Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2016 i Rolling Stone Australia

“No wonder no one put their name to the piece because it was a farce. Not one Australian artist made the list.” Punk Education YOUR RECENT FEATURE ON the Ramones [RS 775] was a real education on the history of a band that I just used to associate with knock-off T-shirts, runway models and cartoonish punk clichés. Turns out they were the real deal. Thanks for setting me straight. Now I’m off to buy some of their records, starting with their debut. Banjo Powell, Coffs Harbour, NSW Punk Oversight Committee THE MUSIC WORLD IS BIG- ger than just North America and the UK. You seem to have forgotten two groundbreaking 1977 Australian albums [in the 40 Greatest Punk Albums feature, RS 775]: (I’m) Stranded by the Saints and Radios Appear…

Growing up in the Eighties, Rich Cohen was obsessed with the Rolling Stones. “It’s my Hemingway, Dickens, Homer,” he writes. So he jumped at the chance, as a 26-year-old freelancer for ROLLING STONE, to spend two weeks with the band as it launched 1994’s Voodoo Lounge tour. Cohen was with the Stones on several later tours as well, first as a writer for RS, then as Mick Jagger’s screenwriting partner on a project that eventually became HBO’s Vinyl. Cohen’s new book, The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, draws on those experiences while providing a fresh take on dusty topics like Altamont and the Stones’ relationship with the Beatles (who, it seems, understood the Stones before the Stones did, which was partly why Lennon and McCartney wrote their…

“ou can call it a supergroup if you like. I think my ladies are pretty super, so I’d go with that.” IT SOUNDS LIKE A SCENE FROM ‘PORT- landia’. Three well-known female singer-songwriters meet at a gluten-free vegan bakery in the capital of hipsterdom in Oregon, and through mouthfuls of artisanal delights and free trade coffee they discuss forming a supergroup. But this wasn’t something dreamed up by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen to gently poke fun at Portland on their popular TV show. It’s what really happened with k.d. lang, Neko Case and Laura Veirs. “Laura and I got a text from k.d. about three years ago,” says Case from her home in rural Vermont. “It basically said, ‘Let’s make a record together.’ I said yes in my head…

While L-Fresh the Lion says 2014 debut, One, introduced his mantra of “positivity and optimism”, new album Become is positioned as a ‘prequel’ that focuses on the establishment of these values. “A lot of the stories on this record are things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” the Sydney rapper explains. “I wanted to show the depth of what it takes to be able to appreciate that positivity.” New life experiences – including a few years spent living in Melbourne and a pair of trips to the U.K and India that created a stronger connection to his Sikh heritage – are not only credited as the genesis of Become’s central concept, but also L-Fresh’s newfound philosophical perspective. “With One I was trying to suggest there are answers…

The Song That Reminds Me Of Growing Up Ray Price “Heartaches By the Number”, 1959 “In Glasgow in the old days, they didn’t play records at parties, but after a certain point they’d go, ‘Let’s sing.’ And they’d point to you and you’d sing your song, and that was my mum’s song for a while. Everybody had their own song that they were good at. That’s what Scottish parties were about. A few drinks, bit of a sing-song, and eventually a fight would break out.” [Laughs] The Song That Reminds Me Of Touring The Allman Brothers Band “Midnight Rider”, 1971 “I started touring in 1973, and the earliest Chisel repertoire had two or three All-man Brothers songs, one of which was ‘Midnight Rider’. They were a very influential…

ON THURSDAY, APRIL 14TH, AT ABOUT SIX IN THE evening, a black SUV pulled up to the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. It was an hour before showtime, but Prince didn’t need much preparation – this was the eighth stop on his Piano and a Microphone Tour, a series of unusual shows, mostly two a night, that saw one of the world’s greatest showmen scaling down his performance for an intimate keyboard recital. “He only soundchecked for a few minutes,” Lucy Freas, the promoter who’d set up this concert, tells ROLLING STONE. As had been his habit for more than a decade – whether playing a 4,600-seat theatre by himself or a 20,000-capacity arena with a full band – the shows were pop-ups, arranged on short notice. Freas had gotten an…

Questlove FROM THE AGE OF 11, PRINCE WAS IN MY EARS AND in my head. I patterned everything in my life after him: his fashion, his affect, his taste in women and, of course, his taste in music. I wouldn’t have started listening to Joni Mitchell without him. And that led me to Jaco Pastorius, who led me to Wayne Shorter, who led me to Miles Davis. I had a simple rule: If Prince listened to it, I listened to it. In the wake of his death, as we all try to come unstunned, everyone is talking about his genius. That’s understandable. But most of the discussion is general. I like to think about the specifics. I like to think of the way he innovated even early on, the way…

