You would think that in 20 years of their absence a lot in the music world would have changed, but ironically Devo have hit the spotlight again in front of an audience who have progressed very little. The band who arrived in the 1970s to save us from cultural and social devolution have chosen a brilliant time to come back, easily slotting right in and picking up where they left off.

Something for Everybody echoes the eighties sound the five piece is famous for. Strong, danceable rhythms lay the foundations on which bold synthesised melodies and unexpected samples resonate to create that familiar, and welcome, Devo sound. On the other hand, it's no reincarnation of Freedom of Choice or Shout; the album does hint at an evolution. Tracks flow more smoothly, indicating a greater appreciation of pop-sensibility. The memorable riffs and hooks stay with you hours after hearing them, simple yet hypnotising lyrics and phrasing playing to Devo's advantage more than ever.

Critics of the record have challenged the higher production qualities of the recording, the band's shift towards a more electronic sound and, at worst, have questioned whether it's just another cashing in on the recent revival movement. Regardless of intentions, the core element of the band is still very evident. Mark Mothersbaugh plays down such speculation, saying that Devo’s not really about a certain guitar sound or a certain voice, but what’s really important is the message; devolution is very real. It is extremely hard in this day and age to find any slice of originality in modern media. Ironic as it may be, this is true of Something for Everybody as well, what links the album with today's audience also reduces the integrity of the music.

While it is a refreshing glimpse back into the past, it seems to be less like an…

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60. Nick Drake – Pink Moon

There are so many artists that have had their legacy cemented by an early visit to the grave. Dying too soon can be an extraordinary way to leave the audience salivating for more. Kurt Cobain, Jeff Buckley, the list goes on. And Nick Drake could be considered the prototype for all of them. And Pink Moon is an incredibly fitting swansong.

Disillusioned with the music business and his lack of success therein, Drake walked into the studio at midnight on two consecutive nights. Over eight hours, he sat in front of a microphone, and with only a guitar, poured every inch of his aching soul onto record. Pink Moon is, to this day, the pinnacle of the lone singer-songwriter milieu. Jose Gonzalez, Damien Rice, even Jack Johnson, all can be traced back to this sparse, unbelievably haunting album. But don’t hold that against him.

The story - probably apocryphal - goes that Drake was so indifferent to the success or failure of his album that he dropped the master tapes off with the secretary at Island records and walked off. However, no such carelessness is evident in the music. While there is only one overdub on the album – some gentle piano on the title track – the guitar provides more atmosphere than the densest wall of sound.
Abetted by Drake’s lilting tenor, track after track of seemingly simple, but surprisingly intricate chamber folk weave a tale of melancholy that so many that have followed in his wake could only hope to recreate. Odd, then, that the closing track, ‘In The Morning’ ends proceedings on a positive note, odder still that words from that song – “And now we rise/And we are everywhere” –…

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Some may say it was ineluctable, but it seems The Hold Steady finally ran out of things to say about "boys and girls in America". If Stay Positive was a tad below their brilliant debut triad, Heaven Is Whenever shows clear signs of tiredness and makes the departure of keyboardist Franz Nicolay as justifiable as it is regrettable.

Lyrically, Heaven Is Whenever follows the Hold Steady recipe: richly referenced narrations, a genuine American underground (often including drugs and drunken parties) and ambiguous, maladjusted characters to symbolise the unease of youth. But here,  that formula isn't effective. Craig Finn's writing feels less inspired and lacks his customary insight. The result isn't convincing and one can hardly relate to the characters or sympathise with their problems. More regrettably, Finn's impressive referencing skills feel of purely aesthetic purpose in this album. As Heaven Is Whenever drowns in a series of blurry, lightweight references, it misses the vivid atmosphere Finn managed to create with his pertinent hints to Jack Kerouac in Boys and Girls in America, or Led Zeppelin in Stay Positive.

Musically, The Hold Steady fail to measure up with the "positive jam" they started with. Despite their attempt to compensate with energetic guitars, the album still misses Nicolay's contribution and the liveliness of his piano melodies. Heaven Is Whenever simply lacks momentum and except for 'Weekenders' or 'Barely Breathing' - with it's foot-tapping syncopations and jazzy feel, very few tracks stand out and most riffs are too predictable to be catchy.

