical but hopeful, and the album is all about our hometown and the trials and tribulations (and don’t forget the triumphs) of the place. This sounds a bit like the premise of Home And Away when spoken out loud.

But this ain’t Summer Bay, and pretty faces we are not.

You guys are a long way out of Melbourne – do you consider yourself distinct from the Melbourne ‘sound’ or scene?

We are not involved in any ‘scene’ whatsoever.

I don’t even know what the Melbourne ‘sound’ is, either; is it trams and traffic?

Growing up, I always felt a bit intimidated by people from the city. They could talk un-self-consciously about things like music and art, but in the country no one

really takes you seriously, so you play things down; never mentioning too much because many people just don’t get it. But we discovered we had great stories to tell in our proverbial backyard, and it’s been a blessing making music out here on our own.

Who else blows your mind in Aussie music? If you could have another act join you on the Gang Of Youths tour, who would it be?

I heard a great Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever song the other day. And the Scott & Charlene’s Wedding song ‘Don’t Bother Me’ has been stuck in my head ever since they came to Bendigo. I’m not sure how they’d do in a gruelling test match, though.

Bernard Fanning is really into cricket and would be a great addition to our team, seeing as though we’d be one short.

We could also maybe give him a refresher on teamwork after the recent Splendour controversy. Deep down, though, we really want the Gangs boys all to ourselves – we don’t want to share them with anyone, not even Bernard.

What: Greater City, Greater Love out now through 1825 Records With: Gang Of Youths Where: Hordern Pavilion When: Friday September 8

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Jen Cloher

FEATURE

Is Telling The Truth

BY JOSEPH EARP “What a powerful thing to know: that one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one fi nds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.” – GEORGE SAUNDERS t goes like this: you wake up, and the first thing you read is a news article about the kind of world that we will live in when climate change irreversibly alters the make-up of the ocean. Maybe you’re not even out of bed yet – maybe you’re lying in the sheets, flicking through your phone – and then all of a sudden you’re reading about the end of the world. Because according to this article, which has been written in the detached, eerily academic tones of a terminal cancer diagnosis, within 20 years ocean acidification caused by our highly polluted atmosphere will begin to poison the air.

Within two decades, this report says, you won’t be able to walk outside your front door without the help of a gas mask. Untold millions of animals will die. The food chain will break down. Supply lines will be severed. The risk of global war will increase. And, same as it ever was, the first to suffer will be the poor and the needy.

So what the fuck are you meant to do? What are you actually meant to do? I mean, you’re lying there in your bed, or maybe sitting at your desk, and this news article is open in front of you, and you’re assessing your choices.

You can, what, try and ignore it? Think about something – anything – else? Maybe share the article on Facebook, adding some pithy comment to make yourself seem less scared than you actually are, something like: “Well, I guess now is finally the time for me to take up smoking”, or, “Guess I won’t bother going on that new diet anymore”?

But that, when it comes down to it, is about all you can do. Because there is a limit to how much you can take. No matter how conscious and aware you might want to be, you can’t keep your heart open to the world all of the time.

No one can. You start your day out by reading that yes, the rapture is real, and more than that, it’s heading our way; that we have 20 or so years, tops, before our way of life is changed forever. And then you have to live, somehow; you have to go on despite this great, horrible atrocity we are glumly trudging towards, and you have to work a job to save up to a future that might not even have a place for you.

“People call it compassion fatigue,” says Jen Cloher, simply. The Melbourne-based musician is sitting in her car, having just dropped off her partner Courtney Barnett at an appointment,

10 :: BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17

“I went into a place of despair about the future of this earth and what humanity is doing to it.

And we are the earth, so we are by extension watching ourselves dying.” thebrag.com

“If you want to keep your heart open, you’ve got to stay sane. And that can be a challenge. To say the least.”

and her voice sounds tremendously close.

“That’s what they call it.”

Cloher understands that particular kind of exhaustion all too well. Last year, after months of reading about environmental devastation and the lies pouring from the mouth of the man recently chosen to serve as the US Republican Party’s nominee for President, the musician found she simply could not take it anymore.

“Compassion fatigue,” she says again. “It’s a terrible couple of words to put together, really, but you can see how it happens when everything comes at you from all these angles.

It’s really easy to become less human. I mean, I think that we live in such a fast world – and the result of that fast living is that we disconnect. We disconnect from our bodies, and from our hearts. We don’t have time to take in the reality of what’s going on around us, and even when we do, sometimes it’s too painful; sometimes there’s just too much suffering that is so readily in your face.”

For Cloher, that disconnect quite quickly came to feel paralysing. “I know that I went through a stage of actual despair, if I’m being honest with you,” she says. “I went into a place of despair about the future of this earth and what humanity is doing to it. And we are the earth, so we are by extension watching ourselves dying. We came up through the earth – we haven’t just been plopped onto the planet out of outer space. And I was really challenged by all that; by what was happening to us.”

So Cloher turned to work, throwing herself into the day-to-day running of Milk Records, an independent music label founded by Barnett, as a way of coping. Thankfully, there was enough to do on that front to keep her active – she had posts to schedule on Instagram, and shows to organise, and press releases to send out – but still, as busy as she was, she couldn’t quite shake a deep, steadfast sense of guilt. “What could I do?” Cloher says. “I had to really think about it – about the difference that I could try and make.”

Eventually, she hit upon a plan. “I made the decision to get involved with a local environmental community group,” she says, “and I brought my skill set when it comes to independent fundraising to a project that they were working on to save the blue-banded bee, which is an Australian native bee.”

Along with Barnett and several other artists from the Milk Records roster, Cloher got to work organising a fundraising gig. She printed limited run t-shirts that she sold via a crowdfunding website that also offered a range of other purchasable perks, and she got down to the quiet, admirable business of doing what she could.

She wasn’t saving the world, of course, in the way that none of us can ever save the world; in the way that we can only ever make the smallest, most imperceptible of changes. But it wasn’t nothing. And in a world of gradually accumulating atrocities, sometimes not nothing is enough.

“It was so rewarding,” Cloher says. “And it was so good for me. Because rather than living in despair I was actually going out and doing stuff. And sure, it may not have fixed everything, but at least I was putting some of my energy and my time into more than just me. And I think that, despite all the bad things that you read, a lot of people do that, all around us, all the time. I think it’s very important. I think it can keep you sane.

“So many of us experience those feelings,” she says. “But we are in this amazing country; we have enough land, we have enough clean air and water; we have food on our tables; most of us sleep with a roof over our heads. That’s what ‘Analysis Paralysis’ is all about. It’s a song about having so much.”

Jen Cloher is far and away the musician’s best record; better, even, than In Blood Memory, her 2013 masterpiece. In fact, it is the record of the year so far – the most fully realised, the most immediate, the most heart wrenching. But more than that, it is the work of a musician who has lost interest in hiding from her audience; a musician who has given up burying her feelings in simile, or using three lines where one will do.

There are songs about her relationship with Barnett that do not pretend to be anything else but songs about her relationship with Barnett.

There are songs about marriage equality. There are songs about Australia’s habit of dreaming small, and turning on any who experience overnight success – particularly those who do so while young.

So by the time the 11 tracks are done, you don’t even really feel like you’ve listened to an album.

You feel like you have been let into some great, beautiful secret; like a stranger has taken you by the hand and quietly, undramatically let you into their life.

And because we are used to artists lying to us – because sometimes we want and expect to be tricked when we relax before our record players with a glass of wine, or cling to the barrier at a show – there are times when Jen Cloher is difficult; times when it whips about the place like a Hills Hoist in a storm. After all, it is unusual even for the musicians we love – the musicians we think of as honest, and unfettered – to tell us the truth. They change names to protect the innocent, and they spin life into white lies to protect themselves.

But Cloher doesn’t. And more than that, she makes not doing so seem like the easiest thing in the world. “There’s just no reason to hide,” she says. “That’s what I’ve discovered.

There’s so much power in being open about your experience. Some people have said to me, ‘Wow, you’ve written some pretty intimate stuff about your relationship and your partner is quite visible.’

“But I’m kind of like, ‘Yeah, but who cares?’ It’s not really hurting anyone. It can’t hurt Courtney, it can’t hurt me. Why would that be something to hide? People need it. ‘Cause there’s a lot of lies – there’s a lot of people out there telling lies.”

Of course, as Cloher herself points out, it’s not particularly new for her to write about her life in such a way. Hidden Hands dealt un-sentimentally and openly with the loss of a parent, while songs on her debut LP Dead Wood Falls are so simple and detail-obsessed as to resemble diary entries. Cloher has always been a confessional songwriter. She is the kind of artist who can scoop up the detritus that makes up what we tend to call “everyday life” and can turn it into song; who writes lines that shrink the room a little and prompt their listeners to draw small, sharp gasps of air.

“I guess the difference this time around was this record was about my heart, and how

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“Because that’s the thing – if you want to keep your heart open, you’ve got to stay sane. And that can be a challenge.” She laughs again.

“To say the least.”

T

his month will see the release of Cloher’s new record, a self-titled collection of 11 songs about relationships, art, grand plans, Australia, and yes, despair.

There is a song on the record called ‘Analysis Paralysis’, which, as Cloher tells it, was born out of those strange feelings of worthlessness that she felt last year; feelings always tempered by the acute understanding that she was a lot better off than most.

Jen Cloher by Tajette O’Halloran Photgraphy

“By the time the 11 tracks are done … you feel like you have been let into some great, beautiful secret; like a stranger has taken you by the hand and quietly, undramatically let you into their life.” thebrag.com

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Jen Sholakis

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“Jen doesn’t really ‘approach me’ anymore. I’ve kind of become part of her – attached to her side like a boil.” – JEN SHOL AKIS it feels to be Jen Cloher in my heart,” she says. “I talk really honestly about being a child, and not really feeling like I was a boy or a girl, and living in a world that goes, ‘You are this, so conform.’ I talk openly about how I think aspects of the music industry are really detrimental and poisonous; I talk about how hard it can be being an artist in this massive country with a small population tucked down the end of the world.” She laughs. “I guess I kind of talk about a lot of stuff.”

Of course, it wasn’t easy to start writing an album that was so unfurnished by disguise, but when Cloher got down to it, the process only ever got easier. And anyway, she never really doubted herself – not really. “It takes a lot of courage to be honest, because you’re kind of like, ‘Here I am, I am not hiding anything anymore.’ But it has been hugely rewarding for me. What I have actually discovered is that the more honest that I become the more connected I feel – the more connected I feel to everything.”

Cass McCombs is to blame for all this – McCombs and Mark Kozelek and Laura Jean, the artists Cloher says have always impressed her with their honesty. They were the forces that guided her, and in their honesty and their truth, they showed her a way of making art that she had only ever guessed at before.

“I read an interview with McCombs where he just said, ‘Write about what you care about. Write about what you love. That’s what the world needs right now.’” The words cut Cloher to the quick.

“You know when something really penetrates your psyche; when it hits your heart? You go, ‘I really understand what this person is saying.’ And I think that’s really the album that I have written – an album about what I love.”

T

o record the new album, Cloher had to escape. She took Barnett and her longtime collaborators Bones Sloane and Jen Sholakis with her, and the four of them fucked off to South Gippsland in Victoria. “It’s dry and tufty up there,” Cloher says of Gippsland. “A lot of cows. A lot of dairy farms.”

Cloher and Sholakis have been round the traps together for some time now – Sholakis played on Dead Wood Falls way back in 2006 and has been a permanent staple of Cloher’s artistic inner circle for the 11 years since. “Jen doesn’t really ‘approach me’ anymore,” Sholakis explains. “I’ve kind of become part of her – attached to her side like a boil. If she was going to approach me about working with her on a Jen Cloher project I’d assume she was approaching me to tell me she was gonna sack me.”

things along the way but nothing too major.

“I got involved in a couple of the longer and more introverted tracks, adding some different textures and counter-melodies to help shape them a little, but the songs had really good structures and arrangements from the get-go. A big part of my job was just to capture that without harm.”

“Jen comes [to the studio] really well prepared with her songs,” agrees Sholakis. “We very rarely just get a sketch or an idea from her. She usually has a fully formed song and an arrangement in her head of how things will go. Obviously once we put our parts down, arrangements can change, new ideas can emerge and so on. But for the most part the songs are whole. Meaning, she could play them on an acoustic guitar to us and they’d sound complete.”

Which Cloher did, strumming out the tunes to the band at the beginning of the recording day and working with them as they began to nut out individual parts. Walker was impressed. “It’s always great to work with people who have a clear musical direction and vision,” he says, “and Jen had all that, plus a killer band that played off each other beautifully. It was a real pleasure to record them.”

The days were long – “eight to ten hours long,” Walker explains – but the recording sessions were no drag. There’s not much phone reception to speak of out in South Gippsland, so Cloher couldn’t have checked an email even if she wanted to. Instead, she and her band relaxed in the evenings with board games, glasses of wine and big, hearty homemade meals. Everyone brought their partners along with them. Sholakis brought her dogs. “It was like a holiday,” Sholakis says, simply. Sometimes, at the end of a day, they went down to the beach and sat there on the sand, just talking.

