Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2016 i Rolling Stone Australia

“An artist who defied classification and who raised the watermark to an extremely high level deserves high praise.” Not Enough Prince . . . I WISH ROLLING STONE HAD provided so many words on Prince when he was alive rather than merely covering him in detail in death. An artist who defied classification and who raised the watermark to an extremely high level deserves high praise, and your piece, whilst generally good (despite your picture on Pg. 65 being incorrectly attributed to the Purple Rain tour – it was Lovesexy in 1988), should have gone much further. I await the standalone issue with in-depth coverage of the albums (with original reviews), the many tours, films and influences. An artist of this calibre deserves no less. Vincent Alvaro, Casula, NSW .…

In 1967, Ralph J. Gleason was a 50-year-old jazzhead and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle when he wrote an essay titled “Like a Rolling Stone”. It declared that to understand “the reality of what’s happening today in America, we must go to rock ’n roll, to popular music”. Forking over $2,000 to a college dropout named Jann Wenner, he co-founded a magazine with a name inspired by that essay – the magazine you are reading right now. Gleason was a character: He would often be seen sipping from glasses of milk in nightclubs (he was diabetic and didn’t drink). As a writer, he used his platform for social critique, frequently on the persistence of American racism. Two new books, assembled by his son, Toby, and published by Yale University…

GWEN STEFANI WASN’T kidding when she called her new solo album This Is What the Truth Feels Like. It manages to combine upbeat pop with bracingly honest lyrics about her split from ex-husband Gavin Rossdale, the father of her three children. “Even before I knew that my life would be forever changed and all my dreams would be crushed,” she says, “I was quite desperate to make new music.” She ended up with a flood of inspiration that she compares to No Doubt’s 1995 breakthrough, Tragic Kingdom, written in a similar breakup haze: “I didn’t even know I could write music,” she recalls. “And then my heart was ripped out, and, like, served back to me on a platter. And this album, I feel like it just fell out of…

“I walked out in front of thousands of metal maniacs.” IT IS MUSIC FESTIVAL SEASON IN Europe. My schedule has me hitting the stage for fests in Belgium, Germany, Sweden, France, Spain, England, Scotland and Croatia. These are on top of shows I have already done this year in five of the aforementioned as well as the USA, Holland, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Russia, Poland and Ukraine. By December, I will be able to add New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Canada to my 130+ show 2016 tour roster. It is a lot of airports, time changes, economy seats and performing on different levels of mind warp due to jet lag. It has been a long time since I was in a band. For many years, I have gone onto festival…

FOR DECADES, VIRTUAL REALITY HAS FAILED TO DELIVER ON its great promise. But on March 28th, Oculus Rift, a breakthrough VR system, debuted – finally heralding the arrival of a technology seemingly pulled from a sci-fi future. On a recent spring morning, in a soundproof studio on the San Mateo, California, campus of Facebook – just days before the $US600 Rift’s release – I’m testing out the Oculus headset in a mountain-climbing simulation created by Crytek, a team of artists and coders that has spent the past year meticulously scanning and re-creating vistas from the Alps to Halong Bay, Vietnam. The experience, which teleports me to a jagged cliff in a virtual world spanning 50 square miles, is so realistic that I can barely look down – when I do,…

Greta Kline wants to meet at her high school hangout, the local diner where she and friends would loiter for a bit too long after class let out. At Eli’s Market on New York’s Upper West Side, the macaroni-and-cheese costs so much per pound it may as well be made of gold, and fussy toddlers crumble cookies into the laps of unruffl ed nannies. “Everyone came here after, like, prom,” says Kline, 22, slinking into her seat. She pulls the sleeves of her oversize vintage varsity jacket over her hands and seems to want to hide even in plain sight. “I was really shy as a kid,” she says by way of explanation. “I’m still really scared of being seen. I don’t like my face on display.” Shyness hasn’t kept…

Sisters Chloe and Halle Bailey are only 17 and 16, respectively, but they have Michelle Obama as a fan, and they appeared on the video album for Beyoncé’s Lemonade. “Magic was in the air in New Orleans,” says Halle of their work in the clip for “Freedom”. “We were saying, ‘What a time to be alive.’ ” The sisters’ music is just as impressive as their endorsers. Their EP Sugar Symphony – self-produced in their L.A. home – is an accomplished mix of R&B, jazz and alt-pop. “Our dad taught us to do everything on our own,” Chloe says. “This industry is so dominated by men and older people,” adds Halle. “You have to look into yourself and say, ‘I can have wonderful ideas.’ ”…

