Discover : Free Dirt – Died Pretty
“Free Dirt is a fine, fiery effort… the band hotwires the past for its own purposes..” – All Music 4 1/2 stars. Released in 1986, Died Pretty‘s magnificent debut album, Free Dirt, remains one of the great Australian rock albums. Combining Stooges-like grunt with the avant-rock stylings of Pere Ubu and the Velvet Underground, the band forged a dark […]
In Praise of: Siri Hustvedt.
” Hustvedt has the imaginative mastery to encase complex ideas in the flesh and blood needed to render them visceral”. – Observer. There are few writers working today who can reconcile an inner life with an outward one as completely as Siri Hustvedt. An American writer, and specifically a New York writer, dense and knotted […]
READ: Svetlana Alexievich
“Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents.” – Svetlana Alexievich. Reading Svetlana Alexievich may be the closest you can get to experiencing the past – […]
Slim Aarons
“I didn’t do fashion, I did the people in their clothes that became the fashion.” – Slim Aarons The difference between fashion and style…… is the difference between the transient and the timeless. Driven by a journalistic curiosity about how the world’s most privileged people lived, Slim Aarons photographed luxury fashion’s evolution through the decades. […]
Listen: Rowland S. Howard – Teenage Snuff Film
“The color of Rowland Howard’s music is a deep-purple bruise.” – Lydia Lunch “His guitar playing was like the stab of a switchblade.” – Laura Jane Grace By the end of his stints in The Birthday Party and These Immortal Souls, Rowland S. Howard had already built a reputation as Australia’s premier anti-guitar hero. […]
Listen: NEU! – NEU!
“Neu: standing with cocked German eyebrows at the nexus of shimmering space rock, processed psychedelia, mechanical kraut, and wonderfully libidinal disco.” – Pitchfork Even in 2022, Neu! still sounds like the future. It’s easy to talk about how much this band/record have influenced but there is no denying that the power of sheer […]
Listen: The Jam – All Mod Cons
“The sound of an English youth movement.” – The BBC An essential ‘angry young man’ record, All Mod Cons remains one of the prime statements of disillusioned youth from the punk generation. Dispersing the personal with the political, guitarist and songwriter, Paul Weller’s lyrics reaches new depths on songs like “In The Crowd” exploring the loss […]
The War on Drugs – I Don’t Live Here Anymore
“A rich, absorbing work that rewards immersive listening.” – The Guardian Despite its three-year, seven-studio gestation, the War On Drugs’ fifth album feels warmer, more organic, and more personal than their last album – the Grammy-winning ‘A Deeper Understanding’. An album that helped propel them from from a small Philadelphia indie-rock concern to arena headliners. […]
Mark Lanegan – Whiskey for the Holy Ghost
Mark Lanegan’s second solo album was released in between his band The Screaming Trees final two albums, 1992s breakthrough ‘Sweet Oblivion’ and 1996’s ‘Dust’. The album showcased Lanegan’s growing maturity as a songwriter and vocalist and is regarded as an early career high point. Lanegan would go on to make another 9 solo albums, nearly always […]
The Church – Priest=Aura
“Evocative, poetic, and gripping music with a distinctly unsettling edge…an astonishing album.” – All Music In the 30 years since its release, the Church’s Priest=Aura has gone from a post-“Under the Milky Way” footnote to an acknowledged career pinnacle. It was a commercial failure upon its release in 1992. Not only was the band unable […]