Maximum Traction

You might have been sleeping on this handy 2013 underground Australian music almanac, compiled by all-around great guy James Webster and published on The Ripe.

I don't think there's another resource out there that concisely and informatively summarizes the veritable shitload of interesting local music that was put out there last year. A very handy cheat sheet if you haven't been keeping your ear to the ground.

Bands and labels can be as productive and forward-thinking as they want but without documentation and acknowledgement in some sort of broader discourse, it can tend to amount to nothing (see: tree; forest; falling; nobody around to hear).

Webster's piece is a useful reference point for a lot of this music and will be a very handy tool for people pretending to have been into this music the whole time.

Spiritualized "Mississippi Space Program" - 'Always Forgetting With You (The Bridge Song)'

Outer space has always been a recurring motif for Spiritualized. There’s a lot of obvious allusion to it through the band’s career: the group is fronted by a guy calling himself J. Spaceman (formerly of the group Spacemen 3); their most famous album is Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space; the video for 'Come Together' depicts an astronaut getting ready for takeoff. There are also plenty of audio tropes connoting interstellar travel, especially through their earlier records—bleeps and bloops from analogue machinery, long-range radio vocal filters, delay suggesting the mind-boggling infinity of space.

In later years Spiritualized have turned away the stargazing of these audio cues, a neat result of the increasing presence of earthy and terrestrial Delta blues and gospel in their music. ‘Always Forgetting With You (The Bridge Song)’, then, is a sort of return to their ‘roots’. It’s from Space Project, a Record Store Day comp with bands making songs using sounds recorded by NASA’s Voyager probes—so Spiritualized’s contribution effectively samples the radioactive signals emitted by Neptune.

Far from being a throwaway obscurity or novelty, though, ‘Always Forgetting With You’ is as affecting as any single Spiritualized song since their classic Ladies And Gentlemen… era. Musically, it places twangy reverb and crooning harmonies alongside oscillating guitar delay and machinery-made field recordings in the band’s trademark mix of the traditional and the futuristic. It also shows that, besides the bleeps and bloops and astronaut dress-ups, there’s a deeper connection between space and Spiritualized—it’s the perfect imagined setting for their best songs. There’s a sublime solipsism in the idea of interstellar travelers like the Voyager probes—hunks of metal, impossibly tiny against the infinite backdrop of the universe, and yet the only thing out there that knows its out there and, in a way, can tell you about it. So it is with the best Spiritualized songs, a grandiose backdrop of sound and noise and strings and horns and backup harmonies, juxtaposed with that single lonely voice, all its feelings and heartbreaks and tragedies and dreams that still resonate, even at a larger galactic scale.

If you don't know, Greg Fleet is a Melbourne comedian whose public profile is probably of a lower standard than his mercurial brilliance deserves.

The reason for this is apparently his self-destructive tendencies in on-off battles with heroin addiction.

This podcast is an in-depth, candid interview with Fleet by old friend and fellow comedian, Justin Hamilton. Sober at the moment, Fleet talks about missed opportunities, deception of others and himself, and the struggles of a middling comedian compounded by the struggles of a junkie.

It's a revealing insight into the mind of someone blessed by talent but cursed by inner demons—the traditional 'romantic' artist cliche. Worth a listen.

Sandpit - On Second Thought

I'd never even heard of this but it's just been reissued and it's really special. Sonic Youth is the obvious namecheck but there's also a bit of Low or Codeine in there.

Makes me think there must be a whole swathe of Australian gems like this that stay forgotten because nobody gives a shit about the subcultural history of a giant sunburned quasi-desert on the arse end of the world.

Also I'm pretty sure the singer is now a heavy drum'n'bass/dubstep DJ. You never can tell.

So this past weekend was Australia Day (for us Australians at least) and with it came the now-annual tug-of-war over who we really are and what it really means. Some people spend Australia Day painting Australian flags on their faces, baring their Southern Cross tattoos and chanting "Aussie Aussie Aussie". Others point out that its date commemorates the first day of an attempted genocide or that nationalistic imagery fueled racist riots in Cronulla less than ten years ago, and that we should be ashamed of who we are, not celebrating it.

