One of the first posts when we started this blog in December 2014 was Dick Diver’s excellent 7", “Arks Up”. But, that was the only post devoted solely to one of my favorite Australian bands from the early 2010s.
Soon after the the blog started, the band released their 3rd album, “Melbourne, Florida”, toured the U.S. (stopping in Davis for a great show with Michael O. and G. Green), then broke up.
Now, they are re-uniting to celebrate the 10th anniversary of “Melbourne, Florida” and do 4 shows in Melbourne. Chapter Music is releasing 300 run opaque yellow version for this occasion and it seems like the band is not reforming permanently.
If you’re looking for touchstones, you can’t miss with The Go-Betweens, Paul Kelly, Apartments, and The Ocean Party. Members played in several other bands (especially Al Montfort!). But there really was something magical about this group.
When I first started listening to “Love Can Make You” from Tully’s third and final album, “Loving Is Hard”, I had no idea that this was a reissue on the venerable Chapter Music label. But, the vocals and sound of the song sound like Guy Blackman’s (the head honcho at Chapter) solo work.
But this isn’t an indie pop album. This was originally released in the early 1970s and it marked Tully’s move to a fully realized psych folk sound reminiscent of bands like Tudor Lodge or Fairport Convention. I’m also reminded of Norma Tanega, Penny Carson Nichols, and to some degree the music of Ray Davies/The Kinks.
Chapter Music reissued all the Tully albums back in the early 2010s.
What is it about super nice Australian musicians/label tycoons. Lachlan Denton (Osborne Again), Mark Monnone (Lost & Lonesome Recording Co.) and Guy Blackman (Chapter Music) are all salt-of-the-earth type folk. There are more, but yesterday, I proclaimed a two-day Chapter Music rage, so let’s get to it.
Guy Blackman’s 2008 “Adult Baby” was reissued to acclaim last year. Now, 17 years later come his follow up LP, “Out of Sight”. It’s not like Guy was a hermit - he’s run one of the most diverse and respected indie labels since the early 1990s. But, according to Guy:
“I got a bit scarred singing my little open-hearted queer songs in the late 2000s, it was a different time back then…So I clammed up for a while, and threw myself into releasing other people’s music instead. Then a few years ago I poked my head out and realised things were changing. I got emboldened to start putting my music into the world again. Of course now things are getting much worse, but this time I’m like ‘f**k ‘em!’”
“Out of Sight” was made with the assistance of Liam Parsons and Steven Blair (Good Morning) and Liam Halliwell (Snowy). There’s a duet with Julien Gasc too. Guy Blackman and Chapter Music are based in Melbourne, Australia.
Like That is an extraordinarily accomplished and very fun album from Melbournes Cool Sounds. It was released towards the end of 2022.
Musically it’s a little bit of a left turn for the band. They were more known for being part of a jangly pop scene that was going on. This album has funk and disco influences. It has a very 80s sound in parts and inevitably brings to mind the Talking Heads.
These songs are so fun! They’re joyful and danceable. They’re the best kind of growth from a band hitting their stride for real. Or I reckon anyway.
Moonlight Kath Bloom & Loren Mazzacane (Connors) 1984, St. Joan (Bandcamp)
Despite Moonlight’s tones being quite hushed, and both Kath Bloom’s vocals and Loren Mazzacane Connors’ guitar being, we could say, adventurous with regard to pitch, any time I throw this album on as background music conversation tends to gradually trail off, and my guest will look at me perplexedly and say something like, “Why is this so fucking good?” Which, I think, is one of the main reasons to buy LPs, whether you’re DJing with wax or just the sort to get a bit pouty when a visitor wants to stream something instead of playing with your carefully alphabetized collection.
On that count, Moonlight is indispensable. Released on a private press label in 1984, Moonlight was the final collaboration between self-taught guitarist/songwriter Kath Bloom and Loren Connors (billed at the time as Loren Mazzacane), an avant-garde acoustic blues/folk guitarist. The recordings are so sparse you can occasionally hear a woody creak break through, like a rocking chair or someone stepping on an old floorboard. Bloom’s voice is an airy thing, seeming to billow and drift of its own accord, even up to high white notes that threaten to move out of hearing. Connors lets Bloom’s steady, dreamy fingerpicking carry the melody, using his own instrument to duet with her vocal. I suspect the appeal of Bloom as a partner was in the challenge of translating her instinctive vocalizations to his guitar. His lead lines share her wandering spirit, plucked sequences of panged off-notes that ring true.
