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?

Marriages is a new project for instrumental soundscapists Red Sparowes whose members over the years have hailed from influential metal acts Isis, Neurosis and Battle of Mice. Red Sparowes erect epic musical panoramas that devolve towards dire, inky apocalypse. While similar, Marriages is more dream than nightmare. No longer instrumental, the whispery moans of Emma Ruth Rundle seduce us into some of the most tender moments in post-anything since Sigur Ros.

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 controversial new ‘mega park’ gulped up Namibia’s entire 1,570 kilometre coastline, from South Africa to Angola. Within its borders is the world’s oldest desert (the Namib), the world’s highest sand dunes (the red dunes in the south) and an eerie clay pan featuring 900-year-old desiccated trees (the Dead Vlei). This extraordinary desert’s most recent claim to fame is that Mad Max 4 will be filmed here in this year after the desert-scape near Broken Hill – the film’s original location – exploded with flowers after unseasonal rains.

But all is not well with the dunes. “The surface structure is so delicate that if you drive across them, they’re broken for life,” says our guide Chris Nel in urgent tones. “The tracks on the dunes are permanent.”

Nel is a nimble, charismatic white Namibian with an accent suggestive of the Afrikaans and German he speaks fluently. The photographs he shows us depict the zigzagging tracks that blemish the entire Namib Desert. “These are ox wagon tracks still here from a German expedition in the 1880s.” He pauses.  “The 1880s.” I feel breathless in the increasingly stuffy vehicle. Another photograph. “These are car tracks that have been here since I was born.”

Red Dunes. Namib-Naukluft National Park. Image: Kate Hennessy

Bring some famous rugged coastlines to mind – California’s Big Sur or Cape Town’s Garden Route. Beauty, exclusivity, and property prices spring to mind. It’s the impossible dream of an environmental zealot to imagine any of these nations could dedicate their entire coastline to national park. It’s no surprise Namibia is the first country to do it.

While the announcement pleased conservationists, policing a national park this immense is expensive. And Namibia is poor. A growing premium, however, is being placed on conservation projects to stimulate tourism, one of Namibia’s fastest-growing sectors.

And what do tourists come to Namibia for? The almost unfathomable sense of space and isolation marked by stark sculptural scenery. There’s only 2.1 million people living here meaning there are, on average, fewer than six people per square mile.

Yellow Dunes. Dollar bush. Image: Kate Hennessy

Nel says the tracks on the desert these days are mainly from unlicensed quad bikes. Swakopmund (the tidy German-influenced town closest to the yellow dunes) has featured in the Guinness Book of Records for 10 years running for the dubious honour of having the most unlicensed quad bikes per square kilometre.

As our bleak lesson progresses, my guilt grows. Right now my husband is somewhere in the Namib, hooning around with several other thrill seekers on a quad biking tour. The same bikes that slice off lizard tails, I discover. I confess to his sins. “Don’t worry, it’s the locals doing the damage,” says Nel. “And the South Africans. Six years ago, South Africa passed a law to stop quad biking but told its people ‘Don’t panic, Namibia has more’. They load their bikes onto trucks and come here. It looks like the great wildebeest migration in the Serengeti.”

Namibia only won its independence from South Africa in 1990. It must be galling to still feel like the bullied little brother.

We rev up one of the yellow dunes. From the top we can see the Skeleton Coast where the icy, grey Atlantic Ocean laps the shores of the desert. It’s a weird sight. Once over the dune, we’re lost in thousands like it, undulating yellow sand as far as we can see.

The sky is grey with fog. No other desert is enshrouded by cold fog every morning – a result of the dunes bordering the Atlantic. The consistent micro droplets of fog ensure life continues, even though rain rarely falls. The other puzzle piece is the ‘east winds’ that blow in a curious mix of grasses, roots and seeds, some from the Kalahari Desert. There’s blackish tangles of it tumbleweeding along the base of the dunes. This stuff kicks off the food chain from the beetles that eat it neatly on upwards to the falcon and the jackal.

