Moya – What Do You Want From Me That You Haven’t Already Taken and Spat On?

Moya’s founding members are an interesting couple of guys. One, John Sweeney, is a musician from Whitley’s touring band; the other, Anthony O’Sullivan, a poet of some renown in Melbourne’s poetry scene. I didn’t know there was a poetry ‘scene’. Here I was thinking poets were the anti-social types who would despise the very idea of a ‘scene’, at least since being a Beatnik went out of fashion. The music that Moya produces, however, is not in the least bit the effete, artsy-fartsy stuff you’d expect from such a pair: it’s ballsy rock ‘n’ roll, plain and simple. Their influences are set heavily in old-style Blues, somewhat like The Black Keys. O’Sullivan roars over the distortion-filled tracks and at their best Moya are achingly reminiscent of the cool old guys from Cream. What Do You Want From Me… doesn’t just offer a cool album title, it’s a painfully festival-friendly sound. The ideal scenario? Think Saturday arvo at Meredith, a few beers already in you, the egg and bacon sandwich you ate in the morning now weighing you down.


Zs – The Hard EP

You know how adolescent girls always talk about ‘experimenting’? You know how by ‘experimenting’, they mean making out with their friends? And they giggle about it after? Then proceed to tell everyone about it? Well, Zs’ style of experimental rock has that same stench of triteness to it, that same yucky, sticky feeling that comes from acts of contrived ‘weirdness’. The Hard EP’s 15 minutes of tuneless, structureless, uninteresting and unfathomably obtuse experimentalism turns my stomach. Unless you have a penchant for listening to other people’s trash, don’t even look at this record. I’m all for experimenting… just don’t record it and sell it.


Des Miller & The Magnetic Heads – ‘Strange Places’

You get the sense that Des Miller listens to a lot of 70s folk. I bet Easy Rider is one of his favourite films. None of this is meant as an indictment – ‘Strange Places’ is a quirky and complex example of down-played psychedelia, and is intensely likable. The sporadic guitar licks and sparse arrangement of the piece might turn some off, and might make it seem a little stilted at times, but Miller adopts an earnest croon – in a 1980s Bowie type of way – that never loses its appeal.

Sea Sick – Sea Sick

Bands nowadays display their influences with the same subtlety that Public Enemy liked to keep track of the time… Sea Sick really, really like Jefferson Airplane, I suspect. And they probably dig Velvet Underground too. Jasmine Golestaneh wails away over the psychedelic arrangement with that lazy, hippy-ish aplomb, but whatever charisma the girl can bring to the music (and her charisma is great), it doesn’t change the fact that Sea Sick, in trying to sound like something, they fail in terms of actually writing palatable songs. It’s all about the ‘feel’ and ‘atmosphere’ with Sea Sick’s music, and they don’t pull it off very well at all.