Sydney-born, Melbourne-based songwriter Laura Jean is a powerful, singular voice in Australian music, renowned for her lush and pastoral folk albums Our Swan Song (2006) and Eden Land (2008). Now she is returning with third album A fool who’ll and a brand new sound. Laura has picked up a Gibson SG guitar, the same kind [...]
Maher Shalal Hash Baz is the oddly-named band for Japanese cult figure Tori Kudo and his wife Reiko (the name is apparently a Hebrew biblical phrase that Tori translates as “be quick if you mean to steal something”). Since the late 1970s, Tori has been a pioneering figure in Japanese punk, post-punk and avant-garde circles, [...]
Melbourne scrap-pop wonders New Estate release their fourth album Recovery, their first for Chapter Music. As the title suggests, it’s a reinvigorated band you hear on the new album, making Recovery New Estate’s brightest, catchiest record to date.
The departure of bassist Brad Cosier in 2010 saw the band undergo a period of inner contemplation, but they have re-emerged [...]
Pikelet is Evelyn Morris, a musical wunderkind raised in the outer suburbs of Melbourne who first ventured onto local stages as a hardcore-obsessed drummer, serving on sticks in such heavy-hitting Melbourne institutions as Baseball and True Radical Miracle. But a few years ago, something tickled Evelyn’s brain in a funny way and she felt compelled [...]
Melbourne’s Primitive Calculators met as teenagers in the early 70s, growing up in the grim outer suburb of Springvale. The Velvet Underground and The MC5 were obvious heroes, but they were also inspired by lesser known bands like The Fugs, The 13th Floor Elevators and The Godz as well as the writing of obsessive rock [...]
Sachiko Kanenobu is generally acknowledged as Japan’s first female singer-songwriter.
Discovered as an precocious 18 year old in Osaka, Sachiko was signed in 1968 to Japan’s first ever independent record company, URC (Underground Record Club), who changed Japan’s musical landscape irrevocably in the late 60s and early 70s with artists like Happy End, Folk Crusaders and [...]
Tokyo’s Tenniscoats centre around the duo of Saya and Taskashi Ueno, a married couple who have been making music since 2000, and together run the highly regarded Japanese label Majikick Records. In that time, Tenniscoats have released three studio recordings, 2001’s Theme Of Tenniscoats, 2002’s The Ending Theme and 2004’s We Are Everyone.
Revered pop romantic Peter Milton Walsh has been the sole constant in The Apartments since the band formed in Brisbane in 1978. After a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spell in The Go-Betweens (that still inspired early Gobies B-side Don‘t Let Him Come Back and Before Hollywood track That Way), Walsh released debut EP The Return Of the [...]
Formed in late 1968, Tully the First were wild, expansive and unpredictable, their live shows now the stuff of legend. Terry Wilson (vocals), Richard Lockwood (reeds), Michael Carlos (organ), John Blake (bass) and Robert Taylor (drums) employed extended improvisation, spacious dynamics and an intuitive intensity, so impressing Australian jazz icon John Sangster that he called them “the best band in the [...]
Forming late 2008 around charismatic guitarist/vocalist Marty Frawley (son of much-missed Paul Kelly & the Dots member Maurice Frawley) and bassist Rick Milovanovic, Twerps have quickly risen to become one of Melbourne’s favourite pop bands. They’ve scored support slots for the likes of Deerhunter, the Bats, Yo La Tengo, Black Lips, Thee Oh Sees and [...]
