New Oz Music: Remi, UV Boi, TEEF, Violet, Andrei Eremin, Amateur Dance, more

Everything happening in Australian music this week… for the last time.

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Here we go mate! Foot down on the pedal and vroom vroom vroom, over the checkered lines and the crowd goes wild. Sorry folks, but this race is run. You’re reading the last New Oz Music column on TheVine. For the time being, anyway. I’m checkin’ out, trading this Australian muscle for the wild frontier. Maybe I’ll roll into a tumbleweed town like yours some time soon. Keep your ears peeled for hooves and gunfire ‘cos when I come, I come blazin’.

But save your tears for now, sweetheart, ‘cos this was never about me, no matter how much it seemed like it. Like the siren sang, it’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you. Together we’ve talked shit, trashed every genre under the sun only to turn around and champion it, we’ve wept and laughed and above all been real sentimental. Perhaps more than the cynics would like but we live to thwart them, don’t we? We stared down the inevitability of death and crumbled into dust, only to wipe it off and find enough of ourselves left to rebuilt. Christ! What a feeling. Maybe it’s only rocknroll but when we get gritty, it’s life itself in all its terror and splendour. Boredom was ever the only sin, salvaged by curiosity and compassion, which could’ve been spared more generously, I’ll be the first to admit. But we got through.

I said last year that the hope of this column was to heap evidence that something is happening here, something incredible and noteworthy, something to which the rest of the world is finally waking up. I lied, sorta; it was as much to remind you to love music and never take it for granted, to always take stock of what appears miraculous around you but which is, in fact, born of human ingenuity and imagination. My greatest regret is never doing enough to document its full extent. Maybe it’s an impossible task, but maybe I shoulda seen more bands at that festival, maybe I shoulda spent a few more days listening to that track or that album, maybe I shoulda dug deeper to unearth those which remain hidden. In more concrete terms, I regret not covering a greater fraction of music from women and queer people and people of colour. You should start an Australian music column and do just that. Maybe I will too.

Whether you read this column from the start or whether this is your first time, whether you only read it when one of your bands were mentioned, or whether you only read it to get a vindictive kick out of this meandering twerp’s self-absorption, thank you. Thank you for the emails, tweets, texts, Facebook messages. Thank you for coming up to me at shows and telling me about your life. This old sap is gettin’ weepy thinkin’ about that kinda generosity. It was more than I ever coulda asked for.

And thank you to the bands for the hundreds of releases reviewed over the past two years. Some of them were shithouse, some of them were overwhelming. As much as I felt sick, I felt inspired, but I always valued both highly. Feeling at all… shit, that’s all I wanted.

What happens next? Who knows. Look to Bandcamp, I reckon. But for now, here’s one last swing from the pitch. Watch this ball soar for six.

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Remi – Call It What You Want (F.Y.G. ACT:2)

One of the greatest functions of rap is in shaping lyrical time capsules, tucking fragments of formative culture into tight bars for the next kids to find, explore, and learn. While indie rockers obsess over timeliness, from track one, Remi drops rich crumbs, from MJ’s Off the Wall to Nick Cave. “I’m interested in that weird shit,” he spits on ‘Werdo’s (From Planet HOB)’ and he backs it up, not omly with atypical namedrops of Australian murder balladeers, but arrangemnts which blend a boom-bap backbone and contemporary electronics. Call It What You Want is a mixtape and perfectly so, each track sounding like Remi rapping off the tongue, everything coming so easily it sounds like the kinda shit that’s close to the surface as close as it is to the heart. He sledges sexists copping their repugnant moves from Chris Brown and Mayweather, racists, and pretentious wankers. dancing like nimble over clatter and soul. Remi makes it look easy.

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KUCKA – ‘Recovery +++’

KUCKA goes Karin Dreijer Andersson on the vocals, wrangling inside-voice beats which swell in a warbling crescendo. It’s not exactly thrilling, but for a certain kinda mood it works.

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UV Boi – ‘LUV’

UV Boi’s latest collabo with Fionn Richards after last year’s ‘T H A N K  U’, UV Boi returns to the iPhone for samples. When UV Boi is playing in this mode, cutting Richards’ aching vocals over the rapid tap of a touch-screen keyboard and the aqueous bloop of an iOS notification, he knows his era. These are the sounds of modern love! Not the soft crunch of a hand on the shoulder of a woollen jumper going for an awkward hug.  Not the slick swish of soft lips finding their perfect opposite. Not the echoed clop of your footstep, my footstep, your footstep, my footstep, walking side by side. It’s clicks and hisses, taps and bloops and quick-read lines on green and blue, and the dopamine rush of that first love heart emoji.

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Sex On Toast – ‘Oh Loretta!’

