Music

The power and the passion of Midnight Oil still burns

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

I’m at home and listening to 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1; Midnight Oil’s apocalypse-themed fourth album. Fucking loud – there was never any other way to listen to them, really. I haven’t listened to the Oils for maybe 10 years, though, because I haven’t needed to. They’ve always been there. I’ve just caught myself singing quietly along to the opening track Outside World as I’m writing: every lyric is embedded in my skull.

Now it’s Only The Strong. “Speak to me, speak to me / I’m at the edge of myself / I’m dying to talk.” Midnight Oil were a deeply political band, but earlier in their career they could do post-punk existential angst with the best of them. They were everything you remember them to be, but also more than maybe you’ve forgotten, or perhaps ever realised.

To call Midnight Oil a pub rock band is, as Nick Kent once famously observed of Television, akin to calling Dostoevsky a short-story writer. They merely played in pubs before graduating to arenas and stadiums. Their closest peers were the Clash, Gang of Four, and early Elvis Costello; the Who their direct forebears. And they were genuine radicals.… Read more..

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Gimme gimme the Ramones, forever

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

My favourite quote about the Ramones comes from Richard Hell, the New York provocateur who, along with Tom Verlaine, formed the art-punk band Television in 1974 and – with the help of threadbare clothes held together with safety pins, on account of the fact they were too poor to buy any more – was already busy changing the sound and look of rock & roll in a Bowery club called CBGBs.

“The first song the Ramones wrote was called I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You, the second was I Don’t Wanna Get Involved With You, then came I Don’t Wanna Be Learned, I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed, soon followed by I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement,” Hell wrote in Hit Parader in 1976, just before the release of their self-titled debut. “So Dee Dee says, ‘We didn’t write a positive song until Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.’”

So much for lyrical content. The music? “It gives you the same sort of feeling you might derive from savagely kicking in your smoothly running TV set and then finding real thousand-dollar bills inside,” Hell went on. It is impossible to overstate, 40 years after their first album, just how exciting the Ramones were when they first appeared on a flaccid mid-’70s rock scene, even if you’d already heard the Stooges.… Read more..

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Sahara Beck: Panacea

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

A gift can be a heavy burden to carry. Sahara Beck is gifted – the 19-year-old has a wonderfully smoky, elastic voice, and she sings like she has all the time and not a care in the world. She’s also a promising songwriter, with a natural, formidable stage presence. In short, she was born to do what she does, and her talent has been recognised early, with awards, radio exposure and high-profile shows.

It all raises expectations ahead of Beck’s second album, Panacea (her first was recorded when she was just 14, with two EPs following in 2013 and 2015) – and you can sense the burden. It’s a good album, well written, brilliantly played and produced, flawed by the artist’s self-consciousness. Instead of winning your heart, Beck wants to blow your mind.

This tendency to show off appears early, with the first single Here It Comes. The stark blues riff at the song’s centre is weighed down with a kitchen-sink arrangement that’s topped off by a wailing coda reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s interminable Great Gig In The Sky. It’s formally impressive – and it will have festival crowds roaring in approval whenever it’s performed live. It’s also completely superfluous.

Partly it’s a curse of the age we live in, of melismatic singing on talent shows, where spectacle is everything and understatement is undervalued.… Read more..

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Richie Ramone: Too tough to die

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

You can understand Richie Ramone not wanting to walk under ladders, much less wanting to open that door, and absolutely not wanting to go down to the basement. “I thought there was a curse,” he admits. “I was really careful walking down the street, you know, because everybody went that young.”

Born Richie Reinhardt, the Ramones’ third drummer is one of three surviving members of the quintessential New York punk band. All four original “brothers” (Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy) are now long gone, as well as artistic director Arturo Vega, who designed the group’s iconic logo.

But, while he may not be an original, Reinhardt – who is touring Australia as part of the 10th anniversary of the Cherry Rock Festival in May – is still more a Ramone than you or I will ever be. He stayed with the band for five years and 500 shows during the mid-’80s, playing drums on three albums.

The first of them, perhaps prophetically, was Too Tough To Die, easily the best record from the Ramones’ troubled middle period. Joey himself once said Richie’s arrival saved the famously volatile band.

“When you get somebody new, everybody is on their best behaviour and it’s a shot of new blood, and that’s what they needed at the time,” Reinhardt says.… Read more..

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“An absolute masterpiece”: the Triffids’ Born Sandy Devotional

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Widely regarded as one of the finest Australian albums ever made, the Triffids’ second album Born Sandy Devotional turns 30 this month. Most famous for its beloved single Wide Open Road, the album uses the empty desolation of the Australian landscape, and particularly the band’s native Western Australia as a metaphor for loss and loneliness. To gauge its enduring influence, The Guardian asked 10 Australian musicians – both peers of the Triffids, and those that have grown up in the band’s shadow – to discuss one song each from Born Sandy Devotional’s 10 tracks.

Ben Salter (solo artist) on The Seabirds

“David McComb’s tempestuous holler kicks in immediately: ‘No foreign pair of dark sunglasses will ever shield you from the light that pierces your eyelids, the screaming of the gulls…’ That thousand-yard stare sensibility, that Australian feeling which permeates the entire album is firmly established. There’s a devastating electric guitar refrain which finally flattens out to one plaintive, repeated note, and the song ends with McComb’s anguished cry: ‘So where were you / Where were you / Where were you?’”

Robert McComb (guitar/violin, the Triffids, older brother of David McComb) on Estuary Bed

“Sometimes I feel like it’s my life, growing up in Perth.… Read more..

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The Drones: Feelin Kinda Free

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

When right-wing columnist/performance artist Andrew Bolt heard the Drones’ single Taman Shud, he wrote that the band was “stamping on the ashes of the West’s musical traditions”. Supposedly offended by the thought that singer Gareth Liddiard didn’t give a toss about anything he said, he added: “critics like these make me feel like I’m offending exactly the right kind of people”.

Naturally, the Drones were delighted. First, they would no doubt feel exactly the same way about offending Bolt and his tabloid constituency. Second, the group has taken a serious left turn with their seventh album, Feelin Kinda Free. “We said ‘fuck it’ and went spaz,” Liddiard told The Guardian last October. He couldn’t have dreamed of a better critical endorsement than Bolt’s “stamping on the ashes” line.

“It’s a pretty weird record and you can dance to it,” Liddiard said of the album. “It’s time to have a groovy Drones record. We’re sick of being a bunch of drags.” With respect, Bolt’s description was pithier, more accurate and more complimentary. Taman Shud was one of the most compelling singles of last year, but good luck to anyone who hit the dance floor to its skittish rhythms.

Boredom, the sixth track on Feelin Kinda Free, is in a similar vein.… Read more..

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