But where are all the animals? The dunes seem utterly barren, utterly lifeless. Where are ‘the little five’ the brochure promised?

Yellow Dunes. "Life giving fog" rolls in from cold Atlantic ocean bordering the dunes. Image: Kate Hennessy

There’s a long history of outsiders coming to Africa to tick off ‘the big five’: lion, leopard, elephant, rhino and buffalo. While tourists these days merely point their cameras, the popularity of the big five dates back to the years of game hunting when foreign luminaries like Hemingway jaunted to Africa to point and shoot their rifles and, in doing so, embody some of the continent’s mythical wildness.

It’s true the big five are thrilling beasts to see. I’m touring in one of Africa’s overland trucks and have enjoyed several exhilarating safaris. But for me, unease nipped on the heels of excitement after the animal fled and the adrenalin faded. I’m wary of tourists with large zoom lenses and expensive sandals, able to reel off all the animals they’d seen but unable to name a current or historical Namibian figure of note. I don’t want to be pigeonholed as another white tourist in single-minded pursuit of Africa’s big five. I figure there have been enough of those. When we arrived in Swakopmund, however, safaris were off the agenda and action sports were on. Left cold by the idea, I saw Nel’s pamphlet advertising the ‘the little five’ tour: snake, spider, chameleon, gecko and lizard. I warmed to the playful jab at the ubiquitous ‘big five’ and booked immediately.

It turns out I’m a rarity. “I get one client every six months from the overlanders,” Nel says. “When people arrive, they’re shown the video with the activities which are skydiving, sand boarding and quad biking.” All my overland friends are presently skydiving, sand boarding or quad biking. In a place as foreign as Africa, I guess we’re a suggestible bunch.

Yellow Dunes. Sidewinder Snake. Image: Chris Nel. Sidewinders move in a sidewinding fashion so they can move over hot sand without overheating.

While they’re barrelling over the surface of the sand, we’re discovering what lives beneath. Nel drives along tracks already etched in the dunes. We skid to a halt at the foot of an immense dune and he is off and running. I’ve noted his inclination to dart off without warning and start burrowing in the sand but this time, I follow. Last time, he excavated a delicate Namib Dune Gecko so transparent we could see its ribs. This time Nel has divined a spider door. He calls his tracking skills “reading the bushman paper”.

The Dancing White Lady spider is tiny, albino and very fierce. It lives beneath a silken arch in the dunes. Cornered, it leaps forward, pirouetting. When geckos attack the spider cartwheels down the sand dune at 44 revolutions per second, effectively disappearing before its prey’s eyes. At the bottom it wards off other predators by hypnotising them with a swaying dance. Next, we see a Sidewinder snake, undulating (sideways!) towards a bush for cover. We follow but it slips beneath the sand, miraculously fast.  It pokes its black tail up from the sand, mimicking a silverfish to tempt lizards so it can pounce on them.

Yellow Dunes. Dancing White Lady spider. Image: Kate Hennessy. Also known as the Cartwheeling Spider and endemic to the Namib dune belt.

The blind Fitzsimon’s Burrowing Skink quivers like glossy mercury freed from a thermometer when we catch one. It’s beautiful. It’s supposed to have a bright blue tail but none have tails anymore. The quad bikes rip them off. A Namaqua chameleon is our next discovery, its bulbous eyes swivelling independently of each other. Within a minute the white chameleon has turned black meaning it’s either nervous or furious. Or both.

Nel takes us to a special high part of desert where the dunes’ windblown creases are streaked by colourful crushed minerals. The dunes “walk”, says Nel, “in the direction of the south west wind”. This bewitching, changeable geography is coloured red (ruby and garnet), white (quartz), black (iron oxide) and silver (mica).

Driving back to Swakopmund, sun angles through the window onto my clothes, which shimmer with mica. A truck hurtles by with an ungainly pod of quad bikes roped to the back. I think of the lizard, that beautiful, wriggling thread of quicksilver, with a blunt stump instead of a bright, blue tail.