‘Oh Loretta!’ leans back, sways with its hands around yer hips more than dragging you onto the dancefloor. Sense of humour intact – “Oh Rebecca / If you were a bus you’d be a double decker” – it’s a pretty tight newie.

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Lonelyspeck – ‘Wring’

Come June 1, TEEF, the record label run by Sound Doc impresario Tommy Faith, will release Imperium In Imperio. Cool it with the Latin, T dot, but that aside the tracklist is frightening. Unreleased tracks and b-sides from Leaks, Electric Sea Spider, Magnum Ego, Collarbones, Spirit Faces, GRRL PAL, Yon Yonson, Yeo, Planete — and that’s just the artists seen before on New Oz Music. 16 tracks in total, it’s pay-what-you-want, but all profits towards Nepal earthquake relief via Oxfam. You got the fuzzies yet?

Lonelyspeck’s ‘Wring’, the vanguard of this heroic regiment, is blanketed with cathode-ray noise but the fixture is in the Adelaide producer’s gorgeous vocals and delicate melodies. If you’ve heard TEEF’s debut signee Spirit Faces, you’re starting to know what to expect. TEEF is forming a sonic identity and Imperium In Imperio looks to have it cemented.

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Violet – ‘Ivory’

The greatest pleasure of this column has always been getting emails from independent artists, person to person, no bullshit, just ‘Here I am, here’s what I’m about’. Violet was one of these folks who landed outta the blue, a 19 year old with a song about white Australians killing Indigenous Australians. And Christ, just the way it starts: footsteps slapping frantic then CRACK! The gunshot echo rings out, then it’s masked by ads touting Australia as the place to be: “The new Australians are real Aussies!” And then that gunshot again. Violet wears Kimbra on her sleeve but her voice and subject matter call just as much to PJ Harvey. ‘Ivory’ is bleak, apologetic, aching for something which we can’t take back, contending with guilt on behalf of those who don’t feel it. The ads worked, y’see. The nice white folks came in droves, only to find a land not quite as unoccupied as advertised. “We shot them dead / We shot them dead.”

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Chet Faker – ‘1998’ (Amateur Dance remix)

Chet Faker’s Built On Glass is split pretty obviously down the middle — triple j jams on the first half, more intricate slow-burners on the second half. I figure this as a result of Faker’s much-reported crisis of confidence.  It probably should’ve been two EPs, although at least he cut through any narratives about returns-to-form/new directions by putting the two parts out within the same document. But as the album is divided, so is opinion. The second half is stronger, reckon, ‘cos Chet gives himself more room.

The two-hitter ‘Cigarettes & Loneliness’ and ‘1998’ are the best arguments in its favour. And while Amateur Dance overrides a lotta what made ‘1998’ stand out, what he subs in is his strength for the entrancing post-midnight build he’s developed over his previous two EPs. Faker released ‘1998’ as an ode to loneliness, drifting into isolation. Amateur Dance repurposes it for the club, only alone in the crowd.

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Andrei Eremin – Recycling

Ony stepped out his wheelhouse and held a jewel case to the sun; glinting off the plastic, all anyone could make out was “BANGERS.” He’d been hiding it in the hay so all we saw were his turns in startling, crystalline production. And while his remix of ‘Low’ will sound familiar to Eremin’s fans, it’s fun to see his signatures scribbled on Juicy’s.

The eerie SNES vamping he adds to Milwaukee Banks’ transpacific boast ‘Sweater Made of Gold’, the pitch shifting and bass pumping on Japanese Wallpaper’s ‘Between Friends’, the biting claps layered on I’lls’ ‘Mine’s Here or My End’s Here or Nineteen’ — Ony encapsulates a temperament not often seen in his service of other musicians largely making more pensive, somber tracks. Like any good mix made for another, it feels as generous as it is revealing.

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Danyl Jesu/BARGE with an antenna On It – Celebration/BWAAOI

Out via Brendan Telford’s Sonic Masala Records, this split LP brings Danyl Jesu and Barge With An Antenna On It is a hardcore dirge rough with jagged riffs and racing drums and syllables chanted like monosyllabic invocations. The easy in is with Barge tracks like ‘New Land Old Sun’ and ‘Nobby Doldrums’ which condescend to being properly rhythmic, where Danyl Jesu’s opener ‘Abandon’ is brutalisation. Seems like the kinda thing the guys in Heads of Charm would dig.

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Sarah Mary Chadwick – ‘Aquarius Gemini’

Geoffrey O’Connor drops the purple and pink for RED! this time, glowering bloody over this pondering arcade haint for Sarah Mary Chadwick’s latest video. O’Connor captures plenty of the eroticism in Chadwick’s music – if the album art didn’t give you any clue – with Chadwick croaking about astrological conflict, meanwhile yearning. Sex and video games. What a nice afternoon.