Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2017 i Rolling Stone Australia

1 Old School Rapper Nick Bryant-Smith (aka Solo) and producer Adit Gauchan, both 29, go all the way back to high school. Recently they travelled to Nepal, the home country of Gauchan’s family. “We literally handed in the master of the album to the record label the day before we left,” says Gauchan. 2 Stuck in the Middle Their fourth album’s title, Bardo State, is a reference to the Bardo Thodol, aka the Tibetan Book of the Dead. “I learned about the Buddhist concept of ‘Bardo’, which relates to an intermediate state of being,” says Bryant-Smith. “Without realising it, a lot of references on the LP apply to that concept, and I definitely feel like I’m stuck between states in my own life right now.” 3 Dance, Sucka Horrorshow want…

“We’re like this problem-solving force with Exes,” says Stone. “It feels a bit like a superhero thing.” THEY COULD JUST AS EASILY HAVE been called You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly or Dropkick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life. After taking up the challenge in 2013 to form a country-folk group to play a handful of songs from O Brother, Where Art Thou? at a show, four jazz-trained Australian musicians started scratching their heads about a band name. They googled “best/worst country song titles”. After a slight tweak to George Strait’s “All My Exes Live In Texas”, they had a winner. For Elana Stone (accordion), Katie Wighton (guitar), Hannah Crofts (ukulele) and Georgia Mooney (mandolin), who had all learned classical piano, this was uncharted territory. With only four…

‘DO YOU RECOGNISE MY VOICE?” Shania Twain asks, leaning forward on a hotel-room couch on a frigid New York afternoon. “It still sounds like me?” Twain – who sold more than 85 million records in the Nineties and early 2000s with country-pop hits like “You’re Still the One” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much” – is discussing her first album in 15 years. Due in autumn, it also marks her first recordings since she was diagnosed with dysphonia, a vocal-cord disorder that causes hoarseness and trouble speaking. The issue kept Twain out of the studio for years as she received voice therapy. She eventually found a timbre that’s recognisable, but deeper than before. “I’m a different singer now,” she says. “There was a lot of coming to terms with that.…

“I’m now 56. It’s been six years since I really cared about my age.” IT’S MY BIRTHDAY AS I’M WRITING THIS. I’M now 56. It’s been six years since I really cared about my age. I was in New York City when I turned 50 and for a few minutes I thought about the fact of that, but soon enough, the real world and my usual predatory schedule came crashing in and it was back to schedules and the weight of obligation and expectation. When I’m off the road, I live in Hollywood. Age is a big deal to a lot of people here. Hollywood, the industry, is to a great extent, youth obsessed. Many people, due to the nature of their work, have a “use by” date stamped on…

‘At the end of Van Halen’s first UK tour, on which they supported Black Sabbath (and blew them off the stage), the response was so great that they hastily put on a show at London’s legendary Rainbow Theatre,” recalls snapper Fin Costello. “They packed the place out and confirmed that they were going to be one of the biggest bands of the time. I had been recommended to them by Gene Simmons, having done the Kiss Alive! cover a few years earlier, at the time when he was mentoring and supporting them. With that recommendation they were up for doing anything I asked them to do. They came to my studio for a photo session which worked out very well, and a few days later, backstage at the Rainbow, Dave…

“I was crazy,” Paris says of her mid-teens. “I was actually crazy. I was going through a lot of teen angst.” PARIS-MICHAEL Katherine Jackson is staring at a famous corpse. “That’s Marilyn Monroe,” she whispers, facing a wall covered with gruesome autopsy photos. “And that’s JFK. You can’t even find these online.” On a Thursday afternoon in late November, Paris is making her way through the Museum of Death, a cramped maze of formaldehyde-scented horrors on Hollywood Boulevard. It’s not uncommon for visitors, confronted with decapitation photos, snuff films and serial-killer memorabilia, to faint, vomit or both. But Paris, not far removed from the emo and goth phases of her earlier teens, seems to find it all somehow soothing. This is her ninth visit. “It’s awesome,” she had said on…

