Bellyache Ben and the Steamgrass Boys
with The MFW and The Noise, launching Yum Yum Tree Records
@ Caravan, 9th December 2011
Sydney is now one record label the wealthier with beguillingly named Yum Yum Tree being launched at Caravan last week. Aiming to support the disparate breeds of music cropping around the warehouses of the Inner West, from the jazz-hued pop of the Elana Stone Band to the kitsch retro of The Cope Street Parade, the label seems set to wreak havoc. Or make a talented group of friends very happy in any case.
Tucked behind the carwash on Addison Road (smokers hurriedly scattering every time a vehicle rolls through), ceilings adorned with spaceman-costume alum, Caravan certainly provided an appropriate atmosphere of roaches (both kinds) 'n rollerdoors for the evening's entertainments. First up was experimental jazz / alt-rock trio The MFW (an acronym of the artists surnames, or the descriptive phrase 'motherfucking wankers' depending who you ask) launching their album Sus Scrofa. Aaron Flower (guitar), Evan Mannell (drums) and Ben Waples (bass) seem to have a habit of establishing rather laid-back indie pop song riffs that are then systematically dismantled into strangely funky blues-influenced improvisations.
Less funky though piling on the experimentalism were second support The Noise, a string quartet (tonight trio) refreshingly unreliant on covers of metal songs, instead ultilising their extreme instrumental ability to create a series of shifting textures, elegant but laden with primitive foreboding. Delivered at all times with immaculate control, this was improvisatory string playing at its unconpromising best.
For the last umpteen months, those in the know have been adjourning to Madame Fling Flongs of a Wednesday eve, to sip booze 'n Bourbon-based cocktails, lounge on the comfortingly mismatched comfortable lounges and listen to the angel-voiced neer-do-wells that form Bellyache Ben and the Steamgrass Boys. Having completed their case study investigating the "regular gigging is really the only way to really nail a sound" rule (turns out it's totally true), the fellas tonight moved into phase two with the launch of their self-titled debut album, a modest (7 track) selection from the dozens of traditional tunes and James Daley (mandolin) originals under their collective picks.
Highlights included Bellyache Ben's (otherwise known as Ben Daley) curmudgeonly rendition of unofficial theme-tune Willie Dixon's 'You Can't Judge A Book By The Cover', the fatalistic stomp of traditional 'O' Death' as well as the obligatory kazoo solo from bass player John Maddox. The Steamgrass Boys have come a long way in the year since coming together; aside from the thrashing they give their instruments, the real attraction here is their vocal chutzpah, the five producing harmonies of unwavering tunefulness and genuine soul – expect to see them hitting the folk festival circuit in the coming year.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
The Rescue Ships
Brian Campeau is a jumbling mass of contradictions: a writer of experimental folk who is also an avowed metalhead; a sublimely generous soul (Campeau insisted on purchasing this starving writer lunch. Score. If you see him, buy the bloke a beer) who genuinely believes in the rightness of the writings of Ayn Rand; a singer of rare levity who enjoys deploying a similarly punchy bluntness of tongue in casual conversation. Indeed at first sight, it seems he gets off on giving the impression of being a total jerk.
Thank goodness then for the tempering influence of Elana Stone, jazz songstress, lover of slip 'n slide and awful cheese-related jokes ("what did the cheese say to itself when it saw itself in the mirror? Hallo Me." Shudder). Highly respected soloists in their own right, together they are The Rescue Ships, one of the most exciting pop acts to emerge from the warehouses of Sydney's underground in the last ever.
Named after their song of the same name ("like Iron Maiden" Campeau helpfully clarifies), the two halves of The Rescue Ships originally met through Stone's brother Jake (sometime Brag contributor and Blue Juice mastermind), first contact provoking "hot chemistry - musically and otherwise" (although "the otherwise is not so much anymore") and resulting in numerous instances of both sitting in on each other's solo projects before songs slowly began to be written in tandem.
"For ages we just played each other's songs," says Campeau. "And then we decided to go to New Zealand, as a writing trip specifically ... During the day we'd go sightseeing and do whatever, during the night we'd just write. We finished with seven or eight songs probably, of which we've kept three or four ... Since then it's been more of an idea like, one of us will have a snippet of an idea and bring it, talk about it, work on it together, rather than bring a finished song ... Elana's been really focussed on getting a good song together, whereas I've been really focussed on getting really good arty production. I think we have that common interest in making it as arty as it is songwritery."