The band's background is unarguable the main detractor of their fifth album. Heaven Is Whenever has little to say about an outworn theme but it stil renders that unique Hold Steady atmosphere. It might make a poor first impression but it unveils a certain charm after a few…

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The Suburbs

Win Butler and Co. show they haven’t lost their deft touch for melody and harmony on the excellent opening track, a jaunty ballad with a tone far less dark than the openers of Funeral and Neon Bible, ‘Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)’ and ‘Black Mirror’ respectively.

Ready to Start

One of several throwbacks to the band’s chief inspirational era in 1980s punk/alternative rock, ‘Ready to Start’ is a post-punk with the now familiar Arcade Fire crescendo in its pulsing, bass-driven bridge, a very solid track that stands up to their prior work.

Modern Man

A slower, more laid-back track which has neither climax nor a particularly memorable melody. Filler.

Rococo

Now they’re really getting into gear. ‘Rococo’ is a Funeral-style sing-along driven by acoustic guitar and choral harmonies, with a one-two punch of in its chorus and towering strings. Sure to become a concert mainstay.

Empty Room

An interesting flurry of strings leads into a pacy pop song made memorable with its eerie backing vocals. The first track to feature lead vocals by Régine Chassagne is also the first that can be fairly described as Springsteenian.

City with no Children

Another solid rocker that fails to take it to the next level. It seems as though Arcade Fire have toned down their tendency towards the dramatic in favour of a tighter, more restrained style. Let’s see how that plays out with the die-hards and over a few more spins.

Half Light I & Half Light II (No Celebration)

The first of two two-song vignettes, ‘Half Light I’ marks the moment…

Found in Columns (Odds and Ends)

Welcome to the second edition of The Quarterly. It’s a recap of the best of the last three months as covered by WB, our writer’s highlights of the year to date and an Australian-only list from our friends at Mess + Noise (www.messandnoise.com).

Half way through the year and we need to say ‘Kapow’. 2010 just keeps getting better. Following on from Newsom, Spoon, Vampire Weekend and Beach House last quarter, we’ve got the likes of Sleigh Bells, Broken Social Scene, The National and Australia’s own Tame Impala vying for our hearts and minds.

Sure, we may all have nanosecond attention spans because of the party drugs, Ipad/Iphones, knives on our streets and political uncertainty but still there’s a lot to get through and a lot of new music to love. In fact, in the three or so years of WB’s small, but hardly insignificant, life this is the best batch of music we’ve seen. Keep on swinging 2010; you’re not done yet…

Highest Scoring Albums of April - June Quarter

1. Sleigh Bells – Treats
2. Broken Social Scene – Forgiveness Rock Record
3. Radio Dept. – Clinging To a Scheme
4. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti – Before Today
5. Avi Buffalo – Avi Buffalo
6. Roky Erickson with Okkervil River – True Love Cast Out All Evil
7. Tame Impala – Innerspeaker
8. Coco Rosie – Grey Oceans
9. Cloud Control – Bliss Release
10. Caribou – Swim

Honorable Mention: The National – High Violet

Darren Levin
Editor, Mess+Noise (www.messandnoise.com)

Richard In Your Mind – My Volcano
Crow – Arcane
Gin…

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On Joe Pernice’s best work to date, 2003’s Yours, Mine & Ours, he and his band took a step beyond the trademark pleasant Americana and produced one of the most enjoyable indie pop records of the decade. Its 2005 follow-up, Discover A Lovelier You, was more ambitious, less successful, but still enjoyable. Disappointingly, however, the next two releases (including the 2009 solo ‘soundtrack’ to his novel, It Feels So Good When I Stop) saw a retreat to the middle of the road. 

That retreat has reached such a point that it is now very hard to reconcile the pop smarts and relative urgency that characterised his 2000-2005 output with the lifeless and predictable fare he’s served up on Goodbye, Killer. The album suffers from not only terminal blandness but also a surprising degree of amateurism: it sounds at times like little more than a bedroom recording, with out of tune and poorly mixed vocals (‘Fucking and Flowers’), and slightly mis-timed country guitar solos (‘Newport News’). 

The album starts acceptably and Pernice actually sounds re-energised on the first two tracks. Once you get past his strange over-singing, ‘Bechamel’ is passable but, with its gratuitous use of French culinary terms, stretches a lyrical gimmick too far. ‘Jacqueline Susann’ is closest to Yours, Mine & Ours territory and Pernice’s best composition in five years, despite the literary name-dropping.

