Category: Music Features & Essays
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Disclaimer | Iterations: John Nixon
Not far from where St Kilda beach forms a firm line against the land, inside the Palais Theatre, which is suspended in the throes of young energy and blatant desire, housing the new strutting contempt of rock’n’roll, John Nixon is watching the Rolling Stones. It’s 1965 and he’s fifteen years old, sitting in the second
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Swampland (Online) | Pure Performance: The Glittering Intensity Of V
Like Madonna, Beyoncé, Cher or Rihanna, V is simply V. The pop references might seem incidental for an artist who conjures a carefully crafted, dark-wave aesthetic, and stands on stage engulfed amongst industrial-sounding drum machines, a layer of ’80s synth-wave and their own reverberating vocals. But if you ask V about their musical influences, their
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Swampland Magazine | Under the Underground: Audiopollen Social Club
Do you remember T.A.D.? Hanging from the ceiling, swinging from beam to beam, conducting a bizarre aerobic exercise. Some people thought he was going to die: it was thrilling. There was a band playing below—was it Blank Realm? Joel Stern? Or was it simply T.A.D., dangling on his own? Or how about this one: when
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Difficult Fun | Kylie Minogue: Fragments of a watery icon
A French house-inspired verse shimmers along, gloating with the smoothness of its own repetitive, euphoric possibility; a woman pouts, sending out her songs amongst a strawberry-coloured wash, entirely aglow as she sings only about the sweetness of desire, never the humiliation; another version of this woman, who is an expert in expressions, is clad in
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Difficult Fun | Sarah Mary Chadwick: The Case for Melancholia
[Kim] Sometimes people walk out of Sarah Mary Chadwick’s shows because they deem them too depressing. There is something in Chadwick’s sparse piano playing and the languor of her voice that makes her songs sound sad even when maybe she isn’t, at least, not entirely. In her lyrics, Chadwick encounters the big, yawning tragedies of
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Difficult Fun | Totally Mild: How limitlessness is not a given condition
The images are strong. The album cover shows a slinking, naked woman, half-submerged in a bathtub of green water. The scene is a 1970s hotel, marred tropical respite, glamour accompanied by schmaltz, lambent lighting and high contrast. At the centre is a woman who, for whatever reason, just can’t seem to be completely happy. While
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Swampland Magazine | New music again? On the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre
In 1981 Melbourne band Essendon Airport released their second album Palimpsest. If you’re lucky enough to have the original vinyl, you can reach inside the sleeve and find a red-and-white screen-printed paper detailing various album information, including the following acknowledgement: “All” “songs” “written” “and” “produced” “by” “ESSENDON AIRPORT”. Like the prevailing character of Essendon Airport,
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Overland | One baby to another: twenty-five years of Nevermind
This piece originally appeared on Overland (online). Twenty-five years since the album’s release, it is very easy to become wistful when talking about Nirvana’s Nevermind. Having not been born when the album hit number one, I’ve tried to imagine the extent of Nevermind’s fame: three million sales in the first four months, 100,000 every week for the
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The Lifted Brow (Online) | “Many things I, I musn’t say”: Approaching the mystery and uncertainty of Xiu Xiu’s “Plays the Music of Twin Peaks”
This piece was originally published by The Lifted Brow. There were strange things happening, and without any decent coherency events could have taken place in any order. I was feeling nauseated and unsettled and couldn’t sleep without waking five or six times a night; a homeless man came running after me, waving his dick and
Tiarney Miekus 