ON THE WALL FACING JOHN Oliver’s desk, on the eighth floor of an office building so far on the West Side of Manhattan it’s practically floating in the Hudson River, are 30 blue index cards. Each represents an episode of the 2017 season of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. And each and every one of them is blank. That’s one reason Oliver is already arriving at the office before 8:30 a.m. each day, though he has weeks until the February 12th kickoff of the show’s fourth season. But he and his staff also have a near-impossible task ahead of them: planning a season’s worth of television’s smartest, sanest show in the dumbest and craziest of times. * Oliver just wants to do his show, to continue using the extraordinary…

Holy Holy Paint Sony/Wonderlick **** The temptation when writing a follow-up to a successful album – in Holy Holy’s case, their 2015 debut When the Storms Would Come – is to repeat the formula to consolidate that success. In keeping with the chaotic James Drinkwater painting that adorns the cover of their second record, Holy Holy have chosen a far more interesting approach. There are enough familiar signposts to their past not to alienate their fanbase, but they’re largely derived from inherently organic elements the band can do little to change: Tim Carroll’s placid, soothing voice, for example, and the way in which it works with Oscar Dawson’s fluid guitar work. Largely, though, Paint sees the duo embellishing the at-times pastoral sonic landscape of their debut, incorporating vague R&B elements…

LISTS 5 THINGS WE LEARNED HANGING OUT WITH PARIS JACKSON Michael Jackson’s daughter shares some extra takeaways from cover-story interview GALLERY IN THE STUDIO WITH TIRED LION Perth quartet bunker down with Violent Soho’s Luke Boerdam to work on their debut LP. COMEDY BEST COMICS IN HISTORY From Louis C.K. to Joan Rivers, Dave Chappelle and Jerry Seinfeld, we rank the greatest comedians of all time. EXCLUSIVE LIVE AT THE RS OFFICE We host a stripped-back performance from hip-hoppers Horrorshow, plus White Lung stop by for a solo set. MUSIC NEWS, AROUND THE CLOCK Get breaking music news from ROLLING STONE’s award-winning staff of writers and reporters 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at RollingStoneAus.com FOLLOW US ON…

Jeffrey Bernard Jeffrey wrote a column called “Low Life” in the British Spectator magazine from the mid-Seventies. I came to him via the Keith Waterhouse play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, though to be true, more because my hero Peter O’Toole played him in the original stage version. Though they’ve been described as “suicide notes in weekly instalments” I find his anecdotes from a life among the demi-monde of London’s Soho district to be like the skin of fat on the top of a neglected stew. The suety gloop is the succulence and squander from a life fully lived. He can be boorish but never a bore. His tales from the gutter were often lit by the stars and gave more to me than a hundred grandiloquent social commentaries. The column…

“It was about capturing the emotive content through lyrics and chords.” CAM AVERY HAS FRIENDS IN HIGH places. Not only does he remain a central cog in such acclaimed bands as Tame Impala and Pond, since moving to the United States he has developed close friendships, and musical partnerships, with in-demand producer and singer-songwriter Jonathan Wilson, as well as Alex Turner of the Last Shadow Puppets and Arctic Monkeys. Yet on his first solo album, Avery is indelibly his own man. A startling exercise in restraint, Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams sees the multi-instrumentalist, as he puts it, “step out from behind the distortion” of those other bands and his own collective the Growl, towards an aesthetic inspired by Lee Hazlewood, Serge Gainsbourg and the Rat Pack. The result is a…

MEET SUBURBAN ZOMBIE Drew Barrymore – she’s just another sun-kissed California girl, except she’s got a nasty habit of feasting on human flesh. When we first see Barrymore in Santa Clarita Diet, the excellent new Netflix comedy, she’s selling real estate outside L.A., living the low-key minivan life with her husband, Timothy Olyphant, and their teen daughter. Then one day, something weird happens – she starts puking toxic waste and gets an insatiable lust for the taste of dead people. At first, she just munches on the occasional foot, sweet-talking the local undertaker into giving her body parts. But soon, she transforms into a killing machine, making blood smoothies out of her victim’s internal organs. Before you know it, she’s complaining, “I’m almost finished with the guy in the freezer.…