(See photo gallery here)

Kate Hennessy travelled courtesy of Gecko’s Adventures

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?

A challenge throbs deep in the flesh of this EP from UK dubstep producer Burial: to listen without feeling heart-sore. Just try. And when you fail, trace your fall. You’ll find what’s responsible are the trademark sounds Burial – real name William Bevan –deployed on previous releases to the same devastating emotional effect.

Bass lines as purposeful as a charge from a defibrillator; a disquieting atmosphere of impermanence and fragility evoked by the hisses, cracks and pops of faux-vinyl static; soulful female vocal samples cut-up and manipulated to radiate a profoundly affecting sense of sorrow and displacement. While Bevan is shuffling familiar elements on Kindred he’s also perfecting his distinct and dark art of dubstep, lifted here to its giddiest, and most grievous, heights yet.

KATE HENNESSY and AARON CURRAN report on the inaugural Dig It Up!, which took over four venues in Sydney on April 22. The series commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Gurus’ watershed single ‘Leilani’. Photos by CHRIS TURNER.

KH: In his welcome message in the Dig it Up program, Hoodoo Gurus’ frontman Dave Faulkner says: “Dig it Up is NOT seeking to carve up the potential audience into marketing segments with a little bit of this for the ‘this’ people and a little bit of that for the ‘that’ people.”

It’s a neat summary of why it feels so good to be walking down Enmore Road on Sunday with a handful of “this people” friends. There are no “that people” to contend with; none of that jarring clash of devotees to different scenes and sounds that music festivals commonly elicit. It imbues the day with the same sense of camaraderie that makes many metal festivals so unexpectedly feel-good. As he continues his message, however, Faulkner loses his thread. The reason each band made the bill, he says, was because they were the “Grade A Good Stuff” – a subjective claim that cheapens the curatorial strength of a festival that features “now” bands (like Royal Headache) alongside “then” bands (like The Sonics) as a way to showcase the thriving continuum of garage rock n’ roll.

The Hard-Ons

AC: It feels incongruous to be entering the Enmore Theatre in the grey light of early afternoon but there’s a fair-sized crowd already in place for the first band of the day. The Hard-Ons rip off their T-shirts and get bare-chested in unison before reliably thumping out their well-seasoned jumble of thrash metal and punk pop. Ray and Blackie welcome new drummer Murray to the band and keep the crowd chuckling with puerile, often self-deprecating, between-song banter that’s as much a part of a Hard-Ons show as the music itself. They play ‘Where Does She Come From?’, then a “cover” of ‘Roadrunner’ by Bo Diddley, which was utterly unrecognisable as the same song. As the set powers on, fun is had, a bass string is broken, cricket is discussed, and lots more noise is made. I had to laugh when they tease the younger members of the audience about whether their parents are cool and have great record collections.

KH: I miss the show but piece it together from three comments repeated by everyone who sees it.
“They all took their T-shirts off at the same time!”
“They were doing their metal thing.”
“They were fucking loud.”

Straight Arrows

KH: “Thanks for getting up early to come see us,” says Straight Arrows singer Owen Penglis. It’s 1.30pm. Wry smiles all round. The Arrows blister into ‘Haunted Out’ from debut album It’s Happening and have the crowd warmed up in five seconds flat. Their lo-fi sloppy surf-rock functions like a medicinal shot of tequila. Makes you feel a bit charged, a bit messy, a bit free.

Snug in the dark recesses of Notes, hand wrapped happily around my “breakfast” beer, I watch a group of middle-aged folk seat-bop to the shouty adolescent sneer and stomp of ‘Bad Temper’: “Get so mad, get so mad/Fuck you Mum. Fuck you Dad/Bad, bad, bad, bad temper!” I wonder if these mums and dads still think rebellion is cool? Or at some undetermined point did they switch to thinking it was sorta silly? Or does snotty rock’n’roll appeal to a demarcated zone of snotty adolescence preserved well into our antiquity? The response to Straight Arrows makes you place bets on the latter.

