AN OLD SCAB: Watching The Paradise Motel play Sirens

“I'm here to pick an old scab, I suppose”, I said, in reply to being asked why I had come to see The Fucking Paradise Fucking Motel on a windy Friday in Hobart. The reply to that was that I must be covered in old scabs by now, and I suppose I am. I'm quite happy with that; they may even form some sort of armour by now, though I doubt it. It was a good question though; I have never really liked this band all that much, and I was wondering as well why I'd felt such a complete compulsion to go and see the reconstituted Motel play.

First time around, The Paradise Motel were an incongruity to me, mired as I was in the ragged glory of the creative mess of music that fermented in Hobart in the mid 90s, an odd scene that has been over praised and thrashed too hard at the same time, but nevertheless gave Australia some stalwart musicians, many of whom are still at it, incredibly. Some have done well for themselves, others are bitter messes of people and some have not grown up in the least, and none of it really matters anyway. The Paradise Motel were certainly ambitious, certainly interesting and certainly not like much else that emerged from Hobart; they were not feedback drenched punks or brittle minimalists or sonic bludgeons (work out three all allusions there and you get a prize), they were big, lush sounding and wore suits. My head was so elsewhere I could not have possibly appreciated it at the time, and I think I was wondering if I could now, as the intervening years have forced me to remove my head from my arse a fair fair bit, though not entirely.

I wanted to see if I could like The Paradise Motel now, I think. That could have been it. Or perhaps I just wanted to stand there and judge the fuck out of them. They'd just gotten under way when I strolled into Sirens, threw my money on the table like an arrogant prick (what do I mean 'like'? I AM an arrogant prick), and proceed directly to the bar, where I remained for most of the gig, downing stubbies in the company of two other Hobart stalwarts who would not appreciate being named at all, but had similar opinions to me. One would not shut up and got a good stare from Mireda Sussex, and I was sorely tempted to begin heckling the fuck out of the band, but I let it go; I'll do my heckling from over here these days. It was hard to resist though. I had a good one up my sleeve, about travellers from antique lands.

They played well. 

They are a good band, there's no doubt of that. The strengths of writing and arrangement augment the work of the central vocalist, which has lost none of it's power and indeed, she has probably become better as a musician in the eleven year hiatus since The Motel last convened. When she is on point, the vocal attack is a beam of clear, hard light. It's not a siren song, but a reply to one: tied hard to the mast she is Ulysses begging to be set free, and never being allowed.

Yes, she is a pretty good front person, and the songs allowed her to really be that good front person more than once during the performance, but not always. Sometimes the whole thing got lost, and I wondered if I was listening to songs or an arrangement of indulgent histrionics – I mean good fucking grief, what where those bizarre cockatoo cries Charles Bickford launched into at one point? I nearly pissed myself laughing at that moment, it just seemed ridiculous. It wasn't helped by the general sound either – I know The Paradise Motel have a conceit about playing non-standard venues(one with which I concur, I might add), and they could not have known how bad the sound at the high ceiling at Sirens can be, and there had been some valiant work by the band and crew to compensate, but I have to chastise them for not doing a little more homework – they could have sounded fucking incredible at The Brisbane and totally seduced me, or even gone to The Peacock Theatre for a functioning compromise. I like Siren's ambience, but it's hard to make it work sonically. I think the band were let down here, and I also think they should know better by this stage of the game. Whatever else they are, these people are seasoned performers who rely much on good sound and live production to get to their sweet spot.

Nevertheless, a couple of the songs got me in. I moved away from the bar at one point, needing to be front and centre as, for the only time on the night, the band really took off.

“Oh.”

“Oh, this is good” I thought.

It was, really. They were working like bastards. I don't know if I truly liked it or not, but watching people try hard is beautiful in and off itself. The moment where good art struggles for transcendence is the moment we all get it, because we all do this, in our own way; one of the reasons we like things like this is the moment when the music is us, the moments when it is a metaphor for life, be it a struggle, as it is for many for much of their lives, or a moment of bliss and relief.

They were nearly there, you know, but I didn't like the next song so much and it was gone, but that's the point I guess. Moments.

Yes, The Paradise Motel are a good band, I really don't know if I like them and there are some things wrong and I can tell you right now they miss some old members a bit, but that is much a bigger scab to pick there, and it is not really mine to pick anyway. I picked at my scab enough for it to bleed a little and the blood caught the blue light and looked pretty enough, and now I'm wondering about the album, and whether or not I should listen to it, because I wasn't going to at all.

Yes, I think I might want to give a good, in depth listen now, and ask all the other questions about why this band even exists, and why Matt Aulich doesn't have a band of his own, and all that crap.

