Lost AT E Minor

Midlake

We’re big fans of Texas-based group, Midlake, whose melodic indie-rock is deliciously produced. We interviewed guitarist Eric Pulido. Read more

Nouvelle Vague go unplugged. Again

We featured Nouvelle Vague frontman, Marc Collin’s Secret Playlist recently, so we thought it would be a good time to check in with him on the eve of the band’s Unplugged Australian tour, which will see them play shows in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in mid-December. As a child of the 80s, I love your covers from that era. Is there a song that you wouldn’t cover? ‘No, I think that every song can be reinvented. It’s only a matter of having the right idea for arrangements, vocalist, production, and so on’. How did you manage you make the Yazoo song Don’t Go sound so damn sultry? ‘It was fun! I asked Gerald Toto to play the chords and sing the melody,thinking of how Jose Feliciano could have done it in the late 60s, and it happened. It is a magical moment when your ideas suddenly become real’. Do you find audiences singing along loudly to the music you play now wherever you perform? ‘It’s always good when the audience is singing. It brings us energy and shows us that they know the albums. Also, we can see which songs are the favourites’.

Flaming Lips DVD

We have a copy of the new Flaming Lips’ DVD, Christmas on Mars [out Nov 11] to give away to a randomly selected US-based subscriber to our weekly email publication who leaves a message under this post telling us their favourite Flaming Lips song. Read more

Sam Weber

There’s some awesome new work up on New York-based illustrator, Sam Weber’s website, including this one above which is did for the Soulpepper Theatre. We asked him a little while back about what his studio workspace was like: ‘I am fairly particular about where I like to work, and what sort of stuff I like to have around me. There are things that I look at often — a book of Max Ernst collages, one on Yoshitaka Amano, and a big stack of clippings from magazines and the Internet that I will periodically leaf through to get inspired’. Read more

Famous Blue Raincoat

Many years ago, when my hair was longer and my clothes were shabbier, I played guitar in a Sydney-based rock band. We never come to anything more than a few years worth of gigs and a deeply closeted aspiration to take the radio charts by storm. We never did. A lack of talent intervened, but it was damn fun while it lasted. Anyway, at one point during this debauched period of my life, I had a friend who was the frontman for the exotically named, Blue Apples of The Moon. He had an unusually resonant baritone and a penchant for writing epic music. One day he handed me a demo cassette with a batch of his new songs on it. I took it to work with me the next day, whacked it into my Sony Walkman, and immediately swooned amongst the lulling tones and fretfully beautiful lyrics of this Leonard Cohen classic. I was gobsmacked. Totally mesmerised. And having never heard it before, I presumed that my friend — this humble frontman of a bizarrely named rock band — had just penned the greatest song of our generation. For about eight minutes and seventeen seconds, I was convinced he was genius. That was until one of my workmates pointed out that it was actually a Leonard Cohen masterpiece, one of many. It turns out that my friend’s demos were on the other side of the cassette. And they were pretty average. But hell, anything would be after this unholy precedent.

On the road with The Basics

A little while back, we ran a week long diary from Australian pop band, The Grates. It was kinda to get a window into the world. Hell, voyeurism is the new black. So we asked Melbourne-based rock band, The Basics, to do the same thing as they bring their music to the deepest reaches of Australia’s Northern Territory. These are the words of bassist and vocalist, Kris Schroeder: ‘Friday November 7. Darwin. It’s a weird old joint this one — I can probably compare it closest to Queensland’s Cairns, with the backpacker industry making up the life and character of the Central Business District. This makes it particularly good for bands, as you’ve got a ready audience staying only metres away from the music venues. Today was our first Darwin gig (at Monsoons), and it was a ripper. I’d organised with my mate Nathan to bring up the Sunshine Reggae Band from Ikuntji in the Western Desert, and they were going to be the first Indigenous band to play in the main street of Darwin, which is apparently quite a cultural breakthrough. The best bit was how well received they were, someone saying “This is great, because it’s what you should expect to see in Darwin, not just bloody cover bands all the time.” Quite chuffed. By the time we played it was packed out, and everyone was loving it. Job done’. Read more