“You can all pretty much go home now,” says Pengilis when it’s over. “You’ve seen the best of the best.” He’s probably joking but I’m glad he said it anyway. The day is enough of a pageant to the past without the ankle-biter bands heaping praise on bands that no longer need it.

Already, those playing at Notes are competing for attention with the bigger acts due to two large screens onstage playing live footage from The Enmore. Watching the Straight Arrows do their darnedest to distract us from The Hard-Ons playing behind them, I’m reminded of a quote by ex-Strangler Hugh Cornwall. “I can’t imagine what it’s like being a young person trying to get a start in the music business – it must be a nightmare,” he said. “Because none of the old fuckers like myself are giving up”.

Fleshtones

KH: The Fleshtones sprint from the wings to their spots onstage in a display that’s athletic shorthand for “We’ve still got it man!” But with Straight Arrows’ hooks still jangling in my head, I can’t latch on. And compared to Notes the Enmore’s sound is echo and mud. “The Tones” are in black pants and bold-coloured shirts, grinning like maniacs with limbs akimbo, all high kicks and synchronised spins. Two songs in and the guitarist is soloing on a human pyramid built from the thighs of the bass player and singer. It’s pure showbiz yet oddly infantalising. I feel like I’m watching The Wiggles. We bail (leaving hundreds lapping it up by the ladleful) and commiserate out the front with some other refugees from the great Fleshtones pantomime. “Want a one-line review?” offers a friend. “Less camp on vinyl.”

The Gooch Palms

KH: Did The Sly Fox get the Dig it Up! memo? They don’t appear to be on board with the festival at all. The stage lights are murky while harsh white down-lights illuminate the meager audience here to see the band. As The Gooch Palms come onstage the screen behind them powers down into screensaver mode and the dreaded DVD icon begins richocheting from corner to corner of the screen. It’s the 21st century’s key signifier of “I can’t be fucked getting off the couch”. Meanwhile, the crowd is still thin on the ground. I flip through my program and start to feel uncool for being here in the first place.

The Gooch Palms duo of Leroy and Kat are like the grown-up versions of the naughty kids with the hippy parents who never told them to behave. Kat sings and beats a couple of drums (sans cymbals) while Leroy sings and plays dubious guitar. “This is a song about hay!” announces Kat proudly, doing a good imitation of unsalvageably unhinged. “You know, the kind horses eat?!”

Leroy chimes in. “It’s time to introduce you to the third member of The Gooch Palms and a very special guest,” he says, ceremonially, before turning and mooning the crowd. To further make his point, he reaches around and delicately separates his ass cheeks. Nevertheless, more people swarm in and, as they do, a curious things occurs. The gig gets better. A couple of the Straight Arrows guys shuffle to the front and prod, elbow and otherwise cajole their friends to join them. Suddenly, the room has energy. Because it’s packed, more people try to pack in.

The Gooch Palms get more raucous, the crowd laughs louder and everyone moves more. The lead singer belts out an Elvis-like croon that’s pretty darn electrifying, followed by some doo-wop falsetto and an Axl Rose screech. Guy’s got talent! They blaze into some sort of crappy yet catchy-as-hell ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’/Ozzy Osbourne mash-up and the momentum of the moment breaks over the room, leaving me stranded on a bone-dry island some distance behind. Nevertheless, it’s captivating. I feel like I’m witnessing the genesis of an “it” band at accelerated speed and ferocity – from near-empty room to hipsters swinging from the chandeliers. Hell, my friends only bailed five minutes before I did and the suckers missed EVERYTHING.

