ROOTS DOWN
OG FLAVAS
ADAMANTIUM WOLF
BLUES ‘N’ ROOTS WITH DAN CONDON ROOTSDOWN@TIMEOFF.COM.AU
URBAN AND R&B NEWS BY CYCLONE
METAL, HARDCORE AND PUNK WITH LOCHLAN WATT
Drake
Hat Fitz & Cara Robinson Okay, I promised a couple of weeks ago that I’d get back to you once I’d had a chance to smash through Wiley Ways, the new record from Hat Fitz & Cara Robinson a few times and this week seems as good a time as any to air my thoughts on the release. Well, firstly, it’s very good. I will admit, sheepishly, that I wasn’t exactly excited when I heard a few years back that Fitz was now performing with an Irish woman whose predominant musical input was going to be playing the tin whistle. Don’t get me wrong, the tin whistle is a great instrument, but alongside Fitzy’s gruff voice and gutsy guitar work, it seemed like it might be a little too incongruent. Or, more frankly, it sounded like maybe Hat Fitz was going to be settling down. Now, most people who have seen the duo know that this is a fear that can be dispelled, and Wiley Ways proves it further. Fitz sounds exactly like he always has; his songs are slightly better and his guitar playing a little more pronounced, but the most striking thing now is how well Robinson complements Fitz; the sweetness in her voice isn’t too at odds with the harshness in Fitz’s, her blazing tin whistle has its place but doesn’t outstay its welcome and she just seems to lift these songs. The work of Jeff Lang in the producer’s chair mustn’t be glossed over either, he’s made these songs shine beautifully in the most natural of ways. Hat Fitz has always been just about as good as Aussie blues gets for mine, and Wiley Ways seems like another leap forward for the inveterate performer and his missus after their first foray together a couple of years back. Great stuff. Also, Fitz and Robinson have announced extensive tour dates in support of the record’s release and rest assured a couple of them are happening in and around the greater Brisbane and Northern New South Wales region. Catch them at The Joynt in South Brisbane on Thursday October 4 and the Byron Bay Brewery Friday 5. The biggest sell-outs in the history of boogie rock are coming back to Australia, thanks to a large supermarket chain who are presenting their tour and using it as a platform to advertise their low, low prices. Look, Status Quo probably totally suck now anyway (I’ve never seen them), despite the fact that they were once a pretty fucking great band, and I just don’t think I can support a tour backed by a supermarket chain; it just feels wrong. But if you’re willing to take the risk, you can see Status Quo at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre Thursday 28 March, a date that is suspiciously close to Bluesfest 2013… I will say no more on that, though. I have early details of another Folk Uke tour that ought to be coming through Australia early in the New Year, following on from a pretty successful showing over here around a year ago. If you’re not familiar with them, this act is the duo that is made up of Cathy Guthrie (daughter of Arlo, granddaughter of Woody) and Amy Nelson (daughter of Willie) who perform irreverent tunes like Motherfucker Got Fucked Up, Shit Makes The Flowers Grow and I Miss My Boyfriend (look it up). The only date I can confirm at the moment sees the ladies playing The Basement in Sydney on Friday 4 January, but I’m sure there are plenty more to come. Jen Cloher has been pretty quiet of late, but she’s back in action with a national tour set for this November. She has a new record in the works – this tour will be in celebration of the first single from it – but more details on that when they come to hand. You can catch her with support from Courtney Barnett at the Black Bear Lodge Thursday 22 November. 34 • TIME OFF
Canada’s multicultural urban scene, centred on Toronto, is so hot right now with Drake, who initially experienced fame as a kid actor in Degrassi: The Next Generation, and The Weeknd. For a big star, Drake – signed to Lil Wayne’s Young Money Entertainment – is awesomely avant-garde, even collaborating with The xx’s Jamie Smith. Admittedly The Weeknd, who unleashed a superb trilogy of mixtapes last year, has been quiet recently – or touring. But then there are the illwave producers in Drake’s clique, chief among them his bestie Noah “40” Shebib. One of Shebib’s illest songs? Jamie Foxx’s chilly Drake-featuring ballad, Fall For Your Type. Also in Drake’s crew are Boi-1da and T-Minus, both similarly making their mark independently. Now Canadian R&B superstar (and one-time folkstress) Nelly Furtado is mounting a comeback six years after her trailblazing Loose, which encompassed some of Timbaland’s finest work. Let’s hope she can, because the lead single, Big Hoops (Bigger The Better), didn’t exactly ignite. For The Spirit Indestructible, out next month, Furtado hired Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins and Salaam Remi (Nas cameos on his Something). Indeed, though Furtado is affiliated with Canadian rappers like k-os, she’s shunned the T Dot’s happening studio talent. Canada’s urban acts have struggled to find success in the US. Drake beat the odds. The ‘90s rapper/singer/producer Saukrates (it’s a play on Socrates) floundered – despite an alliance with Redman - being signed and dropped by labels. Yet Canadian urban types are versatile. The SomalianCanadian MC/singer/muso/activist K’naan has a role as a corpse in David Cronenberg’s extraordinary film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel, Cosmopolis,
