Vote for the new name July 22, 2010

We are going to change the name of Friendly Fire in the near future to reflect the very real reality that everything else has this same name. Suggestions on the back of an envelope scanned and then emailed to us please. Or vote in the poll. By the way, there is no Henry Cow track [...]

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti: Doug Fir Lounge, Portland, Oregon, July 12 July 18, 2010

 The opening acts were mostly hot, but dull, mature-acting girls in their early twenties. Music that middle-aged lechers would describe as precociously sumptuous. Ariel came out and sang a song with them and I swear the whole band got like a hundred times better. Pink and his band The Haunted Graffiti came out in cool [...]

Rentboy starts decade strong February 2, 2010

Rentboy EP (Nocturnal Emissions) launch with guests at Horse Bazaar on Saturday consisted of three hours of jolly good times and not a minute more. Beers were eight, the gig was six. Got there about 7. It was still hot and it stayed hot. Got even hotter the next day. Tad cooler inside the Horse, [...]

sails of oblivion August 23, 2009

Did not attend for all (even most) of this show. What could be worse than spending a day at the Corner, regardless of the entertainment on offer? So only saw the last three acts, Brian Hooper who is not terrible and all the more terrible for that i.e. he is a character in a film, [...]

The Unth!nkables Untitled (Doublethink) February 28, 2009

Certainly the names of Roger Grierson and Phil Judd are two you would tend never to have expected to see in the same place and the same time, though both men first came to prominence in the mid (for Judd) to late (for Grierson) 1970s, as members of Split Enz and the Thought Criminals respectively. [...]

Todd Rundgren, Arena (Cooking Vinyl) February 13, 2009

You may recall the absurd joke a journalist for The Australian played on… who? … a few years ago by sending extracts from Patrick White books to publishers who (a) did not recognise them as White and (b) rejected the work in various ways. What this was supposed to prove is anyone’s guess – like [...]

The Systematics What we did in the afternoons (TU-134) January 31, 2009

I was a Systematics fan from the second release, though I would have been one from the first. Hard to imagine an Australia that was so provincial, in the sense not of being one large province but a number of them, that an independent band’s first single basically could not get out of the city [...]

Peter Escott, Slowcoach (No label) Randy Newman, Harps and Angels (Nonesuch) September 6, 2008

 Men playing pianos in pop/rock have to deal with the fact that the piano is never, in anyone’s language or conception, a cock rock instrument. (They may like this aspect of it, but they still have to deal with it). The man playing the piano cannot pretend, in the way that one hundred billion (at last count) [...]

Beaches/ Barrage/ Inevitable Orbit: John Curtin Bandroom 29 Aug August 30, 2008

Beaches just finished recording their first album. One imagines this show might be seen therefore as a revisit to history rather than a presage to making their mark. Though I have only seen them three times some songs now seem familiar and the attack less astonishing. Look forward to their next step. My appreciation of [...]

Lurid Yellow Mist feat. Dave Graney & Clare Moore, We Wuz Curious (Illustrious Artists/Cockaigne) July 16, 2008

Preamble: I recently had the audacity to take this grocery shopping with me on a Sunday when I had a bad headache. Not the smartest move. Whole excursion was doomed from the start. First the cart wouldn’t push properly. It seemed one of the wheels was bunk. Felt like I was pushing a mule upstairs. [...]