Then Pernice gets embarrassingly self-referential on third track ‘We Love The Stage’: ‘I nearly drowned on my hotel room floor/But even so we made soundcheck by four.’ Ugghh. You always have to worry when a musician who’s getting on a bit starts writing songs about life on the road: they’re running out of ideas and forced to rely on nostalgia for the good old days. How can the listener relate? When Dean…

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Jay Bennett was best known for his time in Wilco. In fact, for those who have seen the Sam Jones documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, a detailed account of Wilco’s making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, he’s probably best known for his departure from a band at their creative apex.

To assess Bennett’s legacy in these terms is certainly unjust. His contributions to Wilco, as documented on I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, were vital to furthering and perfecting the band’s difficult, career-long balancing act between deconstruction and accessibility. Aside from A Ghost is Born, Wilco have never again threatened such heights post-Bennett.

Additionally, there’s Bennett’s solo work to consider. Over six albums, he amassed a catalogue of consistent, if not groundbreaking, releases. Kicking at the Perfumed Air continues this tradition. Musically, the album taps into a wide history with The Band-esque slowburner ‘Hotel Song’, country stomper ‘Second Last Call’ and more than its share of introspective ballads ‘Twice a Year’ and ‘Footprints’.

The album is steered by Bennett’s songwriting talents and his obvious experience is plastered all over Kicking at the Perfumed Air. On the positive side, there’s a pleasant consistency and familiarity to much of the album. The detractor to this being that much of the album seems to skip past, and it’s only with deeper examination that a ballad like ‘When Heaven Held the World’ stands out as a highpoint.

Consequently, it’s the moments that divert from the familiar that are the most impressive. The Boomtown Rats song ‘Diamond Smiles’ opens the album and ends as Kicking at the Perfumed Air’s most definitive statement. There’s a magic in its loose and dramatic delivery – the changing rhythmic…

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With Seagull’s debut album of 2008, Goodbye Weather, we were introduced to a band that held much promise. So much so, that we here at WB named the Melbourne quintet one of our bands to watch. It was a confident calling card; a low-key, earthy affair of wobbly, yet endearingly earnest indie-folk built upon a modest base of musical elements. So why start a review of follow-up album Council Tree with a summation of the strongest elements of the band’s past? Simple. Conspicuous by their absence, the most engaging aspects of this band’s oeuvre have been, unfortunately, abandoned.

It is sad to say that album number two is an album that is difficult to love. Where Goodbye Weather was a wintery embrace with the promise of warmth, this is a more stubborn and hard-hearted proposition; it is unpropitious and introspective to the point of being iron-clad. Even during Melbourne’s peak as the capital of Australian post-rock in the mid-to-late nineties, Council Tree would have stood as an impenetrable white elephant, lumbering aimlessly in never-ending circles.

The instrumental modesty by which Seagull operated in the past are put to shame on Council Tree. As an opener, the dull muted drums, melodica and generic guitar of ‘Rain’ give us an underwhelming introduction that is, unfortunately, rarely bettered over the course of this album. Likewise, Chris Bolton’s fragile vocals (that have always been an element that attracted one to the band’s output) are laid completely bare on Council Tree; so much so that they often sound embarrassingly juvenile and, frankly, annoyingly cloying.

The album’s only enjoyable moment comes when the band look to their past. The engaging ‘Hum Hum’, with its overt rhythm section and outwardly looking ‘propulsiveness’ highlights all…

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“The cure for everything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.” - Isak Dinesen

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.” - Edvard Munch

In Augie March's 2000 debut album Sunset Studies there is to be found poetry arguably unparalleled in popular song lyrics. Singer/songwriter Glenn Richards’s vision pieced together moving re-imaginings of Biblical stories, classical Greek philosophy, and Anglo-Celtic folk music, and wove antique images of war, flowers, the song, and the sea into meditations of perennial literary and philosophical themes, including human relationships, the notion of work, and the inevitability of death. The focus of this essay is one of the album’s masterpieces, ‘The Good Gardener (On How He Fell)’, the album's most poetically dense song with its Miltonian use of language, and one that years later still sparks curious discussion over its meaning.

A light reading of the extended metaphor that runs throughout the song reveals a heart-wrenching story about a man whose lover chooses to have an abortion despite his passionate protest. However, once one begins to excavate the arsenal of symbolism, word etymology, figures, tropes, mythology, and philosophy that Richards threaded together, it becomes a lament of man's desire for eternity and immortality, and his fear of death and the oblivion that comes with it.