Between luminous guitars, thrumming reverb and rich harmonies, Sophie Payten, a.k.a. Gordi, finds a melodic nexus that’s both pastoral and darkly modern. The 22-year-old performed in her local church choir in Canowindra before moving to Sydney, where her first songs echoed the stirring simplicity of her early inspirations, Billy Joel and Carole King. During a trip to Tanzania in her gap year, Gordi says she felt drawn to making music. “I realised how much I relied on music as a form of therapy. I asked one of the leaders to go into town and buy me a really shitty guitar. I still have it. That’s what I survived on for the months I was there.” Each song on her latest EP, Clever Disguise, is subtle and electric, creating space amidst…

Ratings are supervised by the editors of ROLLING STONE. This is still the catchiest music they’ve made since 2001’s ‘Take Off Your Pants and Jacket’. Blink-182 California BMG It’s been almost 20 years since Blink-182 first blazed a pants-less trail across rock radio. But the pop-punk trio are still a generational touchstone: If you missed your formal because you passed out in the back of a rented limo while your date took off to hook up with the captain of the rugby team, Blink’s mix of good-natured snottiness, teen-movie humour, fumbling vulnerability and Big Gulp tunefulness will forever move you in a way no art can. And even if you weren’t on their wavelength, it’s tough to argue against “All the Small Things” or “Rock Show” as grade-A bubble-thrash bangers…

The Avalanches Wildflower Modular/EMI Sixteen years – well, at least they beat Axl Rose, who took 17 years to follow up the Use Your Illusion albums with Chinese Democracy. The Avalanches’ 2000 debut, Since I Left You, was universally acclaimed for its sample-adelic soundscapes, so after years of rumoured new material that never eventuated, the weight of expectation on Wildflower is huge. Inevitably, it can’t hold up. Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi are killer crate-diggers, but across 21 tracks they have a severe case of sonic ADD, resulting in a woozy, glitchy mash-up of flotsam and jetsam. That said, they’ve got great taste, getting their fingers dirty on sunshine pop (the Association, Harpers Bizarre), female soul/R&B (Honey Cone, the Fuzz) and random audio clips from cult films such…

Michael Kiwanuka Love & Hate Polydor Nothing says serious intent like a five-minute overture. Strings simmer and angels cry. The piano finds a slow, stately route to heaven as Michael Kiwanuka’s exquisite guitar tears open his “Cold Little Heart”. “Maybe this time I can be strong,” he sings in a searing study of faith and doubt that strips his flesh to the bone, “but since I know who I am, I’m probably wrong.” So the confessional tone and smouldering orchestral pitch are set for the London soul-man’s second album. Its marriage of celestial atmosphere, heart-sinking melodies and spiritual quest invokes all the parallels that shadowed his 2012 debut – Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye – then plots its own troubled course to redemption. With a lightly sandpapered voice born…

Brandy Clark Big Day in a Small Town Warner Bros. Brandy Clark’s 2013 debut, 12 Stories, heralded a Nashville songwriting renaissance, alongside pathfinders like Kacey Musgraves and Eric Church. Its sequel, and proper major-label debut, ups the ante: It’s music tooled alternately for stadiums and songwriting circles, commercial and public radio, line-dance bars and coffee shops. Clark’s a badass who likes raw guitar – see “Broke” (rhymes with “generic Coke”), a low-rent Southern rocker, and “Girl Next Door” (rhymes with “Virgin Mary metaphor”), a synth-chromed kiss-off pledging “I ain’t your Marcia Brady” that, like Church’s “Springsteen”, doesn’t aim its referents solely at the Snapchat set. Clark is good at bending country boilerplate: On “Drinkin’, Smokin’, Cheatin’”, she teetotals while listing a downward spiral of coping fantasies. She also spikes the…