which presaged the GFC and Occupy movement. Robert Pattinson compellingly portrays Eric Packer, a swaggerin’ billionaire asset manager (or capitalist bloodsucker) who’s unravelling. Packer spends a day travelling across a congested NYC to his old barber in a stretch limo. He belatedly learns that his favourite rapper, the Sufi Brother Fez (K’naan), has died suddenly from a genetic heart condition, the funeral procession partially causing that traffic snarl. Packer is asked sardonically if he’s disappointed that Fez wasn’t shot. The rapper’s record company sees the event as a marketing opp. It’s a symbolic twist to a film about a powerful man disconnected from reality; one who abstracts, and speculates, but doesn’t feel. Packer can’t ‘keep it real’, only surreal. Drake, that King Of Existentialist Rap, would get it. The dude has celebrity, and money, but he’s miserable. Meanwhile, the underrated K’naan, best known for his hit, Wavin’ Flag (and appearing on Distant Relatives alongside Nas and Damian Marley), is due to shortly deliver Country, God Or The Girl. Guests include Nas, Bono and The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. There’s input, too, from Ryan Tedder. Ironically, Drake is co-producing a posthumous Aaliyah album for her manager/uncle Barry Hankerson’s Blackground Records. The emo MC has identified the Detroit soulstress, who perished in an air crash over a decade ago, as a major influence on his melodic rap-singing style, admiring her ‘gangsta’ edge. He has sampled her, and has Aaliyah tattoos. Drake raps on the newly-circulated Aaliyah number, Enough Said, helmed by Shebib, from the LP. Controversially, Drake opportunistically disses Chris Brown, with whom he allegedly brawled in a NY nightclub over Rihanna, mocking the relatively low sales of Brown’s Fortune. It is unfeeling, and Aaliyah’s fans think it’s in poor taste. The singer’s immediate family, as well as her seminal producers Timbaland and Missy Elliott, have distanced themselves from Blackground’s enterprise – and it does all sound suspiciously 2Pac-y, considering it’s about recycling, or contemporising, old demos. Entrepreneurialism gone wrong.
THE BREAKDOWN POP CULTURE THERAPY WITH ADAM CURLEY
No Zu Side by side, the new albums from Cat Power and Melbourne’s NO ZU appear as a countertop display in some trinket shop tucked into the NSW coastline. On a toilet stop off the highway, you’d browse glittered fairy statues and books on accessing tranquillity before coming to the pastel pink and purple records. Cat Power’s Sun, out this Friday through Matador/Remote Control, features a pixelated image of Chan Marshall transposed over a rainbow through a lavender sky. The cover of NO ZU’s Life, also out this Friday through Sensory Projects, is a gaudy collage, its marbled peach and pink backdrop resembling a sample of kitchen laminate, on top of which sits a square of pool-water pattern, the midsection of a bikini-clad body, a plastic bag, a sliver of an upside-down globe. Sun and Life: each is surely promising a metaphysical purpose and a whole lot of pan flute. The albums, however, do not come from a ribbon-flanked tourist stop but from metropolitan record labels dealing in the subcultural in Australia and America. That one of the promises above is made good (guess which) by each album, then, could come as some surprise. Both acts have an interest in exploring something outside of the physical and the individual, in looking for some collective peace or understanding. The real surprise is that, despite the surface similarities of their records, they are able to come to this search by opposing methods. NO ZU’s Life is the work of percussionist Nicolaas Oogjes along with a now core band drawn from Melbourne’s Rat Vs Possum, Oogjes’ former TTT bandmate Adrian Vecino, and additional collaborators. Anyone familiar with TTT and Rat Vs Possum can draw lines between the members and the record’s use of post-punk and no-wave percussion, shuddering and yelped vocals, funk rhythms and a ritualistic approach to
song structure. It’s a bombardment of the senses: music that is so much about the body but has so many parts – interweaving melodies, hyper-detailed percussion, the sheer volume of instruments including synths and sax – that it’s tempting to constantly be deciphering what’s taking place. The challenge here is to let that go. With repeated listens it becomes apparent the intention of Life is to explore what is universally shared. By grabbing often disparate sounds and images from recent history and throwing them together, melding them, turning them into a rhythmic meditation, the music transcends its many individual parts. Even listening to the record alone it’s impossible not to imagine yourself in a moving mass. The suburban images on the cover arranged as a ‘new-age’ collage is to imagine the same possibility for everything to transcend its origin. Marshall’s Sun is very much about the individual. She recorded and produced the album herself and played all instruments. Though the recordings are dense, built with piano and acoustic guitar and electronic beats, the songs are centred on Marshall as a singer and a lyricist, a focus that has not been maintained through the Atlanta-born performer’s career. In promotional material for the record, She even describes it as a “rebirth” and about “personal power and fulfilment”. Yet by concentrating on the self, Marshall comes to some place where the self means the universe. She views her life always through a prism of natural things outside herself: time and earthly things and “people just like you, people just like me”. Through the record Marshall layers her voice to the point where there is often no apparent base vocal track; she is not centred but everywhere. She interrupts herself, most notably on Always On My Own, when in its final moments she sings, “I want to live my way of living,” over herself multiple times. The album’s cover then, depicting a transparent Marshall gazing outwards – at both the rainbow and the world beyond the physical album – is also about transcendence. And so we’re back to the point where both albums are on the counter of a hippie stop-off, nestled amongst the dolphin posters and hemp purses. Then again, what was ever so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding? Other than the pan flute.