"It was quite hard," continues Stone, "us both being lead singers - not [that we have] classic lead singer personalit[ies] or anything - but we were both just set in our ways of doing things. And we both have very clear ideas of what should happen and sometimes they didn't meet up, so it was at times difficult and someone would have to capitulate. And a lot of the time that would be Brian ... I've never made an album that was consistent before, and this one is consistent. I mean, we're not like great radio songwriters together. We don't really write hits. We just write things that we think are really beautiful and hopefully quite different from everything else."
Cooperation is clearly paying dividends though, the pair's live sound, set to grace ears at this year's Peat's Ridge Festival, being a vivid blend of the catchy and the oddball, Campeau's frenetically precise acoustic playing being gracefully complemented by Stone's accordion, the instrumentals being topped by the luscious harmonies of two of the city's best live vocalists.
In between seeking further avenues for musical employment (including taking on the Musical Directorship of Underbelly) and making ends meet juggling half a dozen side-projects each (engineering gigs for Campeau, work with Tripod, Blue Juice and even the odd wedding for Stone), the process of polishing the final mix of their upcoming self-titled debut has become a somewhat extended one. With the end in sight however, Stone is keen to move on to the next stage: "I just want to play really, play as much as possible. And hopefully to see people enjoying that."
First published in The Brag
Thank goodness then for the tempering influence of Elana Stone, jazz songstress, lover of slip 'n slide and awful cheese-related jokes ("what did the cheese say to itself when it saw itself in the mirror? Hallo Me." Shudder). Highly respected soloists in their own right, together they are The Rescue Ships, one of the most exciting pop acts to emerge from the warehouses of Sydney's underground in the last ever.
Named after their song of the same name ("like Iron Maiden" Campeau helpfully clarifies), the two halves of The Rescue Ships originally met through Stone's brother Jake (sometime Brag contributor and Blue Juice mastermind), first contact provoking "hot chemistry - musically and otherwise" (although "the otherwise is not so much anymore") and resulting in numerous instances of both sitting in on each other's solo projects before songs slowly began to be written in tandem.
"For ages we just played each other's songs," says Campeau. "And then we decided to go to New Zealand, as a writing trip specifically ... During the day we'd go sightseeing and do whatever, during the night we'd just write. We finished with seven or eight songs probably, of which we've kept three or four ... Since then it's been more of an idea like, one of us will have a snippet of an idea and bring it, talk about it, work on it together, rather than bring a finished song ... Elana's been really focussed on getting a good song together, whereas I've been really focussed on getting really good arty production. I think we have that common interest in making it as arty as it is songwritery."
"It was quite hard," continues Stone, "us both being lead singers - not [that we have] classic lead singer personalit[ies] or anything - but we were both just set in our ways of doing things. And we both have very clear ideas of what should happen and sometimes they didn't meet up, so it was at times difficult and someone would have to capitulate. And a lot of the time that would be Brian ... I've never made an album that was consistent before, and this one is consistent. I mean, we're not like great radio songwriters together. We don't really write hits. We just write things that we think are really beautiful and hopefully quite different from everything else."
Cooperation is clearly paying dividends though, the pair's live sound, set to grace ears at this year's Peat's Ridge Festival, being a vivid blend of the catchy and the oddball, Campeau's frenetically precise acoustic playing being gracefully complemented by Stone's accordion, the instrumentals being topped by the luscious harmonies of two of the city's best live vocalists.
In between seeking further avenues for musical employment (including taking on the Musical Directorship of Underbelly) and making ends meet juggling half a dozen side-projects each (engineering gigs for Campeau, work with Tripod, Blue Juice and even the odd wedding for Stone), the process of polishing the final mix of their upcoming self-titled debut has become a somewhat extended one. With the end in sight however, Stone is keen to move on to the next stage: "I just want to play really, play as much as possible. And hopefully to see people enjoying that."
First published in The Brag
Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow
There's only a few people kicking around with the time, money, skill, guts or inclination to pull off an album such as 50 Words For Snow. It's that rare thing: a musically and thematically unified song cycle. Tori Amos has given it a stab (somewhat wide of the mark) a few times in the last decade; Björk pulled it off recently with her striking Biophilia; Kate Bush has managed something of similar ambition, the seven tracks presented here unravelling with pristine and unhurried beauty.
