Mistletone

Artwork by Carl Breitkreuz

PISSED JEANS TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY: Wednesday December 6 @ Oxford Art Factory with Batpiss + Low Life. Tickets on sale now.
• MELBOURNE: Thursday December 7 @ The Corner with Batpiss + Blank Statements. Presented by Triple R. Tickets on sale now.
• MEREDITH: Friday December 8 @ Meredith Music Festival. Ticket ballot open now.
• BRISBANE: Saturday December 9 @ The Foundry with Batpiss + Kitchen’s Floor. Tickets on sale Friday.

Mistletone is chipper to announce the first EVER! Australian tour by Allentown sludgemasters, Pissed Jeans.

Aunty Meredith waxes lyrical…

“Pissed Jeans are a band we always get asked for. Been holding on so long. Straight up hi-energy rock from Allentown, Pennsylvania. They have been asked to tour Australia so many times and it hasn’t happened until now. They are five albums in and haven’t made it here yet. We are so stoked to be able to present them.

They are cult. They are amazing live. A great singer. Electric. Inclusive. Funny (how good is their photo?). People love ‘em.

Latest Sub-Pop album, ‘Why Love Now’, co-produced by Lydia Lunch, is perhaps their most polished and hi-fidelity recording to date. But don’t be mistaken … one listen to tracks like ‘Ignorecam’, ‘Love Without Emotion’ and ‘The Bar Is Low’ and you’ll understand that they’ve hardly got designs on some kind of surprise crossover move any time soon.

Influences to the fore include early 80’s hardcore (Black Flag, Flipper) and 90s noise rock (The Jesus Lizard) but dynamic frontman, Matt Korvette, claims he had a moment of realisation many years ago when he came across a YouTube clip of The Birthday Party on a German TV show.

“I saw that video and I’m like, I’m just gonna steal everything in this … and I’m gonna do it bad enough that it’ll become my own thing, you know … and people won’t just say ‘oh, you stole that’ because I’ll just do such a poor rendering of it.”  Just one of many contradictions at play within this band: success as failure … failure as success … with thrilling results!”

Pissed Jeans have been making a racket for 13 years, and on their fifth album, Why Love Now (out now on Sub Pop via Inertia), the male-fronted quartet is taking aim at the mundane discomforts of modern life—from fetish webcams to office-supply deliveries.

“Rock bands can retreat to the safety of what rock bands usually sing about. So 60 years from now, when no one has a telephone, bands will be writing songs like, ‘I’m waiting for her to call me on my telephone.’ Kids are going to be like, ‘Grandpa, tell me, what was that?’ I’d rather not shy away from talking about the internet or interactions in 2016,” says Pissed Jeans frontman Matt Korvette.

Pissed Jeans’ gutter-scraped amalgamation of sludge, punk, noise, and bracing wit make the band—Korvette, Brad Fry (guitar), Randy Huth (bass) and Sean McGuinness (drums)—a release valve for a world where absurdity seems in a constant battle trying to outdo itself. Why Love Now picks at the bursting seams that are barely holding 21st-century life together. Take the grinding rave-up “The Bar Is Low,” which, according to Korvette, is “about how every guy seems to be revealing themselves as a shithead.

“It seems like every guy is getting outed,” Korvette continues, “across every board of entertainment and politics and music. There’s no guy that isn’t a total creep. You’re like, ‘No, he’s just a dude that hits on drunk girls and has sex with them when they’re asleep.’ Cool, he’s just an average shithead.”

The lyrics on Why Love Now are particularly pointed about gender relations and the minefield they present in 2016. “‘It’s Your Knees’ is about the endless, unrequested, commenting on if you’d fuck a girl. You know what I mean? ‘My great aunt won a cooking contest.’ ‘Oh, that’s pretty hot. I’d hit that,’” says Korvette. “It’s bizarre how guys will willingly share this stuff as if it’s always in their brains, and now it gets to come out because you’re on the internet. There’s a boldness to it now that was not maybe there before. So the premise is like, ‘Yeah, she’s hot, but her knees are weird looking. Not for me, man.’”