themusic.com.au
Holy moley – Refused are actually touring Australia. The Swedish hardcore reinventionists, who announced their reformation for some shows across the world in early 2012, will be here for the first (and presumably last) time in November. Catch them out at The Eaton’s Hill Hotel on November 11 for a licensed/all ages show - tickets on sale this Friday thanks to Soundwave. Parkway Drive’s new album is called Atlas as is coming before the year’s end through Resist Records. While details on this release are as yet scant, the band will embark on a launch tour throughout December with I Killed The Prom Queen, Northlane and Survival in tow. The epic lineup will hit Brisbane Riverstage on 14 December – tickets are on sale now. Progressive metal visionaries Between The Buried And Me are set to embark on their second ever Australian tour this November – the five-piece American group will be out in support of their brand new 12-track album The Parallax II: Future Sequence, and they’re bringing djenty three-piece Animals As Leaders with them. They’ll play The Zoo on 15 November, and tickets are on sale this Thursday. Sunshine coast brutal death metallers Limb From Limb have a new album on the way – it’s titled (E)met and we’re due for a taste in early September. It follows on from their Obsidian Records released 2007 debut album, Rip Him From His Fucking Throne. The debut album from Melbourne prog/rock/ metal group Twelve Foot Ninja is on its way – and it’s coming bit by bit, week by week. Silent Machine will be officially released on 2 November, but until then, a new track and an accompanying comic book will be made available each week from twelvefootninja.com. Divination, the debut album from Byron Bay metalcore group In Hearts Wake, is released this Friday through UNFD. Vile Eye is the name of a new Brisbane band brandishing some solid metallic hardcore. Featuring ex-members of Time Has Come, you can check out their demo for free over at vileeye.bandcamp.com. Melbourne’s rising punk stars The Smith Street Band have released their new album Sunshine And Technology – it is available on CD, vinyl and digital formats now through Poison City Records, and you can check them launching it at X&Y Bar on Thursday 6 September. Former Nevermore guitarist Jeff Loomis is headed down under for some guitar workshop action. He’ll be shredding up a storm at Allans Billy Hydes in Fortitude Valley on 27 September – you can buy a ticket in store or online now and go in the running to win a Schecter SGR C7 guitar. Australian metal and hardcore operations just got a little bit more American – Artery Recordings has expanded into the territory, taking on board the Taperjean Records roster in the process. Local acts The Mission In Motion, For All Eternity, We Rob Banks and Storm The Sky now join a management banner that includes such US groups as Chelsea Grin, Vanna and For The Fallen Dreams. Shock Records will handle distribution. Melbourne thrash metal group 4Arm are headed back to the UK for the second time next year. The band will perform at Hammerfest V alongside Napalm Death, Candlemass, Enslaved and plenty.
GIGS OF THE WEEK:
Thursday: Apocalyptica (FIN), Awaken Solace – The Hi-Fi. Dream On Dreamer, Like Moths To Flames (USA), Hand Of Mercy, In Hearts Wake – The Tempo Hotel. Signal The Firing Squad, Deceiver, The Construct, Vile Eye – X&Y Bar. Friday: Ghost Town, Shackles, Shields, Ritual Harm – Crowbar. Dream On Dreamer, Like Moths To Flames, Hand of Mercy, In Hearts Wake – Kurilpa Hall. Saturday: Battleaxe, Thrashed, Skulldragg, Kablammo!, Kingsmoor – The Barra Bar. Wish For Wings, Deadlights, This City Ignites, The Endless Pandemic – X&Y Bar. Sydonia, Beggar’s Orchestra, Perspektio, Davy Dillinger – Crowbar. Sunday: The Dangermen, Monkey Island, Sick People, Mad Macka – The Mustang Bar.