In January, Mumford & Sons fulfilled a longtime dream when they travelled to South Africa to play three shows. While there, they decided to create their own souvenir: “We thought it would be amazing to go into a studio and take a sonic photograph,” says bassist Ted Dwane. “None of us are experts in African music. We didn’t know if it would work or not.” The band spent two days in a Johannesburg studio (“The gear was kind of fucked, to be honest,” says Dwane), working with Afro-electronic collaborators the Very Best and Senegalese pop star Baaba Maal. The result is Johannesburg, a five-song EP that blends the band’s signature rousing choruses with Afrobeat guitars and rhythms. Like the Mumfords’ electrified, divisive 2015 album Wilder Mind, Johannesburg marks another step…

IT’S NOT ALWAYS EASY TO tell Tegan and Sara Quin apart, but here is one way: Bring up Ace of Base. Tegan loves the Swedish pop group; her twin sister, Sara, does not. This distinction became clear a few years ago, when the Quins were trying to convert their longtime sister act from a rock band into a glossier pop machine. They decided to begin by naming some of their favourite Top 40 groups. “Tegan brought up Ace of Base, because she’s obsessed with music from our high school years,” says Sara. “That’s not what I’m into. It took a couple of years to get on the same page.” The sisters, 35, were very much on the same page by the time they recorded 2013’s Heartthrob with producer Greg Kurstin,…

The former Ramones drummer is on tour playing the group’s classic tunes with his band Marky Ramone’s Blitzkrieg. The Kinks “All Day and All of the Night” The raunchiness of the production and Dave Davies’ guitar sound were the beginnings of punk. When I first heard it I was like, “Holy shit!” The Trashmen “Surfin’ Bird” This is an off-the-wall song that’s crazy and insane beyond description. It was different than anything on the radio. Love “7 and 7 Is” This came out 10 years before the genre was really consolidated at CBGB, but it’s still punk. It should have gone Number One. Richard Hell and the Voidoids “Blank Generation” I was in this band. This song spoke for the populace at the time CBGB was going. It reflects a…

When blues guitar legend Joe Bonamassa returns to Australia this September, his touring schedule will include one very special night in Sydney. “I’m playing the Opera House – that’s a bucket-list gig for me,” he says. “We’re being filmed, but it’s just us doing the show that we do Monday through Sunday, because once you get that set rehearsed, it’s devastatingly impactful.” Backed by a full band – horns, harmonies, the whole bit – Bonamassa hits Australia amid a world tour that’s been buoyed by the unprecedented success of latest album Blues of Desperation. “It hit Number Five in the U.S.,” he says, bewildered. “Sandwiched between Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Adele. We all had a bit of a what-the-fuck moment with that.” Following the direction of 2014’s Different Shades of…

The Song I Want Played at My Funeral Quincy Jones “Soul Bossa Nova”, 1962 “I want the Austin Powers theme tune, ‘Soul Bossa Nova’. Imagine the doors [to the church] fly open and you see girls doing backflips down the aisle, and then they all carry me in in a coffin and that’s blaring. As soon as you hear that music you know, ‘Here he comes, the main man!’ It’s going to be epic. I’ve got a pretty mad family, so when we go to a funeral we always try and make a celebration of it as opposed to a mourning. My family’s full of mad Irish people.” The Song That’s Guaranteed To Get Me on the Dancefloor The Strokes “Someday”, 2001 “There’s something about the groove; every…

Will Toledo is garage rock’s most promising young songwriter, but for years music was something he did by himself. He started out recording alone, in bedrooms, dorm rooms and – now somewhat famously – the family Subaru, parking after school with his guitar and laptop outside big-box stores around his hometown of Leesburg, Virginia. He wrote couplets about avoiding the sun, about reading the Book of Job empathetically, about watching too much TV. When he settled on the name Car Seat Headrest, it was in tribute to his mobile confessional booth. Since then, the 23-year-old Toledo has had a dozen-odd releases. But 2016 is sure to be his biggest year: In May, having signed to the indie powerhouse label Matador, he released the exhilarating Teens of Denial, his first LP…

