Rating: 
Ned Collette’s lyrics are as purposeful as parable but they don’t yield their meaning easily. When the code is cracked, though, revelation comes avalanching.
Archive for May, 2012
Lower Plenty – HARD RUBBISH
Metro (Sydney Morning Herald),
May, 2012
Rating: 
Pour a drink, head for the porch and watch the world go by: Hard Rubbish necessitates a laid-back listen. Recorded in one take with bum notes aplenty, here, members of Melbourne bands UV Race, Dick Diver and Deaf Wish trade their amps for acoustic guitars and drum brushes then proceed to casually flaunt all building codes, instead cobbling together a lean-to of loosely-constructed folk; songs with so much space between the cracks there’s room for any passing vagrant to come in and take a load off. These sweet, simple tunes summon the canny vulnerability of Moon Pix-era Cat Power whilst radiating the kind of youthful, accidental charm that’s hard to bottle and impossible to fake yet all too easy to grow out of.
Marriages – KITSUNE
Metro (Sydney Morning Herald),
May 2012
Rating:
In the opener from LA post-metal trio Marriages, five bursts of down-tuned distortion growl from the undergrowth, then retreat, leaving their hot, predatory breath on your skin and the thrilling question only metal can pose: how heavy is this going to get?
What lies beneath
Traveller (Sydney Morning Herald - weekend),
May 2012
This is not how I imagined my Namib Desert tour would begin. Myself, three Germans and an English couple are held captive in our guide’s Land Rover as he flips through a booklet of disturbing aerial photographs of the yellow sand dunes we’re here to see.
The car is stationary, poised to cross the Swakopmund River. It’s not clear when the tour will resume, at least in a locomotive sense. It appears first we must learn some facts about the vast ocean of sand before us that in December 2010 became part of the largest national park in Africa and the eight-largest protected area in the world: The Namib Skeleton Coast National Park.
Yellow Dunes. Translucent palmato gecko. Image: Kate Hennessy
The Dandy Warhols – THIS MACHINE
Metro (Sydney Morning Herald),
May 2012
Rating:
Cut loose from the mooring of a unifying concept, This Machine is a series of unrelated pop songs, disparate in sound and spirit, and marred by some real clangers. Enjoy Yourself shoots for anthemic slam-dunk but bounces awkwardly off the hoop and boing-boings around pointlessly, unaided by an ill-advised kazoo, and pleading you to press ‘skip’.
On the flipside, when standout tracks The Autumn Carnival and Slide gear back down into the drowsy shoegaze the Dandys drove in on with 1995’s game-changing Dandys Rule OK, things improve markedly. These two songs aside, though, you can’t help but wonder: does pop need a band like the Dandys, capable of so much, cramming yet more material into its bloated back-catalogue?
Sydney Morning Herald online music