It begins in isolate, Bush half-whispering half-crooning a snowflake's descent, falling helplessly through the void over a static piano ostinato. The listener is immediately plunged into an otherworldly, almost cinematic, space – a filmic preoccupation suggested by this year's Director's Cut. The music summons a peculiarly northern hemisphere idea of winter, Bush spinning yarns around the fire while outside the ice tumbles on the still, frozen world.
Wilder, far less mannered than 2005's Aerial, Bush has brought her uncompromising talents to bear on cathedral-size canvases, bringing to the foreground a wonder at the missing, the intangible. Whether it be the girl on 'Misty' waking to find her snowman lover vanished, leaving nothing but “dead leaves, bits of twisted branches” or the Shepherds and Sherpas who find no trace of the 'Wild Man' but “footprints in the snow”, everywhere there is an aching pain at a vanished presence. See for confirmation the surprisingly palatable duet with Elton John, 'Snowed In At Wheeler Street', in which immortal lovers are destined to forever cross paths that moment too late.
50 Words For Snow is the work of a perfectionist awed by the miracle of something coming from nothing, “born in a cloud”, dazzling and impermanent.
First published in The Brag
It begins in isolate, Bush half-whispering half-crooning a snowflake's descent, falling helplessly through the void over a static piano ostinato. The listener is immediately plunged into an otherworldly, almost cinematic, space – a filmic preoccupation suggested by this year's Director's Cut. The music summons a peculiarly northern hemisphere idea of winter, Bush spinning yarns around the fire while outside the ice tumbles on the still, frozen world.
Wilder, far less mannered than 2005's Aerial, Bush has brought her uncompromising talents to bear on cathedral-size canvases, bringing to the foreground a wonder at the missing, the intangible. Whether it be the girl on 'Misty' waking to find her snowman lover vanished, leaving nothing but “dead leaves, bits of twisted branches” or the Shepherds and Sherpas who find no trace of the 'Wild Man' but “footprints in the snow”, everywhere there is an aching pain at a vanished presence. See for confirmation the surprisingly palatable duet with Elton John, 'Snowed In At Wheeler Street', in which immortal lovers are destined to forever cross paths that moment too late.
50 Words For Snow is the work of a perfectionist awed by the miracle of something coming from nothing, “born in a cloud”, dazzling and impermanent.
First published in The Brag
Thursday, December 15, 2011
The Hunter
Julia Leigh’s debut novel related a wrenching parable unfolding in simple, crystalline prose. It netted her a generous basket of awards while earning her fans in Frank Moorhouse and Don DeLillo, notables who were subsequently joined in their praise by Toni Morrison and JM Coetzee on the release of her eerie second effort, Disquiet.
Indeed, Coetzee’s thoughts on the latter—“[it is] so infused with the practices of film that, while each scene is fully and even vividly realised in words, it also translates quite naturally into film”—are equally applicable to The Hunter, Leigh’s coolly impersonal third-person voice in the novel mimicking the all-seeing eye of the camera, the story developing through smoothly contained cinematic chunks.
Although Leigh has since moved into filmmaking in her own right (see Sleeping Beauty), the author has remained outside the adaptation process of her first novel, the film instead being steered by director Daniel Nettheim, whose television work on shows such as Love Is A Four Letter Word and All Saints seems to have prepared him well for the challenges of feature direction. Shooting from Alice Addison’s screenplay (whose credentials include several episodes of My Place, based on Nadia Wheatley’s award-winning book, as well as the Cate Shortland-directed 2006 police procedural The Silence), Nettheim has produced a smoothly mesmerising film that absorbs without ever quite becoming gripping.
An American mercenary, operating under the name Martin David (Willem Dafoe), is given an assignment by a shadowy biotech company, Red Leaf: travel to Tasmania and find the last Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, kill it, then harvest its blood, skin and reproductive organs to be used for undisclosed research. Operating under the cover of “researching [Tasmanian] devils for the university,” Martin settles into the ramshackle house of Lucy Armstrong (Frances O’Connor), bereft after the disappearance of her husband, and her two children, the beguilingly foul-mouthed Sass (Morgana Davis) and silently watchful Bike (Finn Woodlock), using it as his launchpad into the bush. With Lucy in a self-medicated stupor, Martin is forced to negotiate with the children whose assistance seems dependent on his promise to search for their father, though his interest in them sharpens as he realises that the unspeaking boy may have sighted the elusive Thylacine.