Wankers.

I may even have to buy the fucking thing.

I doubt very, very much that they'll give me one.

SUPERSTAR 'Floating Weeds / Double Peace' (Totem Tapes)

It's taking me a while to really feel like I'm ready to write anything about anything just at the moment. It's long been a phenomenon with me that I would take ages getting to know things and keep having to go and sit with them again and again; and more to the point, it was also true that I got sick of things that grabbed me straight away. The more confused I am, the better it generally is, and the more I wonder if I am really enjoying something, the more I probably am. I think it's the the wondering itself, the enquiry into music that makes for the best for me – rich complexities that emerge from even the simplest arrangement of two instruments and their subtle interplay – there may not be all that much going on, but the drift back and forth and the choices made by the players – well, I want to get sucked in and a little lost, particularly by something like this cassette.

Yeah, I am reviewing a particular release here. It's a cassette by Super Star, each side an exploration of folding riffs into magic lanterns of sound.

I think I am writing about this cassette, but it's more likely I'm writing about me listening, some layer of mediation of some sort there. It's a bit difficult because it's so laden with mental imagery for me - i see pictures heaps with this one as I unpeel it's sound - it's the soundtrack for some memory of distant past, but not really. I doubt these people where even alive when I was at school.

The music is making me think of other things than itself and I feel right inside it as a result. It's very float tank – I want to be immersed in it and whilst it is quite sweet and simple, something more complex and maybe sinister has emerged over a fair period of time listening – and maybe I read far too much into these things, but possibly I don't at all, maybe they read these things into me.
It does smack of the hypnagogic worlds hinted at by David Keenan in that there essay in the The Wire, but it could also be some trendy inner city art kids with a bunch of Kraut albums and maybe some Tangerine dream – yeah that is possible. Anything's possible.

The tones intertwine like ivy up the old broken swing in the back garden. Spring is here and I really must do some weeding, cuts some things back, water those little corns that got planted. Each movement of Super Star takes me to a new place around my home. Sometimes it's jarring stuff, slightly grating, sometimes it's a ripple that come together. It's a very small universe that one might find in one's pocket by accident.

I do come back to this cassette. It goes better with wine than it does beer, and just fine with herbal tea and a joint. Except I didn't need one and it's morning.

I have to go to work. I don't want to. I just want to turn the tape over and over and over, getting lost in the island of sound. The forward stepping synth riff on the second side – almost jaunty, certainly lively and celebratory – taps my toe. The little stabs of sound turn into awkward memory and all the pictures of segments of plants – with arrows labelling the inner and outer structures are evoked. Yes, it's music from a film I watched at school way back when. Primitive and excited. A bit like that Raymond Scott stuff maybe.

Maybe. I'm not sure as the images cascade past me; perhaps it's not anything more than the sensation evoked and that shall be that.

I really need to do something about my life and my motivational skills. Things like this, that evoke wet swamp worlds made of blue light and winking mould, do not help me hang onto anything like reality. I think this is a good thing but it may not be, but I can really hardly blame Super Star, can I?

Ltd run of 100 cassettes from Totem Tapes.

A. WALLACE / TOM HALL split CS (Sunshine and Grease)

Funny playing field, isn't it, when a cassette release is more of a step up than a CDr, or a download. Sometimes I wonder if it's some odd form of nostalgia at work – but then again, cassettes are a nice format. Maybe it's nothing more than that, or maybe there's some kind of weird-arse cassette manufacturing spot somewhere in Victoria that all these thing are coming from, and it's just about using that service. There's been so damn many recently – I certainly can't keep up, but I like the things, as is possibly clear from the bulk of this blog.

All of which is to say that Aaron Wallace and Tom Hall (the Melbourne one – not the guy from Brisbane, though I have a few things to say about his gear as well, but don't think about that now or you'll get confused) have released a cassette on Sunshine & Grease. 

I got the damn thing and it's been getting the treatment alright. I even listened to the sucker in bath, which was totally great. You should get this, get a pot of some sort of weird tea going and get into a tub of hot water and do the low rent float tank.

Okay. The content.

I gotta tell ya, I have had this spilt for quite some time now and I had all but pressed enter on a review that favoured T Hall over A Wallace and that was totally where I was at at that very point, except that I couldn't quite commit to it. Aaron's mourning keen was fine and luscious, but even the loose structure of his song forms weren't quite there for me. I had some idea that he needed something more before he could truly let rip with the song he obviously heard between his ears, and I was eager to hear it as well, it just wasn't on this cassette. However, before I really tease that out, I really need to deal with Mr Hall.

