1. The Drones - Havilah
Code:
http://mediafire.com/?kjwajtnahmm
A stark fuck you to a decaying world, to its worrying, self-serving masses, the Drones fourth full length is easily their most accessible. Having switched guitarists between records, adding the cleaner tones of the slightly pop-conscious Dan Luscombe (long time Dan Kelly & the Alpha Males guitarist), they have produced a couple of would-be radio hits in "The Minotaur" and "Oh My", hidden between the muck that very well could soundtrack McCarthy's "The Road".
Over the past five years The Drones have quietly turned into and cemented their place as the best goddamn live rock and roll band in the world, still on a Dylanesque quest to never stop playing shows across any continent. The squalls of feedback, the grating pickup scrapes, the bloodcurdling yelps, are all toned down a little here, but never have they sounded so focused; so driving. The razor sharp wit and dry, Aussie humor still shines through, hearkening back to earlier singles like "Cockeyed Lowlife of the High Lands" or "She Had An Abortion That She Made Me Pay For". Singer Gareth Liddiard apparently employed a cut-up technique similar to that used by William S. Burroughs to help with some of the lyrics.
“I made a conscious effort to put my head in the sand. You start working, you have a coffee in the morning, and any self-doubt falls away."
There is a sense of ebb and flow here that is absent from most loud rock music this decade, with nods to Neil Young and especially Van Morrison's seemingly organic song structures. They are tight as fuck when they want to be, but then turn the whole joint on its head when they loosen right up and go where a song takes them.
Another product of its environment, following 2006's Gala Mill (recorded in an old mill in the Tasmanian wilderness), Havilah was written and recorded outside Myrtleford, amid the freezing pines and snow gums at the base of Victoria's Mt. Buffalo.
"It was a great place to write and record. We were literally in the middle of a sub-alpine forest. We had no electricity, just diesel generators. It’d be just about the only record made on a diesel budget."
2. Rowland S. Howard - Pop Crimes
Code:
http://rapidshare.com/files/328170700/Pop_Crimes.zip.html
Ever since I heard through a friend of his earlier this year that Rowland was sinking with an incurable liver cancer, I had this urge in my gut that if he could just hang on long enough to spit out one more record he might hang on a little longer. Unfortunately for us he passed away yesterday, but his guitar sound, that reverb-drenched vampire-fucking assault on the throat and eyes, inspired the insipid tones of kids like Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine to name a couple. Still, those who came since never sounded quite as sinister.
His first since 1999's Teenage Snuff Film, Pop Crimes as a record is a flawed final death knell from the flawed king of underground Aussie music. The man was half dead when he started it, let alone upon its completion. At its beating heart is the magnificent opener/single, "(I Know) A Girl Called Johnny", a lusty, sadomasochistic duet with Jonnine Standish of HTRK. Believe me when i say there hasn't been a song quite like it in some time, and Howard has never written anything quite like it in his career.
"Shut Me Down" is a slow-burning lament built around a vintage Rowland guitar riff, which spills like floodwater over a dam wall into a vintage Rowland chorus: "I'm standing in a suit as ragged as my nerves, and I agree what I've become is surely worth the hatred that you've spat at me."
Examined as a final statement, this record is particularly curious. There is no doubt that Howard knew this would be his last record, his terminal cancer having long since set in. Still, it's a bitter sendoff from a man who perhaps never quite fit in anywhere. "I'm the fly in your ointment, your constant disappointment, just because I can," he spits in "Wayward Man". Too weird for pop music, but too proud to be anyone's underground darling, it's perhaps ironic that Howard as a teenager penned "Shivers", which in one form or another has become somewhat of a cover band classic. He has since gone on to say that he is so far removed from that song that singing it now for him is like singing a cover.
This, remember, was the man who introduced a young fellow by the name of Nick Cave to the avant garde in Melbourne way back in the 70s. Cave went on to carve arguably one of the most critically successful and commercially sustainable careers of the past three decades, a critical darling especially since more recently adopting his "elder statesmen of rock and roll" guise. Howard, on the other hand, played small clubs to handfuls of people throughout the nineties and 2000s. His career was only just starting to receive the retroactive respect from a (marginally) wider audience in the last eighteen months or so. There is definitely an air of unfinished business amongst the finality. Mick Harvey, who played drums on Pop Crimes, had this to say:
"Sometimes people are ready to go because they have been sick for a long time, but Rowland really wanted to live. Things were going well for him outside of his health and he wanted to take advantage of that and he was very disappointed that he wasn't well enough to do so."
Another of the good ones is gone.
3. The Black Lips - Two Hundred Million Thousand
This is fuckup kids making music that fuckup kids should be making. I'd like it go a little harder in parts.
Nothing more to say here.
