duggup

Passion Pit are the audio equivalent of a hit and run. It took me a week to find out who the hell it was doing it. I mean when you think about it, how hard can it be to find a song with big wooofy kick drums, Scritti Politti vocals done with tons of helium [...]

I was given some NO AGE to listen to after they were here in Melbourne last month. The person who gave it to me said “They’re loud and weird – you’ll like them” They were right. So lets run down the checklist. Guitar? Check. Drums? Check. Yep – That’s it. Just the two instruments. No [...]

We haven’t had a Japanese band for a while now, but recently I have been listening to Aural Vampire. They are a strange “Electro / New Wave / Industrial” Japanese electronic band which consists of Exo-Chika and Raveman. They hail from Tokyo and work a dark ,mainly electropopand synthpop music (lots of yummy industrial noises [...]

Manu Chao is a great little find, he has been entertaining my head for a couple of months now. He is a French Latin folk singer of French and Spanish (Basque/Galician) origin.  He moved to Paris as a very young child, when his parents decided to escape the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. During the Eightie’s, [...]

I first ran into Lindsay Buckland years ago when he was busking here in Melbourne, his music would stop me cold every time and more than once I was late for a meeting or would miss the tram because of him.

Lindsay plays dulcimer and we aren’t talking simple folk accompaniments here (altough I am sure he can do them brilliantly. No siree, we are talking electric, amplified, signal processed, digitally looped and spat out dulcimer. And it’s brilliant.

Lets get started by heading you straight over to www.myspace.com/bellx1 , press play on the “The Great Defector” sit back and enjoy what is currently my favourite song of the year. OK I suppose it would be a bit churlish to stop there – lets try Soweto style guitar (shades of Johnny Clegg and Hilton Rosenthal), David Byrne / Talking head vocals and rhythm section that dance along the thin line between chaos and pop perfection. Weird ass lyrics (OK , I just wish I had written them). Here’s a hint they pull off the pop perfection.

Cotton Jones are Michael Nau and Whitney McGraw and together they create a music that  mixes elements of folk, rock and gospel into a truly familiar sound. The guitars and voices blend together like old friends. Hype from the website… Paranoid Cocoon: the debut full-length for Suicide Squeeze.  It’s an album full of quiet, wooden [...]