As a concept, drinking on weeknights is aspirational to me, in the sense of sending yourself out there for it to be the main event of your day. In reality I have a job I care about and find myself increasingly ageing, so my priorities lie elsewhere. What I think Sarah Mary Chadwick is making a point of in her song “Drinking on a Tuesday”, is that it takes commitment, to preparing the right social attitude - “you gotta have a joke to tell” - to really earn a place among the dedicated. I’m just not that fun. 

I happened to listen to it over again in a hotel room in Germany with a gymnastics enthusiast. We’d been hiking in the mountains and talking about the moments of glory these athletes are forced to endure, through injury and exploitation, so it stuck out how Sarah Mary Chadwick draws on a metaphor of athletic dedication and commitment, to pull of a song as blurred around the edges of vaudeville as it is pointed. Although the jangly piano, and faintly reggae-like effect of “Drinking on a Tuesday” ring as a singalong, it might not work with any voice other than Sarah Mary Chadwick’s. A solo in the midst of a team effort.

This might be a song about preparing yourself for the endurance sport of self-destruction. If you wish to be seen clearly, listen to it while in a country where drinking is one of the happiest parts of their culture.

Messages to God is out September 15 via Kill Rock Stars.

Review by C. Billing.

On Jazmine Mary’s ruminative new single “Seagull”, the artist makes a poet’s choices with lyrics that would fit in the cannon of Aldous Harding, or even a little bit Lorde, and twists their voice like a chopped ’n screwed Fiona Apple. Usually when I write to review a song I’m looking to uncover meaning in those lyrics, but instead I find myself accepting that the inscrutable nature of “Seagull” means I’m just going to have to let it be what it is- because ‘Hound dog/ flower power/ hound dog/ flower power’ has never made so much sense than in the place where Jazmine Mary has put it.

Sandwiched between soft drums and a piano, delicate wind instruments flesh out “Seagull”. Maybe I look to the video to make sense of something I can’t explain, where two dancers pose, hold, and lift the musician in a display of strength and comfort. The lighting of Jazmine Mary’s eyes up close as the three of them sway together is the final piece of a puzzle I can’t solve- that “Seagull” is a space where everything is exactly where it ought to be.

Jazmine Mary is on tour throughout July in support of her new album Dog out June 2. Tickets available here.

Review by C. Billing.

Once in a weenie while you catch a live band that comes at you from all angles, making multiple concurrent cases for immediately becoming one of your must-see acts. A couple of weeks ago I had the magnificent fortune to see Ringlets live, and by the end of their set I had already texted everyone in my rolodex to spread the good word.

A deceptively classic-shaped indie rock quartet, Ringlets is the musical Voltron formed by Arlo, Arabella, Leith, and László; this isn’t your cookie cutter rock band, no ma’am. Their self-titled debut album has just dropped, and it’s packed with influences that don’t care if you think they’re cool or not, and melodies that don’t care if you wanted to share your brain with other songs. 

Opening tune ‘I Used To Paint’ kicks off with an intro that, bear with me, calls to mind… 90s Incubus, before immediately giving way to a melodic indie rock tune that would have Suede’s Brett Anderson trading in every cigarette in his pack to have written. 

The album continues apace, with single ‘Sever’ another stand-out, melding kickass riffs with vocal acrobatics, relentless rhythms, and even hints of 90s emo. Yeah, it’s hard to explain.

There’s a change of scenery with eighth track ‘Made of Mist’, with bassist Arabella stepping in to share lead vocals. Her voice would nestle in perfectly over the top of a shoegaze soundtrack, but instead it’s a driving rock number that only heats up as it progresses.

In a world where it’s smart to play dumb, on their debut album Ringlets have unleashed a monster that’s at once intelligent, exciting, and deadly serious about your enjoyment. And they’re unbelievable live, but I probably already texted you about that… 

Review by Matthew “Rolodex” Crawley

Madonna’s Ray of Light is the album that made her a voice- less the idiosyncratic character she’d been known as for decades, instead recognised as a proper, skilled vocalist. Her voice is clear and right up front on that album- her run in the musical Evita trained her not just to perform, but to really, properly sing. I say this because Disembody from Soft Plastics is the best recording I’ve heard from them yet- just how deft those vocals have become from all their training together over only a few years. 

Disembody begins with these vocals up against a background of bass and a casiotone-ish percussion, brought together at just the right moment with a languid swoosh of guitar and sun-warped synth like an out of tune church organ; then a moment of tension that hinges a descent into a driving fury of noise toward the end. There’s something like Julia Deans in Fur Patrol doing Lydia about this song, the voice so skilfully oscillating between melancholy and heartache, boredom and simmering rage, that it makes you forget they’d ever rehearsed it. And there’s something timelessly impressive about singers like these who are unafraid to be, and sound, so clear.

Soft Plastics new album ‘Saturn Return’ is available for pre-order from Flying Out, or their Bandcamp page.

Review by C. Billing.

If you listen to Being Alone by Wiri Donna around other people, no one will talk. The clarity with which musician Bianca Bailey outlines the impact of violent separation, as a soft opener, will take up all the air in a room.

It has the effect of someone casually dropping into a conversation at a party that they hate it here, while everyone around them is out of it. In both the lyrics that rhyme without the appearance of any effort, and the way that she pronounces them, “so I place toothpaste/around my neck/an old wives tale to/get rid of bruises/that nobody uses.” That Courtney Barnett and Anthonie Tonnon trick of utilising a strong accent to create rhymes where they wouldn’t exist on the page, Bailey makes her untethered state seem like the most natural thing in the world.

Wiri Donna’s Being Alone EP is a concept album of sorts, one that tracks the experience of coming of age: from confusion to learning, and curiosity to pain, and the slow burn of increasing pressure on your neck as it comes in and out of focus.

It’s like the stages of grief, misunderstood as being for the people who remain rather than as intended to guide the one who is dying, perhaps ‘coming of age’ isn’t a linear process either, but more like getting stuck in a storm that is in a constant state of transition, between the burst and recession of shock and fury.

How long you stay stuck in the middle part depends on so many things, a flux state captured by Being Alone, and ultimately left unanswered.

Review by C. Billing.