Spike Fuck - The Smackwave EP (Independent)

Spike Fuck’s biography describes her music as inspired primarily by love and obsession, heroin addiction, transness and washed up 60s musicians who make overproduced comeback albums in the 80s.

To me Smackwave sounds like early Bruce Springsteen channelled through Lost Animal. It’s smart pop music with a narrative, and pop music hasn’t had that combination for a long time, so of course Spike Fuck borrows from the past, and in particular from the 1980’s.

Rather than being overproduced, Spike and her producer Elliott Munn have created a truly subtle tribute to that era of pop music. It’s two hands tapping on the steering wheel, car trip music. Lyrically, the themes are indubitably dark but not overwhelmingly so. On the opener Junkie Logic she sings tongue-in-cheek;

“I guess I’m kinda praying/ At least I’m not dead/ Though I’m addicted to drugs/ I can still give good head.” Reminding us all that we’ve gotta keep our priorities straight.

The next song Guts is an absolute tear-jerker and probably the most immediate of the bunch. My personal favourite is third track Tomorrow We Get Healthy where the synth takes a more driving role and Spike’s croon gets its best showcase. One section in particular has one of the most honest set of lines I’ve heard in pop music in a long time. She sings;

“Well, I know there’s another person in me and I know they’re not as kind/ They’ll take all of your money and waste all of your time/ but they wear my clothes and they have my eyes/ They even bare my soul”

The final song, 3:30 Psychosis, is a straight up, sans-drum-machine ballad carried by fingerpicked guitar and melancholy vocals and it makes for a beautiful ending to a great first release. Bring on the full length, I say!

https://spikefuck.bandcamp.com/

Treehouse - Centre Of Their World (Vacant Valley)

Treehouse are a three-piece from Tasmania who’ve been together since high school and it shows. They know their dynamic well. From the opening slide guitar riff of Centre of the World we’re transported back to a time when guitars mattered in rock music. “Everyone’s the centre of their world, they choose to study through their own hell”. This isn’t dole-wave. There’s anger and passion behind the words. There’s also a certain kind of dark humour which, for me, brings to mind the Canadian band Ought.

The production is fairly low key. It sounds like a lot of the album could’ve been recorded live with some basic guitar overdubs. Sometimes it’s hard to tell on which songs the guitar has been doubled and which they’ve been split left and right and effected in different ways.

“It’s so nice to play guitar in the rain” they sing on Hammer on the Door over some pretty solid '90’s style riffing. Other lyrics come in and out of focus in an obtuse way, creating scenes that could be interpreted a thousand different ways. The crux of what the band's doing, though, really is in the guitar work.

There are times on the release when they sound like early Dinosaur Jr. and times where they seem to owe as much to early emo music. On Between Two Shoulders they almost sound like Joy Division with a fevered frontman. The bass gets dirty but never showy, which suits the driving rhythm of the drumming, especially on tracks like first single She’s A Mystic.

Tidal Wash is the EP's proper ending (not including the live version of Set Free, a track from their previous release Gathering The Dreams which comes as a bonus and it’s a very sombre, droning end to an otherwise fairly steady release. I guess last tracks are supposed to be slow though, right?

Treehouse cover quite a lot of ground, but there's a unifying theme here. Put simply, they're well worth checking out for anyone who has held onto their belief in the possibilities of the traditional three-piece rock band.

https://vacantvalley.bandcamp.com/album/centre-of-their-world

Palm Springs - Flowers In A Vase EP (Independent)

Flowers in a Vase is the inconspicuously brilliant debut EP from Melbourne’s Palm Springs. I say inconspicuously because in terms of physical release it was limited to just thirty copies and a hometown launch, which is surprisingly low key for an EP that features Harmony’s Erica Dunn on lead vocal and songwriting duties along with Raquel Solier AKA Fatti Frances on drums and Sara Retallik from Jimmy Tait and Golden Syrup on bass.

The seven songs were recorded in a single fourteen hour day live in The Drones’ studio with their guitarist Dan Luscombe serving as producer, engineer and mixing engineer. There’s six original compositions and one surprisingly un-ironic Randy Newman cover all clocking in at just under twenty-five minutes.

Dunn’s electric guitar consistently toes the line between dirging riffs and lilting fingerpicking, sometimes incorporating elements of both at the same time. Her songwriting is up there with some of the best alt-country acts around today, from Angel Olsen to Paul Kelly.

Sweet Concrete, which has an accompanying video, and the EP’s title track are both notable and could hold their own as stand-alone singles but the real standout in the collection comes in the form of a re-recorded version of an older song of theirs, Winning And Losing, with its delicate dynamic shifts and infectious hook.

The closing cut Last Night I Had A Dream is the aforementioned Randy Newman cover. Though it ends Flowers in a Vase with quite a beautiful song, somehow -something about it- just leaves more to be desired.

On the strength of this EP I really hope that Palm Springs get the chance to record a full length album in between the time spent on their various other projects. When they do, I hope it gets the attention and platform it deserves, because this band deserve a lot.

https://palmsprings.bandcamp.com/album/flowers-in-a-vase-ep

Mount Trout - S/T 7" (Rough Skies)

Mount Trout are fast becoming one of my favourite Australian acts. They released their first EP Geeveston B on Wrong Place records earlier this year and now we have the follow up 7” on Tassie’s other best indie upstart Rough Skies records.

The four songs were taken from the same sessions as the previous release and recorded in a shed in country Tasmania. Like Geeveston B, there are two original vocal-driven songs interspersed with shorter experimental tracks.

