Month: April 2020

You Am I hit the the top of the Aussie charts with their sophomoric record Hi Fi Way, seeing the band embellish the punk and grunge driven formula established on their debut with elements of the frantic rhythm guitar of the Kinks and dynamic arrangements of the Who. With help from Sonic Youth axe-man Lee Ranaldo on production, the band opts for a stripped down, four-to-the-floor approach with much of the material, save for the occasional string overdub during tender moments from vocalist Tim Rogers. The whole album seems built around Rogers’ lyricism and rightfully so – his writing is incredibly relatable for such introspective subject matter, whether he’s singing about “personality pills and something red to swill” or washing his hands four thousand times a day, Rogers’ ability to make a listener nostalgic or heartbroken over something that they’ve never experienced is both a rare gift and the mark of a true craftsman. It isn’t easy to look in the mirror and write what you see – his unflinching honesty as a writer is the lynchpin of these songs.

Roxy Music’s first record, shimmering with campy decadence and art-school ambition, is the sum of the chemistry between two of its principal creators – Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno. Ferry, Roxy Music’s chief songwriter and lead vocalist was a Humphrey Bogart obsessive who’s love of fine tailoring and supermodels had seen him dubbed “Byron Ferrari” by the rock press. Eno was to be an electronic music pioneer whose avant garde production style and synthetic electronic “treatments” for songs (which would notably become a centrepiece of David Bowie’s Heroes a few years later) would revolutionise pop music in the years to come. On Roxy Music, both men’s debut album, the wilful dissonance between Ferry’s pouting romanticism and Eno’s proto-ambient techniques really set the band apart from the rest of the early seventies glam rock pack. While the two are still discovering their chemistry, the moments where they connect are alchemical – the stutter of album opener Re-make/Re-model and the liquid velvet of Ladytron are “eureka” moments for the band. Unchecked, their ambitions carry them in different directions -the 7 minute, Eno driven synth jam “Sea Breezes” is an example. Eno would only stay with the band for one more record (the excellent For Your Pleasure) but this, Roxy Music’s debut, was the birth of a new kind of rock n’ roll: highly stylised and decadent but also world-weary and intelligent with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

King Gizzard’s sixth album, Quarters!, is a sprawling suite of four songs that sees the shapeshifting septet turn their focus to jazz-inflected acid rock. Each of the four tracks on Quarters! clocks in at exactly 10:10 – while the significance of this is unclear, the influences of LA Woman era Doors and Houses of the Holy era Zeppelin certainly inform these sprawling, proggy excursions. Album opener the River drifts along in an upbeat haze and the other three tracks follow suit – all easy, spacious jams over pulsating jazz rhythms that ebb and flow quite naturally. Each song finds an agreeable groove to inhabit and sticks to it, filling the space with intricately woven guitar textures and rhythmic interplay before drifting into the next jam as fluidly as a change of seasons. A hard left turn for the band which saw them nominated for Best Jazz Album at the 2015 Aria Music Awards, Quarters! is listless and meandering in the best way, 40:40 of pure psychedelic day-dream.