On Dit

In case you are a student of the University of Adelaide, cut through the campus as a thoroughfare or are just into great local magazines, On Dit is back for another year with a renewed vigour and a newfound coherence (and pretty layout). The Editors have made something really great out of the unenviable task of trying to edge this 78 year old student newspaper out of the rut of shambolic mediocrity it seemed to be edging towards.

And, of course, yours truly made a contribution to Issue #1 with what else but a piece about the Adelaide band scene called "Mapping The Scene". It features a map of the scene (or part thereof) and the connections between bands, as above. The final nice looking print version has a few connections missing so for completions sake, here is my draft of it.

Read it online here or here, or go and get one from campus. They look so nice in real life it's not even fair.

http://ondit.com.au

Anthony Wignall

Anthony Wignall has played guitar in a lot of bands over the years. From Zeta to Deja Entendu, Oh My Guard! and most prominently The Keepsakes. He also writes pretty amazing songs, with acrobatic melodies that just seem to flow completely effortlessly from, all delivered in his great Lucksmith-y voice with a distinctly Australian sound. The nice kind of Australian sound, the one that feels like suburbs and parks.

Since apparently The Keepsakes are no longer gearing towards an EP release (the tracks of which have been on myspace for some time) and are instead working towards an April album release, I thought I'd hold off on the full band tracks and instead share a couple of equally awesome demos he put on last.fm. In a lot of ways his songs are even better served in a sparse acoustic setting with the sounds of birds outside bleeding into the recording. For me no studio full band version of "Paper Bridges" can top the great vocal multitracking and buoyant melody of its acoustic demo version "Practice". Man thats a sweet song.

The Keepsakes are playing a little acoustic February residency at the Exeter, of which 2 shows remain I think. A nice way to spend a Monday evening, I think.

Anthony Wignall - Practice

Anthony Wignall - Bells

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photo by Sia Duff.

New Honey Pies

Since I first gushed uncontrollably about The Honey Pies back in August, I've finally got around to seeing them live (twice, in fact, in different configurations) and my appreciation has only become more potent. That and I managed to get a hole bunch of old, crackly distorted but awesome home demos from when Jon had yet to form the rest of the band, including the amazing 'Diving Bell', which is given a whole new depth live with those sweet, slightly off kilter three-part harmonies in the "seriously-Jon-Marco-it's-not-even-fair-how-cool-that-melody-is" bridge. I get that feeling a lot actually.

Anyway, this week they released the fourth and final track to their demo CD "Oh Hi We Didn't See You There, We're.... The Honey Pies", a whole 3 months after the first three tracks became available. While 'Too Cool For School' isn't quite as shinily recorded as the earlier tracks, it nonetheless rounds out the release nicely, with a cool backwards solo/outro section that kind of sounds like a lo-fi outtake of Revolver. Got to love the tongue-in-cheek triteness of the rebellious lyrics and title.

As always, this track and all them other beauties can be downloaded, possibly for free, at their website....

Oh, this is an utterly brilliant live set courtesy of the folks at Radio Adelaide.

And they're playing with We Grow Up and The Keepsakes on the 26th of February at the Jade Monkey. Damn my shameless self-promotion, damnit to heck.

The Honey Pies - Too Cool For School

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Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire!

You know, with 'Little Cowboys, Bad Hombres', we've now been privy to five tracks from Sea Priest, the debut of Adelaide's big hope for 2010. That's pretty much half the album(!) If they are anything to go by, it shall be a dizzyingly eclectic but strangely coherent mash of styles that capitalises quite nicely on the potential shown way back with 'War Coward'.

This tune is shiny. The guitars are big and crisp, with a tone that's kind of removed from their last couple of singles yet has an angular, duel-guitar interplay that recalls the dance-punkiness of their earlier work. Obviously though, this one is a huge step forward in terms of melody and song craft. It retains the half-buried vocal mixing of their previous bunch of singles, which in this case helps prevent it from becoming just a flat out dance-pop tune, and rightly so. That and the fact that it is just such a behemoth, kind of like a more "up" continuation of the lurching monster that was 'War Coward'. It's cool the way it marries so many elements of their myriad of past sounds with a fully formed pop sensibility that still manages to be knottier than most JJJ radio fare.

An slightly left-of-centre summer jam, perhaps a bit late in the season, but still pretty cool.

I like that it makes full use of their duel vocalists David Williams and Caitlin Duff, though I've just got to shake of the unnerving feeling that it's a duet between Daniel Rossen and the girl from Operator Please.

Sea Priest is slated for a March release, and should be huge, surely. Judging by the album cover alone, it is destined for the st(rad)osphere.

Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire! - Little Cowboys, Bad Hombres

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Box Elder

Box Elder are a young five piece from the Adelaide who play from the same school of thought as Steering by Stars and the now-defunct Billy Bishop Goes To War, with disembodied, atmospheric vocals and swirls of shoegazy and melodic guitars.