On “Love Without Emotion” Korvette channels Nick Cave’s more guttural side while bemoaning his detachment over cavernous guitars. The crushing “Ignorecam” twists the idea of fetish cam shows—”where the woman just ignores you and watches TV or eats macaroni and cheese or talks on the phone”—into a showcase for Korvette’s rancid yelp and his bandmates’ pummeling rock. “I love that idea of guys paying to be ignored,” says Korvette. “It seems so weird.”

As they did on their last album, 2013’s Honeys, Pissed Jeans offer a couple of “fuck that shit type songs” about the working world, with the blistering “Worldwide Marine Asset Financial Analyst” turning unwieldy job titles into sneering punk choruses and “Have You Ever Been Furniture” waving a flag for those whose job descriptions might as well be summed up by “professionally underappreciated.” And the startling “I’m A Man,” which comes at the album’s midpoint, finds author Lindsay Hunter (Ugly Girls) taking center stage, delivering a self-penned monologue of W.B. Mason-inspired erotica—office small talk about pens and coffee given just enough of a twist to expose its filthy underside, with Hunter adopting a grimacing menace that makes its depiction of curdled masculinity even more harrowing.

“Lindsay Hunter is what I would aspire for Pissed Jeans to be—just a real, ugly realness that’s shocking,” says Korvette. “Not in a, ‘I had sex with a corpse on top of a pile…’ nonsense way—actually real, shocking stuff. And she has young kids, like Pissed Jeans do. I feel a bond with her in that regard. We’re in the same camp.”

No Wave legend Lydia Lunch shacked up in Philadelphia to produce “Why Love Now” alongside local metal legend Arthur Rizk (Eternal Champion, Goat Semen). “I knew she wasn’t a traditional producer,” Korvette says of Lunch. “We wanted to mix it up a little bit. I like how she’s so cool and really intimidating. I didn’t know how it was going to work out. She ended up being so fucking awesome and crazy. She was super into it, constantly threatening to bend us over the bathtub. I’m not really sure what that entails, but I know she probably wasn’t joking.

“Arthur Rizk was the technical guru. It was a perfect combination of a technical wizard and a psychic mentor who guided the ship.”

The combination of Lunch’s spiritual guidance and Rizk’s technical prowess supercharged Pissed Jeans, and the bracing Why Love Now documents them at their grimy, grinning best. While its references may be very early-21st-century, its willingness to state its case cements it as an album in line with punk’s tradition of turning norms on their heads and shaking them loose.

“A crucial thing, I think, for being a Pissed Jeans fan is just stemming from what I would take away from punk, which is, ‘Question things and think about things,’” says Korvette. “Don’t just go to the office and get the same coffee. Don’t just wear a leather jacket and get a 40 oz. Just question yourself a little bit if you can.”

Artwork by Carl Breitkreuz

PISSED JEANS TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY: Wednesday December 6 @ Oxford Art Factory with Batpiss + Low Life. Tickets on sale now.
• MELBOURNE: Thursday December 7 @ The Corner with Batpiss + Blank Statements. Presented by Triple R. Tickets on sale now.
• MEREDITH: Friday December 8 @ Meredith Music Festival. Ticket ballot open now.
• BRISBANE: Saturday December 9 @ The Foundry with Batpiss + Kitchen’s Floor. Tickets on sale Friday.

Mistletone is chipper to announce the first EVER! Australian tour by Allentown sludgemasters, Pissed Jeans.

Aunty Meredith waxes lyrical…

“Pissed Jeans are a band we always get asked for. Been holding on so long. Straight up hi-energy rock from Allentown, Pennsylvania. They have been asked to tour Australia so many times and it hasn’t happened until now. They are five albums in and haven’t made it here yet. We are so stoked to be able to present them.

They are cult. They are amazing live. A great singer. Electric. Inclusive. Funny (how good is their photo?). People love ‘em.