There are moments that have the outsider joy of Daniel Johnston’s music, with its childlike directness and strange lyrical perceptiveness, like closer “Love Makes it All Worthwhile”:
“Every night it’s the same old thing He puts it in And then he takes it out again You might be closer Closer if you do Maybe he just wants some more of you It’s love Makes a difference It’s love Makes it all worthwhile”
“Breathe in my Ear” doesn’t develop much further than its chorus of “Breathe in my ear / I love you,” but Connors’ guitar and the sound of the players’ shifting in their chairs combine to create a warm impression of bodies moving on a well-worn mattress. Other songs are bolted together a little more firmly, but feel no less sublime for it, like “You Cleared Up the Sky,” where Connors takes a long, bluesy solo and you sense Bloom listening with soft wonder to what he plays. At time of writing there were only a handful of vinyl copies remaining of Chapter Music 2019’s reissue on their Bandcamp (well, there are exactly five, so let’s say you have large hands), so if you’re interested it might do you to pick one up sooner rather than later. Do it for your guests.
My claim to fame is that Guy Blackman (Chapter Music) once called me while I was on the toilet to imply that I might have stolen Robert Forster’s (The Go-Betweens) son’s tuning pedal
New Video: Aussie Punk Outfit CLAMM Wrestle with Impatience and Yearning in “Something New”
New Video: Aussie Punk Outfit CLAMM Wrestle with Impatience and Yearning in “Something New” @CLAMMband @ChapterMusic @meatmachinerecs @nathanisariot @riotactmedia
With the release of 2020’s full-length debut Beseech Me, the Melbourne-based punk outfit CLAMM — Jack Summers (vocals, guitar), Maisie Everett (bass, backing vocals) and Miles Harding (drums, backing vocals) — quickly exploded into national and international punk scenes. Originally released by the band on cassette, the album received airplay and praise from Aussie radio stations 3RRR and FBi.…
CLAMM, out of Melbourne, gets maximum force out of the punk
trio formation.The band lands
brutalist punch after punch in battering songs that are anthemic without being
especially devoted to melody.These
are shouty, rally-the-masses adrenaline hits, stripped to pounding one-two
simplicity, and sheathed with echo.
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Care is CLAMM’s second album, following 2021’s Beseech
Me, an album of comparable violence and intensity and snare-shot agitation;
you can get the gist of it from this live performance of “Liar.”The band formed around friends since
grade school, Jack Summers and Miles Harding, and now includes the bass player
and singer Masie Everett.Everett
played on Beseech Me, but she didn’t do much singing there.One of the main differences between
the first album and the second, then, comes her participation in the massed,
shouted refrains.She augments the
chorus in “Done It Myself,” “Monday” and “Bit Much,” making them a group
effort, rather than an individual one, and consequently giving the songs a bit
more communal, enveloping urgency.
The fire, though, comes from the pummeling interplay between
Summers’ militant chants, his wild, flailing guitar and Harding’s primal, kit
pounding cadences.Every sound is
thrown like a punch, rocking you back with sheer bludgeoning impact.The sound is instantly familiar,
though surprisingly hard to pin down with punk antecedents.The closest I can get is Ex-Cult with fewer moving guitar parts,
Stiff Little Fingers without the propensity for tunefulness, or Perth’s
Zerodent but a bit more metal.The
band itself likes to invoke California garage punks like the Osees and Ty
Segall, and I wasn’t hearing it until “Make Me,” whose mammoth guitar riff
sounds like Fuzz.
All 15 songs are shots to the gut, with highlights in
“Monday”’s hopped up denunciation (“I don’t want drugs, I don’t want fame, I
don’t want money, I don’t want love”), “Scheme”’s feedback screaming dissonance
and “Buy”’ sublimely heavy riffs jacked up on amphetamines to warp speed.If you were to ask for anything, it
might be a bit more variation. But then again, if you’re getting this much
oomph out of basic ingredients, why add a lot of extras?
Australian singer/songwrite LAURA JEAN is back with her first album in four years and a new single.
Taken from the new album, “Amateurs” Jean has released the video for, ’Teenager Again’, which features backing vocals by Aldous Harding and Marlon William, who also feature on two other tracks on the album.
