Navigated the pop/rock underground 2007-2012
Why? – Eskimo Snow
The unlikely paring of hip-hop and indie rock actual make for compatible bedfellows with Californian band Why?'s fourth full length album.
Esben And The Witch – Violet Cries
Over-indulgent Gothic melodrama from Brighton's Esben And The Witch. How do you like your nightmares? Black with 2 sugars, thanks.
1990s – Interview about 1990s and Yummy Fur (2007)
During the decade that was the 1990s Jackie McKeown fronted the highly influential but commercially ignored Glaswegian act The Yummy Fur, an ensemble that went through as many reshuffles as a blackjack dealer in Vegas.
The Walkmen – You & Me
Fierce Panda, 2008 [rating:8/10] The Walkmen have always sounded like a band out of time. From the ashes of once great Jonathan Fire-eater, they arrived on the New York scene shortly before the great Strokes
The Church – Untitled #23
Moving on from Uninvited, Like The Clouds to Untitled #23, The Church near the end of the alphabet but not the end of their career.
Mental As Anything – Essential As Anything / Tents Up
Both mental and essential, Sydney's pop legends Mental as Anything return with a career-encompassing collection and a brand new studio album.
Pixies – Brisbane – 31 July 2010
A few nights before this Pixies warm up concert for Splendour in the Grass, I had a vivid dream. In it I was the tour manager or press officer for the band and they were being put up in a luxury hotel with a huge swimming pool which they were swanning around in and (in)famously not getting along and refusing to do the show. It ended with me giving them a “look all the great rock’n’roll bands are dysfunctional, but when you’re on stage for that hour and a half you come together, that's when you work, that's when you function!” speech. And then I drove them to the Zoo in a black hummer.
Sloan – The Double Cross
The best band to come out of Canada, ever, celebrate their 20th anniversary with The Double Cross. It's a Roman numeral thing, y'dig?
Who The Hell Are… The Beggar Folk?
Folk bands are slowly going the way of the emo bands -- cookie-cutter, predictable, uninspired, and inevitably becoming a parody of themselves because music is a business and the market dictates that consumers will always want more of what's popular. The Beggar Folk fall nicely into the afore-mentioned folk music genre, however their music doesn't seem to follow suit with the folk status quo. These are ballads and hymns, carved from trees and molded from soil. This music demands your attention and effortlessly passes any authenticity tests. It conjures up what real Americana and country music should conjure.
Who The Hell Are… The Capitalist Youth?
Consider The Capitalist Youth, a trio of former high school classmates who play “acoustic indie rock combining a living room full of misfit instruments with lyrically driven songs about summer camp, existential crises and gubernatorial indiscretions”. They don’t write and play the kind of music that will leave listeners dumbstruck over their redefinition of a genre, but they’re able to adeptly inject something into their music that only a handful of others have done well: humanity, with a laid back sense of humor, and without any of the awkward pauses that come from other bands who get lucky on a song or two and can’t maintain things the rest of the way.