Nettheim has heightened the bitter tensions between conservationists and forestry workers, a stand-off that also formed a backdrop to the novel: in a loggers’ pub a sticker has been amended to read “Save Our Native Jobs,” Martin finds his car with its windows smashed and “go home greenie scum” smeared across the bonnet in faeces after his initial excursion into the wilderness, while the filmmakers apparently used activists’ 2010 blockade of the Upper Florentine as a ready-made set. Martin is steered between the faultlines of Tasmanian society by Jack Mindy (Sam Neill), a rough-spun local who turns standoffish as Martin’s potential as rival for Lucy’s affections becomes apparent.
Although Nettheim has suggested that his treatment of the political forces at work within the state doesn’t take sides, the occasional shot of bark being stripped from a tree trunk like a body being flayed cannot help but have a strong political resonance. Indeed, neither can the 360 degree panoramic helicopter shots of Dafoe trudging through the spectacular landscape of the central Tasmanian plateau. While such footage allows the land to speak for itself, it also emphasises the character’s isolation within it, highlighting the tension that lies at the story’s core: between those who see the world and the creatures that inhabit it as a resource to be utilised for the material ‘progress’ of humanity and those who view it as holding an inherent value and right to exist in itself.
It’s in the way this struggle plays out in the character of Martin that most differentiates the film from its source material. Brilliantly cast as the bland, craggy everyman, Dafoe seems to completely inhabit the role, predatory eyes hinting at a coldly utilitarian intelligence. Martin moves through a staggeringly beautiful landscape with profound disinterest, his mind completely focused on his task, constructing snares and traps for the creature with meticulous patience. Each action unfolds with an unerringly ruthless logic: in one scene the hunter guts a wallaby only to throw the body away once a particular organ has been conserved as bait. The possibility of love with Lucy is similarly sacrificed, Martin maintaining the fiction that the children’s father is simply ‘missing’ for as long as it suits the needs of his mission.
This notwithstanding, the demands that commercial cinema have placed on the plot seem to have fundamentally altered the emphasis of the narrative. Unlike the novel, in which Leigh allows her character’s callous and implacable nature to remain ascendant through to a sublimely bleak conclusion, Nettheim and Addison subtly transform the narrative from a story of the consequences of exerting dominance over nature to that of a man becoming aware of his ethical responsibility towards the natural world. While other alterations to the narrative—such as injecting additional tension by heightening the animosity with the loggers and the hidden presence of Red Leaf—result in strong cinema, this larger change sits uneasily with the material, a fact compounded both by the deeply ambiguous resolution that the filmmakers have given their version of the narrative, but also by the cloyingly saccharine coda that manages to undercut all that has gone before.
Anna Krien concluded her superb 2010 overview of the Tasmanian forestry debate, Into The Woods, musing on Edward O Wilson’s vision of the “Age of Loneliness” that will surely follow the Holocene Extinction Event through which we are currently living: “a planet inhabited by us and not much else…no apocalypse, no doom, no gates of hell, no wrath of god or mass hysteria, only sadness. I wonder if perhaps the Age of Loneliness has already begun, its effects far more complicated than we realise.” A similar melancholy pervades The Hunter, settling in the hollows of Dafoe’s ravaged face, the stillness of the trees. Narrative niggles notwithstanding, Nettheim's film is an important contribution to Australian cinema.
First published in RealTime Arts, Iss. 106, Dec 2011-Jan 2012, p 17
Indeed, Coetzee’s thoughts on the latter—“[it is] so infused with the practices of film that, while each scene is fully and even vividly realised in words, it also translates quite naturally into film”—are equally applicable to The Hunter, Leigh’s coolly impersonal third-person voice in the novel mimicking the all-seeing eye of the camera, the story developing through smoothly contained cinematic chunks.
Although Leigh has since moved into filmmaking in her own right (see Sleeping Beauty), the author has remained outside the adaptation process of her first novel, the film instead being steered by director Daniel Nettheim, whose television work on shows such as Love Is A Four Letter Word and All Saints seems to have prepared him well for the challenges of feature direction. Shooting from Alice Addison’s screenplay (whose credentials include several episodes of My Place, based on Nadia Wheatley’s award-winning book, as well as the Cate Shortland-directed 2006 police procedural The Silence), Nettheim has produced a smoothly mesmerising film that absorbs without ever quite becoming gripping.