Latest Sub-Pop album, ‘Why Love Now’, co-produced by Lydia Lunch, is perhaps their most polished and hi-fidelity recording to date. But don’t be mistaken … one listen to tracks like ‘Ignorecam’, ‘Love Without Emotion’ and ‘The Bar Is Low’ and you’ll understand that they’ve hardly got designs on some kind of surprise crossover move any time soon.

Influences to the fore include early 80’s hardcore (Black Flag, Flipper) and 90s noise rock (The Jesus Lizard) but dynamic frontman, Matt Korvette, claims he had a moment of realisation many years ago when he came across a YouTube clip of The Birthday Party on a German TV show.

“I saw that video and I’m like, I’m just gonna steal everything in this … and I’m gonna do it bad enough that it’ll become my own thing, you know … and people won’t just say ‘oh, you stole that’ because I’ll just do such a poor rendering of it.”  Just one of many contradictions at play within this band: success as failure … failure as success … with thrilling results!”

Pissed Jeans have been making a racket for 13 years, and on their fifth album, Why Love Now (out now on Sub Pop via Inertia), the male-fronted quartet is taking aim at the mundane discomforts of modern life—from fetish webcams to office-supply deliveries.

“Rock bands can retreat to the safety of what rock bands usually sing about. So 60 years from now, when no one has a telephone, bands will be writing songs like, ‘I’m waiting for her to call me on my telephone.’ Kids are going to be like, ‘Grandpa, tell me, what was that?’ I’d rather not shy away from talking about the internet or interactions in 2016,” says Pissed Jeans frontman Matt Korvette.

Pissed Jeans’ gutter-scraped amalgamation of sludge, punk, noise, and bracing wit make the band—Korvette, Brad Fry (guitar), Randy Huth (bass) and Sean McGuinness (drums)—a release valve for a world where absurdity seems in a constant battle trying to outdo itself. Why Love Now picks at the bursting seams that are barely holding 21st-century life together. Take the grinding rave-up “The Bar Is Low,” which, according to Korvette, is “about how every guy seems to be revealing themselves as a shithead.

“It seems like every guy is getting outed,” Korvette continues, “across every board of entertainment and politics and music. There’s no guy that isn’t a total creep. You’re like, ‘No, he’s just a dude that hits on drunk girls and has sex with them when they’re asleep.’ Cool, he’s just an average shithead.”

The lyrics on Why Love Now are particularly pointed about gender relations and the minefield they present in 2016. “‘It’s Your Knees’ is about the endless, unrequested, commenting on if you’d fuck a girl. You know what I mean? ‘My great aunt won a cooking contest.’ ‘Oh, that’s pretty hot. I’d hit that,’” says Korvette. “It’s bizarre how guys will willingly share this stuff as if it’s always in their brains, and now it gets to come out because you’re on the internet. There’s a boldness to it now that was not maybe there before. So the premise is like, ‘Yeah, she’s hot, but her knees are weird looking. Not for me, man.’”

On “Love Without Emotion” Korvette channels Nick Cave’s more guttural side while bemoaning his detachment over cavernous guitars. The crushing “Ignorecam” twists the idea of fetish cam shows—”where the woman just ignores you and watches TV or eats macaroni and cheese or talks on the phone”—into a showcase for Korvette’s rancid yelp and his bandmates’ pummeling rock. “I love that idea of guys paying to be ignored,” says Korvette. “It seems so weird.”

As they did on their last album, 2013’s Honeys, Pissed Jeans offer a couple of “fuck that shit type songs” about the working world, with the blistering “Worldwide Marine Asset Financial Analyst” turning unwieldy job titles into sneering punk choruses and “Have You Ever Been Furniture” waving a flag for those whose job descriptions might as well be summed up by “professionally underappreciated.” And the startling “I’m A Man,” which comes at the album’s midpoint, finds author Lindsay Hunter (Ugly Girls) taking center stage, delivering a self-penned monologue of W.B. Mason-inspired erotica—office small talk about pens and coffee given just enough of a twist to expose its filthy underside, with Hunter adopting a grimacing menace that makes its depiction of curdled masculinity even more harrowing.