Richards found a perfect convergence and representation of these existential problems in the topic of abortion, and heightened the language to the point of vertigo by relentlessly cramming these ideas into every line of the song with the above literary devices. The words he chose often give the lyrics double or triple meanings, at least one of which is almost always botanical, and lengthy lines convey…

Found in Columns (Odds and Ends)

Continued from Part 1...

The gardener may be interpreted three-fold: literally, as someone whose job is to tend the lover's garden, and with whom housewives stereotypically cheat on their husbands; as a lover with the extended metaphor of the garden as the womb, and the gardener as he who fertilises and brings forth life in the woman; and as mythological reference to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden from the Book of Genesis. This last meaning carries a couple meanings itself.

The first, in reference to the parenthetical title "On How He Fell", alludes to The Fall of Man. Before Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, mankind was made by God to live forever; as a consequence of his Fall he become mortal.

Conversely, procreation has long been poetically regarded as the means to a kind of immortality in the form of one's descendants. Notably, the first 17 of William Shakespeare's sonnets, sometimes referred to as "the procreation sonnets", are written to a young man, encouraging him to marry and propagate so that he may defy time and death, with his beauty living on in his children. Thus, an abortion may be seen as a nipping of such a bud, the opportunity to attain something eternal wasted, and is therefore the gardener's Fall, his seed being "cast out" of the woman's womb, his immortality seized.

Lacking the structure of a common pop song, it may be divided into four parts for the purpose of understanding its narrative technique. The first part consists of lines 1-8. The song sets its mood immediately with its unsettling guitar picking: F# B A# B A B A# B. Built…

Found in Columns (Odds and Ends)

Continued from Part 2...

9 I saw twilight car waxers, corpulent dog walkers, clean canny couples on the sunset strip,
10 From a tower forty miles to the east of Augusta saw a plague on the Indian a'coming on a windship,
11 You were in the garden when the wind swept up and took the foul words from your mouth
12 Now you know what your sarcasm really really means
13 It's the tearing with your teeth of the flesh from the bones of your brother -
14 Kill the shrub to fertilise the flower,
15 Did I hear you saying that the form doesn't matter?
16 Well form into matter, the matter is forever, but only in a good garden.

Going back to his time in his girlfriend's garden, line 9 describes the various people the gardener saw passing by as he worked. Line 10 progresses from the gardener observing the outside physical world to an internal one, perhaps of poetic vision and not unlike the imagined underwater garden.

It has been speculated the "plague on a windship a'coming on the Indian" may refer to an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Fremantle, Western Australia in 1903 ⁽²⁾. In an album where many songs engage in issues concerning contemporary Australian society and Australian history, this would be the only historical allusion in "The Good Gardener", and would be consistent with the motif present throughout Sunset Studies of poetically recreating Australian history. It may be seen as another example of Richards interjecting the stream-of-consciousness element of his poetic process into the consciousness of the character, in a way becoming a part of him; one is almost tempted at this point…

Found in Columns (Odds and Ends)

Continued from Part 3...

Nature is too willing to consume everything in death, the gardener passionately argues, so why fault him for wanting to make life, something human beings are born to do?

23 When I was her good gardener.
24 Sing of the Summer sham,
25 O see them grow tall, see them in their rot, see them go to seed in the cemetery plot
26 I was your good gardener
27 Sing to bring on Spring
28 O ice of Winter would crackle and splinter with my love in everything
29 Ice of Winter would crackle and splinter with my love in everything
30 I was your good gardener...

"When I was her good gardener/Sing of the Summer sham," the song progresses, shifting back into metaphor, but this time with the listener's understanding of its true meaning. "Summer sham" suggests a summer fling or a relationship valued differently by the man and the woman. It's also the right time of year for the conception of a birth that would have occurred in spring.

"O see them grow tall, see them in their rot, see them go to seed in the cemetery plot," a submerged metaphor, sees the flowers in their cycle of life in the first two phrases, juxtaposed with the irony of them going to seed in a cemetery plot, implying their reproduction has been disabled. The cemetery plot also alludes to the metaphor's literal meaning, a human life truncated before it could sprout. "Go to seed" itself has a second and divergent meaning "to decay", making the phrase doubly ironic and an even more poignant description of the aborted child.

Line 28, "O ice of…

Found in Columns (Odds and Ends)

Satisfying both the indie rock and dubstep scenes, Fabulous Diamonds II is a fascinating blend of organic Jamaican dub and psychedelic rock. Like their releases from the past, the tribal rhythms of Nisa Venerosa set the pace for often subtle variation on organ and numerous other instruments. This is the genius of fellow band member Jarrod Zlatic, creating a complex, layered sound from such a multitude of simplicities. While the primitive vocals of Venerosa and occasionally Zlatic are often criticised, it is this minimalist form which communicates their style and art to the listener, and this point has been carelessly overlooked by the band’s detractors.

