Seasick continues to mine the more melodic vein the band first opened up on their split with Little a, albeit with much thicker, shinier production. It sounds a little like the band are aiming for bigger venues – their familiar rolling three-four jaunt  is gaining something approaching grandiosity here.  Adam and Kris trade vocals and a big “holllld on!” hook.

This’ll be on the split with To The North that’s coming out next year – consider me excited.

• Mere Women
• Absolute Boys
• Let Me Down Jungleman Gently
• Aleks and the Ramps (again)

Despite the ‘core’ in slowcore being something of a misnomer – not having anything to do with hardcore punk, as one might infer – it’s a pretty amusing and efficient way of describing a certain subset of indie rock artists that play particularly, consistently, relentlessly slow music. Going with this patch of musical territory are arrangements that are by necessity subtle, sparse affairs. Chords and notes are left hanging in space. You can hear the restraint in the drumming. And there’s occasionally a country and western influence (often so slight as to be barely discernible).

What I want to explore here is a history (not necessarily chronological) of some of the slowcore music to be produced in Australia. Even though, as far as music criticism goes, the Australian landscape in song is a slightly tired area of discussion, I do believe that Australian landscapes, both physical and cultural, lend themselves to slowcore’s forms of expression. At a basic metaphorical level you can see how a musical genre where relatively fewer notes are strung out across large, mostly deserted stretches of time can be compared with a country where relatively fewer people and settlements are strung out across large, deserted stretches of land.

In fact slowcore’s adeptness in describing or harmonising with Australian psychogeography has led to a certain amount of its influence passing into popular Australian alternative rock. And more importantly, when I hear this kind of music, I can mostly tell, on some irritatingly ineffable level, which bands are Australian and which are not. Here’s a selection of Australian songs that loosely fit within the slowcore category, which I will proceed to ramble about.

Bluetile Lounge – The Weight (and the sea)

In my strange internal system of musical comparisons, Perth’s Bluetile Lounge are to tempo as My Disco are to melody – that is, relentlessly minimalist.

The Weight (and the sea) is a serene nine and a half minute tapestry of guitars, bass, drums, lap-steel, piano and vocals. The two guitars seamlessly form one beautifully textured chiming instrument. The lap-steel crying behind the rest of the band is like a whale’s lament. The singer somehow has you on edge for every major key resolution of the melody, and the oh-so subtle climaxes of sound overtake you so slowly that your brain melts into them helplessly. And from the first four delicately spaced cymbal hits that introduce the song to the last carefully-strummed guitar chord, The Weight (and the sea) never shifts from its glacial pace. The pause at the end, presumably performed to the same scale as the song itself, is twenty seconds long.

In fact the album from which this song is taken, lowercase, is brutally, heartbreakingly, impossibly slow all the way through. It sounds boring on paper, but there is such an unexpected amount of tension stored in the space between beats, like the powerful forces in the spaces between subatomic particles, that the music is never completely lethargic or apathetic no matter how slow it is. It’s a balancing act akin to trying to stay on a bicycle after all its momentum has run out.

I lack the bandwidth to upload the mp3 and I couldn’t find it on YouTube, so here’s a different song, ltd from BTL’s second album, Half Cut.

I once saw Kirin J. Callinan (solo artist, former guitarist with now-defunct hype kids Mercy Arms, and contributor to messy Sydney supergroup/collective Fashion Launches Rocket Launches) perform this song at Decolonise Festival on Invasion Day 2008. Love/Delay is a really beautiful piece of music. Forgive the drumming screw-ups in this version and I think you’ll agree with me.

In other news, forgive my lack of posts – I haven’t had the internet at home and it’s been doing me a world of good. However the next feature is coming soon and a couple of reviews and things are in the works as well.

Anyway, it struck me that so many of these bands are defunct, broken up or otherwise faded into relative obscurity. And it’s quite eerie to consider that this was the first musical movement that I feel I’ve closely observed from rise to fall, having moved to Sydney at the beginning of 2006 when the city was fully in thrall to the glamour of the post-punk revival. “Modular Records,” a new friend told me at the time, “think they own this fuckin’ town.” Much the same could be said of promoters like Boundary Sounds and Popfrenzy, both of which arose around the turn of the century and came into their own organising ‘crossover’ nights where indie bands and DJs co-existed in harmony. This was a fairly big deal at the time – as recently as the late 1990s many Sydney bands were directing antagonism towards DJs for contributing (along with poker machines) to the death of ‘rock venues’ by filling dancefloors for a fraction of the space or cost of hiring a band.