“Lindsay Hunter is what I would aspire for Pissed Jeans to be—just a real, ugly realness that’s shocking,” says Korvette. “Not in a, ‘I had sex with a corpse on top of a pile…’ nonsense way—actually real, shocking stuff. And she has young kids, like Pissed Jeans do. I feel a bond with her in that regard. We’re in the same camp.”

No Wave legend Lydia Lunch shacked up in Philadelphia to produce “Why Love Now” alongside local metal legend Arthur Rizk (Eternal Champion, Goat Semen). “I knew she wasn’t a traditional producer,” Korvette says of Lunch. “We wanted to mix it up a little bit. I like how she’s so cool and really intimidating. I didn’t know how it was going to work out. She ended up being so fucking awesome and crazy. She was super into it, constantly threatening to bend us over the bathtub. I’m not really sure what that entails, but I know she probably wasn’t joking.

“Arthur Rizk was the technical guru. It was a perfect combination of a technical wizard and a psychic mentor who guided the ship.”

The combination of Lunch’s spiritual guidance and Rizk’s technical prowess supercharged Pissed Jeans, and the bracing Why Love Now documents them at their grimy, grinning best. While its references may be very early-21st-century, its willingness to state its case cements it as an album in line with punk’s tradition of turning norms on their heads and shaking them loose.

“A crucial thing, I think, for being a Pissed Jeans fan is just stemming from what I would take away from punk, which is, ‘Question things and think about things,’” says Korvette. “Don’t just go to the office and get the same coffee. Don’t just wear a leather jacket and get a 40 oz. Just question yourself a little bit if you can.”

Artwork by Carl Breitkreuz

PISSED JEANS TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY: Wednesday December 6 @ Oxford Art Factory with Batpiss + Low Life. Tickets on sale now.
• MELBOURNE: Thursday December 7 @ The Corner with Batpiss + Blank Statements. Presented by Triple R. Tickets on sale now.
• MEREDITH: Friday December 8 @ Meredith Music Festival. Ticket ballot open now.
• BRISBANE: Saturday December 9 @ The Foundry with Batpiss + Kitchen’s Floor. Tickets on sale Friday.

Mistletone is chipper to announce the first EVER! Australian tour by Allentown sludgemasters, Pissed Jeans.

Aunty Meredith waxes lyrical…

“Pissed Jeans are a band we always get asked for. Been holding on so long. Straight up hi-energy rock from Allentown, Pennsylvania. They have been asked to tour Australia so many times and it hasn’t happened until now. They are five albums in and haven’t made it here yet. We are so stoked to be able to present them.

They are cult. They are amazing live. A great singer. Electric. Inclusive. Funny (how good is their photo?). People love ‘em.

Latest Sub-Pop album, ‘Why Love Now’, co-produced by Lydia Lunch, is perhaps their most polished and hi-fidelity recording to date. But don’t be mistaken … one listen to tracks like ‘Ignorecam’, ‘Love Without Emotion’ and ‘The Bar Is Low’ and you’ll understand that they’ve hardly got designs on some kind of surprise crossover move any time soon.

Influences to the fore include early 80’s hardcore (Black Flag, Flipper) and 90s noise rock (The Jesus Lizard) but dynamic frontman, Matt Korvette, claims he had a moment of realisation many years ago when he came across a YouTube clip of The Birthday Party on a German TV show.

“I saw that video and I’m like, I’m just gonna steal everything in this … and I’m gonna do it bad enough that it’ll become my own thing, you know … and people won’t just say ‘oh, you stole that’ because I’ll just do such a poor rendering of it.”  Just one of many contradictions at play within this band: success as failure … failure as success … with thrilling results!”

Pissed Jeans have been making a racket for 13 years, and on their fifth album, Why Love Now (out now on Sub Pop via Inertia), the male-fronted quartet is taking aim at the mundane discomforts of modern life—from fetish webcams to office-supply deliveries.