Present in the majority of Fabulous Diamonds’ recordings, the use of interacting delay, reverb and gating effects builds on the idea of simplicity of form meeting complexity of sound. Mere alterations in period or range can have such profound effects on the next phrase, and keep things interesting. The best example of this is probably heard in the last of the five untitled tracks, where small variations and movements to the organ’s hypnotising theme occur, often only obvious in retrospect.

With their modal and repetitive sound there are several fronts on which Fabulous Diamonds are challenging the common standards of music. One is the false impression that music must follow a certain formula. Sure, they themselves have a structured approach to the music, but that is used only to strengthen this idea that change need not be in the verse-chorus-verse form. Similarly, instrumentation forms a huge part of how they convey their individual message, Zlatic’s fabulous sax and multiple keyboards intermingle with the often plain and harshly accented voice of his counterpart. For Fabulous Diamonds, the dissonance and deconstruction is as important as any resolution.

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As the pairing of Earlimart and Grandaddy, Admiral Radley’s debut, I Heart California, has justifiably created considerable interest. On paper the coupling sounds perfect. Both bands deliver(ed) a brand of indie rock as much defined by its quirks as by its hooks; both being more products of influence and a cultish following than any substantial commercial success. Rather than the overstuffed ‘supergroups’ of the rock scene, Admiral Radley promised a fitting ‘supergroup’ for indie types, those not as inclined to massive riffs and even larger hair.

I Heart California inconsistently delivers roughly what you’d expect. There’s the hook-heavy pop of opener and first single ‘I Heart California’, there are introspective moments (‘Lonesome Co’) and pumped-up rockers (‘Sunburn Kids’). Such highpoints, and others like ‘Ghosts of Syllables’, show the songwriting skills of both bands meshing in a seamless, natural fashion. The arrangements are deft, the melodies breezy and catchy.

However, while much of the album stands up as individual tracks, there are considerable flaws. Firstly, the record lacks the diversity to justify its 11 track status, bloating after the half-way mark. It’s a few throwaway tracks that particularly hurt the whole package: ‘Ending of Me’ sounds eerily similar to Death Cab’s ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark’, ‘Chingas in the West’ is plain dull and it’s hard to grasp how ‘The Thread’ sits on the same album as ‘I’m all Fucked on Beer’.

While there are some strong songs, I Heart California doesn’t live up to the expectations of such collaboration. It’s a hotchpotch of quirky pop, with some borrowed ideas and throwaways included. Advocates will applaud the fact that it’s done with a knowing wink, but I Heart California has a lifespan less than the independent work of both bands;…

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Little Red – ‘Rock It’

This was always going to be interesting. After the sugar-sweet debut Listen to... and the even sweeter first EP Get Ready, Little Red became Melbourne’s band du jour. A sketchy overseas tour later and they’re back in our ears with ‘Rock It’: a song that wouldn’t have made the cut on their debut full-length for stylistic reasons only. Instead of The Beach Boys-lite, this is The Band. ‘Rock It’ has an unashamedly funky piano line, a seriously infectious chorus, but is a lot less blatant than previous Little Red. Despite the MGMT break-down midway through, ‘Rock It’ is a beautiful, textured little song.

Carnation – ‘Gone’

It used to be cool to sound like Interpol. It was even cooler to sound like Joy Division. Since The Wombats ruined that for everyone with their ‘celebrate the irony’ rubbish, it’s become a whole lot less cool, and a whole lot less ingenious a move to channel the Manchester sound. Carnation didn’t get the memo. Not terrible, just a little tardy.

Dead Letter Chorus – ‘Covered By Snow’

A nice squeaky girl singing the harmonies always serves a song well. Dead Letter Chorus (whether they were around the traps before Dead Letter Circus matters not, it’s an unfortunate coincidence) is a little Counting Crows/Emmylou Harris concoction hailing from one of Australia’s lesser music towns, and it shows – a sound like this wouldn’t get half the attention they’re getting if they were in, say, Melbourne. A little folk, and nicely executed, but bland. Bland like a piece of toast with no delicious vegemite.

Icarus Himself – Mexico

The character of Icarus – a favourite for metaphor-lovers the world over – has survived centuries of bastardised, propagandistic misuses over a couple…

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