Tom Hall does a lovely meander on his side that starts with a simple pattern and kind of slowly draws a wobbling loop around and around it, as if he is hurriedly drawing an infinity symbol on a piece of courrgated cardboard with a Biro – the image keeps the same basic pattern but the line goes all over the shop. If you don't get that, go get the Biro and a bit of courrguated cardboard (it has to be corurgated) and draw an infinity symbol - and keep tracing it. Do it with some speed, as there's beat you have to keep to and you'll notice that you don't' quite stick to where you started. You over the edge and it roughens the shape, varies it, makes little slivers here and there or other interactions of line and form keep on occurring. That's how Tom Hall's untitled side is – it stays in one place to go somewhere. It's a beautiful, involved evolution of a musical pattern that really drew me in as a listener from the get-go and only enriched itself more with me over time. I was much more impressed by where it was heading than I was with Aaron's side of the cassette and I was all ready to say so in pixels, but then, well I wasn't.

Thing is, I was not quite sure if that was really the verdict and wondered if it was me and left it to marinate. In the meantime, the cassette itself got a hiding; it became the thing with which I largely make risotto – you kn ow how you hang out in the kitchen and drink some red wine and keep stirring and adding stock? You really need music at that point and Wallace and Hall are nearly my best cooking companions – all sorts of ham-fisted metaphors about simmering and slow boiling aside, I found a domestic groove with this, standing in my socks on a wooden floor.

Over time, A Wallace's tunes really opened up, and it all transformed. It's a great recording and there is a distinction and I do ultimately dig what Hall is up but Wallace is a hell of guy whose plastic take on the song and it's borders fascinate and involve. It may all change again, and that's the mark of a good anything - it's depth becomes clearer with time spent, return listens are rewarded with more complex appreciation. Which I get with this.

In the meantime, as I considered, the whole tiny run of this great thing sold out. I'm even gladder than I ever I got one, and I suspect that will grow rather than diminish.

But don't let that put you off as you can stroll over to this here blog that the dudes aforementioned run, or something, and just download it and see what you make of it all.

EXTRA FOXX

 

knicked this from Eternal Soundcheck
It's taken me a bit of time but I'm getting to quite like this guy. His CD, The Saddest, on Bedroom Suck is reviewed below.

SCUM Compilation cassette (spilt release from Destination Failure and Magic Crowbar)

Oh,  Oh, for fuck's sake.
This thing – and thing it is – is a wonderful mess. I enjoy listening to it when cutting up pictures of Parkway Drive and sticking their heads onto hardcore gay porn from the 70s (I recently found just such a stash in a junk shop – gold), and other wholesome fun; it's just that I have had to work far too hard to work out
which song is fucking which on this compilation, given that my copy of the tape had no FUCKING INDICATION WHATSOEVER which side was which and I've actually
had to – get this – pick my FUCKING way through all these band's attendant myspaces to try and work out what the fuckery was going on. So, despite my basic liking of this cassette comp – GET FUCKED.
REALLY, GO AND GET FUCKED.
Would it have hurt you to have drawn a dick on one side – or ANYTHING?

Mm. Got that off my chest.

Now that I'm not annoyed anymore, yeah, SCUM is okay. It's not stellar and it's not some overly anal document, it's more like an attempt to capture a certain flavour, so I don't think the scene is all that well represented by this collection of screechering blurts and blats, unless you consider this to be a sort of abstract expression of the scene in question, because all the songs butt up against one another, vying for supremacy and writhing about like little grubs. Thing is, I found that working for me in the end, but as mentioned above, splitting tracks apart was a bit of a chore. I need not have took such a ridiculous exercise on, and just enjoyed the mess for what it was, but some bits stood out more than others and I NEEDED TO KNOW what the fuck was going on.

If I'm correct, the best single track came from SUPER FUN HAPPY SLIDE, but there were also moments of enjoyable pants mess provided by COLLAPSED TOILET VIETNAM and OCCULT BLOOD – this angle is more my speed of ferocity than, say, SUFFER ( this act were a wee bit too straight hardcore for me, and I'm pretty over hardcore these days ) or THE KILL. SCUMMY GUMS did something for me as well, though what I'm not sure, there's just something about it – I found their track distinctive and engrossing. It was nearly the pick, but SFHS had to get the mention - what a wonderfully stoooopid band. I feel like drinking beer and eating bisucuits in a paddling pool of my very own urine just thinking about them.