“Rock bands can retreat to the safety of what rock bands usually sing about. So 60 years from now, when no one has a telephone, bands will be writing songs like, ‘I’m waiting for her to call me on my telephone.’ Kids are going to be like, ‘Grandpa, tell me, what was that?’ I’d rather not shy away from talking about the internet or interactions in 2016,” says Pissed Jeans frontman Matt Korvette.

Pissed Jeans’ gutter-scraped amalgamation of sludge, punk, noise, and bracing wit make the band—Korvette, Brad Fry (guitar), Randy Huth (bass) and Sean McGuinness (drums)—a release valve for a world where absurdity seems in a constant battle trying to outdo itself. Why Love Now picks at the bursting seams that are barely holding 21st-century life together. Take the grinding rave-up “The Bar Is Low,” which, according to Korvette, is “about how every guy seems to be revealing themselves as a shithead.

“It seems like every guy is getting outed,” Korvette continues, “across every board of entertainment and politics and music. There’s no guy that isn’t a total creep. You’re like, ‘No, he’s just a dude that hits on drunk girls and has sex with them when they’re asleep.’ Cool, he’s just an average shithead.”

The lyrics on Why Love Now are particularly pointed about gender relations and the minefield they present in 2016. “‘It’s Your Knees’ is about the endless, unrequested, commenting on if you’d fuck a girl. You know what I mean? ‘My great aunt won a cooking contest.’ ‘Oh, that’s pretty hot. I’d hit that,’” says Korvette. “It’s bizarre how guys will willingly share this stuff as if it’s always in their brains, and now it gets to come out because you’re on the internet. There’s a boldness to it now that was not maybe there before. So the premise is like, ‘Yeah, she’s hot, but her knees are weird looking. Not for me, man.’”

On “Love Without Emotion” Korvette channels Nick Cave’s more guttural side while bemoaning his detachment over cavernous guitars. The crushing “Ignorecam” twists the idea of fetish cam shows—”where the woman just ignores you and watches TV or eats macaroni and cheese or talks on the phone”—into a showcase for Korvette’s rancid yelp and his bandmates’ pummeling rock. “I love that idea of guys paying to be ignored,” says Korvette. “It seems so weird.”

As they did on their last album, 2013’s Honeys, Pissed Jeans offer a couple of “fuck that shit type songs” about the working world, with the blistering “Worldwide Marine Asset Financial Analyst” turning unwieldy job titles into sneering punk choruses and “Have You Ever Been Furniture” waving a flag for those whose job descriptions might as well be summed up by “professionally underappreciated.” And the startling “I’m A Man,” which comes at the album’s midpoint, finds author Lindsay Hunter (Ugly Girls) taking center stage, delivering a self-penned monologue of W.B. Mason-inspired erotica—office small talk about pens and coffee given just enough of a twist to expose its filthy underside, with Hunter adopting a grimacing menace that makes its depiction of curdled masculinity even more harrowing.

“Lindsay Hunter is what I would aspire for Pissed Jeans to be—just a real, ugly realness that’s shocking,” says Korvette. “Not in a, ‘I had sex with a corpse on top of a pile…’ nonsense way—actually real, shocking stuff. And she has young kids, like Pissed Jeans do. I feel a bond with her in that regard. We’re in the same camp.”

No Wave legend Lydia Lunch shacked up in Philadelphia to produce “Why Love Now” alongside local metal legend Arthur Rizk (Eternal Champion, Goat Semen). “I knew she wasn’t a traditional producer,” Korvette says of Lunch. “We wanted to mix it up a little bit. I like how she’s so cool and really intimidating. I didn’t know how it was going to work out. She ended up being so fucking awesome and crazy. She was super into it, constantly threatening to bend us over the bathtub. I’m not really sure what that entails, but I know she probably wasn’t joking.

“Arthur Rizk was the technical guru. It was a perfect combination of a technical wizard and a psychic mentor who guided the ship.”