The Temper Trap Thick As Thieves Liberation The Temper Trap seem like a sincere bunch, and it’s hard not to root for them. On their excellent debut, 2009’s Conditions, the band deftly synthesised pop and radio-rock influences from the Eighties and Nineties, offering up tunes that were defiantly uncool but undeniably resonant. Lead single “Sweet Disposition” soundtracked dozens of films and television shows for a reason: Dougy Mandagi’s warm falsetto and the band’s uncrowded arrangement sounded genuine and humble – the antithesis of so much 21st-century indie rock. The band’s self-titled follow-up in 2012 was less successful, partly because Mandagi and co. tried too hard to be profound (grand declarations, thunderous dynamics) and partly because there was no knock-out single. Their long-gestating third attempt, Thick As Thieves, is similarly problematic.…

Catfish & the Bottlemen The Ride Caroline Somewhere in the middle of The Ride, amid a crunch of distorted guitars and slammed tom drums, Catfish & the Bottlemen stumble upon something that has so far eluded them: maturity. Up until now, Van Mc-Cann and his gang of floppy haired rockers have been content to play the newest enfant terribles of the British rock scene, lurching from one chaotic gig to another. Perhaps not anymore: “I don’t think through things/I never get time,” he sings on opener “7”, before asking his lover for another year to get his shit together. Next he’s contrite – “from every hangover my head feels/to every ex I didn’t treat right” (“Twice”) – over a cluster of furiously strummed guitars and a thrumming bass line. Where…

case/lang/veirs case/lang/veirs Anti- Fear them for they are gods. Like proud winds or mighty oceans they meet in the elemental mystery of “Atomic Number”, weaving and overlapping lines in some mystical manifesto about sparks and chemistry and symbols and other things that defy the petty squabbles of labels, managers and monster egos. Seriously. Even on paper, the sum of these parts could make any harmony-loving heart melt, but their three variously weighted voices coalesce in the ringing cathedral of Tucker Martine’s production with seamless grace and empathy. Sure, they bring their own peccadilloes to the sumptuous orchestral party. It’s k.d. lang’s smoked honey croon, naturally, that nudges “Honey and Smoke” into the ether. Her jazz sense bends and teases “Blue Fires” and “Why Do We Fight”, just as Laura Veirs’…

AVETT BROTHERS AND RICK RUBIN GET AMBITIOUS For True Sadness (due June 24th), the Avett Brothers and producer Rick Rubin shook up the band’s rootsy sound by getting seriously experimental: Using three different studios, they alternated between electronic beats and live instruments, recorded with different lineups, and constantly recut and “deconstructed” songs, according to Scott Avett. The result is a highly catchy LP that runs from lush, big-beat pop to sparse Americana. “We trust Rick,” Avett says. “Not only as a producer but as a friend.” KORY GROW THE BELLIGERENTS’ ISLAND GETAWAY After six years together, the Brisbane indie-psych five piece will issue their debut LP later this year. The quintet hired “a ton of equipment” and recorded and self-produced the as-yet-untitled LP in a farmhouse on Stradbroke Island over…

Brian Eno discovered a new tool while making his first album in nearly four years: “As you get older, your voice drops. I realised I could now hit a low C.” That lower register helped Eno, 67, write The Ship, which mixes the art-rock vocals of LPs like 1975’s Another Green World with the free-flowing drifts of his pioneering ambient work. For the 21-minute title track, Eno fed paragraphs into an algorithmic text generator – including a lifeboat passenger’s description of the Titanic sinking, filthy soldiers’ songs from World War I, and his own scrapped lyrics – and pored through the tangled results. The album includes a gorgeous cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Set Free”, a tribute to Eno’s friend Lou Reed. “I struggled for a long time about…

THE TITLE OF ERIC CLAP- ton’s new album, I Still Do, comes from something his great-aunt Audrey told him before she died a couple of years ago. “I went to see her and said, ‘I want to thank you for being so kind to me when I was a little boy’,” says Clapton, who was born out of wedlock and raised by relatives outside London. “She said, ‘I liked you. And I still do.’ That’s blessed, really. It just says it all.” I Still Do is a classic-Clapton mix of roots, reflection and guitar solos; he covers Robert Johnson, Skip James and Bob Dylan. Clapton also revives an old partnership: The album was produced by Glyn Johns, who worked on the guitarist’s 1977 hit Slowhand. “He is still pretty aggressive…

