Album Reviews

The first time I listened to this album, I had questions. The first: why are they breaking up their band when their latest album is this good? The second: where are the subdued, quiet Augustines I remember from their 2014 self-titled album? Opening track “Are We Alive” assaulted my ears with a drum frenzy and…

Listening to this 19 track long album before you realise it’s a collection of EPs can be confronting. Hanni El Khatib produced five separate EPs last year and this collection is all of them thrown together. The first track, “Baby’s OK” has a strong drum beat and starts with the line, “I was high as…

Ty Segall‘s latest, self-titled album – the ninth in his discography – starts with the dirty, riff-driven track “Break a Guitar”. It’s the perfect opener for an album full of more dirty, riff-driven tracks and sets the scene. Segall’s voice stays within an easy range and complements the rest of the instruments, with its familiar…

Harley Streten, known to the rest of the world as Flume, dropped his freshest music on the market titled Skin Companion EP II, alongside his 2016 LP Skin. The companion EP came to fans as a surprise, offering his audience a chance to hear Flume’s work with artists such as Glass Animals, Pusha T and Moses Sumney. 2017 can only calls success for…

2016 was a hard year, globally, politically, environmentally. People made half-hearted jokes last November that at least we’d be getting a lot of good punk music pretty soon – small compensation, honestly. But the genre that flourishes the most under backwards political regimes doesn’t actually seem to be punk – often, what we remember the…

One of the most influential bands of the 90’s alternative-country movement, Son Volt, are back and better than ever. The LP, Notes of Blue, is the band’s first since 2013, made up of 10 blues galvanised tracks, inspired by a glorious mix of Skip James and English acoustic guitarist Nick Drake. Having grown up listening…

FOAM, the trio out of Perth who have been making waves since 2012 with the raucous live shows, have this month released their first full length, Coping Mechanisms. Recorded over two years and following up four successful EP’s, Coping Mechanisms is an experimental shift in style that proves this alt-rock act have a far more expansive world…

Iluka first appeared on the national music scene in 2011, releasing EPs To The Place and Eyes Closed under her given name, Nikki Thorburn. The youthful acoustics of her earlier releases hinted at the raw creative talent Iluka brings to her songwriting, and as her musical style has evolved from such quietly enchanting pieces to the…

Here’s a fun fact: Other than English, French is the only other language to appear on all government authorised passports worldwide. Why I know that? I have no idea. Here’s another fun fact: The extent of my French vocabulary is limited to what I learnt in Year 8. I remember a handful of words and…

Sometimes when you’re reviewing something subjective, like music or art, you run up against this age-old debate between subjectivity and objectivity. That’s where I am with Dirty Projectors’ new, self-titled album. I think it might be really interesting, from an objective technical standpoint, but I know it bored me and made me feel weirdly twitchy….

Tullara’s debut EP Better Hold On had been a long time coming. The songwriting process began around three years ago, encapsulating a broad spectrum of emotions ranging from intense heartbreak to bounding optimism and retelling a personal journey within six short tracks. The honesty of this EP is inescapable. From first listen it’s evident that Tullara…

Banks & Steelz, the collaborative project of Paul Banks of Interpol and RZA of Wu-Tang Clan works on paper, but how has it actually turned out? Given my lack of prior exposure to both Interpol and Wu-Tang Clan, I’ve come in with no expectations of what either of the two featuring artists should be bringing…

In The Service of Spring is the debut full-length from Sydney’s Dusken Lights. It’s an extremely relaxed album – very, very low energy – but very sweet and pretty when it works. The opening track, “Superman, Wondergirl” (sidenote, why no Wonder Woman?) is a promising opener, with the juxtaposed vocals of singer/guitarist Paul O. Watling…

In 2016, artists of colour have expectations placed on them from both sides of the political spectrum – those on the right would rather they stayed silent about their concerns, while oftentimes those on the left expect each artistic statement to be a political paean and call to arms. This is, of course, an unfair…

Back in September, I sat opposite Briggs and Trials in Brisbane as they told me about Reclaim Australia, the debut album by their collaborative project A.B Original, and how it stood to shake up not only the Australian music industry, but our social community as a whole. Generally, you learn to take such grandiose claims…