To be honest, in real life, recording sessions tend to be considerably less exciting than they appear in the movies. There are more drugs in films, not to mention significantly more moments when the recording artist, usually played by some old, colourful character actor you vaguely remember from that one movie, pulls their headphones off their ears, dumbfounded, and mutters, “We got it.”

So Cloher had no massive, heart-stopping revelation that she was making the record of her career while laying the songs down to tape. There was no moment when the band locked eyes, and the cameras swooped in to collect close-ups of

Courtney Barnett and Jen Cloher

Thanks to that connection, Cloher and Sholakis didn’t have to talk too much about the album in advance, or worry about making sure the other knew exactly what the thing was meant to sound like. And anyway, Cloher rarely works that way; rarely dives into the album-making process with something as nebulous as a genre or tone in mind. “I’ve never been like, ‘I am going to make an album in this style, or one that sounds just like this’,” Cloher says. “I just don’t think my musicianship extends to that kind of thinking ahead.”

That’s not to say she’s completely unaware of where she’s heading, mind you. She is not new to this particular game – she knows what she wants from a record and how, in the vaguest possible sense, she wants the thing to sound. She might not have a blueprint, but she has something else. Maybe the kind of plan that can’t be readily translated into words; that we just know on the deepest level that we know things.

So for Greg J Walker, the man responsible for the album’s recording, the key was about staying as uninvolved as possible. “Most of the songs didn’t change too much from their initial structures,” he explains. “Jen had already put a lot of thought into them and it was primarily a live, band-orientated album we were aiming for. We changed a few 12 :: BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17

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FEATURE

Jen Cloher by Tajette O’Halloran Photgraphy

“Writing a song is a bit … like fishing. You doodle around, you sing a bit, you try to make up a melody. But you might never get anything. You might be there for days, and get nothing.”

their faces, and a sense of mutual appreciation settled over the room like a light rain. There was, in other words, nothing more to the recording sessions than four friends standing in a room, playing beautiful, sturdy songs with ease, for no other reason than they wanted to.

But throughout, Cloher resisted all temptation to play the process down, or be cynical about the record she and her friends were assembling.

She was done with that kind of self-depreciation – exhausted by having to put up a front of false humility. “That was probably because I’ve watched someone go and have a big, successful experience outside of Australia,” Cloher says, the conversation drifting back to Barnett. “I loved [Barnett’s success], even though a lot of the album is about watching it from afar and at times feeling lonely – which I think is pretty normal when you don’t see your partner for about a year and a half.

“But the other side of [what happened] with Courtney was just this immense joy I got from watching an Australian woman being celebrated around the world for her songwriting. I feel like it was maybe the first time I had ever seen that happen. That’s not to suggest that other women from Australia haven’t gone and had big success overseas … but it felt like it was just Courtney being herself. That was hugely affirming for me, and for heaps of women and men in this country.”

Jen Cloher was mixed in Chicago, in a loft-cum-miniAmericana museum presided over by Jeff Tweedy of American band Wilco, by a man named Tom Shick.

“[What happened] with Courtney was just this immense joy I got from watching an Australian woman being celebrated around the world for her songwriting. I feel like it was maybe the first time I had ever seen that happen.” thebrag.com

And it was in that mixing studio, its walls covered with old guitars and paintings, that the record finally began to take shape. “I’m so glad we went to Chicago,” Cloher says. “It ended up being a really satisfying way of ending the project. It just meant we had such closure – closure that you don’t always get when you’re making a record. It was like, ‘Wow, it’s a complete thing now,’ you know? It’s an actual record.”

M

ilk Records takes up a lot of Cloher’s time these days.

She spends much of her waking hours at the computer, answering emails and checking in with the small army of publicists, artists and pressing companies Milk has become involved with over the years. “It’s the worst when you’re lying in bed at night and you just remember all of these emails that you have forgotten about; these emails that you know that you need to get back to,” Cloher says.

When we speak on the phone, it’s still some three weeks before the new album will come out, so Cloher has plans to lay low for a little bit. She hasn’t been to the dentist in a while she says, and she knows she needs to, and she’s way overdue a trip to the shops.

“You get lost in all of your exciting projects, and then you’re like, ‘When did I last buy a jumper?’”

Of course, such respite will be temporary – come the release date of August 11, she’ll start touring, not just in Australia but internationally. “This will be the first time I’ve ever had a worldwide release – although, when I say worldwide, let me be real about that: I mean England, Europe to some extent and the US. “It’s a big job, but it’s really exciting. It’s been a dream of mine to get out and play to new audiences overseas. I’ve never even played to audiences outside of Australia before, so it’s exciting finally getting round to it now.”

It remains to be seen what kind of world Cloher’s album will be released into – after all, who has the selfconfidence or the foresight to predict the news cycle anymore? Who has it in them to guess what’ll happen tomorrow, let alone the day after that, or the day after that? August 11 is a lifetime away. There will be a lot more international sabre-rattling before Jen Cloher comes out. And the planet will be that little bit hotter.

Which is all to say, we are living in the kind of era that wears away at a lot of things, but that wears away the sanctity of art first. It’s hard to think about Picasso when there’s war breaking out, or to put a record on when you’re worried about the

breathability of the air, or whether it’s safe to bring children into a world that is beginning – finally – to buck itself free of the human race.

Cloher knows that, of course – Cloher has had those thoughts herself. “I think any artist who is awake and conscious has had that dilemma,” she says. But whenever that fear starts to set in, she just calms herself by thinking about the Dirty Three. She saw the Melbourne-based, Warren Ellis-led instrumental trio early last year when they played Sugar Mountain festival, and the experience was a revelatory one.

Or, more accurately, she didn’t see the band – she saw their audience. She was standing side of stage when the group played, gazing out at a sea of faces, all of them awash with something that looked a little like rapture. It was a startling moment.

“People were bawling,” Cloher says. “There was tears and snot running down their faces. And it was such an intimate moment. It was so powerful to witness all these people having huge emotional and physical responses to the music that has obviously changed them, and helped them along their path.

“And sort of around the same time I had been reading a lot of work by Mary Oliver, who is this incredible poet – she’d be probably in her late seventies now, and a lot of her childhood was spent in the wilderness. She writes beautiful poems – almost like haikus about nature and animals and the planet. And she has this great poem about how poetry is like bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

Cloher says the words again. She’s still sitting in her car, somewhere in Melbourne, and it’s almost like the vehicle shrinks down; like it contracts to fit the exact dimension of her words.

“Bread in the pockets of the hungry. Those words just reminded me that even that though we live in a world where people want to tell us that art is not a need, it is. It’s a deep need. It’s as necessary as the air we breathe; the food we eat. We have to have art in our life.”

She takes a breath, laughs, and the world expands a little bit. “Realising that was cool. It was like, ‘Fuck yeah. Of course I’m going to keep making music.’”

What: Jen Cloher out Friday August 11 through Milk Records With: Flowertruck + Hachiku Where: Oxford Art Factory When: Friday August 25 BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17 :: 13

FEATURE

Hoodoo Gurus: Keeping Their Cool The Hoodoo Gurus’ Brad Shepherd talks to David James Young about the 30th anniversary of Blow Your Cool!, keeping competitive and the huge Fist Full Of Rock tour

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hen one thinks of the Hoodoo Gurus, it’s not unusual for your mind to be immediately cast to ‘What’s My Scene?’: perhaps the band’s best-known song and a certified classic across the barbeque, jukebox, karaoke bar and footy field. It served as the lead single to the Gurus’ third studio album, Blow Your Cool!, which celebrated its 30th anniversary back in May. While the album itself went Gold and charted in the top five, lead guitarist Brad Shepherd is strikingly honest about where the band was at the time of its recording. For such a big, major-chord rock record, Blow Your Cool! had the band almost do exactly that.

“At that point, I felt like we’d already established ourselves,” reflects Shepherd.

“People might have seen it as a makeor-break thing, but if that was ever a component it was on the record label side of things. We struggled quite a bit with that record while we were making it. We didn’t really see eye to eye with our producer, Mark Opitz – I think perhaps he may have

had a briefing with the label about their vision for the record as opposed to our own. We were definitely in different places in terms of what we wanted out of making the album. In many regards, I think what you see on the record that followed [1989’s Magnum Cum Louder] was more of the direction we wanted to go in. At the end of the day, Blow Your Cool! was a very polished and highly-produced album. It’s some people’s favourite Gurus record, and I get that; but for us, it was creatively conflicted.”

Despite this crystal-clear recollection, Shepherd insists he doesn’t dwell on the darker side of the album too much.

As far as he’s concerned, what matters most is having those songs reclaimed each and every night they happen to be on the setlist. Regardless of their recorded output, Shepherd prides the Hoodoo Gurus on being a live band – and, decades after their formation, still one of the best on the circuit. “We’ve obviously been playing songs from the album for all of those 30 years since it came out,” he says.

“That’s the heart and soul of what we do – the glorious, ebullient energy of rock’n’roll.”

“I’m much more familiar with their live versions now, which are more in tune with what we like to do as a band. They’re a lot more rough around the edges... with a few mistakes here and there, of course.”

Shepherd laughs, before continuing: “There’s no Steve Vais in this band.

[There’s] essentially a punk-rock ethos in what we do. That’s no secret – I was in The Fun Things, Dave was in The Victims and both Rick [Grossman, bassist] and Kingsy [Mark Kingsmill, former drummer] were in their fair share of punk bands. To this day, those influences are still pretty evident when we play. That’s the heart and soul of what we do – the glorious, ebullient energy of rock & roll.”

Having recently brought this energy to remote and regional areas on the You-Do Gurus tour, alongside fellow stalwarts You Am I, the Gurus are soon to head out once again with their old sparring partners – as well as Perth’s Jebediah and Melbourne-via-Geelong’s Adalita – on the big-swinging Fist Full Of Rock tour. Shepherd holds fond memories of the very first time he got to see You Am I in action, which would spark a friendship that has lasted some 25-years-andchange between the two bands. “I don’t actually remember meeting Tim [Rogers], but I do remember seeing You Am I for the first time,” he says.

“They were supporting Nirvana at Selina’s in Coogee Bay – it must have been ‘92.

I can tell you, as God is my witness... they mopped the floor with Nirvana. They made them look like a bunch of milksops.

You Am I felt like an atomic bomb had just dropped on the stage. They just set the place on fire. No doubt they’ll be trying

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the same tactics with us on this tour we’re going on!” Shepherd also recalls being equally impressed by his first encounters with both Jebediah and Adalita’s former band, Magic Dirt.

“I remember Magic Dirt opening up for us at Deakin University, outside of Geelong. Not long after, we played with Jebediah at an outdoor show at the University of Perth. I remember, in particular, that they reminded me of Redd Kross – which, really, could only be a good thing. Both acts were bands that we’d run into time and time again as we toured around the country. They’re all good mates, so having all of us on the same tour is going to feel just like old times. None of us have done this kind of run in quite some time.”

The Fist Full of Rock tour is a fatal fourway that’s bound to see bodies writhing, guitars turned up to 11 and countless voices lost from all-night sing-alongs.

Despite being the senior act of the festivities, Shepherd and his Gurus co-horts are as raring to go as ever.

“We’re all professional acts, but we’re also very competitive,” he says. “All bets are off once we’ve got a guitar slung over our shoulders. You Am I will attempt to obliterate any chance that we have of redeeming ourselves, and we simply won’t allow for that to happen. Rock will be the winner on the night!”

With: You Am I + Jebediah + Adalita Where: Enmore Theatre When: Thursday August 31

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xxx photo by xxx

“I can tell you, as God is my witness...

[You Am I] mopped the floor with Nirvana.”

“We were definitely in different places in terms of what we wanted out of making the album.”

“I don’t trust people who say ‘I hate the Rolling Stones’.

All you’re saying to me is that you’re an imbecile.”

FEATURE

Melvins: War Of Attrition Meg Crawford speaks with founding member Buzz Osborne about outlasting the haters.

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uzz Osborne, AKA King Buzzo, frontman of legendary three-piece punk-sludge outfit Melvins, is heading back to our shores following a band first: the release of their first ever film score, Love, which forms part of their new double album A Walk With Love & Death.

The Melvins photo by Chris Casella

Death (the first side of the new album) is true to the Melvins’ heavy and hard form: they’ve long been renowned as the godfathers of grunge (Melvins even predated the Seattle scene). On the other hand, Love – an instrumental,

“The older I get, the less tolerance I have for big stadium shows and lots of smoke and mirrors ... It’s less human, almost.” thebrag.com

industrial and thoroughly unsettling piece – is a different beast entirely.

When we tell Osborne that it makes us feel positively anxious, he roars with laughter. “Did it?” Osborne asks.

“That’s funny, and kinda to the point, you know.”

did in their teens and twenties. So, it doesn’t surprise me.”

While the album obviously addresses some weighty topics, Osborne gives some food for thought about how best to approach them. “It was a good sounding title and you can take it a long ways,” he says. “It’s not [about] becoming at home with them; you’re just walking with them, you know?”

Plus, Osborne’s kinda immune to criticism. When pressed as to how he’s managed to develop such thick skin, he puts it down to the fact that the band’s never been as big as its cult following fervently believes it ought to have been.

