Category: Music Writing
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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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The Australian | Review: Gabriella Cohen
What does it mean for Gabriella Cohen to call her second album Pink is the Colour of Unconditional Love? Does it relate to how pink is often derided, joked about and stereotyped? If pink has trouble being valued or establishing its worth, then it’s well suited for Cohen’s conversations on what we choose to love and…
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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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Difficult Fun | Jen Cloher Review: On love and the willingness to be fooled
And what of quieter revolutions? That’s what I want to know when it comes to Jen Cloher. Her fourth album, self-titled and released last year, was met with zealous praise. But how much of this was surface? How much was lifted right from Cloher’s own press; an album about music, Australia and love? The problem is…
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RealTime Magazine | Xiu Xiu and Twin Peaks: Derivatively original
Though it’s known for its mysterious imagery and disquieting phenomena — chevron stripes, inexplicable crying, clairvoyant logs, lessons of adolescence, slowly swishing leaves, red curtains and extra-dimensional rooms — Twin Peaks is a remorselessly sonic television series. Angelo Badalamenti’s compositions are the hooks the show hangs on and any attempt at merely covering these songs…
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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…
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Collapse Board | Review: Amanda Palmer and friends in all their glory, live at a house party in Lutwyche
When we arrived outside the house in Lutwyche to see Amanda Palmer, it was 6.30pm and eerily quiet from where, just a few kilometres down the road, Australia’s music industry was frantically hobnobbing and self-congratulating themselves for another BigSound. I had visions of a punk-cabaret-fest full of brutal-profanity-wisdom, where the burlesque and the naked body would…
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Collapse Board | Review: Go Genre Everything, Scrabbled, Gravel SamWidge, The Legend!, Nana Vigilante + Bent
Nine photos and nine extended captions for Go Genre Everything, Scrabbled, Gravel Samwidge, The Legend, Nana Vigilante and Bent on a Saturday night in Brisbane. Although I didn’t see Bent and no photographs were taken. That was my own fault for having a self-inflicted bad day and feeling uneasy about leaving the house. It was…
Tiarney Miekus 