Australian national identity is so conflicted because it straddles so many contradictory myths, beliefs and realities. Australians are an "easygoing" people living under a virtual nanny state of rules, regulations and red tape; a "free" people, who in Queensland live under what could be called an autocratic police state; a "peaceful" people whose foundation myth is a senseless military blunder that sent thousands of young men to their death in an alien land, and who've been involved continuously in unnecessary conflict over the last two decades. We're a country beset by bushfires, floods and ozone layer holes, which can't make up its mind about climate change; a land of heavy drinkers scared silly by alcohol-fuelled violence; an island nation of immigrants that refuses to help asylum seekers.

I think there's been a shift to reappraise our national character in recent years and inevitably it's been an undertone in contemporary Australian music which, perhaps not coincidentally, is going through a purple patch of critical and commercial success. This is why I always had a lot of time for dolewave (or chillmate or Melbourne jangle or whatever you want to call the wave of post-Eddy Current independent music that fits under so many banners), because even when it was formulaic and affected, it presented a version of Australiana that was alternative to the accepted norms and (in my opinion) more accurate. It's not 'Land Down Under' or 'Great Southern Land'. Twerps or Dick Diver or Royal Headache or Bitch Prefect or Total Control or TV Colours or Geoffrey O'Connor or the UV Race don't need to shout their roots from a rooftop but they are Australian, they show it in many little ways and they aren't ashamed of it (or for that matter, proud of it). One of the great pleasures I've had in listening to this vein of 'Australian' music over the last few years has been imagining someone living in England or Detroit or Brazil listening to it too and getting an image of everyday Australian life and culture that's less sexy but more real than AC/DC or Skyhooks or Molly Meldrum.

So maybe one of the better things to come out of the national holiday I'm not even sure I should be celebrating was this mix from Instant Peterson and Andras Fox. It's a collection of underappreciated and forgotten tunes from Australia and New Zealand and shows we've got a far deeper and richer musical culture than you might guess from the traditional Crocodile Dundee image.

Dance and electronic music has had an interesting lean towards national identity over the past year or so—the new Presets album featured blatantly parochial lyrics, and Client Liaision have a vivid aesthetic based on a postmodern capitalism that has far less space in our collective cultural self-awareness than the jolly swagmen and bushrangers but probably far greater influence on our daily realities. Even a fairly abstract instrumental like Andras Fox's own 'Your Life' (with a distinctly Australian B-side title of 'Magpie Echoes') somehow feels particularly suited to a sunny afternoon in Melbourne.

New Order - The Perfect Kiss

'The Perfect Kiss' is as fun and playful as any 1980s dance 12-inch—which is weird coming from a band formed in the shadow of an infamous suicide who then made their name with the sternly ominous anthem 'Blue Monday'.

It goes for about 8 minutes (10 in the version they play for this video—more on that later), meandering leisurely through any musical idea that seems to pop up. The narrator of the song's lyrics repeatedly ignores his deranged friend's apparently murderous intentions to say "let's go out and have some fun", and makes an obvious masturbation joke in the second verse. I mean, the middle eight is literally a bunch of frog noises.

While the giddy, anything-goes ecstasy of the song is strange in itself, the video just makes things stranger. Directed by Jonathon Demme (who, to be fair, also directed the willfully-weird Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense), it separates the members of the band from each other and from their instruments with intimate shots that are uncomfortably long for a pop performance video. The effect is that New Order don't appear holistically as a band, but as a machine made up of several discrete parts. With their matter-of-fact expressions, their obvious physical detachment from the rhythm, and the way they move between instruments (or workstations), New Order come across as some sort of factory production line, turning out floor-fillers in the same way you might assemble a washing machine.