Mothers are the latest in a long and illustrious line of Indie bands from Athens, Georgia, with their hipsteriffically titled debut When You Walk a Long Distance You Are Tired. While they have many things going for them, not least their fantastic singer, the album could benefit from a little more editing and a more…

I’ve followed Illy since his earliest releases. I remember first getting into him in high school when he reworked Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”. Next I smashed his second album, The Chase, on my train rides to and from my first year of uni. When touring his fourth album Cinematic, I saw him play on an…

There’s a strange level of joy knowing that an album of such an immense quality as Don’t Let The Kids Win was written and released by an artist that grew up not too far from where I did. Much of where I grew up is quite maligned and often only makes the media headlines for…

St. Paul and the Broken Bones know how to bring it. I saw them earlier in the year when they toured on Bluesfest, and their Sydney sideshow was just one of those sets you had to see to fully understand and appreciate. For a band to play such a polished set, you could easily think…

Solange Knowles‘ A Seat At The Table may very well be the album that brings the artist to breakthrough-levels of success but for those who have been following her music for the last few years, this 21-track epic is the result of a creative talent that has been thriving and developing outside the mainstream for quite some time….

Irish duo Hvmmingbyrd come to us with their debut EP Know My Name; released in September, the first offering from Deborah Byrne and Suzette Das sees the ladies step out from the alt-folk realm their music once occupied, in favour of some ethereal and distinctly more electronic soundscapes. What results is five tracks of promising material from a duo who,…

Adelaide singer, songwriter and guitarist Begbie is only twenty years of age and has developed some talented tracks that you should definitely get behind if you’re into the indie scene. The journey is only just underway, but the skills are there for a path of success. Riddles opens with the track “Bottles on the Floor”; it…

I don’t know about you, but there’s just about nothing better than a party band making party tunes for getting absolutely rattled to on a Saturday night. Having followed the progression of Northeast Party House for the past couple of years, you get the feeling that the lads from NPH enjoy a good party and…

Sometimes a piece of art becomes so intertwined with a contemporaneous event that true, unbiased analysis becomes impossible. Just as Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was erroneously seen as a response to 9/11, and Bowie’s Blackstar became his swansong, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree comes in the wake of a tragedy. Halfway through the writing of the album’s material, Cave’s teenage son died in…

Despite being short for their hometown of Glasgow, GLA, the latest release from four-piece Twin Atlantic, may as well stand for ‘guitars, loud, aggressive’. Now onto their fourth full length release, the group have an unarguably high benchmark to meet on the back of 2014’s successful Great Divide, and they certainly give it a red…

If someone says they’re a Wilco fan, it could really mean a lot of things. Maybe they’re wearing a chambray shirt and cowboy boots, in which case they probably mean they like Being There or AM. Or perhaps they’re high and paranoid, in which case they’re Yankee Hotel Foxtrot fans, or they’re high and loving…

Christ, there have been some absolutely stellar Australian album releases this year that have captured the full spectrum of emotion, threaded catchy-as-fuck guitar riffs and percussion throughout, and presented it in a rocking format to hungry music fans. Like Horror My Friend, Slowly Slowly and Pretty City before them this year, Ceres have produced a 2016 album that has done…

Travis Collins has come a long way since taking the prize of Toyota Star Maker Quest (a competition that has kick started the careers of Keith Urban, Lee Kernaghan, and James Blundell to name a few). Now, twelve years later, Travis has released his fifth album, Hard Light. Delving into loss, love, courage – it…

Ball Park Music have wooed audiences across the nation with their genre-defying versatility and clever lyrics, cementing themselves as a stalwart of the Australian alternative music scene. Their fourth studio album, Every Night The Same Dream, following on from Puddinghead, demonstrates a mature, moodier direction and does not disappoint. The shamelessly fun first track “Feelings”,…

Too often, acts struggle to find a quality sound on their sophomore release that meets both the changing tastes and influences of the band members, but also tries to meet the demands of the fans they won over with their first release and any potential new fans that may be out there. For an act…