Lead singer Timothy Brown’s voice is eerily reminiscent of the late Jason Molina, in tone and delivery, while the guitars verge on drone at times. The dynamic of the band fits the song writing perfectly and helps to create this weird world were lyrics about Green Tea suddenly seem very, well, meaningful…

If you haven’t heard Mount trout yet then do yourself a favour and check out their self-titled 7” out now on Rough Skies records.

https://roughskiesrecords.bandcamp.com/album/mount-trout-7

Two Steps On The Water - Having Pop Punk Feelings In A Country Western Body (Independent)

I don’t know whether to call Having Pop-Punk Feelings in a Country-Western Body an album or an EP but in my mind it’s the former. The six songs on here run for just shy of half an hour and make for a cohesive collection of ideas alongside a fully-developed sound.

In fact, even their previous two EPs -Two Songs for the Piano Accordion and In a Shed… Doing ASBESTOS we can- sounded deceptively like a band that had been playing together for years. They’ve actually only been together since late 2014. If I were to try to describe them to someone who hadn’t heard their music I’d probably throw out to comparisons to other great violin-weilding Australian acts like The Go-Betweens, Rowland S Howard’s Teenage Snuff Film band and of course, Dirty Three, with some PJ Harvey and Neutral Milk Hotel thrown in there for good measure.

The first line of the first song is melancholy, “Crying to myself on the street / Thunderstorm for one” and it builds to a peak in the middle with crescendoing violin, emotive drums and what could be seen as a plea from lead singer June Jones of “Let me paint my face, put on my dress and go out dancing / I wanna not care if it’s not allowed / Fists might await me but I won’t care / People might hate me but I won’t care”. It’s just the start of a concept that runs through Having Pop-Punk Feelings in a Country-Western Body and it’s a concept that becomes a celebration over the course of the album. It’s such a great title for a collection of songs that are mainly concerned with gender transition. It’s tongue-in-cheek and suitably so.

My favourite song on this record, and the one that you will hear shortly, is More True More Rowdy and it’s because of the glimpse of the inner-workings of June Jones' mind and especially her views on small-town masculinity and the trappings thereof. She sings: “Portrait of a cowboy in a sports car / Gladiator at home in a sports bar / The mask has been shattered / The pieces been scattered / Glued back together with Red Bull an Jaeger” and later on “I just don’t know what to do with myself / Does high-as-fuck count as an emotion?”

I feel like that song is a perfect summation of my teenage years. Somehow it manages to be person-specific and anthemic at the same time. I think this record will be a favourite of many this year for the bold take on the subject matter but most for the impressive and singular musicianship of the band as a whole.

https://twostepsonthewater.bandcamp.com/album/having-pop-punk-feelings-in-a-country-western-body

Burlap - Burnout King (Trait/Blackwire Records)

With Burnout King, Burlap have created a record that sounds like a disgruntled and deranged teenager teetering on the verge of going postal. It’s actually menacing to listen to at times, the way the best hard rock or hardcore should be.

The first two songs Snotty and Don’t Touch Me sound exactly like their titles and set the scene but it’s Single Mothers and the albums first single Good Boy where this precocious teen really hits its stride.

The refrain of the latter “I’m a good boy / I keep my mouth shut” becomes more and more insistent as the song progresses while the guitars almost become more subdued, providing an interesting juxtaposition.

It’s the dynamic shifts that I really love with this band. There are times when an unexpected change completely transforms the feeling of the song. Take Bubbles for example; the records fifth track starts off sounding like the breakdown to a death metal song then somewhere around the midway point we’re lulled into a false sense of comfort by some pretty sounding guitar parts before being dropped right back where we started in the final minute of the track.

When I first heard Burlap on their 2014 demo I thought they sounded something like The Jesus Lizard or Killdozer, and I guess they still kinda do, but with this album I hear more of a comparison to acts closer to home like Pale Heads or early Witch Hats.

The release comes to us from Blackwire (and Trait Records), a label that started around a collectively run record store in Sydney where the band have frequently played since their formation and features artwork from Melbourne based singer-songwriter and illustrator Jess Locke. Fans of loud, sludgy rock music and a penchant for misanthropy will really get a kick out of Burnout King.

https://burlapsydney.bandcamp.com/album/burnout-king

Mount Trout - Geeveston B (Wrong Place Records)

Everything about this release is a product of Tasmania. The band name, the EP title, and lyrics like “Can you take the Ute to the top of the road? I’ll ride in the tray with the dog and the wood”.

Everything about this release is Tasmanian except for the actual sound, which is equally reminiscent of Songs:Ohia or Palace Music as it is of Sonic Youth.

They’re a three piece with three distinct pieces. The guitars are unhurried and unworried, often holding on single notes for longer than would generally feel comfortable, and sometimes careening into unfamiliar and discordant territory. The drums ebb and flow like tension and release and the vocals tie it all together. The lyrics sometimes come across as stream-of-consciousness, and maybe they are, I don’t think that lessens their meaning.

There’s a lot of simple self-reflection. “I’m not one to fight, never was” he sings on the EP’s second track Pacifist before going on to sing about childhood squabbles with siblings and the anger that builds through age.

Top of the Road and Sama Hut both centre around living in the country. The simplicity of gathering wood and making a fire. They're songs about the lifestyle intrinsic to the people making the music.

I spent two weeks in the area the EP gets its name from at the start of this year and finding this release on coming home was like a belated memento. It even turned out that old mate I’d been drinking with down at the local recorded it in his home studio.

So I have this somewhat-removed personal connection with the release but I don’t think that’s necessarily why I like it so much and why I haven't stopped listening this last two weeks.

There’s an abundance of incredible, experimental music coming out of Australia at the moment but Mount Trout is a singular entity. They sound like actual outsiders, not the ones you see pretending with synths and vocoders in dark clubs. This is the real thing.

https://wrongplace.bandcamp.com/album/geeveston-b