The marginalized and the misfits have always had an underlying presence in Burial’s work. It’s there in the track titles, so evocative of life outside the social norm—“Broken Home”, “Loner”, “Fostercare”, “Truant”, “Homeless” (and perhaps as a result of this marginalization, “You Hurt Me”). “Etched Headplate” features a sample of British woman talking about a juvenile delinquent, someone who wants to do the right thing but has to deal with “…will power, self-discipline and circumstances…” And then there’s the overall Burial sound, his outsider aesthetic, crackling strings signifying the decaying inner city habitat of the poor and the outcast, the woozy ambience more suited for a loner’s headphones on a night bus than a hands-in-the-air club singalong.

  But in his last two releases, Burial seems be overtly taking up the mantle as a champion for the downtrodden—notable from a publicity-shy, virtually-anonymous producer who rarely does an overt anything. Last year’s Truant EP (apart from being exquisite) contained a section in the B-side “Rough Sleeper”, from about 4:10 onwards. As always the samples are hazy, but it sounds like the pitch-shifted voice is exhorting the listener to “be strong” and “stay alive”, while acknowledging “the light surrounding you”. It’s not much to go off, granted, but over an arrangement far more uplifting and empowering than the morose textures the producer is known for, it felt like Burial was pulling back the veil as best he could, reaching out and saying “it’s okay”.

  Those few minutes of “Rough Sleeper” really affected me, but it’s nothing compared to his new surprise release. Rival Dealer, social politics aside, is an impressive artistic statement, breaking from the usual palette of grand tragic sadness to make music that is, at times, joyous, warm and inviting—or at least as joyous, warm and inviting as Burial is going to get. Tempos are upbeat rather than languid, textures are sentimental rather than gloomy, and the snatches of vocal samples are defiantly empowering: "I'm gonna love you more than anyone", or "this is who I am". If the music wasn’t a clear enough arm-around-the-shoulders, he’s gone out of his way to put himself firmly on the side of the underdog—emotional epic "Come Down To Us" features an extended sample from a speech delivered by transgender director Lana Wachowski, and Burial has even taken the uncharacteristic step of releasing a statement (read on-air by a radio presenter) about the intentions of Rival Dealer:

              I wanted the tunes to be anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves, to not be afraid, and to not give up, and to know that someone out there cares and is looking out for them. So it’s like an angel’s spell to protect them against the unkind people, the dark times, and the self-doubts.

  At one point Burial was dubbed the ‘Pallbearer of Rave’, as he reappropriated and twisted the tropes of dance subgenres like jungle, hardcore and 2-step to craft elegies for the halcyon days of UK dance culture. In a way, Rival Dealer takes that full circle—let’s not forget that rave itself began as music for the marginalized. House was born in gay clubs, frequented by black, Latino and female patrons, many of whom felt that the only place they ‘belonged’ was on the dance floor. Ecstasy, early clubbing’s drug of choice, is a pill full of love, empathy and social togetherness. When they did have lyrics, early dance hits carried messages of deliverance from struggle—dreams of the good life and repeated mantras of unconditional friendship on the journey to a promised land. And the imagery of rave culture—smiley faces, “peace love unity respect”, huge everyone-in outdoor parties—makes sense when you see it as an attempt by the broad category of outsider ravers to rework their mini-society into an inclusive utopia for everyone. Burial includes fairly explicit musical allusions to these early raves throughout Rival Dealer—the title track moves from a hardcore rhythm to a 2-step beat, and the drum machine that eventually pierces through “Hiders” is proto-house.

  This is what makes Rival Dealer a staggering work, and what has kept up the Burial tradition of me scrambling hopelessly to articulate its genius. On the surface level, you could hear those drum machines and warm, positive textures and just be pleased by an esteemed producer expanding his range. But go just a little deeper—into Burial’s history of focusing on the outcasts, and his use of early dance music tropes as signifiers of overcoming marginalization via early rave’s social utopia—and that’s when Rival Dealer becomes something truly magnificent. I don’t think we’ve heard a more complete and meaningful artistic statement from any album in 2013.