IT STARTED, LIKE ALL GOOD STO- ries do, in a smoky Berlin cafe, about six years ago. Having just haphazardly wheeled a bass amp stacked high with guitars and bags through the cobbled streets of Neukölln, Oscar Dawson and Tim Carroll entered the Gelegenheit cafe and prepared to play their first-ever show together. They weren’t yet called Holy Holy, but the songs they’d be performing – tracks they’d written during Carroll’s regular visits from his then-base of Stockholm to see his friend in Germany – would go on to feature in Holy Holy’s repertoire for years to come. “[The cafe] was like something out of a movie, cos it had wooden tables and chairs and candles, and there was a small bar in the corner,” recalls Carroll today, sitting in…

Fractures SOUNDS LIKE: Ornate, wintry pop brushed with moody coos for caressing your blues FOR FANS OF: Bon Iver, James Blake, Gotye WHY YOU SHOULD PAY ATTENTION: Melbourne musician Mark Zito grew up as the youngest of four siblings, with his eldest brother Andy a singer and multi-instrumentalist, inspiring Zito to make music. (“There were always instruments laying around at home, so I picked up a guitar as a teenager and learned ‘Wonderwall’ as my first song, which I assume was everyone’s first song,” jokes Zito.) Formal piano lessons followed, as did many hours spent locked in his room learning to play guitar. The 27-year-old only began using his voice four years ago when the bluegrass band he played bass in needed some back-up vocals, inspiring Zito to sing more…

“I still listened to music, but I wasn’t interested in creating. It wasn’t a good feeling.” HOLLY THROSBY’S FAVOURITE MOVIE as a child was The NeverEnding Story. When she sees it now she can’t quite fathom why – “That movie is so fucked up; the themes are just awful” – but as a youngster growing up in the inner-Sydney suburb of Balmain, she’d watch the 1984 fantasy epic a couple of times a week. This, let’s not forget, is a film that features a gratuitously disturbing scene in which a horse drowns. The main protagonist, meanwhile – a boy called Bastian, who’s just lost his mother and is bullied by his father and at school – is drawn into a fantasy world where he faces off against a swirling cloud…

The Shins Heartworms Sony *** This time it’s personal for James Mercer. Album five from his reliable indie-pop sugar rush is as convoluted as ever in thought and melody, but the “heart-worms” of the title seem to feed on the inevitable reflections of middle age. “Fantasy Island” spells out dreams of an attention-seeking schoolboy in a cocktail of chagrin and melancholy. “I don’t want to show you my feelings,” he sings at the edge of sweet falsetto that remains his default pitch, “I just want to crash through the ceiling/Before it gets too real.” The folkie road movie “Mildenhall” is more literal still: dewy reminiscences of a fateful cassette passed in class, those first Eighties bands down at the Corn Exchange, cautious chords on his dad’s guitar — “and that’s…

Real Estate In Mind Domino **** In 2015, Real Estate bade farewell to the considerable talent that is guitarist Matt Mondanile, who left to exclusively serve his other band, Ducktails. As a result, Real Estate’s dissolution became a distinct possibility. However, Mondanile, while integral, was not the group’s creative heart, with singer-songwriter Martin Courtney managing to reshuffle the five-piece’s line-up to produce what may be their finest record. The band’s familiar essence is immediately recognisable on opener “Darling”, a warm, shimmering affair adorned with the dreamy jangle of new guitarist Julian Lynch. His style is fuller and arguably more experimental than Mondanile’s more minimalist approach, allowing these bittersweet, mournful songs a deliciously expansive, more woozily psychedelic atmosphere – here, they evoke long-time touchstone Beachwood Sparks more than ever. That…