“I think it started out by us not having anyone who liked us too much, so it was mostly negative criticism,” he muses.

“But I felt like what we were doing was right and we’re somewhat vindicated by the fact that we’re still here and most of those people aren’t. It’s a war of attrition.”

Osborne has often repeated the belief that 20 per cent of the Melvin’s audience is lost with every new album, but are replaced by new and most probably younger listeners, and expects the same of this release.

Realistically, though, Osborne couldn’t give a shit about alienating anyone.

“Not at all,” he says. “People get older and move on in their world. They have children or become less interested in music and do other things than they

Part of the band’s longevity also stems from the fact that Osborne has always paid heed to the lessons he took under the belt from his earlier and smaller punk gigs. “What was important was the intimacy of them,” Osborne reflects.

“Back then it was more about the ideas behind the music. The older I get, the less tolerance I have for big stadium shows and lots of smoke and mirrors.

I don’t particularly care about that. At all, really. It’s less human, almost, and

distracting. If you feel like you need that sort of thing, maybe you should pare it back a bit and see if you can remember what you liked about being a band to begin with.”

That said, Osborne’s not against bands making a buck and is happy to consider himself a fan of one of the most monolithic bands ever to grace a stadium.

“I never understand people who don’t like anything about the Rolling Stones: they’re out of their mind,” he says.

“That’s a band that has sold millions of records and for once I can agree with the general public. It doesn’t happen often.

The Rolling Stones have done lots and lots of stuff which is amazing and I don’t trust people who say ‘I hate the Rolling Stones’. All you’re saying to me is that you’re an imbecile.”

With: A Walk With Love & Death out now through Ipecac With: Redd Kross Where: Factory Theatre When: Thursday November 9 BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17 :: 15

FEATURE

The Horrors: Great, Horrible and Sick Joshua Third speaks to Holly Pereira about reinvention, Blade Runner and embracing discomfort.

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ever a band to be restricted by the confines of a genre, The Horrors return with their fifth (and aptly titled) album V, which sees them exploring brand new sonic territory. The band’s trademark intensity is still there, framed around an entirely new method of experimentation that signifies an exciting new chapter for the British band.

When reflecting on their previous albums, guitarist Joshua Third explains the band’s motivation to set out in a new direction.

“The last three records were a trilogy of albums. We kind of explored a sound, and the techniques we were using to make them, as far as they could go. For V, we decided to completely change our methods with no clear idea of what the result would be. We made the last two albums without a producer in our own studio. For this one we decided to get rid of our studio and work with someone who really wants to produce and be hands on.

Paul Epworth fits that bill entirely.”

Having produced the likes of Lana Del Rey, Rihanna and Adele, Epworth may initially seem like an odd choice for a band as alternative and experimental as The Horrors. “I imagined working with Paul would be us all sat around a piano writing these songs,” laughs Third.

“Paul’s a really amazing producer and I think he understood very quickly that kind of approach wouldn’t work.”

Third admits that there was often a dragging out of the recording process, a cause of some frustration that Epworth was able to work around. “Paul had great momentum which was really refreshing.

We could have laboured over something for a month but he was more about getting the results very quickly. As there’s a lot of us and everyone’s got ideas, I think he quickly realised if someone was stuck on something to put them to one side for a bit and get someone else to work on a different section of the song.”

“It’s a very experimental process,” continues Third. “We’re constantly exploring new ideas, new sounds and how to present the songs. Some of the songs came together very quickly: ‘Weighed Down’, for example, was written in our first week with Paul and remained mainly unchanged throughout the process, whereas a track like ‘Hologram’ was started by Tom Furse (keyboardist) in his bedroom and went through many iterations throughout the writing process.

The track was over 20 minutes long at one point and then we pulled it back.

There’s constantly new ideas thrown in the pot; songs take a lot of twists and turns on their way. It’s not a quick process, unfortunately.”

The first taste of V is single ‘Machine’, a menacing six-minute industrial-inspired track accompanied by a futuristic CGI music video that has the band’s faces concealed within contorted and complex

“For V, we decided to completely change our methods with no clear idea of what the result would be.” shapes. This follows on from the unveiling of V’s album sleeve which features their faces embedded within a strange wax-like substance.

“The idea for the album front was inspired by Blade Runner – that kind of science fiction dystopian future thing.

We thought about what records would be like in 50 years time, imagining there’d be a whole mix of languages on the front because languages and cultures have intermingled. We worked with Erik Ferguson who makes great, really horrible and sick things. We gave him our faces and said to make a band shot that isn’t just five guys sitting against a brick wall.”

Given the band wear their influences on their sleeve, Third details some of the musical influences on the writing of the new record. “We listened to French bootlegs of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno. Their experiments with very long tape delays sound quite exciting, I’ve started trying to nut it out myself. Credit to Paul, he actually encouraged it – most producers would have told you to stop mucking around!”

While each member plays an integral part in The Horrors, lyric writing is left to lead singer Faris Badwan. Concealed

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“Faris has a complete blanket ban on talking about lyrics at all,” says Third.

“He feels they are incredibly obvious and to talk about them anymore would literally be destroying them.

Lyrics normally happen quite late, but occasionally there’s a line that we pick up on that sets the mood for a song.

We’ve never really worked in a way where Faris has said, ‘These are the lyrics, you write the songs.’ It’s not really that kind of process.”

When asked about where The Horrors see themselves in relation to the greater music scene, Third sums it up succinctly.

“We’re very lucky,” he says. “A lot of bands have to repeat the same record constantly. Occasionally they get to do an experimental one, but no one really likes it so they go back to what they were doing before. We’re like the exact opposite. People like our records and then we do something completely different. That seems to be our role in the musical landscape. It’s how we’ve stayed together and not become bored.

It’s very challenging but exciting and interesting to do.”

What: V out September 22 through Wolftone/Caroline Australia thebrag.com

xxx photo by xxx

“Faris [Badwan] has a complete blanket ban on talking about lyrics at all.”

within dense layers of sound, the words are often thought of as secondary to The Horrors, but nonetheless a source of curiosity. It’s clear, however, that the band prefer not to discuss them at length.

FEATURE

Boo Seeka: Better Late Than Never Too Soon

Tanja Brinks Toubro talks to producer Sammy Seeka about the duo’s longawaited debut album.

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t has been onward and upwards for Aussie electronica duo Boo Seeka since they released their debut single ‘Kingdom Leader’ in January 2015 – a tune that was written just days after the pair met each other for the very first time.

“I’m probably 90 per cent excitement, 10 per cent nerves. I reckon Boo is the opposite,” producer Sammy Seeka, half of the band, laughs. “But we are super excited for [the album] to come out, we can’t wait. It’s been a while for us and we’re super proud of it. There’ll be people, of course, that don’t like it and that’s fine, we’re not trying to please everyone. We’re just trying to create music that we love.”

Within the first year of starting their mutual musical journey, Seeka and vocalist Boo released two strong singles, played all over Australia and toured Europe twice.

“We played a festival called Surfana Music Fest, in the sand dunes south of Amsterdam, in June of our first year,” Seeka recalls. “It had only been four months since Boo and I met and we were on the other side of the world and they’re singing our songs back to us at this festival.”

Boo Seeka photo by Ian Laidlaw

Now, almost two and a half years later, they have released six singles in total and are finally ready to release their debut album, Never Too Soon.

“When we started this thing, we were writing songs and we were happy with

them and they were going well, but as time went on we became greater perfectionists. Things that were good enough then, weren’t good enough anymore,” Seeka explains. “But this year we finally started smashing out some stuff that we’re super happy with and yeah, we got it done – better late than never.”

of red wine and just sit there at night and write and play and just have fun with it.

And if we hit a road block, then we would just move straight on to something else.

I think that was the biggest key for us: knowing when to move on to something else. We didn’t do that before and I think that’s why we were finally able to finish some songs. And the album.”

The duo has toured pretty much nonstop from the beginning, and though it has obviously prolonged the process of finishing the debut, it has never hindered their creativity.

There will be a few of the well-known Boo Seeka tracks on Never Too Soon, but the record mostly consists of new material.

“Pretty much all of our ideas would start on the road because that’s where we spend most of the year, whether it’s in Europe or America or Australia,” says Seeka. “So that’s where we spend most of our time together, that’s when things are coming to us and we’re writing them down or quickly recording them on an iPhone or pulling out the laptop and recording something that we’re doing at the time.”

Upon returning home to Sydney, they would continue working on those ideas before finishing the tunes in producer Ian Pritchett’s garage studio. The biggest obstacle for the pair has really been knowing when a song was actually done.

“We finally figured out how we work best together and literally it took almost two and a half years,” Seeka explains. “The album was largely done in my bedroom where we would open a couple of bottles

“A lot of the songs were written fairly recently,” Seeka shares. “There’s a couple of songs on there about specifi c, isolated instances or people and then there’s a bulk of songs that we wrote in the past few months that are about a relationship Boo was having and the road that took. When it ended, he was obviously feeling a lot of emotions and it really sparked his creativity, and that’s when we knuckled down and kicked out a lot of songs. So a lot of them, like ‘Does This Last’, the second last single, and ‘Turn Up Your Light’, the single we just put out, are based around that.”

When asked to define the Boo Seeka sound, Seeka hesitates a bit. “It’s never an easy question to answer because it’s constantly changing and we have never been able to pinpoint it. I suppose I could drag in elements of the musicality or I could describe what it does to me or to other people when you listen to it,

“We like to paint a picture and put people in it musically, take people somewhere where they can shut their eyes and for three or four minutes just not be where they currently are.” and so I would say that it’s quite dreamy, it’s quite poppy, it’s quite electronic.

It’s pretty hip hoppy. We like to paint a picture and put people in it musically, take people somewhere where they can shut their eyes and for three or four minutes just not be where they currently are.”

The duo will be embarking on a massive national tour, hitting 18 venues around the country in October and November.

“We can’t wait for it, we love touring Australia. We have a more established following here so the shows are bigger and we have a lot of friends that come out when we’re around the country.

Our mantra when it comes to touring Australia is to go wherever people want to come to a show. There’s a hundred thousand places and little towns that you can play in this country, so why not do it?”

What: Never Too Soon out now through Sureshaker

“It had only been four months since Boo and I met and we were on the other side of the world and they’re singing our songs back to us.” thebrag.com

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28:07:17 :: Enmore Theatre :: 118-132 Enmore Rd Newtown 9550 3666

josh pyke

What we’ve been out to see this week. See full galleries at thebrag.com/snaps

05:08:17 :: Qudos Bank Arena :: Olympic Blvd, Sydney Olympic Park 8765 4321

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s n a p s

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29:07:17 :: Metro Theatre :: 624 George St Sydney 9550 3666

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04:08:17 :: Enmore Theatre :: 118-132 Enmore Rd Newtown 9550 3666

steve hackett

03:08:17 :: Oxford Art Factory :: 38-46 Oxford St, Darlinghurst 9332 3711

minus the bear

FEATURE

Gang Of Youth There Will Be A Light

BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG

Gang Of Youths’ David Le’aupepe on bringing philosophy to pop music and putting their lives on the line ou know you’re in the liner notes, too... right?”

David Immanuel Le’aupepe – singer, songwriter, lyricist, rhythm guitarist and occasional pianist in the Sydney-bred, London-based pop/rock band Gang Of Youths – has a list of names up on his phone screen.

It’s a part of the ‘thank yous’ section of the liner notes for Go Farther In Lightness, the second studio album from the band, arranged into a square that will presumably be printed for both the CD and vinyl versions of the record’s physical release.

Among those names being thanked personally is Natalie Files, the band’s Australian PR representative, to whom Le’aupepe has just posed this question. Files wanders over to get a closer look at the text – and sure enough, there she is, along with a mention of her company, The PR Files.

“I’m so touched,” Files remarks, her cheeks gaining colour and a smile stretching across her face. “That’s really sweet!” Le’aupepe is somewhat dumbfounded by this response. ““Are you kidding me?” he asks. “Of course we’d thank you. You do everything for us!”

What may seem like a grand gesture to some – a public profession of gratitude – is a mere pittance for someone like Le’aupepe. That is, by the way, meant in the best way possible. Le’aupepe is inherently kind, passionate and affectionate. Throughout our conversation, he will go on to refer to several people as his “best friend in the world”.” You believe him each and every time the phrase escapes his mouth. You believe that Le’aupepe is best friends with everyone he knows, such is his nature as a being. You believe that every person Le’aupepe describes as such would immediately turn around and describe him in turn the exact same way.

And if you believe in David Le’aupepe; you believe in Gang Of Youths. It’s human nature.

After not actively pursuing music since his high school days, Le’aupepe began to write songs again when his then-wife was diagnosed with cancer. It’s a mythology that has woven itself into the Gang Of Youths narrative, to the point where it is indelible, inextricable and omnipresent.