The combination of Lunch’s spiritual guidance and Rizk’s technical prowess supercharged Pissed Jeans, and the bracing Why Love Now documents them at their grimy, grinning best. While its references may be very early-21st-century, its willingness to state its case cements it as an album in line with punk’s tradition of turning norms on their heads and shaking them loose.

“A crucial thing, I think, for being a Pissed Jeans fan is just stemming from what I would take away from punk, which is, ‘Question things and think about things,’” says Korvette. “Don’t just go to the office and get the same coffee. Don’t just wear a leather jacket and get a 40 oz. Just question yourself a little bit if you can.”

Tropical Fuckstorm (l-r: Fiona Kitschin, Gareth Liddiard, Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel) photographed at Nagambie Victoria, on 5 August 2017 by Bleddyn Butcher

TFS (Tropical Fuckstorm) are excited to announce their debut headline shows in Sydney and Melbourne this November / December.

TFS TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY: Saturday November 25 @ Lansdowne Hotel. Tickets on sale now from Oztix.
• MELBOURNE: Friday December 1 @ Gasometer Hotel. Tickets on sale now from Oztix.

TFS take on the big issues, in the clip for their first single ‘Chameleon Paint’ solving all of the world’s problems by realising they are the only people in the world capable of knowing exactly why everything has gone so south so fast.  They enter the world of crappy old arcade games, to beat some sense into Trump, Putin, Pauline and their Nazis mates, only to find out there are more sinister forces at play. Created by Chris Matthews of Defero Productions (also the genius behind the Drones clips for Taman Shud and To Think That I Once Loved You).

“TFS deliver one of the greatest debut singles in living memory” Double J

Don’t miss out, tickets on sale now!

Tropical Fuckstorm (l-r: Fiona Kitschin, Gareth Liddiard, Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel) photographed at Nagambie Victoria, on 5 August 2017 by Bleddyn Butcher

TFS (Tropical Fuckstorm) are excited to announce their debut headline shows in Sydney and Melbourne this November / December.

TFS TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY: Saturday November 25 @ Lansdowne Hotel. Tickets on sale now from Oztix.
• MELBOURNE: Friday December 1 @ Gasometer Hotel. Tickets on sale now from Oztix.

TFS take on the big issues, in the clip for their first single ‘Chameleon Paint’ solving all of the world’s problems by realising they are the only people in the world capable of knowing exactly why everything has gone so south so fast.  They enter the world of crappy old arcade games, to beat some sense into Trump, Putin, Pauline and their Nazis mates, only to find out there are more sinister forces at play. Created by Chris Matthews of Defero Productions (also the genius behind the Drones clips for Taman Shud and To Think That I Once Loved You).

“TFS deliver one of the greatest debut singles in living memory” Double J

Don’t miss out, tickets on sale now!

HTRK photo by Jeremy Yang

HTRK TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY: Thursday November 16 @ Cake Wines Cellar Door with special guest Julianna Barwick (USA). Tickets on sale now.
• MELBOURNE: Sunday November 19 @ Melbourne Town Hall, headlining Melbourne Music Week. Tickets on sale now.

HTRK have announced two Australian shows in which they will be performing a mix of old and new material.

JULIANNA BARWICK TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY: Thursday November 16 @ Cake Wines Cellar Door with HTRK.  Tickets on sale now.
• MELBOURNE: Friday November 17 @ St Paul’s Cathedral (MMW Hub). With Kath Bloom (US) + Divide and Dissolve + Wilson Tanner + Kirkis (ft. Melbourne Mass Gospel Choir) + Two Steps on the Water + James Tom & Jack Doepel (Krakatau) and the T.C Lewis Pipe Organ. Tickets on sale now.

Mistletone proudly presents Julianna Barwick, returning to Australia to headline Melbourne Music Week’s opening night at St Paul’s Cathedral, curated by Smooch Records. Julianna will also play an intimate Sydney show with renowned Australian band HTRK.

