Album Reviews

Caracal was one of the most anticipated releases of 2015. Disclosure had burst onto the scene two years before, with the brilliant debut LP Settle and lead track “Latch”, which introduced the world to the undeniable Sam Smith and that those two hair raising, falsetto syllables, “Da! Da!” (You sang them in your head right…

During my first listen of The John Steel Singers’ new EP, Midnight at the Plutonium, it’s a cold Melbourne winter day, but damn, this album makes it feel like a Brisbane summer afternoon. At just eight tracks, it’s short and sweet, and the funk that seeps through has a good chance of getting you bopping around,…

It feels like Montaigne’s debut album, Glorious Heights, has been a long time coming. Yeah, she’s been in listener’s ears since being unearthed back in 2011, but it’s not like she’s spent the past five years sitting back resting on the laurels she created as a high schooler. Some might not have blamed her if…

There aren’t too many good things to come out of illness and disease. Two of them, however, are the first two releases from Sydney band Gang Of Youths. While 2015 was hit by the massive and anthemic concept LP The Positions, 2016 is inevitably going to become enthralled by its follow-up EP, Let Me Be…

I’m trying to teach myself French, and a friend put me on to Christine and the Queens (the stage/project name of bilingual French musician Héloïse Letissier). It turns out it’s only about half-useful, because Christine and the Queens’ self-titled debut has a lot of English lyrics, at least on the international release. It’s a good…

Brisbane artist Emma Louise took the music world by storm at 19 years of age, producing a debut EP that earned her a nomination for the 2011 J Award Unearthed Artist of the Year. A beacon of raw musical talent she soon had a debut full-length album and an ARIA nomination under her belt. Sophomore…

Rap music has always had an undercurrent of self-examination to go along with its social commentary, but it seems that now more than ever, we want introspection from our artists. From Kanye West’s lexapro lyrics to Kendrick Lamar’s visionary classic from 2015, verses that could have been ripped from the casenotes of a psychologist are…

Hey Geronimo‘s Crashing Into the Sun may be one of the great mis-timed album releases. When it’s 10 degrees, you don’t long for an album full of summer jams and Beach Boys harmonies. Crashing Into the Sun denotes fun and heat, from the glorious beach-body album cover to the Sgt Pepper’s psychedelia. While it may stand in stark contrast to the…

This is an astonishing record. A story is secreted among its dayglo pop detritus: girl ditches home, meets wannabe folkstar (who does shit his way) and somewhere around “Colours” they eat tabs or fuck or both. You can practically hear the lysergic acid splash against Wildflower‘s prefrontal cortex. But writing about it is risky. Why…

There’s something warmly nostalgic about the type of music Band Of Horses have made over the past 12 years. Cease to Begin reached me when I was moving out of home for the first time, while Infinite Arms was a staple of my study playlist during my second year of uni. Listening back through certain cuts from those…

UK band Catfish and the Bottlemen, named after lead vocalist Van McCann’s encounter with an Australian busker called Catfish the Bottleman, have recently released their follow-up album to 2014’s debut, The Balcony. The Ride is a stonkingly good collection of tunes which are so polished and mature in their sound and production that I was…

Tribute albums are funny things. Usually formed by a disparate rabble of mainstream artists and indie darlings, they often lack consistency of style and tone. For the most part, Day of the Dead, an extensive tribute collection to The Grateful Dead, avoids this typical problem. Collated by Bob Weir and members of The National, it…

From the time you first heard the opening vocals on “Sweet Disposition”, you knew The Temper Trap had just that little something that was going to differentiate them from the rest of the pack. A legitimate force when they released their debut LP Conditions, the band lost their way with their experimental, breaking-from-the-mould self titled…

Ngaiire, to me, is an artist who has existed on the perimeter for far too long. As someone who doesn’t live in Sydney, my exposure to Ngaiire pre-2013 came merely in the form of a backing vocal feature here, a live spot there. ‘Why haven’t we seen more of this girl before?’, I’d think. Then…

The Lumineers released one of the easiest listening albums in recent years with their self-titled debut LP and with it, they were essentially granted the choice of playing to whomever they wanted, wherever they wanted, whilst simultaneously owning the keys to cities all over the world. They released one of the most catchy tunes in…