But circa 2005/2006 you could wander down to the biggest nightclubs in the city (notably HOME on Darling Harbour) – massive clubs in other years reserved for mainstream pop-house DJs and rarely for bands - and dance to bands made up of dudes in skinny jeans playing wiry four-to-the-floor post-punk stuff with lyrics yelped in British accents. The scene was marked by its overt debt to the 80s and its strong connections to the fashion world – designer jeans label Ksubi (then Tsubi) were prominent and Cut Off Your Hands’ Blue On Blue EP was released by Levi jeans’ short-lived Levity record label. Another feature was the extreme ambition of bands whose hype outweighed their actual output. People really believed they were going to get famous and end up on the cover of the NME.

The musical trend has certainly moved on – skinny jeans and disco-beat high-hats are no longer in favour quite as much, at least. What exactly has taken its place is harder to quantify – in Sydney there’s been something of a counter-push by psychedelic and shoegaze bands like The Laurels and Warhorse, an upsurge of bands taking cues from the swampy, bluesy punk of The Birthday Party, and a wave of ‘experimental pop’ groups like Ghoul, Kyu, Seekae and megastick fanfare.

In any case here’s a sample of some of the bands that exemplified the trend in Sydney and Australia. I still feel like many of them were entertainingly addictive and maddeningly arrogant in roughly equal measures.

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The Valentinos – Man With The Gun

Later on these guys had to change their name to Lost Valentinos, but as The Valentinos, this was their ubiquitous early single. As Jonny Polaroids writes:

During a brief period of Sydney music, when you couldn’t swing a Candy’s Apartment without hitting a skinny jean cunt dancing to a Kings Of Leon disco remix, The Valentinos ruled this town.

That said, it took them until 2009 to actually put an album out. Having looked this up on YouTube I’ve also just noticed that the description of their clip for 17 Deaths, a tacky horror-movie thing, somewhat tastelessly makes a point of mentioning that it was shot in the same national park where Ivan Milat tortured and buried seven backpackers.

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Starky – Is This How It Ends?

Sydney band Starky occupied something more of the celebratory, major key territory of the genre. They started out on Laughing Outlaw Records, were later signed to Universal but broke up after leaving a few decent singles like this one as well as Hey Bang Bang and Me Michelle.

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Damn Arms – Test Pattern

In much the same way as Brisbane band The Saints pre-dated The Sex Pistols, Melbourne’s Damn Arms pre-dated British nu-rave hype kids Klaxons by about six months. I loved this song when I first heard it (as an next Crop mp3 download from Triple J) and learned the bassline. This song and that Death From Above 1979 album are still the only reasons I’d consider buying a bass fuzz pedal. Test Pattern actually achieves the frantic, buzzing energy that makes this kind of stuff worth doing, and I think it’s because Damn Arms formed from the ashes of Snap! Crakk! who played house shows with hardcore bands in Adelaide. That is, they didn’t start out playing in nightclubs with expectations of fame, like a few other bands in this genre did.

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More soon!

In the meantime, have a read of this review I wrote in 2008 for a ‘Music & Popular Culture’ elective at UTS.  I didn’t pay any attention to Alps who also played on the night in question because I was already well over the word limit for the assignment. I regret this.

This review was also written before I really knew the residents of MGTVLE, and the bands that played there – so forgive the flippant, critical tone, I was really just trying to do my best Simon Reynolds impression for the tutor.

MGTVLE was shut down by Marrickville City Council in mid-2009. Consider this a farewell/retrospective thing.

Cities only reveal themselves to you achingly slowly – this is something I have learned. It wasn’t until my third year of living in Sydney that I discovered the vital, exclusive underground that I’d dreamed of when I was growing up in a boring, small NSW town. I started working in an Ultimo call centre with independent musicians and I played soccer with anarchists who organised DIY (do it yourself) punk shows in warehouses. Suddenly, I knew where and when things were going down, so to speak, particularly in the loose network of informal/illegal/independent venues and events (select the adjective you prefer) happening all over the inner suburbs of Sydney. At some point, a friend from the call centre took me to my first show at MGTVLE.

MGTVLE could be described as somewhat inaccessible. Short for Maggotville (a wordplay on the suburb in which it’s situated), MGTVLE is a venue, practice space, communal kitchen, bike workshop and, importantly, home to the bunch of punks and activists that are the lifeblood of the place. Because the venue is unlicensed and police presence very much unsought, gigs are never advertised with an address – to go to your first MGTVLE show, you generally just have to know someone who knows where it is. Wander down a back street of a labyrinthine industrial area. Walk through a doorway unmarked except by the black-clad people drinking outside. Climb the narrow flight of stairs lit by a single bulb, pay your six bucks and get your stamp – you’re there. The most immediately eye-catching interior feature used to be the massive poster behind the low stage of a man screaming at a line of riot cops with a water pistol held to one’s helmeted face. That seems to be gone tonight. Instead a simply-spray-painted cartoon bunny chews a carrot and sneers, ‘Magic happens, cunt.’