Julianna Barwick’s revelatory third full-length, Will, was a surprising left turn for the California-based experimental artist. If 2013’s Alex Somers-produced Nepenthe conjured images of gentle, thick fog rolling over desolate mountains, the self-produced Will was a late afternoon thunderstorm, a cathartic collision of sharp and soft textures that sounds looming and restorative all at once.

Barwick’s busiest period in her career to date has seen her playing piano for Yoko Ono, performing at Carnegie Hall at the annual Tibet House concert with the Flaming Lips and Philip Glass, the Rosabi EP and beer created in conjunction with brewing company Dogfish Head, and a re-imagining of Bach’s “Adagio” from Concerto In D Minor.

Barwick’s life over the past several years has largely been lived in transit, and as such the genesis of Will was not beholden to location; Barwick worked on the album in a variety of locales, from a desolate house in upstate New York to the Moog Factory in Asheville, North Carolina, to Lisbon, Portugal, the first European city to embrace Julianna’s music in 2007.

“I love touring, but it can be a wild ride,” Barwick reflects on this cycle of constant motion. “You’re constantly adjusting, assimilating, and finding yourself in life-changing situations.” Those experiences played into and helped shape Will‘s charged, unstable atmosphere: “I knew I’d be playing these songs live, so I wanted some movement,” she explains. “Something that had rhythm and low-end.”

That sense of forward propulsion is largely owed to Will‘s synth-heavy textures, an ingredient she was inspired to add to her vocal loop-heavy formula after demoing a new prototype analog sequencer for Moog during last year’s FORM Festival in Arcosanti, Arizona.

The electric current that runs through Will takes on various shapes of intoxicating instability: the orbiting chain of tones that wafts through “Nebula”, the frizzy sine waves lying under the firmament of “Same”, the haunting vocal echoes on opener “St. Apolonia” that were recorded late at night at a Lisbon train underpass, and the martial arpeggios that accompany Will‘s processional closer “See, Know”.

“While making this record, there were moments of isolation and dark currents,” Barwick admits. “I like exploring that, and I love when I come across songs that sound scary or ominous. I’ve always been curious about what goes into making a song that way.” The beguiling, beautifully complicated Will is the result of that curiosity, as well as the latest proof yet of Barwick’s irresistibly engaging talent as a composer and vocalist.

HTRK photo by Jeremy Yang

HTRK TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY: Thursday November 16 @ Cake Wines Cellar Door with special guest Julianna Barwick (USA). Tickets on sale now.
• MELBOURNE: Sunday November 19 @ Melbourne Town Hall, headlining Melbourne Music Week. Tickets on sale now.

HTRK have announced two Australian shows in which they will be performing a mix of old and new material.

Mistletone Records is proud to release Ross McLennan‘s brilliant new album All the colours print can manage, out October 6 on Mistletone / Inertia.

Ross McLennan and his 10 piece band The New World launch All the colours print can manage in Melbourne with a Northcote Social Club matinee show on Saturday November 4, with support from Mistletone labelmates The Orbweavers duo. Doors open 2pm. Tickets on sale now!

• “McLennan puts a lot of himself into what he writes, each record is a reasonably accurate snapshot of his mental health; (and) his fourth solo record sees him balance his love of pop with some of the darker themes that naturally find their way into his songs. Anyone who has followed McLennan’s post-Snout work knows that the quality of his output hasn’t deteriorated in the slightest. Perhaps that’s because McLennan knows he must remain true to himself. It’s what McLennan has done throughout his entire career, and we’re all the richer for it” – DOUBLE J

A singular and illuminating songwriter, Ross McLennan dives deep into the collective subconscious whilst touching raw nerves which reverberate the anxieties of our times, giving his songs a revelatory and prophetic aura. The Ross McLennan hit factory has been open for business since 1991, when he formed Melbourne indie trio Snout and made an indelible impression on the Australian musical landscape throughout the 1990s. As Double J recently commented in their retrospective of Snout’s career: “Their shrewd handle on pop in all its forms meant that they could employ diverse influences into their sound – sometimes heavy, sometimes groovy, sometimes jangly – yet emerge sounding completely cohesive”. Since disbanding Snout, McLennan has made three unfailingly excellent solo albums and been shortlisted for the Amp (Australian Music Prize). Accompanied by his ensemble of strings, woodwind and a choir, Ross McLennan has manifested magical performances at Melbourne Festival, Brisbane Festival, Queenscliff Music Festival, Brisbane Powerhouse and the Famous Spiegeltent, and supported artists such as Cass McCombs and Matthew E. White.