These songs were private, written purely with the intention of making her battle that little bit easier. Eventually, Le’aupepe assembled a group of musicians – including close friends from his church days – in order to play the songs live. This became Gang Of Youths – and the rest, as they say, is history. Working their way up through the ranks of support slots to small pub shows, the momentum of their debut album – 2015’s The Positions – ultimately lead to them becoming one of the most in-demand bands in the country. This month, shortly after releasing Go Farther In Lightness, they will begin their biggest national tour to date, with the Hordern Pavilion

“It felt very natural to employ devices that would have normally been used by, say, Vivaldi or Bach. I think it requires a lot of patience and diligence to understand and to love. There was something about including that in the record that felt like it was an extension of me.”

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s:

“This is the most accurate representation of who I am, sonically. I wanted to challenge something about our consciousness as people who listen to modern music.” somehow becomes small. There’s a rattle, as Le’aupepe fumbles and reaches for his chest. “I have them with me everywhere that I go.” He reveals a necklace with a locket in the middle, which itself reveals photos of both his mother and his father in its two frames when opened. “One of my best friends in the world, she photographed my parents... I had this made.”

Having this invaluable possession serve as an impetus, Le’aupepe is once again right back into the flow of discussion. “My relationship with my father, in particular, is one of the biggest lyrical inspirations of this album. I talk about his magnolia tree. I talk about the frailty in old age he’s experiencing, and missing out on the humanity he’s really starting to demonstrate at this age. I talk about how I’m not there to experience it, missing out on it, because I’m overseas. I talk about things that he and my mum have imparted in me – wisdom, religious ideology, identity. My mum’s Judaism, and my dad’s Samoan culture.”

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned from your parents?

Le’aupepe pauses, reflecting on the weight that comes with such a question. “Empathy and humility,” he replies. “That a bank balance does not determine our ability to do great things. We didn’t grow up with much, but we grew up with all the things that make a human rich.”

This leads Le’aupepe to also make mention of his older sister, Giselle, who he says was one of the most important figures in his life growing up – and still is. “I don’t think that I would be playing music if it wasn’t for her,” he says. “She used to play me Joni Mitchell records when I was three, four years old. The religious lessons and the social lessons that I learned from her are a part of what helped raise me. She’s a part of this record, too, in a big way. In the song ‘Persevere’, I talk a lot about the bigger religious questions, and often, my sister has influenced so much of that, as well. She and my brother-in-law were with me for a lot of the time that I was writing this record.”

He smiles to himself at the thought of them, laughing. “There’s a line in the last song, ‘Say Yes To Life’, where I talk about getting drunk at their wedding.”

It may seem surprising from an outlying perspective just how easily these bigger-picture conversations – family, religion, identity – weave in with talk of the music of Gang Of Youths. That’s just the thing: Gang Of Youths doesn’t just see the bigger picture. They’re in it. They rotate in the same atmosphere. It’s something Le’aupepe and co. have never shied away from – which may be why they’ve never sought affiliation with any sort of movement that isn’t their own. show serving as the centrepiece. It’s a lot to take in – especially because Le’aupepe is still wondering whether people will hate Go Farther or not.

“I am a long-winded, ambitious, terrified person,” Le’aupepe begins. He’s seated on a leather couch in a room closed off from the offices of Sony Music in Sydney, a few floors above where he and his bandmates would record the bulk of Go Farther. “I had to express that the only way that I knew how: making a 78-minute record. All the songs serve their purpose.

This is the most accurate representation of who I am, sonically. I wanted to challenge something about our consciousness as people who listen to modern music.”

Le’aupepe points specifically to the usage of strings and orchestral arrangements which factor heavily into the album. It’s something the band has tapped into previously – in ‘Strange Diseases’, for instance, the lead single from their 2016 EP Let Me Be Clear. On Go Farther, however, it’s a part of nearly every song – and, in cases like ‘‘Achilles Come Down’ or single ‘Let Me Down Easy’’, it’s the central musical focus.

“I was raised on classical music,” he says. “I’ve spoken a lot about my father being interwoven into everything that I do – he raised me on this music. I’ve never really strayed too far from it. It felt very natural to employ devices that would have normally been used by, say, Vivaldi or Bach. I think it requires a lot of patience and diligence to understand and to love. There was something about including that in the record that felt like it was an extension of me.”

Family is, unsurprisingly, one of the dearest things to Le’aupepe’s heart.

In the opening track of Go Farther, entitled ‘Fear And Trembling’, he sings of getting older – and, by proxy, of his family as well. “I was waiting on the future / But the future only came / In the form of greying matter / In my only father’s brain.” Last year, both of Le’aupepe’s parents entered an assisted living facility, not long after they got to see him perform what was the band’s biggest show at the time at the famed Enmore Theatre. This meant they would move out of the house that Le’aupepe had grown up in – and, indeed, was still living in when he wasn’t away on tour. Aside from leaving Le’aupepe temporarily homeless, couchsurfing for a few months, this transition also had a considerable emotional impact on him. “It still affects me,” he says. “Every day.”

“I mean, my parents, I...” he trails off – for once, at a loss for words. He grows quiet – normally mountainous in frame, he arches inward and

Rather, this is to do with any religious associations one may have with Gang Of Youths as a band. Because of the backgrounds of the individual members (as well as the initial ties to Hillsong), some have come to Gang Of Youths’ music under the impression of them being a Christian band. That’s something that isn’t lost on Le’aupepe, and while he’s obviously grateful for every GOY fan out there, he hopes that his own personal message isn’t lost in translation.

“Here’s the reality: a lot of Christians get into our music, thinking that I’m going to reaffirm their biases,” he says. ““All I am doing is echoing the doubt that they are repressing. That is an irrevocable and unequivocal part of what I am attempting to do with my music, my career and my life. This is about me asking questions; challenging the conventions of becoming the iconoclast that most Christians claim that Jesus was. There’s a part of me that misses that community of church; but at the same time, there’s a part of me that wants to challenge it, always.

“I don’t want to be part and parcel of the cultural Christianity that is embedded in hypocrisy and conservatism. Even the more progressive strands of Christianity, I find, are obsessed with the wrong things.”

As for where Le’aupepe stands now on his own personal faith and religious subscription, he describes it as ever-evolving. ““Any honest person would recognise that their philosophical and spiritual identity will change day-to-day,” he says. “No one is 100 per cent stoic all the time, just like no one’s 100 per cent utilitarian all the time. I mean, today I’m not interested. Tomorrow, I might be.”

Note the operative words that open that last quote: “any honest person”.

While someone like Le’aupepe may seem one of the most forthright and open people in Australian music, it simply boils down to his own idea of what honesty means and how it reflects on his own actions. Some

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That’s not just evident in the ongoing battle of genre semantics – although, hilariously, the album’s press release does see Le’aupepe note that the band are not “cool”. “Nor,” it continues, “do we clothe ourselves in ornaments of what is currently in vogue re: indie rock in 2017. We are not predominantly white, middle-class progressives producing music selfaware and effete — nor are we making a new fetishised brand of garage punk that inexplicably makes a soft return every 15 years.”

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FEATURE

“A bank balance does not determine our ability to do great things. We didn’t grow up w

“We are not predominantly white, middle-class progressives self-aware and effete — nor are we making a new fetishised brand that inexplicably makes a soft return e

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“A lot of Christians get into our music, thinking that I’m going to reaffirm their biases,” he says. “All I am doing is echoing the doubt that they are repressing.” songwriters never want to give away their real stories – myth swallows up everything from ‘In the Air Tonight’ to ‘You’re So Vain’ in an attempt to build urban legends. With Le’aupepe, there is no other story. No one can debate the true meaning behind his songs – everybody already knows it.

It should come as no surprise, then, that he is able to vividly answer a question concerning who he was at the beginning of writing Go Farther in contrast to who he was upon its completion.

“I was afraid,” Le’aupepe begins. “Lonely. Terrified of love. Down and out. Still recovering from horrible shit. Trying to make sense of the world. There’s a line on the record: ‘Now I don’t know if I believe in anything’. When you’re at the point of trying to save something so desperately, you become a vague impression of yourself. I was trying to emulate this guy called Dave. I didn’t trust anyone.”

And at the end of writing the album? “Still all of those things, but more content. I’ve embraced love. I’ve embraced life. I had to learn how to believe in things again. I came to

advocate for believing in things as an antidote for nihilism. I care so much less about work than I used to. I found things to care more about.”

Like what?

“One of them is sitting right over there,” Le’aupepe replies.

He points to a corner of the room, where Joji Malani – Gang Of Youths’ lead guitarist – sits quietly, minding his own business and eating his lunch. Malani will later head out to radio press commitments with Le’aupepe, and will also perform a secret stripped-back show with him at the reopened Lansdowne Hotel the very next day. For now, however, he’s simply content to noodle away on an unplugged electric guitar and occasionally look at photos of his dog. Unsurprisingly, Malani is yet another of Le’aupepe’s best friends in the world. He takes the acknowledgement calmly, although the seemingly spontaneous call to his attention evidently came as a slight to his alone-time. With a smile in our direction, he quietly retreats back to his own company.

Gang Of Youths photo by Maclay Heriot

– PRESS RELEASE FOR

Le’aupepe continues: “I opened myself up to love, and I found someone that I want to love for the rest of my life. I opened myself up to pain, and I experienced a lot of it. I overcame so much of it. That’s what this record is about: overcoming. Becoming human. It’s about realising and recognising that the absence of meaning, objectively, in the universe is not a death-knell for us all. If anything, it’s a liberating and motivating force that can propel us into better, more illustrious places as people. This notion that we can all master our humanness.

There’s this great line that Colin Firth’s character says in Kingsman: The Secret Service.

‘Nobility isn’t being superior to others – it’s being superior to your former self.’ That stuck with me. There’s a Nietzschean element to it.”

The devotion Le’aupepe shows to his own family is equal to that of his bandmates – Malani, drummer Donnie Borzestowski, multi-instrumentalist Jung Kim and bassist Max Dunn. With the exception of Borzestowski, who joined shortly after the release of The Positions, these

“I’ve embraced love. I’ve embraced life. I had to learn how to believe in things again.

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FEATURE

ith much, but we grew up with all the things that make a human rich.”

“I’m starting to realise now that I want to alleviate people’s suffering.

I want to give them hope, and some kind of respite from the world. Now that I’m able to do that, it’s fulfilling.” musicians have been with Le’aupepe from the very start. Not only are they his most-trusted friends and confidants, they are also vessels in their own way for his story. It’s a lot to ask of someone, which explains why they are akin to family in Le’aupepe’s eyes.

“The time it took to cultivate this relationship is time I would do over again,” he affirms. “Every lifetime I ever have, I will elect to build this relationship again. The older I get, the more detached from the trappings of a career that I get, the more I find things to care more about... the more I realise the community that I have built in my life matters more. It is infinitely more significant, more life-affirming and can bring me more contentment and make me more susceptible. For the time that I’m alive, I want to spend my moments meditating on people who give a shit about me. I want to give a shit about them back, tenfold.”

producing music of garage punk very 15 years.”

Eventually, Malani makes his way over to the second couch facing Le’aupepe. Having finished his lunch, he pays attention to the conversation more. Considering how much of the Gang Of Youths narrative – practically all of it, really – focuses solely on Le’aupepe, this can be seen as a rare chance to enter another perspective into the dialogue.

Ironically, in talking about his own part within the making of Go Farther, Malani discusses having to alter and recalibrate his own perception of his role to that of an outsider’s perspective. “What we went through on this album was really different to how it was on The Positions,” he says.

GO FARTHER IN LIGHTNESS

“On the first album, I feel like Dave was a lot more controlling. There were also times where he had so much personal shit going on that he wouldn’t really care. I’m not saying any of this to put him down – this is stuff he’s openly admitted.

He’d just be so exhausted from his personal life where he literally just did not have the capacity to make any kind of executive decision. Ironically, that kind of left a bit more space for someone like me. It was kind of like a dictatorship – again, that’s stuff Dave has openly admitted.”

Le’aupepe glances over, smiling. “It’s still a dictatorship,” he teases. “It’s just more of a lazy anarchist one now.”

Malani continues: “This time around, Dave oversaw everything. He saw the whole thing through. We’d compose really differently – we’d do a live take, for example, where Jung and I wouldn’t be in the room. It’d just be Dave, Max and Donnie. That was really different for me – I really play off these guys, so it was really weird. I’m someone who takes direction from energy. Maybe it was the idea of getting verbal direction that felt different. It was a new thing to take on board for someone like me.”

Of particular note and interest to Malani is the live element of Go Farther In Lightness.

Having already started playing a couple of songs – the band’s Laneway Festival sets would open with the powerful ‘What Can I Do If The Fire Goes Out?’ – this upcoming tour will see the band get to premiere a solid chunk of the record. It will be from there and beyond, Malani believes, that the songs will come to take on a life of their own.

“It’s more about ‘us’, per se, when we’re playing live,” he explains. “Because it was recorded so differently, I don’t feel the same about playing the songs live than I do about hearing them back recorded. That’s not entirely to say that I prefer it one way or another. I view the two as totally different things. It’s weird... The Positions was recorded in parts, as little bits and pieces, but I remember it in my head as this one hectic time. With Go Farther, it was all recorded in a very organised manner, all in one place. For me, though, because it was recorded so differently, I hear so many different things when I listen back to it. There’s all these different memories and emotions all attached to it. Doing it live is just another interpretation of the same piece.”