Of course, this all adds to the deliciously underground authenticity of the place, and there’s a sense in which most of those subculturally connected enough to participate wouldn’t have it any other way. MGTVLE is not shiny or new or well-designed – mostly by circumstance, partly by choice. Supposedly resistant ‘indie’ culture in Sydney trades on the authenticity of subversiveness to such a degree that the ultra-trendy Oxford Arts Factory in Darlinghurst went through a phase where longnecks in brown paper bags (traditionally used to disguise alcohol bottles and thus avoid police fines) were served over the bar even though the OAF is a fully licensed venue. The vague sense of naughtiness being chased in that slightly pathetic gesture is more authentically realised at this unlicensed, illegal (and therefore more authentically ‘independent’ and ‘underground’) venue. For these patterns of consumption, the idea of something being ‘independent’ or ‘underground’ is synonymous with it being exclusive. One can make comparisons with the symbolic economy of authenticity David Grazian describes being negotiated in the downtown Chicago blues scene.

It would, however, be reductive to the point of being offensive to talk about MGTVLE only in terms of its indie cool – being a non-profit space that people live in and pay rent for, MGTVLE does not have a matching drive to sell itself through its street cred. Quite the opposite – the idea is to create a venue that doesn’t have to sell massive amounts of alcohol or put in poker machines to stay alive, and is therefore more accessible (open to under-18s, for example) rather than less.

That MGTVLE is exclusive is a double-edged sword. Exclusive, in the literal sense that most people are kept out. People are kept out – and so is the dumb planned obsolescence of Sydney indie fashion and its concomitant commoditisation. People are kept out – and so many miss out on participating in what goes on.

Tonight Wollongong four-piece Ohana and Sydney three-piece The Thaw are recording a live split EP. The Thaw are on first, and they set up on the floor rather than the stage. A pillar of the Sydney DIY scene since 2004, The Thaw are three female musicians (‘not a chick band’, thanks very much) from the western suburbs with a keen political awareness that permeates a lot of what they do. All band members are vegetarians, and have anarchist leanings – various members volunteer for Food Not Bombs Sydney and Jura Anarchist Bookshop, and the band supports a food co-operative in the Philippines.

Sadly, with prevailing stereotypes about feminists and vegans, this description probably paints them as intense and humourless. Far from it. The band is relaxed and chatty onstage, cracking jokes and calling out amusing song names. Their sound is a dense but very listenable kind of art-rock created from droning bass chords and liberal use of feedback, effects pedals (particularly delay) and unusual guitar techniques. During th’echo, the insistently weird tick-tock beat that is the song’s backbone is created by her picking the strings above the nut at the guitar’s head and looping the result through an effect pedal. Cymbal rolls wash over the top of it all with soft mallets, and skittering hi-hat and tom beats bound through the upbeat parts. Drummer Katrina seems to take lead vocal duties as well as the drum kit, but all three Thaws chime unpredictable harmonies together on many of their songs, so it’s difficult to tell.

The noisiest moment comes during a song Kat says is written ‘about Palestine… and how complex and fucked up the whole thing is’. All three Thaws scream the song to a climax. I don’t catch the words, but the pain and sympathy felt is evident. Set-closer Getting pumped with your friends and doing mad shit is a slow-burning, righteous epic recalling post-rock masters Mogwai or the rich soundscapes of Japanese ‘artcore’ band Envy. Steph rubs a screwdriver along her fretboard to create an improvised e-bow, sliding from a haunting lament to a bristling, soaring wail. The tempo increases until Katrina’s machine-gun snare runs are simultaneously holding the song together and threatening to tear it apart. Suddenly the drums fade and Kath and Steph let the song paint itself out of existence the delicate way it came in.

Between sets I look around a bit more. On the far side of the room two tables are set up. One is near the communal kitchen, where vegie-burgers or Lebanese bread with hummus are served for a gold coin donation (or an offer of helping out with the cooking or washing up). The other is the ‘distro table’ where Shaun from the Australasian DIY label Tenzenmen has boxes of CDs, vinyl and cassettes from punk, indie and DIY electronica acts from around Australia and Southeast Asia. On other nights touring bands might be selling t-shirts to recoup some of their losses to petrol costs, but tonight it seems to just be Shaun. On sale is a Punx Against The Gold Mine compilation raising money and awareness for the Irati Wanti (‘the poison leave it’) campaign to prevent cyanide gold mining in an Aboriginal community.