The liner notes indicate that this was all mixed by one Robert Mayson and I think his contriubtion, apart from anything else, was to really squash all the cuts into one, making me think that what was being gone for wasn't a strict representation, but an expressive reaction using the band's material as a starting point. I sort of like that idea and I'd like to hear a more amorphous version one day, where it all does just turn into a chunk of screaming meaty goodness.
Some mention must go about the lovable cover art - it's by well-known punk try hard and trendy art wankstain, the wonderful Stewie "Wolverine's Gay Brother" Cole - go look at his blog, he's doing some of the best stuff he's ever done right now.
Order this cassette from the weirdos over at Magic Crowbar.

ABSOLUTEN CALFEUTRAIL Braybrook (Sabbatical)

One the better small labels in Australia currently, responsible for a range of excellent releases, Sabbatical are hard to pin down – Noise and it's attendants seem to be a focus, but beyond that, the real interest would seem to be quality. One can rely on a Sabbatical release being a fine example of whatever wedge of the sonic spectrum it's emanating from. Basically, I recommend all available product. Releases are limited editions of at the most 200 so sleep not.
I'm fortunate enough to have a fine selection at my disposal and I really should have written more about it all some time ago, but well, I didn't. I aim to rectify this slowly over the coming weeks, beginning this sharp winters day with a pungent confection from Absoluten Calfeutrail entitled Braybrook. A short run of 40 on cassette has allowed few to hear this so it really does want discussing so it's existence can be acknowledged – because it's decent, at the very least.
Braybrook, if we mean the industrial suburb in Victoria, Australia, is not a trendy inner city suburb. Wikipedia tells me it's got a decent immigrant population, and that there is a pentecostal church in the area. It's described as suburb where people live but commute to work elsewhere – a bedroom suburb. I'd not heard that term before today, but it seems to be a fair summation of not only this place but a great many like it that exist the world over. Inhabited but tired and weary, places to sleep. I might be unpacking a little too much from the packaging of this cassette, but it seems to be a puzzle to be picked at; Mark Groves, the author, is cursed with being a deep thinker and it may be that I'm required to engage on a certain level – to submerge myself in this small yet significant release – to get the most from it. Its' easy enough though, really, if I allow myself to go with my first thought – the discussion is class, economics, money based. This would not be all though;  Side one is a planing tone of sound the evokes distance, aircraft flying overhead, a whining sonic that is a giant drill, a flock of mechanical insects, distant traffic and transport which one sleeps and eats in and does little else but watch Hey Hey it's Saturday every Wednesday. Side Two takes a different tactic, as a warbling bleat keeps a kind of rythym underneath which drums of objects turn and voices seem chruned into non-intelligble sound before an eruption occurs then decasy into muttering befoe the final track brings us to another shaking beat that decasy into a an alsmost pathetic thumping before the silence arrives, completing the journey into Braybrook.  It's bleak. Of course it is. It's from a place that is nowhere, nothing.
It's just that it isn't. There are people in Braybrook, there's a community centre, a catholic school (of course there's a catholic school. Catholicism is synonymous with the working class in Australia). There's life. More than that, there's history.

So is this cassette, named for a suburb, is not a hymn to the nothingness of working class lives, but something else, for Mark Groves is cursed with being a deep thinker, and to suggest that this exploration is a trendy Fitzroy wanker freaking out about the horror of the suburbs – well, no. Braybrook is an attempt to discuss history and change in a tiny pocket of Melbourne. I had to research to get that but I've been spoon fed by track names and imagery and it's easy to see the arc of narrative on this release – and I really must say, a noise cassette that's about the history, about the rise and fall of a suburb? That points to the industrialisation of agriculture and all that is implied by that moment for Australia itself? Using the small to point to the large? I never would have thought of that, not being that much of a student of Australina history,  and now I have and I'm the better for it. This sonic reaction to historical moments and events is a well-defined and thoughtful piece that evokes questions and encourages me to think further.
This is an excellent release; the sounds contained herein are interesting impressions of the patterns of history, informed by research and crafted with care. Meticulous, thought out and controlled, they demand a cool listen coupled with thought and research to unpack, although they were pretty good just to have playing while I made dinner as well.
If you can find one of these small gems, get it. Braybrook will satisfy.

The Slugfuckers - vintage footage

Good grief, this has turned up on Youtube, and I am quite blown out by it.
I actually recall seeing a Slugfuckers vinyl in Eduardo's the import record store that supplied Hobart in the 70s and 80s. I had no idea what it was and no money, so a life-changing moment slipped through my fingers until Chapter Music released Can't Stop it and I finally got to hear the Slugfuckers- and yep, I have no doubt this is great stuff. Anyway, there's a film these people made, that has some kind of plot and is some sort of art thing, that someone has GOT to release, which this is a clip from. I nearly fell over when I found this via the Magic Crowbar blog.