“It’s a better album,” says Le’aupepe, seemingly out of nowhere and to no-one in particular. “Just generally.”

“I definitely agree to that,” Malani replies.

Of course, the question still remains as to how audiences will feel, and whether they will agree with Le’aupepe and Malani. The band are unquestionably aware of the risks that a record like Go Farther presents to an audience. That is, after all, why they took them to begin with. As far as they are concerned, they want every creative decision that is on this record to reflect on their own forged path. “Progression is the main thing,” says Malani.

“All those artists and bands that started in their own scenes and movements, they were trying to be beyond what they had. ‘Just because I have this shitty guitar and amp, doesn’t mean I can’t make something that fucking rocks.’ When you’re doing the same thing that someone else has done, and not doing so out of an actual necessity... we didn’t want to be trapped by that.”

“I wanted to reach for the stars on this album,” says Le’aupepe. “Some people play in a three-piece punk band, and that’s beautiful. It deserves commendation. For us, though, I think we’ve always wanted to make big, layered, articulate, meticulous, intense rock.

That manifested itself toward things that are impractical when we were recording. It didn’t matter if there were 54 orchestral parts and there’s only five of us. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Making this album, there was an urgency in me. I wanted to do something in response to that. I wanted to make something that was honest to myself.”

“Having freedom is good, man,” he concludes. “Not having a boss, making your own decisions, making your own calls, being autonomous and working with people that actually give a shit about that. That’s where we’re at right now.”

Talk continues after the interview informally concludes, mostly about music. Broken Social Scene come up more than once – both Le’aupepe and Malani are huge fans, and recently got to see them live overseas. So, too, do Arcade Fire and The Killers – “We got compared to them a lot when the first record came out,” comments Malani on the latter, “even though I don’t think we have ever had any kind of conversation about them within the band.”

Tattoos come up, as well. Le’aupepe has an artwork tattooed on his arm inspired by Feist; another inspired by hardcore band Gang Green, who he describes as “the first hardcore band I ever loved”. This is clearly music that has impacted deeply on his own life – which leads one to wonder how he feels whenever he sees the band’s calling card, a squiggly line resembling a heart rate, scrawled onto someone’s body in a lifetime commitment to his songs.

“For the time that I’m alive, I want to spend my moments meditating on people who give a shit about me.

I want to give a shit about them back, tenfold.”

“I care more about what goes on inside of them,” he says. “Most people get something tattooed on them if it means enough to them. Some people, 20 years from now, might get that shit lasered off. Still, if it means something to them right then and there, then that’s a win. If what I’ve done means that there’s a change that happens inside of them – they become a little more ambitious, a little more hopeful, a little more empathetic – then fuckin’ A. That’s why I’ve kept doing this. I started this career because I wanted to deal with some shit that was going on. That’s not enough to last – the therapy aspect was not enough, because it almost killed me. I’m starting to realise now that I want to alleviate people’s suffering. I want to give them hope, and some kind of respite from the world. Now that I’m able to do that, it’s fulfilling.”

The promotional cycle goes on – Le’aupepe and Malani will soon depart the building, meeting with newspaper editors and radio announcers alike all in the name of spruiking Go Farther In Lightness. Several shows on the tour have already sold out. Were you to flick through the band’s prospective calendar, you’d probably find that they already know what they’re doing well into next year. Soon, they’ll be back in their new home of London, living in one another’s pockets and reaffirming their familial tendencies. As their name suggests, they’re going to continue to bandy together and celebrate their new lease on life; evolving beyond their initial solitary purpose and manifesting new ones with each step forward.

People are going to love Go Farther In Lightness. What was beloved about the band previously is strengthened here. People are going to hate Go Farther In Lightness. It’s too long – intentionally – and indulges too much for its own good. Truthfully, many won’t know what to make of Go Farther In Lightness at all. It’s a confusing record at times, thematically scattered and curiously arranged. All of these scenarios are absolute givens.

What, however, does Le’aupepe hope that people learn from listening to the album? For such a complicated and delicate record, the answer that comes is surprisingly simple: belief.

“Believe in something,” he says. “Believe in something that is in some way emancipatory for yourself. Believe in something that is helpful. Believe in something that is helpful for other people. The foundations of belief are rooted in more than just ideology. These are the things that keep us all afloat. You are unequivocally going to die, y’know – it is going to happen one day, at some time. Live accordingly.”

Show me the way.

Show me the light.

Go farther in lightness.

What: Go Farther In Lightness out Friday August 18 through Sony Music With: Gordi + Fountaineer Where: Hordern Pavilion When: Friday September 8

I came to advocate for believing in things as an antidote for nihilism.” thebrag.com

BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17 :: 23

FEATURE

The Ocean Party: All In The Family Guitarist Lachlan Denton talks regional touring, keeping your friends close and learning to relax, with Anna Rose.

W

ith their seventh album about to drop, The Ocean Party couldn’t demonstrate the shift in their lives and the inspirations they’ve felt since last year’s release, Restless, more clearly. Out later this month, Beauty Point paints a beautiful portrait of family, themes of belonging and identity running rife in a panoply of melodies.

Guitarist Lachlan Denton says the band is pretty fortunate to be in the position they are, their balance of life commitments perfectly weighted because all six members have the same goal in mind. “Everyone is so dedicated to music, which is a big help,” says Denton, “We all write songs, we all carry the burden, we all write two songs each and get an album ready to go.

“As far as touring goes, we kind of have a bit of a relaxed policy these days – if someone has to miss a tour, we work around it. We’re adaptable, which is the main thing.”

Adaptable indeed: The Ocean Party’s upcoming national tour in support of Beauty Point boasts several regional performances in places most bands wouldn’t normally attempt to visit. That sense of family and belonging motivates the band’s decision to perform in lesser known areas. “We’re all from Wagga Wagga originally so it means a lot to us to get out to regional places,” Denton says. “A lot of it is selfish – we just love to tour and want to get out as much as we can. Being able to get in the van and spend a good chunk of a month together, that’s super fun.

“Most of us have lived in Melbourne for the better part of a decade and I don’t know, I enjoy the vibe of going to regional towns. It’s relieving, it’s so unpretentious. It’s a bit of a cliché but people are so down to earth, super honest – it’s a refreshing way to be.”

That laid-back atmosphere is evident in the production of the new album.

24 :: BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17

Created on location in Stanwell Park, Denton says that the opportunity to record away from the city and in environments more in keeping with the band’s chill vibes made for something of a holiday. “There’s a real family vibe around there and I guess it reminds us of ourselves in a way – you can almost say the Illawarra has a regional feel to it. The people we’ve met with the label are super warm, lovely people. It’s like a second home for us.

“When we made this album we thought, ‘We really have to go away and just kind of spend some time hanging out with friends there’. It was sort of partly a holiday – camped out in the van for a week, recorded during the day, hung out with friends around the fire at night, it was just super chill. Ocean Party never looks at touring for just the promotional things, I don’t think we’d keep being a band if we looked at it in such a cold manner; we always want to enjoy everything we do otherwise we wouldn’t do it. Making an album is another excuse to hang out together.”

Whether Denton was aware of it or not at the start of the conversation, The Ocean Party mantra is ultimately ‘all in the family’.

It’s safe to say that they wouldn’t have conducted the production and recording of the album with Spunk Records if the label weren’t able to get on board with that very natural vibe of theirs.

“It’s hard to know where we’d be if we hadn’t found ourselves in that situation where we’ve been allowed by Spunk to do what we do, how we do it, on our terms and in such a warm environment,” Denton says. “[For] a lot of people it’s a

hard slog to get their album out but we’ve managed to surround ourselves with the right people and it makes it ten times easier. I feel it’s a pretty special thing we’ve got with everyone who’s involved.”

Beauty Point expresses a sense of identity, belonging and family among the six members of The Ocean Party. It’s a little introspective and perhaps a little introverted, because they are making it about the band and their collective. So how does The Ocean Party manage to embrace fans in to the family and share with them what they’re expressing with their new music?

“I feel like if you’ve followed us this long, probably, you would naturally get it,” says Denton. “I don’t think we’re a band who’s outside the communities we visit. We invite people into our lives, in a sense. If we go somewhere and people want us to be there and we sense that, we get on their level.

“I can’t say there’s any deliberate thing we do musically to invite people in, but hopefully the music just talks and everyone sees we’re pretty average people who are trying to be positive but music is our outlet to have a sook sometimes – everyone should be able to do that sometimes. I’d like to think we invite people in in a way that they feel they can do what we do themselves, that they can be inspired.”

What: Beauty Point out on Friday August 18 through Spunk Where: Volumes Festival With: Gold Class, Body Type, Straight Arrows and many more When: Saturday August 19 thebrag.com

xxx photo by xxx

“I enjoy the vibe of going to regional towns. It’s relieving, it’s so unpretentious. It’s a bit of a cliché but people are so down to earth, super honest – it’s a refreshing way to be.”

“Hopefully the music just talks and everyone sees we’re pretty average people who are trying to be positive but music is our outlet to have a sook sometimes – everyone should be able to do that sometimes.”

FOREVR: Drawn Into The Dark Max Jacobson talks to frontwoman Sam George-Allen about the dark draw of Hobart, and building a Frankenstein’s monster of a debut

G

othic dream-pop, alternative R&B, experimental hip-hop and many more sounds show up on the expansive double release of Classics and Death is a miracle from Brisbane experimental act FOREVR. There’s so much going on across these demanding 18 tracks that it makes sense they emerged from an inspiring setting that the band placed themselves in for the making of the album.

FOREVR photo by Luke Henery

Needless to say, it was a taxing experience creating a work so large, living inside its unsettled emotional state. Lead vocalist and lyricist Sam George-Allen gives some insight into their musical points of inspiration, as well as the external and internal influences coming from the culture of Hobart and the circumstances of the band themselves.

bring together every disparate musical influence that its members are drawn towards. The keen-eared listener could potentially catch Gorillaz, Slowdive and Nine Inch Nails embedded in the record’s atmospheric embrace.

“We wrote a couple songs and upon fi nishing them would be like, ‘yeah, this kind of sounds like Nine Inch Nails’,” George-Allen laughs.

“In terms of the production, we all listen to lots of hip-hop, especially this producer BOOTS: he’s incredible,” she says. “The boys who did the production admire him a lot. The entire thing is self-produced and they handle quite a lot of that. My role in the band is to write the melodies and lyrics, and writing some riffs. The production is a collaborative process, and that’s where the sound really emerges.”

“We all went to really weird places emotionally,” she admits. “2016 was a really weird year for all of us, personally. A lot of the work of the album was done in very strange hours and on very little sleep. Often we’d go into the studio the whole weekend without seeing the sunlight, and we’d drink too much coffee and take a lot of Modafi nil. All this sent us to some strange, aloof yet connected headspaces, which allowed for some weirdness to come through.”

The process of recording was a bit scattershot, but ultimately still felt like a joint effort. “It was interesting experience doing such a big project,” she says. We started recording in March last year. We went down to Hobart and recorded nine tracks down there, and the whole recording process was spread out over the next 18 months. We set up satellite studios, one at Donnie [Miller]’s studio and one at Tom [Roche]’s, so the parts got made separately but brought together in one studio.”

As hostile as that may sound, the band were united in their desire to

FOREVR were granted a signifi cant level of freedom in the creation of their

thebrag.com

LP, both in timeframe and budget, facilitating their venture into such left-fi eld experimental territory. When an investor comes into the picture, however, some compromises can potentially be forced – but the band didn’t let their council fun ding interfere with their vision and overall enjoyment in making music that satisfi ed them.

“We had this idea for a double album for a while. We had funding from the council which gave us pressure to get the project done within a deadline, but afforded us a lot of freedom having money behind it, which made us feel very lucky,” says George-Allen. “We have fun making this experimental music, we had freedom to explore it from the council and didn’t feel constrained – not that we’d ever feel obliged to make anything clearly commercial. Obviously I want people to like it, but the main goal was to make stuff that we like. But I really don’t know what to expect.”

There’s a thriving creative scene in Hobart that focuses on and celebrates art on the darker side. Sam explains how this blackly vibrant setting seeped its way into the formation of the album.

“We went to Hobart twice during the recording process. Hobart is awesome.

To me, as a mainlander, it has this slightly spooky vibe, from places such as MONA – which has completely changed the economy and the reasons for people to go to Hobart. There’s

FEATURE

“Dark Mofo … is a celebration of the dark, strange and challenging, and I feel like that kind of vibe influences our music.”

“A lot of the work of the album was done in very strange hours and on very little sleep. Often we’d go into the studio the whole weekend without seeing the sunlight.” also festivals like Dark Mofo, which is a celebration of the dark, strange and challenging, and I feel like that kind of vibe influences our music. I wouldn’t be surprised if, given some distance from the album, we notice an influence from the setting.”

Once you’ve spent so much time and given so much of yourself to a musical project, it’s extremely difficult to take a step back from it and look at it through the perspective of the listener. Gaining a sense of objectivity towards your own creative output is near impossible, so when asked about her expectations upon release, Sam gave a great answer as to why it’s very hard to have any.