On the back of the MGTVLE toilet door, along with paste-up graffiti, flyers for other shows and protests, someone has written in black permanent marker: “All I want to do is enjoy the music, but I deal, have to deal, with the homophobia and sexism of this scene.” That homophobia and sexism is consciously thought about, discussed and dealt with in this space would seem to set it apart from most commercial music venues in Sydney, and indeed in Australia. MGTVLE has a “Safer Spaces” policy that is sometimes displayed on the door that asks participants to be mindful of how their behaviour affects others’ enjoyment of the event and relative comfort and safety in the space (particularly if drinking). This kind of policy is more usually seen at progressive activist meetings.
Someone has written in green marker underneath the first complaint that “All I want to do is enjoy the homophobia and sexism of this scene, but I deal, have to deal, with the music” – no doubt a provocation to the anarcho-punk bands (known colloquially as ‘crust punks’) that regularly play MGTVLE and speak up about gender issues in punk.

While waiting for Ohana to start playing, Katrina Thaw and I discuss the current plethora of independent venues in this particular area. Kat is enthusiastic, but says, “I worry about the ghetto-ness of it all. I’m playing shows that are 5 minutes away from the warehouse I played in the other day – and people will make the trek to one of these places in Marrickville, but they won’t come to this show that we organised next week in Bankstown right near the station.” She’s conscious of the inner-city elitism that has swallowed the Sydney indie scene and constantly threatens to do the same for activist and DIY scenes in the inner west.

Ohana are finally ready to start playing. Somehow between The Thaw’s set and the beginning of this one, there have appeared many more indie scenesters clad in fashionable keffiyeh and high-waisted skirts.

“Basic maintenance of assumptions keeps us glued to the fucking ground!” screams singer Will Farrier, one knee lowered as if to brace against a strong wind. Ohana’s opener When Things Come Alive is a jagged triptych of a song, sharply changing direction twice after the intro’s urgent but near-monotonal buzz and throb. Above it Farrier’s shouted lyrics and wordless falsetto float and leap eerily.

Lyrically, Ohana deal repeatedly with similar themes to those that the English post-punk luminaries Gang of Four dealt with thirty years ago – revealing a disgust for capitalism but recognising its power to corrupt everything around you and make you complicit, complacent. The music snarls and bristles, but with frustration and disillusionment rather than uncomplicatedly revolutionary urges. Farrier’s lyrics and indeed Ohana’s whole aesthetic are influenced by the writings of French post-structuralist Michel Foucault (track one on their first LP was named Foucault You Diabolical Genius). Another song which makes an appearance tonight, Bad Credit/Good Posture, sounds like a high-noon exchange between an ordinary citizen and an agent of state surveillance – “I am afraid of you my friend, but you are terrified of me… even though we seek to meet outside the gaze of the strongest lens…”

Ohana’s music is composed of angular, precise rhythms. Not a note is wasted. The sparseness and space in their post-hardcore compositions makes clear their debt to Melbourne minimalists My Disco. In fact, it’s only about a third of the time that all four musicians are playing at once. Individual parts are repetitive and simple, but together the songs are compulsively danceable, in no small part due to drummer Kino’s brilliantly inventive ostinatos. This is music that is more than the sum of its parts. Set highlight One On Four is an example. A syncopated, arpeggiated, almost-staccato guitar line runs throughout the song, sounding somehow distant. It’s joined at intervals by a complementary, mumbling bassline and a cascading second guitar melting over the first. Before you realise, the subtle climax of the song is upon you and Farrier is screaming that “some things are irreplaceable! Some things are better off not lost!”

Farrier wears a Miles Davis t-shirt and dances a strange, pivoting swing, as if hinged at the waist. In fact all four (male) members do cast poses, throwing their bodies around the stage and dancing jerkily to their own beat, taking up space in a way that The Thaw (now quite noticeably) didn’t.

Like The Thaw, Ohana close their set in spectacular fashion. The Birth of the Clinic, named after Foucault’s famous examination of examination, surveillance and the insistent structures of modernity, starts innocently enough with a relaxed drumbeat. Scratchy guitars pick out lonely, unresolved chords and then burst into rapid semiquavers. When the bass and drums join them the beat becomes stultifying, insistent, oppressively heavy. The volume climbs until suddenly it ceases coldly and all that is left are the guitarists robotically trading harsh harmonics and generating a profound sense of unease. Then silence but for a sparse, stop-start drum beat. Farrier is bent double, leaning on his amp in the corner of the room, metres away from his microphone. He barks out three lines that echo unamplified in the room: “What goes in my mouth? What comes out yours? The birth of the clinic.”

