Mistletone

3RRR, Mess + Noise and Mistletone proudly present SPRING TONES at Roxanne Parlour  (Level 3 / 2 Coverlid Pl, Melbourne) on Saturday, 26 September.The Spring Tones lineup features Vivian Girls (USA), Bachelorette (NZ), Tiny Vipers (USA), Ducktails (USA), Hawnay Troof (USA), Love Of Diagrams, St Helens, Aleks & The Ramps, Songs (Syd), The Dacios, The UV Race, Mark Barrage, Super Wild Horses, Rat Vs Possum, The French, Children Of The Wave, Woollen Kits and Aoi (see band profiles below!), plus DJs theUniverse, Deformative, DJ Ka-Splosion and Panel of Judges DJs.Punters who attended Winter Tones at Roxanne last year will be pleased to know that we’ve taken some steps to ensure no-one will be kept out in the cold. The new and improved features of Spring Tones include hard tickets and stairwell access to keep queues to a minimum, plus a balcony to keep smokers close to the action. Spring Tones tickets are $35 + booking fee and are on sale now from Polyester (city & Fitzroy), Missing Link, Corner Hotel box office (57 Swan St Richmond, phone  9427 9198) or right here from the Mistletone website.Doors open 6.30pm. SPRING TONES ARTIST PROFILES…

Straight outta Brooklyn, Vivian Girls are bringing a bevy of garagey girl group goodness to headline Spring Tones as part of their first ever Australian tour. The trio — Cassie Ramone (guitar/vocals), Kickball Katy (bass/drums/vocals) and Ali Koehler (drums/bass/vocals) — burst on to the scene last year with a critics-favourite debut album and an ace sound combining 1960s girl-group vocals, fuzzy garage rock, punk and post-punk with blasts of shoegaze and skuzzy DIY charm. On their short road to “out of nowhere” status, the ‘Girls have blurred the lines of genres and come up with something aggressive yet beautiful; simple, gutsy music with a lot of class and melody. Their much anticipated new album Everything Goes Wrong is out soon on In-Fidelity through Inertia.

VIVIAN GIRLS AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES:

SYDNEY: Fri 25 Sep @ Spectrum w/ Hawnay Troof (USA), Circle Pit and Dead Farmers. Tickets on sale now from Moshtix outlets or phone 1300 GET TIX.MELBOURNE: Sat 26 Sep headlining Spring Tones @ Roxanne Parlour (Level 3, 2 Coverlid Pl, city) w/ Bachelorette (NZ), Ducktails (USA), Tiny Vipers (USA), Hawnay Troof (USA), Love Of Diagrams, St Helens, Aleks & The Ramps, Songs (Syd), The Dacios, UV Race, Mark Barrage, Super Wild Horses, Rat Vs Possum, Snawklor , Children Of The Wave, Woollen Kits And Aoi. Spring Tones tickets on sale now from Polyester, Missing Link, Corner Hotel box office (57 Swan St Richmond, phone  9427 9198) or Mistletone website.HOBART: Sun 27 Sep @ Brisbane Hotel w/ Native Cats, Moe Grizzly and Manchester Mourning. Licensed all ages show, starts 5pm. Tickets on sale now from Brisbane Hotel, Ruffcut Records and The Dwarf website.MELBOURNE: Wed 30 Sep @ Northcote Social Club w/ Panel of Judges and Miniature Submarines. Tickets on sale now from NSC box office, phone 9486 1677.ADELAIDE: Thu 1 Oct @ Metro Hotel w/ Hit The Jackpot and Rich Parents. Tickets on sale now from Oztix outlets or phone 1300 762 545. BRISBANE: Fri 2 Oct @ Step Inn w/ Nova Scotia, The Legend with the Deadnotes, and Feathers. Tickets on sale now from Oztix outlets or phone 1300 762 545.NEWCASTLE: Sat 3 Oct @ Sound Summit. More info here.

Annabel Alpers, the songwriter from New Zealand who’s behind the studio concoctions of Bachelorette, is fascinated by the way things work: cities, androids, relationships, life and death, “the neural pathways in my brain.” Her fascination with systems and mechanisms dovetails with her music, which loops and layers her voice and instruments into lofty pop edifices, pulsating and chiming in radiant major chords. The songs on her new Bachelorette album, “My Electric Family” (out now on Mistletone in Australia, and Drag City in the US), aren’t as entirely self-made as her previous work; they incorporate other musicians on guitars and drums, only enriching her reveries. Annabel will return to Melbourne for one of her mesmerising solo performan
ces at Spring Tones.