They've managed to strike a really effective balance across their three guitarist line-up, with each player weaving in and out of each other adding texture and nuance across a track without ever becoming cluttered, something that comes across really well in the mixing of this track "Vega". The bass and drums are no slouches either, with all five elements really coming together organically and cohesively.

Another tune from these home recordings (Folk Hands), which I guess will surface as an EP sometime in the future, goes for around six minutes with no vocals (in the unfinished version I've heard) and is entirely reliant on the riffing, and it's really quite captivating. The guitar tone as well, I can't really describe it, but it's that clean almost surf-rock/spaghetti western kind of sound, but much slower and more melodic. It's ace.

They're playing a show at the Metropolitan Hotel on the 20th, with the coolest gig poster concept I've seen in a while. (Note: I am also playing this show, but I swear I am not biased at all.)

Box Elder - Vega

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Knit Factory

While most of these tracks aren't exactly brand new, I've only really been fawning over them over the past month or two, so I thought I'd share them anyway.

Best Coast is Bethany Cosentino, an American songwriter who relocated back to California and started making appropriately dreamy garage pop with a terrific lo-fi sensibility that goes nicely with the pristine sounding melodies and vocals.

Best Coast - When I'm With You

Micachu & The Shapes are a band out of England led by talented producer/songwriter Mica Levi. A friend saw them at Glastonbury last year, and when they happend to be playing down the road from my hostel when I was in Melbourne for GB, I jumped at the chance. They did not disappoint.

Micachu & The Shapes - Wrong

Deep Sea Arcade had been one of those bands you know the name of, read about a lot on Triple J playlists but generally ignored. I don't know why but I kind of expected them to be some kind of Nu-metal act for some reason, and how wrong I was. Great tight 60's pop with a sweet chorus hook

Deep Sea Arcade - Lonely In Your Arms

Zeal is the bedroom electronica project of Adelaidean Robert Jarvis, and Wasps is the first track from his new album which was assembled using his array of modified Playstation midi-controllers. It also features guests like my band-mate Anthony and them folks from Radio Spectacular!!!

Zeal - Wasps

Sam Clark

So here was I thinking Ringo Brown left Neighbours to become a paramedic. How wrong I was! Kind of like this song is wrong. And it's accompanying video.

Up until now I think I've managed to avoid being a snide little critic and only posted music I genuinely enjoy, but man, this is so awful. I thought the music industry stopped working like this around 2003. For some reason I can't shake the feeling that it reminds me of David Brent's foray into pop music.

I love the totally unnecessary "tender" piano outro that doesn't even try to tie in to the 4 minutes that precede it.

Take Donna back Ringo, Zeke and Karl need you. Maybe Alan Fletcher & Waiting Room need a new guitarist.

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Svavar Knútur

Over the past week I've been at Radio Adelaide quite frequently doing some training for Student Radio this year, and aside from the joyous experience of realising my ad-libbing skills are beyond woeful and being flummoxed by a control panel, I got to meet an Icelandic singer-songwriter called Svavar Knútur.

While waiting for a practice studio to free up, this guy who looked like a cross between a backpacker and a teddy bear came in off the street, ukulele in hand, and asked if he could please be interviewed. The Range team managed to fit him in and he proved to be hilarious, and talented to boot, regaling us with his ukulele-driven reinterpretation of the folk classic "Clementine".

It was remarkable enough that we all came out to his show at the Grace Emily that night. Suffice to say it was amazing. Between sweetly hushed acoustic tunes about melancholy and loneliness, he literally had me in tears with hilariously bawdy stories that I shan't repeat here, and a truly genuine appreciation for our appreciation of his music.

It was during an in between song break when he ruminated on quitting his job to become a few years ago to be a musician, something in retrospect motivated by his more recent diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder. He remarked that during meetings and work days, he would just zone out and think of melodies, but now playing music around the world makes all those 'butterflies' go away.

He then proceeded to play a song that went "Let's get f***ed up in Leipzig on a Sunday night, we'll get into a fight with the polizei!", complete with a hefty ukulele driven mid-section where he brought out renditions of the covers requested by drunk Germans in Leipzig, from 'Living on Ze Prayer' to 'Eye of the Tiger', and my personal favourite, 'Firestarter' by Ze Prodigy, complete with sung synth lines.

Perhaps the best Thursday evening yet this year.

I've been playing his album Kvöldvaka pretty much non-stop since then, and it is fantastic. Apparently it was recorded with a whole bunch of friends (the list of backing vocal credits is staggering) with two microphones between them all, in the studio of Sigur Ros. So, apparently all Icelandic musicians do know each other.

Svavar Knútur - Clementine

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