Kids In Dust/The Sunnyboys

AC: Kids in Dust are, in fact, the Sunnyboys. Every person in the packed Enmore goes absolutely nuts as the original line-up of Bill Bilson (drums), Richard Burgman (guitar), Peter Oxley (bass) and Jeremy Oxley (lead vocals and guitar) step from the wings, where their families are packed in tight together to watch them play their first show in … too many years. The songs are mainly drawn from their classic self-titled debut – ‘Tunnel of Love’, ‘Happy Man’, ‘Let You Go’, ‘My Only Friend’, ‘I’m Shakin’ and more – and each is played with a damn sight more precision and vitality than we had any reason to expect. (Though Burgman’s quip to Bilson that the band “don’t sound bad considering we only had a 10 minute rehearsal” was a lighthearted step beyond credulity.)

Looking around, everyone is dancing and cheering, and some even look a little emotional, which is understandable given the health issues that Jeremy Oxley has faced in being able to sing these amazing songs for us, and the esteem in which they are still held. His voice is still strong and distinctive, while I’m astonished at the sheer fluidity of the guitarists’ interplay. The rhythm section is similarly solid; Burgman has a Cheshire cat grin and can’t stop beaming at them both. (He looks like we feel.)

‘Alone with You’, perhaps the best-loved Australian song of the post-punk period, is a fitting closer and Jeremy Oxley’s impassioned guitar solo bites hard, almost as loud as the applause of the crowd.

Belles Will Ring

KH: There’s few inroads to Belles Will Ring when it comes to the written word. Theirs is such a well-crafted amalgam of ’60s and ’70s influences– from Electric Prunes to The Mamas & The Papas – that it almost sounds like they imagined up the whole trip themselves. But it’s so tastefully delivered to a note and to a gesture that it makes the experience wonderful to partake of but difficult to report on. Perfect circles always are.

Percussionist, keyboardist, flutist and co-vocalist Lauren Crew is especially alluring today when juxtaposed against the backdrop of aged Sunnyboys. With a notable lack of women on the bill, the belle of the Belles copes with a roomful of lascivious eyes with her signature blank stare. “She’s a real snake-charmer,” says a friend in admiration. It’s true. Her moves are hypnotic. Her tambourine is firm and precise. Her stare is cool. Her voice is warm. They wrap up with ‘The River’: the soundtrack to a drug-addled spaghetti western, dumping you on your acid-fried ass deep in the desert badlands with just coyotes and cacti for company. Scorching on record, elevated to incendiary as a set-closer and the only time you hear vocalist Liam Judson really lose his lolly.

Spencer P Jones

AC: Up at the Sly Fox, Spencer P Jones performs to a full-house. I’m way up the back so can’t see much except for occasional glimpses of a white Stetson hat. His voice is too distant and the guitar is thin and trebly in the mix. ‘The Bogans (Are Having All the Fun)’ gets some audience members singing along, but I find myself straining to hear any lyrics at all. I give up during a song about Valentine’s Day.

Tek & Younger

AC: Radio Birdman’s Deniz Tek and Rob Younger are playing to a less-than-capacity room at the Enmore, undoubtedly the result of everyone needing a break from the place after The Sunnyboys. A handful of classics are tossed out in quick succession – ‘I-94’, ‘Alone in the Endzone’, ‘Hand of Law’ – but they lack the ferocity and edge that marks the finest performances I’ve seen by these guys. A version of ‘Hindu Gods of Love’ by the Lipstick Killers sounds fantastic though. It’s a highlight of the set, along with frenetic closer ‘Aloha Steve and Danno’. (That’s what’s wrong with Australian music these days – not enough songs about TV cop shows.)

Steve Wynn

AC: There’s a timetable swap over at Notes and Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn comes on earlier than the schedule I had. Two of the guys from The Fleshtones are backing Wynn, along with a female drummer who plays with formidable drive. They sound fantastic in this small room, ending with a driving cover of ‘Who Do You Love’ (yet another Bo Diddley song and one which the Hoodoo Gurus have also covered). Wynn seems genuinely chuffed by the crowd’s response and leaves us with the promise of more shows soon.

Royal Headache

KH: Barreling from side-to-side like an enraged, fuzzy-headed crab, Royal Headache frontman Shogun is the show. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of his voice and his furious delivery and how it elevates the band’s otherwise standard three-chord pop-rock to something worth witnessing … again and again. The band functions much like Shogun’s unruly limbs which don’t always do his bidding. A few seconds into ‘Down The Lane’ he hissy-fits centre stage.

AC: Geez, that Shogun fella is a fairly grumpy sort, isn’t he? He seems extremely uncomfortable as he paces the stage, making gruff demands to the soundie to change the foldback levels, and to the band themselves about what songs to play or what speed to play them at. (To be fair, he was right on that last point, making them stop during the first verse of ‘Down the Lane’ and rev it up by about 10 BPM.) Most of the best tracks from their debut LP are played, like ‘Never Again’, ‘Really in Love’ and ‘Psychotic Episode’, and they end on a furiously agreeable cover of ’80s pop-standard ‘Teardrops’ by Womack & Womack.

Died Pretty

AC: Died Pretty take the stage to an intro tape of Os Mutantes’ ‘A Minha Menina’, with guitarist Brett Myers dressed simply in black polo and jeans while singer Ron Peno is rocking a waistcoat-and-tie combo. When Peno spoke to M+N recently, he’d promised Dig It Up! audiences a diverse set of mostly earlier material and the band stayed true to those words, with soaring takes on ‘Stops and Starts, ‘Lost’, ‘Sweetheart’, ‘Crawls Away’ and an especially-welcome ‘Landsakes’ from Free Dirt (1986). I’m tempted to go and hassle someone at the mixing desk though, as the sound that we’re hearing doesn’t seem commensurate to the effort of the musicians: the keyboards are too weak, the overall mix is too quiet, and when Myers hits a pedal and peels off one of his patented psych-fuelled solos, you can barely feel it.

KH: A rising ratio of meatheads in the audience doesn’t help. Guys are barging through the front section with tinnies, front-on, instead of sidling sideways as gig etiquette dictates. By sheer force of will, however, I enjoy the majestic ‘Godbless’ from Doughboy Hollow as much as the next DP devotee; a track that’s all the richer for the many here who wept over the Sunnyboys’ reportedly glorious set a few hours earlier: “So here I am, alone with you/The Sunnyboys, God bless them/And God bless you.”

‘Dig It Up R&A’

KH: In the Green Room Lounge, Laughing Outlaw label owner Stuart Coupe is interviewing Steve Wynn (Dream Syndicate), Brad Shepherd (Hoodoo Gurus) and The Fleshtones singer Peter Zaremba. It’s an interesting chat full of frank and colourful details. Rock is eating itself, however. Coupe asks his “panel” about playing with Died Pretty back in the day. They all nod sagely and begin talking about a legendary gig at Paddington RSL. No one mentions that Died Pretty – the real Died Pretty that is, not the one resurrected from collective memory – is bashing it out as they speak, a few doors down.

The Sonics

AC: Back at the Enmore, the grandfathers of garage rock, The Sonics, walk out in matching black and silver outfits. They’re looking confident, as well they might, seeing as how they practically invented the music we’ve been hearing all day. If we had any reservations about seeing a bunch of grey-haired, paunchy guys in their ’60s and ’70s play greasy punk/R&B, that’s quickly dispelled when they punch out astonishingly-tight, fuzzed-up classics like ‘He’s Waitin’, ‘Have Love, Will Travel’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Boss Hoss’ and ‘Shotdown’, one after the other with barely a rest between them.

The voice of original frontman and Phil Spector-lookalike Gerry Roslie, has lost a little of its fearsome growl over the decades, so he shares duties with bassist Freddie Dennis, who is more than capable of offering up raw screams as required. The band sound better and better as the set progresses, ending with a crazy-good trio of ‘Strychnine’, ‘Psycho’ and ‘The Witch’. Most of us are dancing and cheering the Sonics’ inimitable sax-driven stomp, including Ronnie Yoshiko from The 5.6.7.8’s, who go-go dances feverishly side of stage.

The Hoodoo Gurus

AC: The Gurus can’t wipe the smiles off their faces. Dave Faulkner’s got on his old fringed jacket (y’know, the one he’s wearing on the back cover of the ‘Tojo’ single) and Brad Shepherd has dug up his trusty old Gretsch. They play Stoneage Romeos – an album that sent many Australian listeners down the garage rock path in the first place – in almost the original order, coming straight out of the gates with a tearaway ‘(Let’s All) Turn On’.

‘Leilani’ sounds fantastic, the crowd matching every one of Faulkner’s shouts of “ummgawah!”, and ‘I Was a Kamikaze Pilot’ is an unstoppable rave-up. For the encores we get a mixture of the much-loved and the biggest hits, kicking off with the anthemic b-side ‘Be My Guru’ and the triumphant ‘Bittersweet’. The Gurus throw in a more recent number, ‘Crackin’ Up’, which has the energy but little of the melody of their best material, closing the night with a raging version of ‘Television Addict’ from Faulkner’s early band The Victims and the ever-popular ‘Like Wow – Wipeout!’ Here’s to the next 30 years.

The Greening the Wharf website team

You can link through to the individual case studies here:

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Sue's website

Sue & I talked about my life as a writer here.

Please see review in PDF.

Were I Lambchop’s publicist for Mr. M, I’d allow a long lead-time between promo copies and the record’s release date to give critics the longest possible time to let this one marinate. Like furled seedlings, all Lambchop records need time and attention to bloom. All are eventually growers. Especially Mr. M.

The story goes as such. When Kurt Wagner’s friend Vic Chestnutt died, Kurt (also an artist) began painting his way out of the pain. He was approached by Mark Nevers (producer for Will Oldham and Andrew Bird) who told Kurt he “had a concept of a sound and a method that worked with the tone of [Kurt’s] writing”. Mr. M was a chance for Kurt to “do things as directly and true to [his] desires as possible”. What an offer. It’s the kind of creative honesty we all crave in the aftermath of grief.

A red flag is waved in the first 15 seconds and that flag is strings. Lots of them. Swooping, film-score-worthy strings. They recede into the undergrowth as opener ‘If Not I’ll Just Die’ progresses but, along with horns and piano, remain a constant theme throughout, coating instrumental tracks like ‘Betty’s Overture’ in the yellowed showbiz smoke-haze of a Reno casino circa ‘64. Grief isn’t an overly apparent theme. Grief’s attendant state of introspection, however, is, and when ‘Gone Tomorrow’ ambles off into a long, mesmeric jam it seems to mirror the far-sighted meditations we succumb to when someone we love dies.

While Wagner’s hushed, reedy voice and finger-picked guitar is still the heart of Mr. M, Nevers’ orchestral touch has birthed a record that’s more complex and elusive than its forerunners.

First published on The Vine, here.

There’s no music while we wait for Aphex Twin. Just roadies roaming the first few rows bearing video cameras with searchlights, gathering footage of faces in the crowd. Purposeful and silent. Some people try to duck the interrogative shaft of light but most stare back, enjoying the confrontation. They’re fans of Aphex Twin, after all. Confrontation is the point. We’re all strapped in here.

Aphex Twin live at Future Music in Brisbane. Photo C/O Justin Edwards

’90s anachronisms are peppered throughout the audience – re-incarnated habits and styles that had passed on with little commemoration. Like the scowling guy wearing black bug-eye sunglasses. Like the couple awkwardly ‘cuddle-dancing’ to opening DJ Mark Pritchard. Like the oblivious people waving glow sticks. Like the ferals in fluffy pants.