“These songs arise from my acceptance that I will always be an ‘amateur’. At the same…
As a budding experimental composer, Australia’s David Chesworth
(Essendon Airport, Whadya
Want?) aimed to move “beyond the constraints of modernism,” as he put it
in one interview, by performing in a range of
venues and exploring new audience relationships. Some of the recordings of
these events
have followed a similarly elusive path, long remaining out of print or altogether unreleased. Chesworth’s
sought-after synthwave masterpiece
Industry & Leisure (1983), for example — recorded live in an art
gallery, inviting crowd feedback — only saw its first proper
reissue this past February on B.T.E. Records
(Spain). But, thankfully, Melbourne’s Chapter Music has followed suit by
unearthing another even rarer early performance piece from Chesworth: the
genre-eluding and never-before-released gem, Drive Time.
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On a cold winter’s night in 1984, Chesworth
and bassist Bill McDonald (Paul Kelly, Frente!) played the exclusive
eleven-song set in the Trinity Chapel at Melbourne University, where it was
broadcast live over the unsuspecting airwaves of local classical channel ABC
Radio 3AR. The station brought along a live announcer who gave traffic and
weather updates from the choir stalls between songs, context which has sadly
been omitted from this release. However, their engineer is to thank for
preserving the set, having slipped a soundboard tape of it to the duo as they
were packing up their gear. The most bizarre aspect of all, though, is the
presence of an unknown organist practicing Bach from somewhere in the church’s
depths, which only adds to the mysterious, reverb-heavy aura of the recording
and helps to underscore its uniqueness.
Was anyone else making music like this — let’s
call it minimalist post-punk lounge-groove — at the time? Is anyone making it
now? The Native Cats, a fellow bass and synth duo
from down under, feel like the most obvious current comparison, but Chesworth’s
vocals play a more supporting role than Chloe Escott’s. His lyrics are built on
simple rhymes that work to complement the occasionally absurd sense of mystery
of the proceedings: “He’s over there/The
one with the face/Sold out of his place,” Chesworth sings on “Influence,”
as the music plucks suspiciously along. Perhaps he’s referring to the organist
whose venue they’d overtaken.
With its general air of whimsy, Drive Time might be more closely aligned
soundwise to what England’s Woo had begun tapping into around this same time.
Especially when the pair fully embrace their playful side on the Muzak-like
tracks that play in between the record’s more locked-in and swaggering
workouts. On “Slide,” for instance, things get downright hokey as Chesworth
mimics dueling banjos on his Yamaha DX7 and McDonald moseys assuredly beside
him in a punk throb. Meanwhile, “Telling” lands somewhere between the closing
theme of an 80’s game show and the score of a nature documentary.
Elsewhere, Chesworth riffs on the setting
itself by letting church bells ring via his keyboard on the Hitchcockian
“Walls,” which wavers and whistles as it progresses while remaining
surprisingly groovy. The album’s standout track, though, is “Delay,” where
percussion pops off like popcorn, accompanied by the chiming of a xylophone
that intensifies and ascends when Chesworth declares: “I would if I could/Be in love.” Fortunately, thanks to this
release, a whole new audience is finally getting the opportunity to do just
that with Drive Time. And it’s hard
to imagine why they wouldn’t…love it, that is.
While doing yesterday’s post I realized I’d never posted about the excellent “Life” LP from No Zu (Melbourne, Australia, this album on Metal Postcard, but they are now associated with Chapter Music). Vacation posting is the perfect time to catalogue this.
It has always reminded me of Talking Heads “Remain in Light”. Another Bandcamp user mentioned Golden Palominos and The Thievery Corporation (never listened to this).
Young kids do make music and I’m sure a lot of it is good. But in all my time listening to music, I’ve never heard of an under-18 band sound this good/mature. Tangled Shoelaces (Brisbane, Australia) were 10-14 years old when they started making music, and all 18 or under when they stopped. So, all of the music on this Chapter Music release was done by non-adults (by the US standard).
Listen to “The Biggest Movie Ever Made”, close your eyes and think of Able Tasmans or The Go-Betweens. I was worried that only one song would be great, so I did some “YouTube-in” and found enough other songs to know that Tangled Shoelaces were for real.
“Turn My Dial - The M Squared Recordings” is set for release on April 1, 2021. I would have guessed this was some sort of April Fool’s joke, but it doesn’t look like it is.
The Biggest Movie Ever Made
Tangled Shoelaces
·Turn My Dial - The M Squared Recordings and more, 1981-84