Love Of Diagrams have just unveiled Nowhere Forever, their awesome new album. Recorded at Bear Creek Studios in Seattle with producer Ryan Hadlock (Gossip, Blonde Redhead, Steve Malkmus among many others), Nowhere Forever is the guitar-drenched dream-pop record Love of Diagrams have always wanted to make. It’s a new exploration of maximalism – a heavy, guitar drenched layered sound featuring Love of Diagrams’ most sophisticated songwriting and most beautiful pop melodies to date. The dual vocals and harmonies of Antonia Sellbach and Luke Horton, and the hypnotic beats of Monika Fikerle on drums, have never sounded finer.

A cursory glance at the pre-history of the people involved in St Helens reveals one-degree-of separation from Spider Vomit, Bird Blobs, Minimum Chips, Alpha Males and Kes Band. Satelliting the core band are occasional contributors from Love Of Diagrams and Panel Of Judges. The gravity that pulls their energies into something tangible, into the distinct entity that is St Helens, is the songwriting skills of Jarrod Quarrell. Jarrod previously fronted The New Season and (when there’s a full moon) still prowls the night as Lost Animal, performing in minimalist solo electronic mode. Jarrod’s world weary but ultimately victorious songs, his bitter-sweet, intertwining vocals with Hannah Brooks, the band’s razor sharp guitar interplay, and the broken glass danger of their live performances have made St Helens a must on the Melbourne scene.

From unintentional beginnings back in 2005, Aleks & The Ramps slowly morphed into a “real” band with performances featuring choreographed dance moves, ill-fitting basketball uniforms, injuries and equipment breakages due to wild stage behaviour accompanying their schizophrenic pop tunes. Their second album Midnight Believer is a fine demonstration of the Ramps’ peculiar and wondrous kind of haphazard indie rock, or experimental pop which is perhaps the result of short-attention-span-songwriting. Or something. Sometimes (if you play your cards right) they do sick dance routines. 

Tiny Vipers, aka Jesy Fortino, a musician living in Seattle, is bringing her sparse and haunting songs to Australia for the first time. Tiny Vipers has just released Life on Earth, her second album on Sub Pop/Stomp. Tiny Vipers’ complex yet minimal sound  of her bouyantly deep voice, accompanied by sparse yet deft acoustic guitar, offers mysterious windows into a fragile human soul with a beautiful and hollow vision of experiences beyond. Fortino simultaneously conveys the sadness of trauma and a tremendous natural beauty of untamed wilderness of the human heart and soul. Transcending the mere folk tag, Tiny Vipers leaves behind her contemporaries. Often compared to Joanna Newsom or Cat Power, the music has been deconstructed into an aether that floats beside the poignant lyrics. Drawing from disparate inspirational sources, from the avant-garde or from country musician Townes Van Zandt, Tiny Vipers’ playing is no imitation. Fortino stands on her own, giving a musical life to those themes that inhabit her lyricisms: love found and lost, places come and gone.

Ducktails is Matthew Mondanile, a New Jerseyian whose pop is drenched in a warm drone. There is a pretty amazingly realized aesthetic running through his stuff, with all its plastic nostalgias — like Ninja Turtles pizza, fake palm trees, sugary cereal — and the lo-fi tape fuzz that also permeates his other projects, Predator Vision, Real Estate, and Dreams In Mirror Field. It’s home recording with one of the comfiest feels you’ll find, reminiscent of Ariel Pink but with an exploratory nudge. Matthew prefers cassettes as scuffed-up homes for this stuff, but he’s just released a vinyl full-length on LA DIY label Not Not Fun. This might be the culmination of a point in time in music history, of the so-called “lo-fi tropical psych-drone” sound.

Hawnay Troof‘s story is one of great complexity. Leftfield prodigy Vice Cooler, a gifted small town reject, has redefined underground music with a strong work ethic, charm, and a smooth grace. The spark for HT was ignited while Cooler was attending high school in Alabama. From making humble tunes in his bedroom to inciting thousands internationally into a craze, Cooler quickly turned into one of the most respected southern “outsider” artists. Hawnay Troof created some of the strangest (and often difficult) electronic music of the first decade of the 21st Century, yet the songs resonate via turntables in Europe’s most prestigious dance clubs, raves, and basements. Managing to steal show after show with his unifying performances, he has made even the most reserved art galleries break into dance.

Songs are Steve Uren, Max Doyle, Ela Stiles and Jeff Burch: a fabulous, Sydney based four piece, 3/4 of whom originally hail from New Zealand. One of our fave Australian bands of this and any era, Songs are about to release their wildly anticipated debut album on Popfrenzy Records.  “Inspired by bands like the Clean and the Go-Betweens, Songs make
music that sounds like dancing around your kitchen.” – Dazed and Confused.  “Songs are four people who know a lot of stuff and who make music that sounds like they know a lot of stuff.” –  Vice Australia.