Red Hot Chili Peppers The Getaway Warner Bros. Being a Red Hot Chili Pepper is a challenging gig to age gracefully in; literally or metaphorically, tube socks on your johnson ain’t a good look at 50. To their credit, the Peppers’ 11th LP is a bold attempt to jibe their past party-dog selves with their present-day artistic ambitions – not always a perfect fit but a compelling one. With production by Danger Mouse, and Radiohead sixth man Nigel Godrich on the mix, the sound is top-shelf modern-rock splendour: shimmering guitar fractals, flashing string arrangements, artisanal rhythmic flourishes. Yet Flea’s bass still grounds the music, as sinewy as Iggy Pop’s musculature, with Anthony Kiedis dirty-romanticising L.A. as he macks his way through. There are surprising moves (the Chic-cum-Daft Punk mash-up “Go…

Double Bind Spunk On their 2014 debut LP Discipline, Auckland’s Trust Punks took a familiar Dunedin-sound art-punk jangle – not far removed from the early work of fellow Kiwis Surf City –and derailed the linear directness with frequent experimental diverts. Empowered by a strong protest perspective, Double Bind injects feedback-guided noise and an angsty snarl to this core, as the quintet reimagine an anti-establishment punk spirit for modern predicaments – most notably Antipodean refugee policies. This clear thematic focus is kept lively via side dishes of irony, sarcasm and bitterness and, although they occasionally resurrect the brighter pop tones of their former self (“Pig”), it is within the exploitation of their newfound, unfiltered aggression – whether that be spitting barely audible exhortations (“Paradise_angel-wire”) or surrendering to the suffocating clangour (“Leaving…

Biffy Clyro Ellipsis Warner “We have achieved so much more than you possibly thought we could,” remarks Simon Neil in “Wolves of Winter”, before adding: “You can achieve anything, just remember no ‘i’ in team, but there’s two in brilliant.” If it sounds like Biffy Clyro are in bullish form on their seventh album, it’s with good reason. The opening song is not only an us-against-the-world anthem that takes aim at the band’s detractors, but is the link between the arena-levelling rock of their previous three LPs (the Scots approach their records as trilogies) and the uncharted territory they explore here. Witness the trap beats of “Re-arrange” (inspired by listening to A$AP Rocky and Kanye West), the pop-rock of “Friends and Enemies”, the black metal blast beats that infiltrate “Herex”…

Who’s Vedder, Who’s Best? Eddie Vedder joined the Who on “The Real Me” at a backyard gig in California, which raised $3 million for cancer research and treatment. “I love Eddie,” says Roger Daltrey. “He doesn’t copy. He does the Eddie Vedder version.” Björk’s New Virtual Reality Björk attended Bjork Digital Media Preview at Carriageworks in Sydney. Bjork Digital was the premiere of the musician’s new virtual reality project, and formed part of Vivid, the annual festival that features light sculptures and installations throughout the city. Leon Plays On Severe winds forced Leon Bridges to cancel his main-stage set at Washington State’s Sasquatch! Festival – so he took his guitar to the lawn for an unplugged set. “My word is bond!” he said. Gaga’s Fast Car Racing legend Mario Andretti…

On the morning of January 11th, 2016, Rob Sheffield was in shock: His hero David Bowie had just died, two days after dropping his stellar new album, Blackstar. Sheffield’s literary agent called and asked if he’d be willing to put an in-progress Beatles book on hold and slam out a new one about Bowie. “She said, ‘Just write for a month, and that’s the book’,” says Sheffield, a ROLLING STONE contributing editor. “I said, ‘Well, he recorded Low in a month. But I’ll do this without the same pharmaceutical aids he used.’ ” If anyone was suited for the job, it was Sheffield, who fell in love with Bowie the minute he heard “Fame” on the radio in 1975 and wrote brilliantly about his idol over the years. “He was…

Paul McCartney was talking recently to a woman who works at his New York office when he got an idea. She was about to embark on a road trip and wanted an extensive playlist of his music. He made one – it was released as Pure McCartney on June 10th, a 67-track collection that covers every corner of his post-Beatles catalogue, from “Big Barn Bed”, a 1973 country rocker, to “Sing the Changes”, from his 2008 album with the Fireman. For McCartney, hearing the old songs was a time trip. “Maybe I’m Amazed” reminded him of the satisfaction he felt recording it after the Beatles’ breakup, and “Live and Let Die” evoked his children’s youthful days. “My kids said, ‘My dad wrote that’, and nobody at school would believe them,”…