All the colours print can manage is the title of the forthcoming Ross McLennan album and a phrase from the song “Selling Good News”. As McLennan explains, “it refers to very human visions of paradise: pictures fleshed out in hues from a colour matching booklet. The colours have corresponding numbers. The colours might look different depending on the paper stock they are printed on, and the light in which they are viewed. The people in the pictures are wearing clothes in a modern neat casual style. Complete families have died and are strolling peacefully through paradise with all their limbs intact. This is not so different to how the narrator views the world.

“Some of the songs on this record are hopeful, some not”, McLennan reflects. “This album took five or so years to make, and there Is a whole other album on the cutting room floor. But I needed to get the balance between light and shade right.

“I wanted to make a charitable album. To have some things that you could dance to and smile about, but not sell out sadness and despair. Across the record, there is a corresponding tension between physical reality and the mental drift to abstraction/distortion, the connected and the dissociative. There are the iron clad rules of the rotating earth and then there is a banana peel. The narrator has foot in each camp.”

Artwork by Alex Fregon

Mistletone is rapt to announce that Nite Jewel is in orbit to return to Australia this October.

NITE JEWEL TOUR DATES:

• MELBOURNE: Fri Oct 20 @ NGV Friday Nights. Tickets on sale now from NGV.
• SYDNEY: Sat Oct 21 @ Cake Wines Cellar Door. Tickets on sale now from Eventbrite.
• BRISBANE: Sun Oct 22 @ The Junk Bar. Tickets on sale now from Oztix.
• FREMANTLE: Sat Oct 28 @ St John’s Anglican Church. Tickets on sale now from City of Fremantle.

Los Angeles electro-R&B luminary Ramona Gonzalez — aka Nite Jewel — returns to Australia as a duo, hot on the heels of her critically acclaimed new album Real High. Nite Jewel has been prolific as ever, also sharing a B-sides collection Real Low, last year’s album Liquid Cool, a limited edition 12” for Italians Do It Better, and two collaborative EPs (one with Bay Area rapper/producer Droop-E as AMTHST).

Nite Jewel has also had memorable collaborations with Dam-Funk, Omar-S, Julia Holter, Sean Nicholas Savage, Samantha Urbani, Zoë Kravitz and many others — transforming foggy, fading memories into crystal clear lucid dreams. Her latest collab with Dam-Funk (as Nite Funk) was named Best New Music on Pitchfork.

With Real High, Ramona Gonzalez updates her feminine inner dialogue to reflect the increasing challenges of hyper-modern society, in particular with respect to selfhood. Recorded over the course of four years in Los Angeles with the help of Grammy-winning producer Cole M.G.N. (Ariel Pink, Beck, The Samps), these songs of transformational love and relentless nostalgia range from expansive, futuristic balladry (“Real High,” “Part Of Me”) to gauzy dance-floor hits (“2 Good 2 Be True,” “The Answer”); the most focused and bold Nite Jewel effort yet. The timeless production, unique voice, and pristine song-craft of Real High create an irresistible combination that is only better on the live stage.

• “Real High is the album fans have been waiting for… Her whole attitude reeks simultaneously of someone not giving a fuck while also brainstorming meticulously, and her music has never sounded richer on so many levels. The album borrows heavily from the old-school R&B feel of pastime pop greats like Janet Jackson and Aaliyah while mostly marrying this visage to contemporary dancehall rhythms” – DROWNED IN SOUND

“HOW IT WAS” video: