Mistletone

Aunty Meredith has just announced Sharon Van Etten and Parquet Courts will perform at Golden Plains Number Nine (March 7-9). Sign up for the ticket ballot here.

We at Mistletone are overjoyed that Sharon Van Etten — or Shazza, as we like to call her in this hemisphere — and her stunning band, are coming back to Australia in March. For all the attention that was paid to her 2012 break-through Tramp, Sharon Van Etten is an artist with a manifest hunger to turn another corner. Writing from free-flowing emotional honesty and vulnerability, she creates a bond with the listener that few contemporary musicians can match. Compelled by a restless spirit, Sharon Van Etten is continuously challenging herself, and has outdone herself this year with Are We There; a self-produced album of exceptional intimacy, sublime generosity and immense breadth. She sings of the nature of desire, memory, of being lost, emptiness, of promises and loyalty, fear and change, of healing and the true self, violence and sanctuary, waiting, of silence. The artist who speaks in such a voice is urging us to do something, to take hold and to go deeper. Here’s hoping she brings the personalised tissues which have graced her merch desks overseas…

Parquet Courts left delirious punters reeling in their wake after last year’s brilliantly bombastic Laneway Festival shows and sweaty headline gigs in Sydney & Melbourne. To quote The Vine‘s review of their Sydney show, “The partying gets harder and the screaming gets louder, until it ends abruptly, with no encore, leaving behind a convincing case for Parquet Courts as the best band in the Northern Hemisphere”. Parquet Courts delivered another impeccable album this year in Sunbathing Animal, which took a huge leap forward in terms of songwriting and vision whilst heightening the heaviness, mania and punk rock drive that has made the band beloved of music nerds everywhere. Still rooted firmly in the unshackled exploration and bombastic playing of their earlier work, everything here is amplified in its lucidity and intent. The songs wander through threads of blurry brilliance, exhaustion and fury at the hilt of every note. Parquet Courts sounds more like themselves than ever, a pinpoint accurate reading of the same American punk expansion they all but defined on Light Up Gold. Watching Parquet Courts tear it up in the sup’ at Golden Plains — “Late on Sunday night, before the kings of disco” — is our dream come true.

Below, watch the video for Parquet Courts’ “Black and White”, co-directed by Parquet Courts’ Austin Brown and Australia’s own Johann Rashid, who besides directing the UV Race film Autonomy and Deliberation and Eddy Current Suppression videos, plays in East Link and Home Travel:

And here is some sweet live footage of Sharon Van Etten performing Tarifa at Cafe De Le Danse in Paris, filmed by Valerie Toumayan: