Kate Hennessy : Freelance Writer

Rating:

Brian Eno built his career by being patient with music and impatient with its confines. The former saw him pioneer ambient music in the 70s while the latter freed him to explore production, visual art, festival curation, writing and other oddball projects.

Enjoying a high strike rate of acclaim, Eno came to occupy an enviable realm where he’s recognised by most, accessible to many, yet answerable to no-one. So when he casually resumes a series 37 years after starting it, barely anyone blinks.

(more…)

It’s been five years since Beaches released their debut record. Yet the follow-up, She Beats, is defined by a crackling synergy, as though the Melbourne band’s three guitars crept off and kept jamming through the hiatus. Were a guitar to develop sentience, what would it do? Indulge in the wah and the whammy bar and bathe itself in feedback – which is what happens here.

(more…)

Rating:
First published in Spectrum (Sydney Morning Herald – weekend)

This is Low’s tenth LP and their twentieth year together. Milestones that, for another band of similar cult status, would spark a flare-up of hyperbolic praise. But the music of Minnesota-based trio Low doesn’t befit hyperbole.

“You know our M.O.,” says singer and guitarist Alan Sparhawk. “Slow, quiet, sometimes melancholy, sometimes pretty.” And good enough to enchant Robert Plant (he covered two songs on 2010 record Band of Joy).

(more…)

Rating:
The single from Tomahawk’s first record in six years, Stone Letter, is a 90s anachronism that belies Oddfellows’ excellence. Though if the song’s pop punk guitars and formulaically explosive chorus is up your alley, you may be estranged later by the weirder fare, like the deranged yet debonair jazz-metal-swing of Rise Up Dirty Waters which could be a California-era Mr Bungle track burst free from a time capsule.

(more…)

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, here.

Usually, if you can hear fan over folk star, the show is just dreadful. But I can now count on one finger the concerts at which the crowd sing-along has been enjoyable. Rodriguez.

The sing-along to 1970 track Sugar Man may be drowning out the main act but it also represents a feeling that something wrong – namely, Rodriguez’s retreat into relative obscurity after his two Dylan-esque records bombed – is still being put right.

(more…)