“I didn’t surround myself with people that nurtured my creative beast.” FROM THE OUTSIDE LOOKING IN, 2013 was good to Emma Louise. At 21, the singer/songwriter, then based in Brisbane, released her debut album Vs Head Vs Heart, which peaked at number 12 on the ARIA charts, and her 2011 hit single “Jungle” was remixed by German producer Wankelmut and re-charted across Europe. But Emma Louise had been feeling the weight of increased scrutiny over the past two years and the pressures, both external and self-inflicted, had taken the fun out of making music. “With that album I had such a different mindset to now, I was very judgmental and critical of myself,” says the singer, now based in Melbourne. “It wasn’t a very pleasurable thing to release and record…

Audio-Technica ATH-SR5 $269 rrp Hi-res audio from Audio-Technica that won’t break the bank The HD audio market is getting more affordable and more portable, with players available under $200. Which makes the ATH-SR5s a perfect accompaniment to a pocket HD player. At a reasonable $269, these on-ear phones deliver the crisp, all-encompassing sound that home audio enthusiasts used to gloat about. Line 6 AMPLIFi 30 $699.99 rrp The perfect, all-in-one amp solution for the bedroom guitarist Line 6 were the first name in amplifier and effects modelling, compressing walls of amps and pedalboards into the portable and innovative Pod system over 18 years ago. Now they’ve combined that modelling with a portable bluetooth amplifier/ speaker that can conjure up a plethora of guitar tones in conjunction with a handy smartphone…

 “Inspired by Prince’s example, Robert Forster spent much of 1986 prancing about in a boob tube, a delightfully incongruous sight,” recalls Bleddyn Butcher. “For New Year, he devised a new image: he had his hair dyed silver in imitation of Dynasty’s improbable kingpin Blake Carrington. The result was more Goldilocks than Silver Fox but Robert was unfazed. He’d found a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, like those Harrison Ford sported to play the impossible dreamer Allie Fox in Peter Weir’s adaptation of The Mosquito Coast, and a new model. He asked me to photograph him in the quizzical pose used for the movie poster. So I did. It didn’t take long. We had the studio to ourselves. Talk turned, by magical tangent, from utopian experiments in the Central American jungle to…

A little more than a decade ago, Anderson Paak was a high school kid in Ventura, California, playing drums in his Baptist church and setting chopped-up samples to homemade beats. A demo tape sparked deal meetings, and his dreams seemed to be taking solid form. “I thought I was going to be Kanye,” he says. “The producer that can rap too.” But what came next was a nightmare. His mum – a South Korean-born woman who’d been in the produce business – and his stepdad were sent to prison for tax-related issues during his senior year. Paak stopped making music and started bagging groceries. “Just working and trying to get some stability,” he says. By the time he was 21, Paak was back in the studio with a new perspective.…

SWMRS co-leader Cole Becker is hanging from the ceiling. The California punk rockers are charging through bracing, hook-y songs off their debut, Drive North, at a New York show. They even return to the stage after their allotted set time and keep rocking unplugged. Though just hitting their twenties, SWMRS have been playing clubs like this for years; they formed in elementary school and had assistance from their drummer Joey Armstrong’s father – Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. “When we were 13 to 14, he was telling us to text every time we wrote a song,” says singer-guitarist Max Becker. Despite attaining early credibility, SWMRS (who released two albums in their teens as Emily’s Army) found the scene too bro-ish (“Aggressive dudes crowd-surfing on 14-year-old girls,” says Cole). One…

“ALL OF THE INSTANCES WHERE FURNITURE HAS BEEN THROWN, ALL WERE BECAUSE OF ALCOHOL.” IN THE SUNNY CORNER OF A MEL- bourne café, Mark Lizotte sits coiled like a spring. He’s eyeing a large beetroot juice and exquisitely presented fruit salad but holding out for one crucial detail. “This conversation is not gonna go far unless I get caffeine,” he says, pushing dark glasses towards a low-slung black baseball cap. The disguise might be a hangover from his pop idol days as Johnny Diesel. But if that experience taught him anything, it’s never to settle for good enough. Does anyone still call you Johnny? Yes. [Squeals] “Johnny Diesel!” That snapshot is everything to them. They know I’ve made albums after that but I’ll never kill it. Your website displays 68…