“It’s been such a long time coming; we’ve all spent so much time with these songs that I fi nd it really difficult to get any sense of objectivity about it, which makes it really hard for me to think ‘who might like this music?’.

I hope it fi nds an audience. I like challenging, experimental music and weird production that’s a little intricate, so I hope it falls into those categories and other people can like it for those reasons. Give it a year, though, then I might be able to get some objectivity.”

What: Classics and Death is a miracle available now through Super Duper

BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17 :: 25

reviews

albums

What's been crossing our ears this week...

ALBUM OF THE WEEK DAN SULTAN Killer Liberation Music

atmosphere surrounding the lead-up to the momentous Wave Hill walk-off through the eyes of an Indigenous pastoral worker.

As an exceptional musician and songwriter, Dan Sultan was never one to fade into the background. However, it’s the honesty, grit and immaculately-crafted melodies found within his fourth studio album that will see Sultan back in the spotlight and once again receiving the acclaim he deserves.

From there, Sultan dives head first into the album’s lead single ‘Hold It Together’ with soul-drenched lyrics of courage through adversity and a truly uplifting gospelinspired chorus, while the politically-minded ‘Kingdom’ makes no bones about our country’s dark past, and showcases the songwriter’s diversity and musical maturity.

From the first bars of the opening track ‘Drover’, you find yourself marching to the beat of Sultan’s drum as he recreates the

“The honesty, grit and immaculately crafted melodies found within ... will see Sultan back in the spotlight.”

To close the album, Sultan chose the candid chorus of ‘Easier Man’, exposing vulnerability and the inevitable regret that comes after a relationship breakdown.

In this ever changing modern landscape we live in – where crass, cliché and cutesy often win out over soul, sincerity and substance – Killer will no doubt push Sultan front and centre, where he belongs.

Natalie Rogers

FOREVR

JEN CLOHER

GOLD CLASS

THE CREASES

Brisbane’s FOREVR demand our full attention with their grandiose double-album opus, Classics and Death is a miracle. Each album aims to display a different side of the band’s uniquely dense and experimental approach to synthpop. But what show up in spades across both records are FOREVR’S meticulously detailed production, powerful sonic intensity and dreamy melodies.

It’s been four long years since Jen Cloher’s last solo album, and while she’s been far from idle or out of our collective eyeline in that time, it’s bloody good to have her back putting out new material of her own. That’s because 2017 – and everybody involved with it – needs a healthy dose of Jen Cloher’s fire, and if you don’t feel like you’ve had a savage if eloquently delivered kick to the pants after a runthrough of these 11 excellent songs, then you’re probably not wearing any pants and you should do something about that immediately.

There’s a lot more to this Melbourne four-piece than the instrument referred to in their new album’s title, though pounding percussion remains a major driving force of their heady postpunk sound. Drum points at a shift in the group’s make-up (with Logan Gibson recently taking over from Mark Hewitt on the sticks), but it also marks an evolution of the band’s sound.

After releasing the Gradient EP in 2014, a debut LP has been a long time coming from The Creases.

While the Brisbane foursome’s first release was a propulsive blend of post punk and shoegaze, debut album Tremolow is a brighter, brasher record.

Classics / Death is a miracle Super Duper

Classics creates an artfully dark world that consists of drugged lullabies and gothic disco floor-fillers. FOREVR successfully turn pop music on its head here by overloading the senses with off-the-wall instrumentation, which brings in distorted guitars and bright synths kept in cohesion by heavy, explosive drumming. FOREVR can give off an appeasing tone, as in ‘True’, an addictive 90s alt-rock inspired jam with a strong groove and a guitar riff that gets etched in your brain upon first listen. The band can also adopt a gloomy expression in the slower tracks such as the contemporary R&B-influenced lead single ‘Columbus’ and the dissonant, ominous opening track ‘Floodlight’. The raw experimentation, appeasing vocals and colourful production that fuel Classics make for a very progressive pop album; as abstract as it is well-composed.

Death is a miracle shoots for a much more dance-y, nightclub-oriented vibe, mixing in a more trap-style flavour of alternative R&B/hip-hop. This disc puts an emphasis on atmosphere, with tracks such as ‘Halogen Glass’ and ‘Petriocha’ making for serious highlights. FOREVR use this stylistic change to drum up evocative new moods and continue to show off their creativity with a bounty of rich sounds and textures: the spacey ‘Forgive’, for example, hits with a veritable wave of cymbals and strings.

With this broad sonic palette, Death is a miracle feels like an electronic synth-soaked sketchbook filled with colourful, engaging experiments.

You start off with gentle, eerie R&B and then seamlessly progress into some bass heavy, thumping tech-house driven synth-pop in the closing tracks. What’s impressive is that FOREVR manage to pack Death is a miracle in a fairly cohesive package with their knack for layered soundscapes and an overarching languid feel in the vocal melodies.

Jen Cloher Milk! Records

When she’s not using Rolling Stones lyrics to weave tales of missing her partner while she’s on tour on lead single ‘Forget Myself’, or meandering in perfectly off-kilter fashion while questioning the Australian dream on ‘Regional Echo’, she’s raining blows on the “feral right” on ‘Analysis Paralysis’, and on both the over-privileged and (gasp!) music critics on ‘Shoegazers’. It’s all well and truly called-for, and Cloher delivers on every track, while her other half is pretty damn handy on lead gee-tar, too.

FOREVR can have your mind meandering between being mellowed-out and utterly dumbfounded by their music. Their versatility allows them to be both the soundtrack to a raging nightclub or a lonesome late-night journey into the internet rabbit hole.

We should be happy Jen Cloher is on our side. What an outstanding album.

Max Jacobson

Paul McBride

“Death is a miracle feels like an electronic synth-soaked sketchbook filled with colourful, engaging experiments.”

26 :: BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17

Drum Remote Control

Debut album It’s You exuded confidence and successfully captured their live sound, but the follow-up album both consolidates their strengths and points toward new directions. Gareth Liddiard (The Drones) produces, not attempting to fix what wasn’t broken in the first place, but delivering subtle craftsmanship in the background to support the band’s vision.

What sounds like a spaceship landing introduces the urgent, unyielding lead single and opening song ‘Twist In The Dark’. An ‘us vs them’ theme of dark romanticism against oppressive external forces soon emerges in frontman Adam Curley’s lyrics (“We wake at dawn to hear they’ve won”, he intones on ‘Rose Blind’), an expansion on the more solitary perspective of the first album. His tightly bound verses are unnerving, repressed and delivered in a lower register vocal, then swiftly uncoiled for furious, frenzied choruses – these are anthems for the alienated, simmering with angst and passion.

Chris Girdler

Tremolow Liberation Music

The first evidence of The Creases’ evolution came in 2015 with the single ‘Point’ (featured on the second side of Tremolow). The mix of chiming guitars and a wash of synths gave an early sign to the new direction. It’s ‘Impact’ that outright pronounces the band’s renewal – its anthemic chorus and jubilant use of horns show a swagger unlike anything The Creases have released previously.

Using the standard guitar-bassdrums trio as the foundation, each song gets extra vibrancy from the embellishments made with strings (‘Is It Love’), synths (‘Everybody Knows’) and horns (‘Were Young’).

It belies a far poppier sensibility than the band’s first offering.

Undoubtedly, the album owes a lot to Britpop. From the snarl of ‘Everybody Knows’ to the jangle of ‘At Last You Find’ and the lackadaisicalness of ‘In My Car’, it’s written large and without parody or plagiarism. But the high quality of the songs is undeniable, and indisputably the sound of The Creases.

Tremolow has to be one of the early contenders for the soundtrack to summer. It radiates. It’s a triumph.

Michael Hartt thebrag.com

name the artists

Share your answers at facebook.com/thebragsydney.

How many bands can you name from these colourful album covers?

ART BY KEIREN JOLLY

BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17 :: 27

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arts in focus FEATURE

There’s never been a Sydney Fringe Festival hub like this before [FESTIVAL] David Molloy speaks to festival director Kerri Glasscock about the mammoth space the festival calls home in 2017.

I

t’s not an aircraft hangar, and never was. But it sure feels like one, and it’s certainly the closest thing to an aircraft hangar most Sydneysiders will have set foot in.

And come September, it’s going to have a slew of weird and wonderful new residents, all of whom are still as gobsmacked to be here as the punters will be.

“It was FedEx’s HQ – it had a 24 hour operation here,” says festival director and CEO Kerri Glasscock, her voice echoing through the cavernous HPG Festival Hub in Alexandria. When we speak, the hub is not fully festival-ready, but the space hums with potential.

“For the independent sector, it’s the business.

This is the thing that could change the state of underground warehouse spaces in Sydney.”

“We have the whole building,” she continues. “This floor, which is 7000 square metres, and then three floors upstairs.”

festival for five years, she’s hardly one to rest on her laurels – and she sees the HPG space as a boon to everyone in her industry.

The Sydney Fringe Festival has always been an expansive affair – this year alone, the festival has accrued 42 venues across the city – with a central hub for parties and events, but thanks to their partnership with real estate developer HPG Australia, the curators now have a true centre of operations.

“I’ve been very firm on my interviewing about reminding people to not take something like this for granted,” she says. “I think it’s very easy to go, ‘Oh, Fringe is just doing a hub and it’s great,’ but it’s very easy to forget that we’ve never actually had this before, the independent sector in Sydney … a developer’s never gifted a site like this to an arts organisation in the way that HPG has.

“It’s like a Carriageworks for the indie sector,” says Glasscock, referring to the perennial contemporary arts space in Redfern. “That’s what this is, really, in essence, for as long as we have it … HPG are a principal partner of ours now, so the idea is that they’re happy for us to stay as long as we can.”

While it presents an incredible opportunity for the festival itself, Glasscock is looking even further into the future. Having established underground performance space The Old 505 and directed the

“For the independent sector, it’s the business. This is the thing that could change the state of underground warehouse spaces in Sydney, and it could also completely reimagine how we as a sector use spaces in Sydney and the partnerships that we could make to solve the lack of space.”

If there’s one thing the HPG Hub does not lack, it’s space.

So much so, it’s (somewhat ironically) proved a challenge to use the space effectively, and

there’s significant work to be done between now and September to isolate performance spaces and keep the cavern cosy. But there’s plenty of plans in place, and the moment those plans are completed, the Hub becomes a (temporary) party palace as Heaps Gay take over and queer the place up for their Masqueerade event.

“I have to keep correcting people, because they think it’s a typo,” Glasscock laughs. “We love Heaps Gay – I’m so excited to see what they do here.”

Upstairs, in the hauntingly empty office spaces that make up vast stretches of the upper floors, even stranger events will unfold, as Glasscock has given one of the country’s most avant-garde companies free rein to do what they will.

“It’s like a rabbit warren – it goes on forever and ever,” she says as we wander the vacant first-floor halls.

“I wanted someone to do a zombie apocalypse up here, but no one did. This is where Mongrel Mouth are taking over the whole floor, and

they’re doing an immersive thing where you can walk through the space.”

On top of these events, there’s two stages that will play host to festival headliners like Fringe Ambassador Tim Freedman and “sex clown” Betty Grumble, a plethora of installations and performance art pieces, and even a selection of video projections from a Scandinavian fringe film festival. The ambition and diversity of the program alone is enough to put the Fringe on the same scale as Cockatoo Island’s Biennale festivities – an enormous achievement for the independent arts sector.

“This is a kinda groundbreaking activation,” she says, “and we’re pushing the boundaries of what can be done; which is what we do at Fringe anyway.”

The Sydney Fringe Festival kicks off on Friday September 1, and the full program is available at sydneyfringe.com

“This is a kinda groundbreaking activation and we’re pushing the boundaries of what can be done; which is what we do at Fringe anyway.”

28 :: BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17

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Dignity Of Risk allows young performers to push the boundaries on the national stage

arts in focus FEATURE

[THEATRE] By David Molloy

I

n 1972, essayist Robert Perske first articulated the concept of the ‘dignity of risk’ in relation to caretaking for the aged and disabled. In his treatise, he put forward that “overprotection may appear on the surface to be kind, but it can be really evil … [it] can smother people emotionally, squeeze the life out of their hopes and expectations, and strip them of their dignity”, concluding that “there can be healthy development in risk taking and there can be crippling indignity in safety”.

Now, in a landmark co-production between the Australian Theatre for Young People and Shopfront Arts Co-Op, that notion is being fully embraced in Dignity Of Risk, a show devised by young artists of varying ability levels about the freedom to make mistakes.

“The idea for the show came about a couple of years ago when the Harness Ensemble – who were predominantly at that point an ensemble with disability – as they became young adults, started thinking about what they could and couldn’t do in the world; what independence they could have, and what and who around them stopped them from taking risks,” says Natalie Rose, the show’s director and Shopfront’s Creative Producer.

“Then I came into the show and the ensemble grew – well, it doubled – and then ATYP came on board … and got fi ve people from here to make it like a mega ensemble.

“We’re looking at being a person in the world regardless of ability – the ensemble is with and without disabilities – but looking at how you judge yourself, how you judge other people and how other people judge you; this sort of real tug-of-war in your life of when you’re deemed capable and incapable.”