Let’s get this out of the way right now: A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead’s latest, is not the greatest album ever made. The fact that this will be seen as a crushing disappointment by many is a measure of the devotion of the band’s acolytes. Radiohead is often touted as the Only Rock Band That…

Melbourne seven-piece outfit King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have just released their eighth full-length release, Nonagon Infinity, and it is nothing short of pure madness. Although typically referred to as a psychedelic rock group, the septet have been here, there and everywhere over the course of their relatively short musical career (for a group with…

It may have been seven years since Paul Dempsey released his solo album Everything Is True but halfway into “The True Sea”, the opening track on his 2016 release Strange Loop, you forget about the long period in between. Its exploration of space and the loftiness of Dempsey’s vocal over seven and a half minutes…

Last year’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late was a bold move for Drake, moving away from the ultra-relatable, slightly neurotic rapper-singer and towards something closer to street-minded hip hop, taking aim at critics over dark, brooding beats that were glued together by an adrenaline-inducing energy. It was mafioso rap for the selfie generation,…

Luca Brasi are one of those bands who, when you see them perform live, it’s impossible not to feed off the energy the band generates on stage. The band exudes an ebullient confidence that has been showcased well over their previous two albums and with their latest release, If This is All We’re Going to…

With Feelin’ Kinda Free, the Drones have reasserted themselves as the enfant terribles of Australian music. They’re willing to go where others aren’t, and they bring an unmatched intensity to their music. Anticipation has been building for this release since “Taman Shud” dropped last year, a single that showed that this album was going to…

It’s been two days since Beyoncé unleashed her latest visual album onto the world in the form of Lemonade. Two days since the visual component showed her strutting down a street, armed with a baseball bat and smashing in car windows with a reckless abandon of woman scorned. Two days since she further explored and embraced her Southern…

As a populace, Australia has known Violent Soho have been building towards stardom for the better part of this decade. While their first and sophomore records (We Don’t Belong Here and Violent Soho) received little praise and only minor success, 2013’s Hungry Ghost was the punch-in-the-face and kick-in-the-teeth that rightly put Violent Soho on the…

The world was treated to a surprising (and hard-rock wet dream inducing) announcement early this year – the great man himself, Iggy Pop, was going to release an album of new material. Not only that, but it was to be produced by another rock legend, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age and Eagles…

This Is How I Let You Down is Montreal-based alternative folk-pop band The Franklin Electric’s debut album. The band is headed up by Jon Matte on vocals, piano and trumpet, with Liam Killen on drums and vocals, Alexis Messier on guitar, and Martin Desrosby on bass. Matte is also the songwriter, plus he produced the…

When British alt-pop band The 1975 came into prominence with the release of their self-titled debut album, their name became synonymous with teenage hipsters across the globe. After two years of touring and tracking their pop rock beats across the world, the band promised a reinvention in the wake of their second album – and…

Kendrick Lamar‘s To Pimp a Butterfly has been hyped as much as it has for some very good reasons and we’re still yet to see how that album will continue to grow, influence, and inspire the next generation of discerning emcees, who will hopefully seek a similar impact to the one Lamar has had over…

Parquet Courts are like that crush you had in high school – they’re smarter, cooler, funnier and more interesting than you and all you can really do is bow down to them and hope their cred will rub off on you. They’ve had a career that would make any discerning punk rock fan blush and…

Sydney based trio RÜFÜS first set disco balls turning in 2010. Following two EPs and a debut full-length album, listeners all around the world were grooving to their smooth indie-electronica music. Sophomore album, Bloom, is a lush progression of the catchy hooks, soaring vocals and entrancing dance vibes that the Sydneysiders have effortlessly disseminated for over five years….

‘Lay down, lay down. Give me someone new…’ is an extremely pertinent lyric to the entire entity and act that is DMA’s. While they’ve definitely drawn a few favourable comparisons during their rise over the past two years, there’s been plenty of conjecture over whether DMA’s are in fact ‘someone new’ or just something recycled…