“It’s good to stick to your guns,” says Khan. “Listen to yourself. This is what I did.” OVER THE PAST 10 YEARS, NATA- sha Khan, better known as Bat for Lashes, has presented variously as a pagan priestess (held largely responsible for encouraging the headdress phenomenon at festivals); as a wanton blonde alter ego, Pearl; and as an unvarnished warrior woman, as on the cover of 2012’s The Haunted Man, shot by Ryan McGinley, where she stands naked with a man slung over her shoulders, his limbs strategically unfreeing her nipples (and pubis). That the twice Mercury Prize-nominated musician should inhabit the titular character of her fourth album, The Bride, seems a reasonable progression. In recent shows she’s appeared on stage in wedding gowns and veils with lurid make-up, as…

Plimpton in the Big Easy RS 277 November 2, 1978 George Plimpton wore Ali’s robe while writing about the late-career rematch with Leon Spinks at New Orleans’ Superdome: It was not going to be easy for Ali to climb down from the heavyweight championship of the world. He had once told me, “It stays with you always. You can be overweight, with an old pair of shoes and an old coat, but you can always wake up and think back.” But he had not ever acted like he believed that. Dr. Gonzo’s House Call RS 265 May 18, 1978 Late one night in New York, Hunter S. Thompson was granted an unexpected hotel-room interview with Ali, who was already in bed with his wife: I tried to hide…

Bat For Lashes The Bride Parlophone/Warner Girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, boy gets killed on the way to the wedding, girl loses her mind, takes off in the honeymoon car and possibly has sex with an alien. OK, laying out the bones of this concept album on paper doesn’t really bear scrutiny. And it doesn’t always hold up on record either. Part of the problem for Natasha Khan, the Englishwoman who trades under the name Bat For Lashes, is that the lovelorn tragic heroine persona is rapidly becoming a cliché in a post-Lana Del Rey world. And perhaps Khan would argue it is her character speaking, not the songwriter herself, but the lyrics can be purple-ish and border on greeting card rhymes: “You know I love…

Peter Garrett A Version of Now Sony To understate, Peter Garrett has lived. And while there’s clearly no need to retell his story here, it’s worth noting that he is still living – emphatically. A Version of Now – the first collection of Garrett’s songs alone – is anything but nostalgia. Framed by stark, honest production from man-of-the-moment Burke Reid, the album wrestles elements of Garrett’s colourful chronology, but finds the singer reflecting not on what he’s done, but on what he’s learned, the implication being there’s more to come. Nothing here is as edgy as the Oils, but an understated intensity nods to history without ever pining for it. “Tall Trees” announces Garrett is “back”, not with self-congratulatory bombast, but rather a happy sense of fate, before “I’d Do…

MUST-HAVES OK Computer 1997 A reputation-securing masterwork. Jonny Greenwood’s guitar wizardry made for sweeping space-rock epics, while Thom Yorke bemoaned techno-dehumanisation and “yuppies networking”. The result: one of the Nineties’ best LPs. Kid A 2000 The controversial left turn that became the consensus pick: Goodbye, guitar fireworks and verse-chorus-verse structures; hello, drum-machine twitches, song-form sabotage and exquisite synth-craft. A new 21st-century rock language was born. In Rainbows 2007 Maybe Radiohead’s most adventurous LP, and their sexiest. The pay-what-you-will marketing strategy was game-changing, and the deliciously glitchy grooves and Yorke’s prettiest singing found the perfect space between bliss and oblivion. FURTHER LISTENING The Bends 1995 The first quantum leap in a career that’s been full of them, taking the band from Brit-rock also-rans to budding artistes. “Fake Plastic Trees” is a…

“The last time I threw a tantrum? Every day.” The last time I swore at the telly Today, when [Treasurer] Scott Morrison was saying on ABC 24 that every time Bill Shorten opens his mouth, he spends more of your money, and all he’s doing is making all working people’s tax bills higher. And all I thought was just, “Why don’t you ask your rich fucking mates to pay their fair share of fucking tax and we’d have beautiful hospitals, and beautiful fucking schools, and beautiful roads, and you can go get fucked.” The last fight I had The closest I’ve had to a physical fight was actually with the quiet one in Shihad, Phil Knight, the guitarist. He’s a lovely guy and is placid most of the time, but…