For young performer Jake Pafumi, the experience has been revelatory, allowing him to defi ne precisely what the process of growing up entails and the risks inherent – and necessary – to maturing. “This specifi c opportunity has been a real eye opener for me, personally,” he says. “I feel that the ensemble, they have vastly different experiences in the world that they’ve come from [but] we’re all kinda going along the same journey – growing up, fi guring which boundaries we can push, who holds us back, what we are able to do with our abilities and capabilities – and it’s been an eye-opening experience as to how we interact with each other; how we interact with the world around us.”

“There’s been this comfort in discovering that regardless of your abilities and capabilities, that everyone’s kind of in the same boat of having a bit of a shit time every now and then,” says Rose, never one to mince words. “There’s kind of comfort in the fact that we’re all in this crappy world and trying to figure out who you are together.”

Even for its co-producers at ATYP, the show itself is potentially risky – it’s rare for the company to engage in the nebulous practice of devised theatre, having primarily worked in scripted theatre before.

Naturally, it’s a measured risk: Rose has built a career on devised work with collaborative performance ensemble Post, and contemporary performances incorporating personal stories are Shopfront’s bread and butter.

“Everything in the show has been generated from the ensemble in collaboration with the creative team, so it’s personal stories on stage, and it’s walking that line between fact and fiction,” says Rose. “In the fact that it’s a devised piece, there’s a risk just in that, in itself. Any devised work is risky territory. I’d say that Shopfront always uses the voices of the people in that ensemble or workshop to make the work.

We’ve definitely followed that

path and that’s something new for ATYP – to put on a show that isn’t entering the rehearsal period with a script. At the beginning of the period, we had no idea where we would end up.”

young people (especially those with disability) been offered such a gamble – the possibility of failure, the chance to overcome a challenge, is exactly what they want and need.

The result is truly unique – a contemporary performance in which young people with and without disability recreate their personal experiences on stage, dismantling the perceived boundaries between them. “It’s real people on stage telling real stories,” says Rose.

“If you’re not able to push your boundaries and speak up for yourself then what’s the point in going for something, if there’s no risk?” says Pafumi.

If it sounds daunting getting up on stage at the national youth theatre and speaking to your own life experience in an experimental art form, that’s precisely the point. Rarely, if ever, before have

“If there’s no fear, how’re you gonna push yourself; how’re you gonna know your limits; how’re you gonna reach your highest potential? You just don’t know if you’re not gonna take those risks.”

“If there’s no fear, how’re you gonna push yourself; how’re you gonna know your limits; how’re you gonna reach your highest potential? You just don’t know if you’re not gonna take those risks. If you sit comfortably, you might be happy but you mightn’t get anywhere, but I feel like if you take a risk, you can find out truly your potential and what you want to do and where you want to go.”

Dignity Of Risk runs from Wednesday August 9 – Saturday August 26 at ATYP.

arts review ■ Film

Maudie is an actor’s film, buoyed by strong performances

By Rylan Dawson

S

ally Hawkins gives the performance of her life as real-life Canadian artist Maud Lewis.

Forced into living a reclusive life and riddled with crippling arthritis, Maud is desperate to escape her existence as a social pariah. Her salvation comes in the form of a flyer left by a roughand-tumble fish pedlar, Everett (Ethan Hawke), seeking the aid of a ‘woman’s touch’ in his home in Newfoundland. Unsure of his new housekeeper at first, Everett slowly falls in love with Maud and the two embark upon an unlikely and insecure marriage.

The film serves to remind us that everyone has a story to tell. Maud’s joy in life becomes painting, embracing cheerful landscapes and canvases of flora and fauna. But there is more to Maud: she’s a prisoner of her time, with her perfect contentment

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tempered only by the whims of her bullish and chauvinistic husband.

The storyline can be laborious, but the performances delivered by the two leads, steered by director Aisling Walsh, lift the film above and beyond. Their relationship is the focus of the film, with most of the screen time located in a one-bedroom home, drawing the audience into the characters’ suffocating world through their crisp dialogue, unspoken love and disdain. Hawke’s merciless grunts shape his character as a man horrified by the mere thought of ever showing his sensitive side, while Hawkins creates a pure portrayal of a woman whose desire is to escape into any sort of simplistic contentment.

The film’s biggest (and only) fault is the run time. It may be the filmmaker’s intention to deliver to the audience the same

inescapable melancholy felt onscreen, but with little to no plot available (a passing mention of Vice-President Nixon’s interest in Maud’s paintings aside), there is no reason for it to last nearly two hours. Shaving 30 minutes off would have created a much tighter, dialogue-driven drama rivalling Hawke’s brilliant Before Sunrise trilogy. That aside, Maudie will captivate your attention for most of the film’s length, even against your reasonable doubts going in.

This is a movie for anyone who secretly believes in their heart of hearts that suffering and despair offer the only lifestyle worth living.

It’s no Romeo And Juliet, but there is a deep and intriguing connection between these two that lasted until their dying days.

Maudie arrives on Australian screens on Thursday August 24.

“This is a movie for anyone who secretly believes in their heart of hearts that suffering and despair offer the only lifestyle worth living.”

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FOOD + DRINK

REVIEW

Sydney’s Top 6 International Eateries

BY SUSI GEORGE, DAVID MOLLOY AND POPPY REID

S

ydney’s greatest strength as a cultural hub is the rich tapestry of influences that flow into it from around the globe. Fascinatingly, the city is also something of a mecca for foodies, with Michelin-starred restauranteurs like Noma’s René Redzepi even using pop-up venues as a launching pad for their more daring creations.

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With these things in mind, we decided to celebrate the venues that best showcase the multiculturalism that defines Sydney, with palate-pleasers that draw inspiration from Mexico, Japan, India, Hawaii and even further abroad.

1.

4.

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1.

The Two Wolves Cantina, Chippendale

Tucked into Grafton Lane beside the newly refurbished Lansdowne Hotel, this community cantina is considered “the definition of soul food” for good reason. It’s volunteer-run and emphatically not-for-profit, with their proceeds going towards a variety of charitable organisations.

So the ethics are tasty enough, but then there’s the grub – sourced from family recipes that volunteers bring in, the rotating menu constantly surprises. From Pope Francis’ spicy empanadas to bun thit nuong, all the way to mucho picanté agave and chilli glazed wings, there’s something to warm even the coldest soul. Oh, and halfprice Taco Tuesdays.

2.

Flying Fajita Sistas Restaurant, Glebe

This Glebe institution has been given the Best Tacos In Sydney nod more than once, mixing European influences in with their staple Mexican fare. This is the place for fajita lovers, and the ceviche (lime-cured snapper) is top-shelf stuff. The more adventurous can dive into a bowl of guisado con chochoyotes (king prawns and masa dumplings in a tomatillo-guajillo chilli broth) or line up one of the Sista’s six mouthwatering tequila fl ights.

3.

The Bach Eatery, Newtown

New Zealand may not seem “international” compared to Mexico or Japan, but goddamn can those Kiwis cook.

The folks at Bach – deriving their namesake from the NZ slang for a beach house – seek the taste of summer, and

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pride themselves on simplicity and freshness. Shellfish lovers, welcome to your new home: the greenlip mussels with kaitaia fire mayo are just the beginning. And, of course, there’s L&P to spare – it even appears in cocktail form.

4.

Saké Jr, CBD

Boasting “fast food that tastes like fine food”, Saké Jr takes the precision and refinery of Japanese cuisine and crams it into grab’n’go form. Your life is not complete until you’ve had a JFC (Japanese Fried Chicken) burger, which puts karaage pride of place.

How about a sushi burrito? Or a Hawaiian fusion inspired poke bowl?

Naturally, there’s enough craft beer from Urban Craft Brewing Co. and imported saké available to knock out a salaryman, and $10 ramen nights for the pocketconscious.

5.

UME Burger, Barangaroo

Look, no one’s denying that Barangaroo is a blight on the landscape – a monument to Sydney’s true corporate owners and bloated casino magnates. But it’s also rather shiny, and while you’re walking the overdeveloped harbour, what better way to distract yourself from the consumption of the city is there than filling your face with a frighteningly good fish katsu burger and a Kirin?

Along with deliciously umami food, UME Burger boasts a sensational view of the bay that goes down well with a tall glass of umeshu (plum wine) and house-made soda.

6.

Brick Lane, Darlinghurst

So maybe you can’t fork out $1200 and a fortnight off work to get to London – why not have London come to you? Brick Lane models itself on its British counterpart, a street festooned with Indian restaurants, while bring a modern inventive twist to their experimental dishes. The menu is chockers with Punjabi palate-pleasers, many of which are vego friendly – the eggplant and potato curry is the kinda shit you dream about.

7.

Salmon & Bear, Newtown/Zetland

Australian chef Mark Jensen installed a gigantic Mibrasa oven from Spain in his restaurants’ two locations in Newtown and Zetland. It’s made clear from the first bite.

Try the snapper that’s been charred on one side, and the side of roasted vegetables that offer campfire nostalgia with a caramelised twist.

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game on Gaming news and reviews with Adam Guetti

2017

New Releases The last few months have been arguably sparse for hardcore video game fans, but August picks things up substantially, so start rounding up those pennies for some of the month’s top picks.

Tacoma kicked things off for the month – a space-centric adventure brought to you by the team behind indie darling Gone Home. It entered XBO and PC’s orbit on Wednesday August 2.

Earlier this week, on Tuesday August 8, Gears of War veteran Cliff Blezinski released the new online shooter LawBreakers (PS4, PC). The air-focused gameplay looks solid, but is going to face some pretty strong competition in the face of Overwatch.

Meanwhile, long-time Sonic fans will be eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sonic Mania. Touted as the title that will help steady the struggling hedgehog, the brand new 2D adventure game certainly seems to be hitting all the right notes. It speeds onto PS4, XBO and Switch from Tuesday August 15.

Things really get going, however, on Wednesday August 22 when Uncharted’s Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross bid farewell to the boys and go it alone in the series’ first standalone adventure, The Lost Legacy. Copious amounts of climbing and shooting are still expected.

For the sports fans, Friday August 25 promises Madden 18, now making the most of EA’s gorgeous Frostbite engine, while Tuesday August 29 introduces an incredibly unexpected Nintendo Switch mash-up between the Mushroom Kingdom and Ubisoft’s Rabbids, with Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. It might sound strange, but this turn-based strategy experiment actually looks to be shaping up rather well.

SMASH! Sydney Manga and Anime Show While most are aware of the likes of Oz Comic-Con, EB Expo and PAX, they’re not the only conventions worth your time. SMASH! is a much quieter achiever, having celebrated manga and anime for many years, and 2017 is bound to be no exception.

Taking place on Friday August 18 and Saturday August 19 at Rosehill Gardens, there’s no shortage of things to do. From art exhibits to maid cafes, and everything in between, SMASH! hopes to tick all the relevant cultural boxes. There will even be an abundance of cosplay to see, panels to visit and Japanese voice actors and illustrators to meet in the flesh.

Tickets start from $35, so to grab yourself a piece of the action, visit smash.org.au.

Celebrate Studio Ghibli Whether you’re a hardcore gamer or not, chances are you’ve heard of

Japanese animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli. After all, the team is a major driving force behind the PS3 classic Ni No Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch and its hugely anticipated upcoming sequel.

WHAT'S ON

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If you’d like to gain a greater appreciation for the animators before that point, why not become a part of Celebrate Studio Ghibli?

Running from Thursday August 24, you’ll be able to enjoy a month-long showcase of their work as all 22 magical creations are screened in cinemas across Sydney, along with a behind-the-scenes documentary.

From Newtown to Penrith, there’s never been a better chance to revisit classics like Spirited Away, Grave of the Firefl ies and My Neighbour Totoro.

For more information and details on the screenings, head to studioghibli. com.au/celebratestudioghibli/

reviewroundup

By Adam Guetti

Review: Tekken 7 (PS4, XBO, PC)

S

even iterations deep, there’s a lot of pressure on Bandai Namco’s shoulders to deliver with Tekken’s latest slugfest, but fans should rest easy in the knowledge that, for the most part, it delivers.

Already released for arcades a number of years ago, the fighter has been polished and spit-shined on multiple fronts, and is all the better for it. Movement feels exceptionally fluid, the rage system packs some extra depth, and the new treasure battle will quickly become addictive. There is a steep learning curve for newbies, however, with a focus on accuracy and an abundance of combos to take in, so make sure you’re ready for a 4 real fight.

Review: Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy (PS4)

Review: Arms (Switch)

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N

t’s been a long time between drinks for everybody’s favourite marsupial, but with a new console generation comes a new lease on life – and make no doubt about it, Crash is back. Yes, this is still just a collection of old PlayStation favourites, but what you might not know is that developer Vicarious Visions has impressively rebuilt the whole package from the ground up with its own code.

What this allows for is an experience that expertly shifts things around so that everything feels just how you remember, but plays even better. It’s also hard – often crushingly so – but checkpoints are now thankfully more forgiving, cementing this release as pure 4 nostalgic heaven.

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intendo Switch owners haven’t had the largest library to draw from as the console continues to gain its footing in the market, but Arms hopes to help alleviate that with a quirky boxer that definitely punches up the charm.