‘THE ONES THAT DESTROY ME are the ones I like best,” says John Mayer, sitting next to a massive recording console at Los Angeles’ Capitol Studios. He just blasted “Still Feel Like Your Man”, one of more than 30 songs he wrote beginning in late 2014, during a period of “intense sadness”. He had recently split up with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Katy Perry and was going through some deep soul-searching, which yielded his most emotionally revealing music yet. “It’s beyond a breakup record,” he says of The Search for Everything. “It’s about me. Proudly, it is, as my therapist says, a study into the metaphysics of absent love.” Mayer says he was looking for a change after 2013’s Paradise Valley, the second in a pair of more low-key Americana…

When you think of a house where a rock band live, rehearse and party, chances are you’re perfectly imagining Kew House, the sprawling, dilapidated headquarters of Melbourne ban Kingswood. Graffiti-covered walls, amps and guitars litter every piece of surface area, including a basketball half-court and even a motorcycle workshop under the house. When we turn up Kew House at 10:30 in the morning, the place is a hive of activity. Upstairs in the control room, guitarist Alex Laska, singer Fergus Linacre and drummer Justin Debrincat are working on potential set lists for their upcoming tour, pausing intermittently to jam out tracks in the big live rehearsal room. Kingswood certainly make great use of the property, using it for work and play in equal measure. “When we’re all in the house…

DUNE RATS ARE NOTHING IF NOT the real deal. If they seem like a bunch of hard-partying, nihilistic Brisbane punks, it’s because they are, and don’t know how to do it any differently. Over breakfast beers in Sydney’s Newtown (that’s right, brekky beers), they talked us through their take on the process of making their sophomore effort, The Kids Will Know It’s Bullshit. “It took us nearly three years to write the fucker,” says bassist Brett Jansch. “We’d work a song into our set and then scrap it. You’re stuck with them like kids if you record them.” When asked if those songs will resurface later, he scoffs, “I don’t know why we’d go back to an old song. It’s kind of like we’ve chopped the baby’s head off and…

THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED. The triple-storey weatherboard anomaly with vintage motorbikes in the basement and much evidence of rock & roll behaviour within is visibly sagging between towers of steel and glass just off one of Melbourne’s busiest intersections. “You’ve caught it in its ugliest state,” says Kingswood guitarist Alex Laska, weaving through a kitchen lined with Sixties rock posters. Demolition of the band’s rented HQ keeps being postponed, but in the aftermath of sessions for a stunning second album, After Hours, Close To Dawn, “it’s become a shambles,” he confesses. “I mean, we don’t even know where the keys are.” A depleted rack of guitars occupies a dusty alcove under the stairs. Singer Fergus Linacre pauses to single out one vintage sci-fi plank with ironic affection. “You know what’s…

“WORKING WITH EL-P MAKES IT SAFE FOR ME TO GET OUT THE DARKEST THOUGHTS I HAVE,” SAYS KILLER MIKE. EL-P WAS RIDING THROUGH a downtown L.A. intersection, shotgun in Jonah Hill’s Audi, when another car materialised seemingly out of nowhere and – bam! – T-boned it. The Audi’s entire passenger side was destroyed but, amazingly, everyone emerged OK. “I’m a believer in air bags,” El-P says three days later. At the time of the accident, he’d just met Hill, who is a big fan of Run the Jewels, the furiously inventive, critically beloved hip-hop duo that El-P formed in 2013 with his friend and fellow MC Killer Mike. Right before the crash, Hill and El-P grabbed a bite and “talked about working on some shit”, El-P says. “Possibly a video.”…

Rings Matilda Lutz, Alex Roe Directed by F. Javier Gutiérrez No stars ONCE AGAIN, A CURSED VHS tape and lanky-haired ghost terrorise folks – but this D.O.A. movie proves the thrill (and chills) are gone If crap movies carried penalties for inflicting torture on audiences, then Rings would merit a death sentence. This overdose of cinematic Lunesta takes the horror out of horror-show – and the show is lost as well, since Spanish director F. Javier Gutiérrez doesn’t seem remotely interested in rousing anything in us besides all-consuming apathy. Seriously, how do you screw up so bad when the source material is so fertile? Ringu, the 1998 Japanese horror movie directed by Hideo Nakata, scared audiences on a global scale with its tale of a cursed videotape that killed anyone…