Kings of Leon “Sex on Fire” The chorus on this is just so fucking great and passionate. When I hear it, it really affects me. I don’t even know what the fuck the song is about, but I don’t have to know. Simon and Garfunkel “Bridge Over Troubled Water” For all kinds of reasons, I wish I had written this song, but I don’t think I have it in me. It’s like going to school and church at the same time. Pink Floyd “Comfortably Numb” David Gilmour’s voice and guitar playing are just so soulful. When he hits the first note on the guitar solo, it’s just bone-chilling. Bruce Springsteen “Born in the U.S.A.” I know it’s a protest song, but the twist I would have put on it would…

Michael Kiwanuka’s 2012 debut, Home Again, was a critical and commercial success that established the British-Ugandan Londoner as one of modern music’s most soulful singers, and had the likes of Jack White reaching out to collaborate. Why, then, as he worked on its follow-up, did he consider quitting music professionally? “There were periods in the process where it was really difficult,” he says from his London flat. “I did about 16, 17 songs that I thought would make an album, but when I got to the end of it I was like, this isn’t good enough. There were times where I was like, ‘It’s not happening, I’d rather just do this on the side.’” Part of the problem stemmed from a desire to prove his debut was no fluke; that,…

Got beef? In his highly entertaining new book, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life, Steven Hyden – of the late sports-and-culture site Grant-land – analyses classic standoffs with a sportscaster’s breathlessness: Beatles vs. Stones, Biggie vs. Tupac, Kanye vs. Taylor. His impulse is less to pick winners than to figure out why we care. “It’s about sympathising with a particular worldview represented by an artist over a different worldview represented by an ‘opposing’ artist,” Hyden writes. “You are what you love – and also what you choose not to love.” The historical data is fun to sift through – did Scott Stapp really challenge Fred Durst to a charity boxing match? – and Hyden’s adjudication is fast and furious. “The…

“‘Khe Sanh’ is one of the most misquoted songs in the world.” “This photograph was taken at a CD release party that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) threw at New York City’s Hard Rock Cafe in 1991. PETA was releasing the Tame Yourself compilation album of various artists to benefit their animal rights campaigns. The party was packed with celebrities and press, and there was a jam session that featured Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, the B-52’s, k.d. lang, Lene Lovich, actor River Phoenix, and Raw Youth. I later saw Chrissie in her monogrammed waitress uniform serving veggie burgers. I was more than aware of her long time hardcore vegetarianism, but it was still ironic to see her passing out burgers even though I was aware that…

“I THINK WE NEED TO GO OUT WITH NEW MATERIAL. THAT’S THE FIRST AND, FOR ME, MOST IMPORTANT THING.” ROB HIRST DRIVES HIS AGEING Citroen into the parking area of a photographic studio on Parramatta Road in Sydney and leans out the window grinning. “I never thought I’d spend 25 years of my life listening to Alan Jones on the radio – and [finally] agreeing with him.” The opinionated shock jock and the drummer from Midnight Oil and myriad other projects such as the Break and the Backsliders are unlikely allies – and it’s a union forged over only one subject: coal seam gas mining. It’s a subject explored in the song “The Truth Walks Slowly (In the Countryside)”, on which Hirst has collaborated with Nashville-based Australians O’Shea, featuring his…

MUST-HAVES Dirty Mind 1980 For his third album and first masterpiece, he wanted to be more deliberately me, he told ROLLING STONE at the time. So he stripped down his sound, and for the album cover, he stripped down to his underwear. Recorded at his home on Lake Minnetonka, outside Minneapolis (where he knocked out several songs in one night), Dirty Mind targeted New Wavers as much as funkateers. The sound was manic and spacious at the same time, and the songs were packed with sexual obsession. Prince euphorically sang about taboo subject matter: a threesome in “When You Were Mine”, incest in “Sister”, an all-races-welcome orgy in “Uptown” and the self-explanatory “Head”, in which a virgin bride goes down on him on the way to her wedding. But his…