Presumably the people here aren’t interested in Future Music Festival – the reason Aphex Twin is in Australia for the first time in eight years. Maybe, like me, their entry point to Aphex Twin wasn’t dance music. I came via industrial music; was mesmerised by the pace of his abrasive, punishing sounds and its relentlessness. Later, it was the ambient works that roped me in. I’ve never been in it to dance. That’s why I’m taken aback when he kicks off mixing hip-hop. There’s the bass line from Digital Underground’s ‘The Humpty Dance’, bells from Run DMC’s ‘Peter Piper’, drums from Public Enemy’s ‘Security of the First World’ and sax from Wreckx-N-Effect’s ‘Rump Shaker’. It’s deafening and has macabre trace elements of Richard D. James somewhere in the mix. But it’s not what I’m here for.

The LED panels fire up – a huge, split-level wall of light with ferocious capacity – and begin to strobe the black and white Aphex Twin logo. The visual stimulus of it ripples across the crowd – brand power at its most visceral.

What other logo sparks recognition within spitting distance of the musical mainstream yet is so synonymous with raw confrontation?

The set moves to electro, mixing in scratching samples and even some James Brown. I’m hoping this is the calm before the storm because I’m here for the unadulterated Aphex Twin experience. The one that’s seen me slumped on the far reaches of dance floors with my head in my hands. The sonic stamina test. When lasers start slicing through the air to an ecstatic cheer from the audience and he mixes in the first distinctly Aphex Twin sound – like a car horn that’s been put through a blender – I think: ‘It’s begun’.

I’m upstairs in the seated section but, like me, people are standing in the sloped aisles, bodies illuminated by the powerful lights. The visuals are showing the faces from the crowd– at times recognisable, at times a swirling, mutated mess. It’s an obvious inversion of the dancing-crowd visuals that are so popular with people who dance to be seen. But the critique only works when their faces are all messed up. Because when they’re not – and when they recognise themselves and dance harder – I’m plunged back into the crucible of hell I suffered in Poland last year: an electronic music festival sponsored by an energy drink where I watched in despair as kids saw themselves dancing on the screens, filmed it, then replayed the footage on the dancefloor; in the process spiralling so deep into a void of narcissism I willed them never to return.

Everything is escalating. The pace, the lights, the harshness of the sound. Richard D. James’ maniacal face is devouring the faces on the screen and the sound is compacting into the aural equivalent of a pumice-stone scrub. Then it begins. Bob Hawke, Kath & Kim, Steve Irwin, Molly Meldrum, Ossie Ostrich, Kylie and Jason, Guy Sebastian, Julia Gillard and The Wiggles all flash up on the screen bearing Aphex Twin’s face – even more distorted than usual, stitched together and pig-like with red devil eyes. The crowd gasp in delight with each new identity. Now it’s Gough Whitlam in his ‘It’s Time’ t-shirt, a picture that means a lot to me. But I hand him right on over and laugh as his face is defiled. Why? Visually, it’s a clumsy cut and paste. Conceptually, it’s infantile. So why is it so electrifying? Is the sound and searing light crippling our cognitive faculties? Pummeling us into a state of submission? “Yes!” we cry. “Take our icons! Violate our celebrities! Steal their faces! Fuck them up!”

The last 10 minutes is quite simply an onslaught; a full-body audio exfoliant; a sonic sandblasting. This. This is why I come. It’s cleansing to be so consumed; to have no space for ambivalence, distraction or doubt. It’s like extreme exercise or (good) sex.

Just like that, it’s over, and we’re stranded in a throbbing aftershock of silence. First a rumble, then a great wall of cheering rises. Foot-stamping. Slow claps. Pogoing. Whistling. Escalating roars when people think he’s returning to the stage. People in the upper section — who are usually half-asleep by the end of Enmore shows — lean over and start drumming on the overhang. Still, nothing. But none of the traditional signals that it’s genuinely over either. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it in Sydney but, then again, usually the PA starts blaring The Strokes and people shrug and file out. More stamping and cheering. Beer cans torpedoing stage-wards as the crowd capitulates to its collective desire to suffer again at the hands of this masochistic maestro.

Maybe we’re getting weary of the fiction of how tough we’re doing it in Australia. Maybe we want to feel something that actually hurts.