The kind of musicianship and sense of community evident in MGTVLE and places like it doggedly resists commoditisation through a sense of being an end in itself, rather than a means to access fame or money. And that sense – of the event, the space being an end in itself – is strong. It’s something that will never die, no matter how many DIY venues are forced into closure.

Influences are worn on sleeves (Swervedriver, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, etc) and the lyrics can become a bit meaningless if you try to break them down too much, but this album just sounds AMAZING – simultaneously languid, urgent, poignant, paranoid and above all, huge. LoD haven’t made anything terribly ground-breaking with Nowhere Foreverbut they have made something endlessly listenable – my friend Jon and I found it staying in his car stereo and my CD player for weeks. And it is distinctly their own sound despite all the above – anyone writing this album off as ‘too derivative’ hasn’t given it a chance yet.

One of the best things about this album is its sincerity. This is pretty much an irony-free record – such a relief! And of course the best thing about this album is how loud it is without being grating or jagged. I first listened to the whole thing through new headphones on the way to work after a huge night out and it was like pouring warm honey on my brain.

Love Of Diagrams are launching the vinyl version of Nowhere Forever at the Annandale Hotel, Sydney, on the 9th of January with Ghosts Of Television and The Laurels.

I’m unable to disguise my enjoyment of the album’s many hilarious lines, delivered in Aleks’ deadpan voice and buried somewhat low in the mix. For example: “This is not some elaborate prank/I learned to love like I learned to drive, in Soviet tanks”. Or: “What if you broke his heart/and he died in a car wreck/and then I played his part/in the re-enactment?” Or when bassist Janita reels off a list of absurd demands: “I want a superpower! And a photocopier! I wanna sleep around! I want a new stapler!” She later asks Aleks if he can call her an ambulance and he replies with a shrug: “I’ll have to use your phone, baby – they no longer take calls from me“.

(Man, I really should stop now).

All of those lyrics are from one song, Circa 1992 Ideas, one of the three standout tracks. Its blend of charmingly silly Darren Hanlon-style ballad with mutated elevator muzak is weird and winning. Destroy The Universe With Jazz Hands, which opens the album, is a three-part let’s-go-dancing-while-the-world-ends epic. And the beautiful album closer Antique Limb is probably my favourite pop song of the year, with its lovely major-key afro-pop rhythms and the delightful contrast between Aleks’ flat, gruff uncertainty (my housemate commented that “he sounds like he might slit his wrists!”) and Janita’s sweetness: “You’re a dream come true! I dreamed you up right down to your pointed shoes!“

(note the patented Ramps dance about two minutes in, often performed by the band at their live shows!)

I’d hasten to add, though, that this is a proper album album which flows from start to finish very nicely indeed with nary a dip in song quality. The feeling I get really strongly from this album is that it’s made by a bunch of people not unlike myself – young 20-somethings living in share-houses in the inner city, not yet ready to leave childhood entirely behind for adulthood, but negotiating an awkward, mostly-happy medium between the two. Hey Owl, for example, finds the protagonist attempting to deal with the death of his lover in a plane crash by alternately believing that they’ve come back as an owl “in the tree outside our place” or tricking himself into thinking that they’re simply away: “I can’t deal with this amount of change, so I pretend your phone’s still out of range“. I can’t decide whether the whole thing is clumsy and immature or genuinely heartbreaking, and therein lies its appeal – the way we negotiate through these periods in our lives bears the marks of both childish denial and real adult grief. So if you can deal with a bit of cutesiness in your indie-pop (and honestly, if you can’t then what’s the point of listening to indie-pop?), this album is excellent.

Put simply, Bare Arms’ self-titled EP is just really, really good. They’re a band so tight that they can effortlessly wrench their songs from lung-crushing, furious intensity to passages that are genuinely quiet, fragile and intricate (I think I’ve even seen drummer Katrina use wire brushes in the ‘quiet bits’, although that could be my imagination). They use this dramatic dynamic ability to great effect throughout the six songs on this record, Tom’s hyperactive, melodic basslines interlocking with Aaron’s chunky palm-muted guitar riffs and Kat’s heavy, frenetic drumming. And I can virtually guarantee that no other hardcore band referenced Deleuze and Guittari (The Refrain), the occupation of Palestine (Permanent Traumatic Stress Disorder), the end of the world (In The End, We’re All Dead) and simple homesickness (South Coast Line) all in the one record this year.