Drawing inspiration from Nintendo classic Punch Out, Arms is all about strengths, weaknesses and knowing when to capitalise on the right opportunity as you duel opponents packing extendable arms and super-powered fists. What this often leads to is a tense feud of dodges and weaves as you work towards curving your perfect hit or timing a crucial grab.

Alone, Arms might lack the substance for a lengthy addiction, but alongside some friends or delving into the game’s online suite, Arms is a boatload of fun from start to finish.

3.5

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out & about Queer(ish) matters with Arca Bayburt

Things You Don’t Ask Queer People

A

s a person who’s in the minority, it’s understandable at times that I have to field questions that are a product of innocent curiosity blended with a forgiveable amount of ignorance.

There are also questions that are so absurd that they don’t deserve an answer, because their premises have no logical justification; so, by answering them, you’re automatically accepting an imbecilic world view.

It’s the equivalent of stepping into a sandbox with a child to discuss matters outside of the sandbox while you’re both pretending the world outside of it doesn’t exist. Doesn’t work.

A culture that sweeps gay under the rug is gonna have some weird ideas about their fellow humans. So here’s a thought exercise. Imagine a gay couple. Let’s say for argument’s sake they are two men and they’ve got a bunch of kids. Regardless of whether you’ve just met them, or if you’ve known them forever, which of the

On Saturday August 19, head to The Shift Club on Oxford Street for HIGH NRG DECADENCE. Despite the lockout limitations (1:30am), the party

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Dance and Electronica with Alex Chetverikov

Ultra Music Festival 2016

The premise of that last question is unacceptable because it assumes that: a) There must be a mother for parenthood to be viable b) One of these men is not a father Now for another of my favourite fool questions, aimed at a gay couple who are two women: a) Which one of you is the man?

The premise assumes that one of a couple must be of the opposing sex or gender for it to work – or, in order to preserve their hetero-sanity, a straight person must assume some creepy imitation of heterosexuality is being performed in order for the relationship to be valid.

That’s just silly. I like to quote Ellen DeGeneres on this one: “Asking who’s the man and who’s the woman in a same-sex relationship is like asking which chopstick is the fork.”

The pressure is on for queer people to embody normative heterosexual traditions and that pressure is exerted by, y’know, the massive hetero hop that is Planet Earth. These nonsensical questions are asked by well-meaning simpletons because their cultural programming has them ensnared in a world view that queer people disrupt simply by existing.

Luckily, this can be remedied by exercising basic empathy.

So which chopstick is the fork?

Why I’m Not So Excited About The Impending Arrival Of Ultra Music Festival

T

he imminent arrival of Ultra Music Festival to our shores screams a lot of things to me. Ultra currently plays to five continents and 21 countries, so it’s fair to say it’s managed to capture the popular vote. But with the hyper-successful international mainstream music festival brand set to touch down in 2019, I’m certainly not holding my breath.

Leaving little to the imagination Raucous fanfare? Bells-and-whistles production? Headliner after headliner? No thanks. Perhaps it’s age catching up with me (the old, wizened bastardry of 29), but this well-oiled festival machine seems almost entirely divorced from any semblance of the natural, and, from the looks of it, leaves very little to the imagination. Throw something a little more subversive in the mix, or a suggestion of chaos; even something with a hint of uniqueness to it.

I’ve never really been one for blown-out entertainment, though, so the slick & polish of blaring TV screens, fire pillars and DJ festival stages tends to get lost on me.

Developing the local industry Festivals are an essential part of the musical landscape – that much I can agree with. What I find problematic is their scale (in this case, Ultra’s sheer, gargantuan scale) and what they contribute.

Perhaps it’s highly idealistic on my part to suggest that a multimillion dollar company play an active role in developing and supporting the local industries within which they operate. What I’d love to see is Ultra putting a bit of the hard-earned towards local events and infrastructure, and supporting the broader network of artists, many of whom might never be considered in their events.

Australia has a burgeoning local electronic music scene steadily producing a veritable wealth of talent, and, in between making money hand over fist, one hopes Ultra don’t lose sight of the bigger (or smaller) picture. The irony of it all is that, in all their noisy technicolour, Ultra culture assumes something of a bland monochromatic nature, recalling the whitewashed plethora of cashed-up Vegas DJs.

this week…

On Sunday August 13, get over to the Imperial Hotel in Erskineville for some spicy community action: SEND TURNBULL A SPINE! In the face of majority support throughout Australia, the Prime Minister has failed to deliver marriage equality, so the queer community has decided to deliver him what he desperately needs – a spine. Support this fundraiser to build a giant spine and send it down to Canberra. The spine will be driven from the Imperial Hotel down to Canberra on Sunday arvo and be delivered on Monday morning.

You can make donations and see progress at sendturnbullaspine. com

Off The Record

following questions is acceptable to ask? a) What’s your kid’s name? b) How long have you been together for? c) Which one of you is the mum?

“THERE’S A REASON WHY MALCOLM TURNBULL IS BEING HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR FAILING TO DELIVER BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS TO QUEER CITIZENS – AND THAT’S BECAUSE THE LESS WE TALK ABOUT IT, THE MORE PEOPLE GET BIZARRE, FANTASTICAL IDEAS ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE GAY.”

Now I’m gonna go ahead and contradict myself by answering some unanswerable questions, just to illustrate my point further. After this, you might have some idea as to why we desperately need a real conversation about gay rights and same sex marriage in Australia.

There’s a reason why Malcolm Turnbull is being held accountable for failing to deliver basic human rights to queer citizens – and that’s because the less we talk about it, the more people get bizarre, fantastical ideas about what it means to be gay.

brag beats

Reeking a bit of globalisation

Heaps Gay’s Masqueerade

will be going until 4am, so be sure to hydrate.

The lineup is stellar, featuring Alex K, KCB, Oursource, Dave Austin, Rata, Charlie Brown, Steve S, Andee and Lately with a special secret guest to be announced. Tickets are available now.

From Saturday September 2 to Monday September 4, in a giant warehouse somewhere in Alexandria (location to be announced), prepare for some dirty, twisted and extremely gay

good times with Heaps Gay’s Masqueerade for the Sydney Fringe Festival’s opening weekend. There will be great music, art and performance featuring local legends, artists and musicians: Lupa J, Post Motel, Rebel Yell, SVETA, Okapi Neon, Jikuroux, Caroline Garcia, Anna May Kirk x Alice Joel, Honey Long x Hayley Coughlan, Matt Grant and so many more!

The dress code is ‘Transform/Disguise’ and tickets are available now.

In a recent article on women in electronic music, I made passing mention of Smirnoff’s campaign to “equalize” gender representation in the industry. While it remains to be seen how effective Smirnoff’s initiative is, and how well it’s realized, the (public) intent is there. With its incredible success, popularity and reach, events and institutions like Ultra are a potential platform for charities and other vehicles of social progress. I’d love to see their Sponsors card read like more than a list of multinationals. Engage the community, and think about how your event can be more than just a music festival.

Ultra Music Festival 2017

Fear not, folks. Ultra Music Festival is still two years away. In the meantime, check out thebrag.com/gigs for everything happening in Sydney’s EDM scene.

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g g guide gig g

send your listings to : gigguide@seventhstreet.media

pick of the the issue

For our full gig and club listings, head to thebrag.com/gig-guide.

New Found Glory Montaigne

THURSDAY AUGUST 10 FRIDAY AUGUST 11

Metro Theatre

New Found Glory + Stand Atlantic

Metro Theatre, Sydney. Saturday August 12. 7pm. $34.80 Our very own fantastic wreck is just 21 years old, and already headlining the Metro. Don’t get jealous – get in the crowd.

7:30pm. $68.85 WEDNESDAY AUGUST 9 In The Round w/ Maples + Timothy James + More Leadbelly, Newtown.

6pm. $5 Kiyanosh & The Syndicate + The BeatLab + The Knots Play Bar, Surry Hills.

8pm. FREE

Lonely Sheep + Anni & the Electric Fins + Countrypolitan Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 7pm. $7

THURSDAY AUGUST 10 Dave Favours & The Roadside Ashes + The Ramalamas Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 7pm. $7

Durry + Crust Fund Kids + Loose Unit Valve Bar, Ultimo.

8pm. $10 Fuzz Face w/ Forest Hall + Ride For Rain + Whispering Jackie The Hideaway Bar, Enmore. 7:30pm.

FREE Joseph & James Tawadros Camelot Lounge, Marrickville. 7pm.

Montaigne + I Know Leopard + Alex The Astronaut

$37.90 Kaloune + Rosie Henshaw Django Bar, Marrickville. 6pm. $12.90 Owen Campbell Frankie’s Pizza, Sydney. 8pm. FREE Slaves + Awaken I Am Bald Faced Stag, Leichardt. 7pm. $25

FRIDAY AUGUST 11 Flynn Effect + Gods Of Eden + Mercury Sky + Reign On Mars Factory Floor, Marrickville. 8pm. $15 Shaun Kirk Venue 505, Surry Hills. 8pm. $15

Skizophrenia + Enzyme + Eraser + Grey Places + Rapid Dye Valve Bar, Ultimo.

9pm. $15 Sons Of Zion Max Watt’s, Moore Park. 9pm. $39.80 Tuppaware Party + SCK CHX + Sloom Botany View Hotel, Newtown. 9pm. FREE

SATURDAY AUGUST 12 Bangarang: Never Grow Up Valve Bar, Ultimo.

10pm. $10 Hollie Matthew + Nick Perry The Bearded Tit, Redfern. 4pm. FREE Husky + Hot Spoke + Tia Gostelow

Crooked Colours Jep & Dep

Crooked Colours Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. Thursday August 10 + Friday August 11.

8pm. $25 Last time they played Sydney, they were supporting Crystal Castles. Now they’re locals wielding a debut LP, ready to get in your bones.

Jep & Dep + Ainsley Farrell + Obscura Hail + The Singing Skies The Gaelic Club, Surry Hills. Friday August 11. 7:30pm. FREE Sydney folk-noir duo Jep & Dep are ready to lull you into melancholic wonder with vocals that would make The Handsome Family envious. xxxx

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g g guide gig g send your listings to : gigguide@seventhstreet.media

With Confidence

$22.90 Paper Parade + Graham M + Tim Boffa Manly Wharf Hotel, Manly.

3pm. FREE

MONDAY AUGUST 14 Soul Messengers The Beat Bar, Potts Point. 8pm.

FREE

TUESDAY AUGUST 15 Acoustique Lounge L1 Lazybones Lounge, Marrickville. 7pm. $15 Tim Walker Gladstone Hotel, Dulwich Hill. 8pm.

FREE

THURSDAY AUGUST 17

With Confidence + Seaway + WSTR Factory Theatre, Marrickville. Friday August 18. 8pm. $30.99 Pop-punk emo kids rejoice! You finally have local representation, and this is their only Aussie tour this year. Ready your GHD.

Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $31 Marlo Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park.

6:30pm. $101.90

Noctet Foundry616, Ultimo. 8:30pm. $21.50 Sanctuary Valve Bar, Ultimo.

8pm. $5

Shellie Morris + Troy Jungadi Brady + GuGu Miliywutj Powerhouse Museum, Ultimo.

7pm. $45

SUNDAY AUGUST 13 Edith Piaf And Friends Camelot Lounge, Marrickville. 7pm. $32.90

Rhys Darby

Fallon Cush + Bryan Estepa and The Tempe Two + The Forresters Union Hotel, Newtown. 4pm.

FREE

Institutionalized Fest V Valve Bar, Ultimo.

2pm. $15 Jess Ciampa + Jose Zarb Django Bar, Marrickville. 6pm.

Emma Davis Golden Age Cinema, Surry Hills. 9pm. FREE

FRIDAY AUGUST 18 Jack The House 7: Beat Dis!

Slyfox, Enmore.

9pm. $25 King + Evocatus + Somnium Nox Bald Faced Stag, Leichardt. 8pm. $20 Tumbleweed + Los Hombres Del Diablo + The Dark Clouds Miranda Hotel, Miranda. 8pm. $25

SATURDAY AUGUST 19 Set Mo Metro Theatre, Sydney. 9pm. $32.25

SUNDAY AUGUST 20 Acoustic Sessions The Botanist, Kirribilli. 2pm. FREE Sunday Social w/ Helena Ellis + K-Time + Lavida + Melkior The Argyle, The Rocks. 9pm. FREE

TUESDAY AUGUST 22 Acoustique Lounge L1 Lazybones Lounge, Marrickville. 7pm. $15

Have a gig or club listing to get in The BRAG? You can now submit your gig and club listings, head to thebrag.com/gig-guide.

Mark Seymour

Mark Seymour & The Undertow The Basement, Circular Quay. Friday August 18 + Saturday August 19.

7:30pm. $55

Rhys Darby

The frontman and songwriter of Hunters & Collectors slips quietly into the confines of the Basement to wander back through the highlights of his spectacular career.

Enmore Theatre, Enmore. Friday August 18. 8pm. $71.30 It can’t all be music, can it? The manager of New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo takes to the stage el solo as part of Just For Laughs.

For our full gig and club listings, head to thebrag.com/gig-guide. xxx

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COLOURS