Ladyhawke Wild Things EMI When Ladyhawke, aka Kiwi singer/songwriter/guitarist Pip Brown, delivered her self-titled debut in 2008, the timing was perfect. Nu-rave was all the rage, Brown had already enjoyed a high-profile collaboration with Pnau, and her candied Eighties synths coupled with a Stevie Nicks rock chick aesthetic rushed her towards the mainstream and ARIAs success. Her 2012 follow-up Anxiety was a break with the past; while solid, the largely synthless, rockier record lacked the sparkle of her debut, and its title reflected its fraught gestation as Brown fretted over how fans would react to her change in direction. Four years on, Wild Things is a return to what Brown does best – twinkly power pop with huge chords – and her anxiety has all but evaporated as she sings…

The Monkees Good Times! Rhino/Warner Hey, hey, they’re the Monkees, and like that Liverpool band they were always compared to in the Sixties, they get by with a little help from their friends on their first album in two decades. That’s XTC’s Andy Partridge behind “You Bring the Summer”, with every instrument chiming and talk of “the chips and the dips and the root beer”. That’s Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller behind the Beatle-esque psychedelic-pop workout “Birth Of An Accidental Hipster”. It’s not too hard to pick the tracks from Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo (“we’ll have a dinner date tonight and play some scrabble with the guys”) and Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard (“me and Magdalena are driving down through Monterey”). The (slightly) younger generation has listened well, their songs…

Band of Horses Why Are You OK Universal Band of Horses’ 2006 debut, Everything All the Time, launched the flannel-clad beardos as next in line to some sort of ethereal indie-crown, thanks to permanently soaring single “The Funeral”. But four MOR-ish albums on, that grandeur proved a feint: leader Ben Bridwell and his rotating cast of bandmates turned out to be Southern Rock acolytes with the sound down, better suited to looking at the stars than being them. On fifth album, Why Are You OK, they’ve enlisted the production services of Gran-daddy’s Jason Lytle and Rick Rubin, whose shared touches seem palpable – Lytle offering subtle atmospheric flourishes, Rubin grooming the band’s chilled soft-rock. “Whatever, Wherever” and “Country Teen” float like a lazy Beach Boys; the lovely unspooling lament of…

Bob Dylan Fallen Angels Columbia Bob Dylan loves to fully plumb his good ideas. So it’s unsurprising that Fallen Angels continues his foraging of the Great American Songbook via tunes made famous by Frank Sinatra, whose colloquial delivery Dylan evidently learned plenty from. FallenAngelsisn’t merely overstock from last year’s Shadows in the Night, though Dylan’s approach is similar. His phrasing remains spectacular, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious, and the playing is sublime. The horns are gone – no big loss – and the core band is nicely expanded with session guitar legend Dean Parks. Dylan vet Donnie Herron steps up, adding Texas swing and Hawaiian flavours on steel guitar (“Young at Heart”, “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”) and using a viola to channel Hot Club jazziness. The songs date mostly to the…

“It was humbling,” says Mandagi of the reaction to 2012’s self-titled album. DOUGY MANDAGI KNEW the Temper Trap’s 2012 self-titled album was in trouble the moment it was released. Though he and his bandmates had, a few weeks prior, been at an album playback in L.A., surrounded by industry people going, “Yeah, this is amazing!”, the reviews weren’t quite as complimentary, particularly those handed out by the British press. “We wrote a song about the London Riots [‘London’s Burning’], and I still stand by our right to do so, cos we’ve been living in London paying taxes for seven years, it happened on our doorstep. But obviously the media there felt differently. That was a bit hard for me to stomach, cos straight off the bat you’re leading on a…

GUITARISTS BRYCE AND AARON Dessner of the National never saw the Grateful Dead in concert. But when they were teenagers in Ohio at the turn of the Nineties, the twin brothers were Deadheads in every other way, immersed in their father’s Dead LPs and playing the tunes with childhood friend and future National drummer Bryan Devendorf. “We used to jam on ‘Eyes of the World’ for hours,” says Bryce, noting that Devendorf went to “lots of Dead shows” with his brother Scott, the National’s bassist. “The National are considered a post-punk band. But half the time”, on the tour-bus stereo, “it’s the Dead or New Order.” That sums up a lot of the depth and sprawl on Day of the Dead, a 59-track Dead-covers anthology curated by the Dessners over…

ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON IN San Diego, Tom DeLonge sits in front of a Mac in a darkened room, searching “black triangle UFOs” on YouTube. He plays a clip of a mysterious glowing craft, which hovers over Paris before disappearing in a flash of light. Conspiracy theorists refer to it as a TR-3B; some believe it’s a machine the government secretly built from gathering UFO intelligence. “It’s pure, unadulterated anti-gravity,” he says, marvelling at the craft’s movement. “It would scare people if they knew this existed.” For as long as he can remember – even before he sang “Aliens Exist” on Blink-182’s multiplatinum pop-punk classic, Enema of the State, in 1999 – DeLonge has been obsessed with what he calls “the phenomenon”. He can tell you about reports of triangular…

ON SUNDAY MAY 8TH, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ruined Mother’s Day by declaring that he’d called upon the Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove to dissolve both houses of the 44th Parliament, and that there would be an election on Saturday July 2nd, thereby beginning the second longest election campaign in Australia’s history. It’s only the seventh double dissolution in Australian political history and, as with most of the previous ones, is less about a government being thwarted in executing its agenda and more about having a strategically clever early election. That’s because the Prime Minister knew he’d need to get to the polls early. His replacement of the stumbling Tony Abbott in a shock and bloody leadership challenge in September last year had divided the Liberal party – the final…

“Soft & Wet” from For You 1978 The keyboard funk of his debut was too light to burn rubber, but the weird synth squiggles showed he was looking for new sounds from the start. “I Wanna Be Your Lover” from Prince 1979 His first R&B Number One hit introduced him to the world – bouncy keyboards, a disco groove and one request: “I wanna be the only one you come for.” “Scandalous” from Batman 1989 A bubble-bath slow jam sung in a pained falsetto that adds grit to the fantasy. “Joy in Repetition” from Graffiti Bridge 1990 Underwater soul rock in the style of Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, cut during the sessions that yielded Sign ‘O’ the Times. “Loose!” from Come 1994 A techno fantasy with wild guitar – it’s…

Ratings are supervised by the editors of ROLLING STONE. For Drake, the past is a defining preoccupation. Drake Views Young Money/ Cash Money/Republic The best thing you can say about Drake is the worst thing, too: He’s a lightweight. That description suits his nimbleness at switching between flows and genres, and his stunning economy when crafting hooks. But his fourth album reveals him as a lightweight in other, frustrating ways: shallow in his thematic concerns, slender in the scope of his ambitions. It’s impossible not to compare Views with recent opuses by Drake’s pop-titan peers – Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, Kanye West. Where those artists framed personal sagas within higher-stakes issues of race, gender and class, Drake remains obsessively focused on one thing: Drake (his armada of girlfriends, his guilt…

Broods Conscious Universal The breakout success of Broods’ 2014 debut, Evergreen, required the NZ brother-sister duo, Georgia and Caleb Nott, to suddenly ramp up their intimate-electro creations to bigger rooms on the fly. It’s inevitable, then, that follow-up Conscious – again helmed by producer Joel Little (Lorde, Ellie Goulding) – bears the growing pains of a band seeking arena-size additions to the set. The result is an uneasy marriage of booming synths and familiar chart-pop hooks trampling over the intimacy so inviting of Broods in the first place. Conscious opens with two glaring examples: “Free”, almost a cyber-redo of Taylor Swift’s “Out Of the Woods”, and “We Had Everything”, which might be mistaken for a subdued cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”. Little himself is part responsible for the slight,…

Ryan Adams  Heartbreaker: Deluxe Edition Paxam Records/The Sound Of Vinyl Proof, if it were needed, that great music often blossoms in desperate times, when Ryan Adams wrote and recorded his debut album at the turn of the century, his career and personal life were at rock bottom. Whiskeytown, his highly-regarded alt-country group, had recently disbanded, and his relationship with music publicist Amy Lombardi had also come to an end. Broke and convinced he’d missed his shot, he returned home from New York City to Jacksonville, North Carolina, and moved into a friend’s place spitting distance from the house in which he grew up. It was there that, for the most part, he wrote the 15 songs that would become Heartbreaker, captured live in a 14-day session at Woodland Hills studio…

The last time I stole something It’s been a few years, but I stole a beer glass from the pub. It’s not a thing that I ever see in shops or anything. When I’m at home, I always drink my beer out of a glass. And everybody calls me a wanker for doing that, everybody else is drinking their beer out of the bottle. But it makes me feel like I’m on holidays or something when I’m drinking beer out of a glass. The last word I looked up in the dictionary I use an online dictionary all the time for when I’m writing lyrics. The last time [was] to look up the meaning of “cinéma vérité”. Back in the days before computers, I remember I always had a dictionary…