An American mercenary, operating under the name Martin David (Willem Dafoe), is given an assignment by a shadowy biotech company, Red Leaf: travel to Tasmania and find the last Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, kill it, then harvest its blood, skin and reproductive organs to be used for undisclosed research. Operating under the cover of “researching [Tasmanian] devils for the university,” Martin settles into the ramshackle house of Lucy Armstrong (Frances O’Connor), bereft after the disappearance of her husband, and her two children, the beguilingly foul-mouthed Sass (Morgana Davis) and silently watchful Bike (Finn Woodlock), using it as his launchpad into the bush. With Lucy in a self-medicated stupor, Martin is forced to negotiate with the children whose assistance seems dependent on his promise to search for their father, though his interest in them sharpens as he realises that the unspeaking boy may have sighted the elusive Thylacine.
Nettheim has heightened the bitter tensions between conservationists and forestry workers, a stand-off that also formed a backdrop to the novel: in a loggers’ pub a sticker has been amended to read “Save Our Native Jobs,” Martin finds his car with its windows smashed and “go home greenie scum” smeared across the bonnet in faeces after his initial excursion into the wilderness, while the filmmakers apparently used activists’ 2010 blockade of the Upper Florentine as a ready-made set. Martin is steered between the faultlines of Tasmanian society by Jack Mindy (Sam Neill), a rough-spun local who turns standoffish as Martin’s potential as rival for Lucy’s affections becomes apparent.
Although Nettheim has suggested that his treatment of the political forces at work within the state doesn’t take sides, the occasional shot of bark being stripped from a tree trunk like a body being flayed cannot help but have a strong political resonance. Indeed, neither can the 360 degree panoramic helicopter shots of Dafoe trudging through the spectacular landscape of the central Tasmanian plateau. While such footage allows the land to speak for itself, it also emphasises the character’s isolation within it, highlighting the tension that lies at the story’s core: between those who see the world and the creatures that inhabit it as a resource to be utilised for the material ‘progress’ of humanity and those who view it as holding an inherent value and right to exist in itself.
It’s in the way this struggle plays out in the character of Martin that most differentiates the film from its source material. Brilliantly cast as the bland, craggy everyman, Dafoe seems to completely inhabit the role, predatory eyes hinting at a coldly utilitarian intelligence. Martin moves through a staggeringly beautiful landscape with profound disinterest, his mind completely focused on his task, constructing snares and traps for the creature with meticulous patience. Each action unfolds with an unerringly ruthless logic: in one scene the hunter guts a wallaby only to throw the body away once a particular organ has been conserved as bait. The possibility of love with Lucy is similarly sacrificed, Martin maintaining the fiction that the children’s father is simply ‘missing’ for as long as it suits the needs of his mission.
This notwithstanding, the demands that commercial cinema have placed on the plot seem to have fundamentally altered the emphasis of the narrative. Unlike the novel, in which Leigh allows her character’s callous and implacable nature to remain ascendant through to a sublimely bleak conclusion, Nettheim and Addison subtly transform the narrative from a story of the consequences of exerting dominance over nature to that of a man becoming aware of his ethical responsibility towards the natural world. While other alterations to the narrative—such as injecting additional tension by heightening the animosity with the loggers and the hidden presence of Red Leaf—result in strong cinema, this larger change sits uneasily with the material, a fact compounded both by the deeply ambiguous resolution that the filmmakers have given their version of the narrative, but also by the cloyingly saccharine coda that manages to undercut all that has gone before.
Anna Krien concluded her superb 2010 overview of the Tasmanian forestry debate, Into The Woods, musing on Edward O Wilson’s vision of the “Age of Loneliness” that will surely follow the Holocene Extinction Event through which we are currently living: “a planet inhabited by us and not much else…no apocalypse, no doom, no gates of hell, no wrath of god or mass hysteria, only sadness. I wonder if perhaps the Age of Loneliness has already begun, its effects far more complicated than we realise.” A similar melancholy pervades The Hunter, settling in the hollows of Dafoe’s ravaged face, the stillness of the trees. Narrative niggles notwithstanding, Nettheim's film is an important contribution to Australian cinema.
First published in RealTime Arts, Iss. 106, Dec 2011-Jan 2012, p 17
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)