 The Dacios are a high-octane, lysergic, nitrous sucking rock n’ roll beast. Like a reprobate Phoenix exploding from the ashes of legendary Tasmanian band Little Ugly Girls, The Dacios initially tore onto local stages in 2005. Permanently stimulated by a synapse twisting brew of rock n’ roll sour mash, they are esteemed for their white-heat live performances. Linda J’s lyrical concoctions are a virulent antivenom which she expectorates in heaving torrents against the darkening forces of urban banality. Her unflinching psychic insights wrench the cancerous lesions of modern life into the glare and splay love’s ordeals on a dissection table like so many toads, their entrails pullulating with rheumy ooze. Monkeys Blood by The Dacios is available now via Tom Lyngcoln’s cochlear speakeasy, Solar/Sonar.

Proto punks The UV Race (featuring members of Straightjacket Nation, Dick Diver and various Latrobe Valley ne’er-do-wells) have been playing for a year and a half now. As the story goes, a bunch of them got together and decided they’d start a band that sounded like the Electric Eels, or at least a band that subscribed to their aesthetic. The UV Race specialise in “throwback punkaroo songs that are primitive and exuberantly discordant and juvenile, wheelbarrows full of enthusiasm hauling loads of muck and mire around these tunes, vocals get mumbled and howled like a dog, there’s some talk of blues, bleating keyboard shepherding underthunk-drumbeats and jabbed/strummed guitar…it’s Australia(2008)-via-Clevo(1978)“ – Terminal Boredom. The UV Race’s debut 7 inch (captured on tape by Eddy Current guitarist Mikey Young) is nearly sold out and they have a vinyl album is coming out in a couple of months and they also feature on an Aarght! Records compilation, The Real Worlds Lousy With Ideas vol 7. 

A Mistletone party would not be complete without a performance by Mark Barrage. It’s been a wee while since Mark Barrage released his brilliant Mistletone debut Delays, which was bestowed with four stars by the Music Australia Guide and declared it “raw, bedroom-produced brilliance.” Mark Barrage is the moniker adopted by Melbourne-based sound maker Mark Gomes, formerly known as Barrage. His sound is that of obfuscated, broken electronica – blunted samples and bent, buzzing synths playing against one another between the walls of his out-pop compositions.

Amy Franz and Hayley McKee formed Super Wild Horses in 2008 in a car whilst shouting bratty rhymes at each other.  Beer was involved. Earlier this year, Aarght! Records released their eponymous 45 rpm EP, featuring 6 excellent bursts of skeletal pop evoking Phil Spector & The Ronettes on a budget in a No Wave tin shed.  Super Wild Horses’ songs are stripped to the very backbone and clad in distorted call and response Fall-esque yelps, cavernous big beats, and primal twangs. Their raucous performances gleefully prove that all it takes to be a kick-arse band is to get up there and do it. If there is a game plan it’s to have fun – loud, primitive fun.

Rat Vs Possum is made up of four friends that like floor toms, vocal harmonies, pop music, experimental music, drum samplers, casio keyboards, jangly guitars, loop pedals, glitter, healthy food promoting, hugging, dancing, collaborating and celebrating. Their live shows have been said to create “a joyous, harmonious atmosphere amongst the audience that you kind of feel that instead of playing their whacked-out, tom-heavy psychedelic anthems, these four misfits are actually the good witches of Brunswick casting blissful spells on us all, intent on converting the world to their doctrine of love for heroic apes, glitter, and communal fruit.” – Deformative 

The French is a completely new project featuring Nathan Gray, Julie Burleigh (occasional sitarist in the Hi God People and recorder player in Beaches) and Bianca Hester (Paeces). More details as they come to hand!

Children Of The Wave came together in Melbourne in 2006, the union of a folk/pop songwriter (Major Chord) and music writer and member of wrong rock/ noise outfit Front of Van. Carapace slowly evolved from studio experimentation, from half starte
d musical sentences, from uncomfortable silences and curious sonic experiments and have developed a unique sound with elements of pastoral pop, field recordings and musique concrete imbedded in textural loops, harmonies, and conventional instruments such as organs, melodica and clarinet. blissful debut album Carapace (out now on Sensory Projects) is filled with experiments in pop, ethnic-melds, near-country, acoustics, found sounds, field recordings, and cinematic abstractions of the most textural, yet strangely melodic inclination.

Woollen Kits play a kind of washed-out punk rock that slides a line between Bratmobile, Jonathan Richman and Scratch Acid and have released three home-recorded and handmade EPs on their own Periodic Collective label over the past two years, including a split with Wonderful Fellowship. In 2009 they became a three piece, and continue to play short and catchy pop tunes, shorter and catchier than ever.

From the beyond comes Aoi, dropping jewels of hand-stitched experimental hip hop. Tracing an arc of dusty chopped samples and lo-fi synth splatters into a texta mess of headnod drum patterns, Aoi has been producing primitive abstract instrumentals and playing live around Melbourne since late 2007.