Pop in print

Rowland S Howard

2009-07-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

Teenage Snuff Film
Cooking Vinyl, 1999

It reminds me of a song called 'Lay Me Low', five minutes of melodrama that I know like the back of my hand, from the album Let Love In by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. On that track, Cave sings about the impact his death will have on the world. It is ridiculously self-indulgent and, eventually, just plain ridiculous. It starts off with his friends and family mourning and then journalists writing their obituaries: "They'll try telephoning my mother/ But they'll end up getting my brother/ Who'll spill the story of some long gone lover/ That I hardly know." Then it moves into fantasy – motorcades ten miles long at his funeral, the sky storming and the sea raging to mark his passing. Oh, what nerve! To believe that the fucking Earth itself would shake at his loss!

The song that reminds me of 'Lay Me Low', and that I have been listening to all week, is 'Sleep Alone', from Rowland S Howard's solo album Teenage Snuff Film. Perhaps it's no coincidence they remind me of each other. Howard was the other main songwriter in The Birthday Party, the group that launched Cave's career. I have written before of how the two met, and how they parted over creative differences, leading to the end of the band. After The Birthday Party, as Cave's solo career took off, Howard remained comparatively underground, collaborating with arty punk artists like Lydia Lunch, joining Crime and the City Solution and later starting his own group These Immortal Souls. In '99, two decades after writing the famous track 'Shivers', he released his own solo album.

'Sleep Alone' is the final song on the record. It opens with a crash – all wailing guitar and high-pitched squeals of feedback over a pummelling drumbeat – and Howard's posturing as some sort of intergalactic Dirty Harry taking aim at the universe. "First I shot down the stars/ Because you said they ruled us," he sings, matter-of-factly, as if he was just doing a job, before reloading and moving onto the next target. "Then I took out Mars/ Yeah, he was the cruellest/ His lover followed suit/ By way of suicide/ And the others stood there silent/ As I dealt out peace of mind." After taking down the planets, one by one, he finally rests: "The sky is empty, silent/ The Earth is still as stone/ So nothing stands above me/ Now I can sleep alone." It is ego unleashed.

The Drones

2009-06-15T08:00:00.001-07:00

Havilah
All Tomorrow's Parties, 2008

Most of my favourite songs by The Drones – and there are many – tell specific stories or describe particular scenes. The first one I ever heard was 'The Cockeyed Lowlife Of The Highlands', the opening track on their debut album, which just about blew my head off. It tells of a couple on the run after holding up a bank. "Margorie! It seems you're shaking, shaking, shaking so bad/ The pigs are gonna track us with a Richter scale!" yells one to the other. Then they get in the backseat, shoot up to calm down, and she kills him. (And while we're on that note, there is, I think, a lot to be said about the female characters in Gareth Liddiard's songs.)

Anyway, 'Luck In Odd Numbers', from last year's Havilah, isn't like that at all. It was the first thing I listened to in 2009 and, judging by how often I've played it since, it will be the last as well. I have no fucking clue what it is about. It is full of Biblical and geographical references – for example, it is the only song to actually mention Havilah, the name of the album and also a land of abundance spoken about in Genesis – along with the repetition of the numbers one, three, five, seven and nine. It goes on for eight and a half minutes, broken in two parts, and finishes in a deafening, wailing climax with the singer screaming out to God.

I have been trying to figure out exactly what it is about that song that led me to listen to it all week – which may sound ridiculous, like I'm over-thinking things for the point of it, but, you know, that is what I do – and, for the most part, I have been failing. Perhaps it's the rhythm and the sound, that epic sound of splintering guitars as large as the landscapes in the lyrics. Perhaps it's the beauty of the verses, like this one, that do nothing to explain what the song is about but tell a story in themselves: "And each chance I get to get close to you/ The shadows come and the late afternoon makes/ The warmth withdraw like a dive bell sinks/ And the air turns to octopus ink."

Gogol Bordello

2009-06-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

Gypsy Punks
Side One Dummy, 2005

Occasionally you just want to write about a band of gypsy punks. Gogol Bordello are a group of Eastern European agitators from the lower east side of New York who dress up in ridiculous costumes, play a mix of folk and punk and boast about taking over America. If you've seen the no-wave documentary Kill Your Idols, you might remember the band's enigmatic singer Eugene Hutz alongside the other humorous standouts – groupie turned grumpy singer Lydia Lunch and those two hedonistic dickheads from A.R.E. Weapons. Hutz was the one dressed like a cartoon carny, who offered a brilliant riposte to this decade's recycling of 1980s fashion: "Sure, it might seem like a good theme for a party on Saturday night, but you wouldn't want to base a cultural revolution on it."

Clearly, in Hutz’s opinion, that revolution would be much better handled by the gypsies. There's a song saying so on Gypsy Punks. In fact, there's ten of them. Of the other three songs, two are about parties and purple clothes and one is instrumental. It's not quite clear how seriously Hutz takes himself (it certainly is hard to as a listener), but you can hardly fault his good intentions, spat out in faulty grammar like a pissed-off ESL student: "I'm gathering new generation/ That's gonna stand up to it/ To this karaoke dictatorship!/ I make a better rock revolution alone with my DICK!" Take THAT, poseurs! That THAT, NME! Pow, wham!

The best songs on Gypsy Punks are meant for partying and, like everything about the band, they announce themselves fairly loudly. 'Dogs Were Barking' is a raucous Eastern European wedding celebration, while 'Oh No' documents a neighbourhood party made all the better by an electricity blackout – when it turns all bucket-drums, acoustic guitar and frolicking revellers. The last track, 'Mishto!', is a blistering cover of a traditional folk violin piece, heavy on the kick-drum, that sounds something like a novelty cousin of one of The Dirty Three's more thunderous numbers (in a good way, I promise). Normally I'd try to offer some witty insight at the end of this column, but, well, Gogol Bordello really do just sound like a childish Ukranian punk band playing folk covers. Which is why I love them.

The Riptides

2009-06-01T08:00:00.000-07:00

Resurface
PolyGram, 1987

Sometimes I wish there was space for a subtitle to this column, but I never get around to actually organising it – so you'll just have to use your imagination to pretend this week's is called "In Praise Of Liner Notes". Toby Creswell is the writer behind the recent Great Australian Albums series on SBS, which covered, in wonderful detail, classic records by The Triffids, The Saints, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and, ahem... Silverchair. Anyway, Creswell was also the editor of Rolling Stone in the late 1980s and, after that, one of the founders of Juice magazine and the author of a biography of Jimmy Barnes. I've never met him, but I'm told he is a very nice man.

I first heard The Riptides on one of those compilations of local rock and roll history that I keep crapping on about – Tales From The Australian Underground, I think it was, or Do The Pop, both of which I am still listening to and enjoying – and last year stumbled upon a live double-LP of theirs called Resurface at a second-hand shop. On the inside sleeve is a wonderful review by Creswell, describing his experience of hearing them for the first time. It begins: "We were in a bar called the Australian Heritage in Kings Cross, Sydney. There I was drowning my sorrows on cadged drinks and the last thing I wanted to hear was a surf band from Brisbane..."

Then he describes how the band, seemingly all of a sudden, had kids dancing on chairs and on tables and how the stage was set up in front of a giant window looking down over Rushcutter's Bay and how it fogged up and turned white from all the sweat. It's meant as no disservice to the music to say this story is the best thing about Resurface. It captures something that microphones simply can't – the feeling of being there, of getting swept up in the moment, of being miserable in some dingy bar in Kings Cross in the winter of 1980 and having your night turn around in the best way imaginable. I have read it more times than I've actually listened to the record.

Belle & Sebastian

2009-05-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

If You're Feeling Sinister
Jeepster, 1996

Occasionally, this column chooses itself. Whenever I am very sad, or very happy – or, as has been the case for the last two weeks, both – I end up listening to a song from Belle & Sebastian's second album If You're Feeling Sinister called 'Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying' over and over for days. The song isn't actually as tumultuous as the title would suggest – there's nothing in it to suggest why the protagonist needs to get away, or what from. It's just a story, a gentle and introspective story about reading books and thinking about lovers, with a rhythm that suggests that it is already set on the road – a sort of soft back-and-forth lilt like a train carriage in motion.

When it is playing, the song seems to be endless. It doesn't have any clear beginning or end, and certainly no logical progression between the verses. When I visited the band's website today to double-check the lyric sheet, I was surprised to see that it fit onto a single page. One verse describes getting wrapped up in the pages of a clichéd book with the same kind of fancy and suspension of belief that allows me to play the song itself so many times: "Oh, I'll settle down with some old story/ About a boy who's just like me/ Thought there was love in everything and everyone/ You're so naïve!... Still it was worth it as I turned the pages solemnly, and then!/ With a winning smile, the boy with naivety succeeds!"

I have admitted before to my guilty love for twee pop songs, and this is surely the twee-est of them all – like watching a Wes Anderson film or reading a Salinger book at home in bed with a cup of tea and a cosy blanket. But also, perhaps, it is time I stopped using the word "guilty". I have been thinking lately about sentimentality and the dramatisation of everyday affairs and the search for meaning in the smallest of things – in my favourite writers and critics as much as in pop music – and, I think, I am finally happy to say that I will most always choose that endeavour over the alternatives. Then again, I could just be being a bit emo this week.

Art Brut

2009-05-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Bang Bang Rock & Roll
Banana, 2005

Art Brut appeared a few years ago, about the time Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand were still the next big things (instead of the last big things), with an album about loving rock 'n' roll and hating rock 'n' roll and failing to get an erection and still being in love with a girl that you dated in tenth grade. The lyrics were completely deadpan, half sung and half spoken in a thick English drawl by frontman Eddie Argos, who mocked himself and the group at every possible turn. The album opened with a single called 'Formed A Band', about, um, yeah, forming a band: "And yes, this is my singing voice. It's not irony. It's not rock and roll. We're just talking... to tha kids."

There are so many funny lines on Bang Bang Rock & Roll that I could fill the column with them twice over. But it isn't a novelty record. One of the best tracks is 'Bad Weekend', a counterpart to the earlier 'Good Weekend' (which is about finding a new girlfriend: "We wanna be lapsed Catholics/ Got the contraception but haven't got the knack yet"). The chorus of 'Bad Weekend' is: "Popular culture no longer applies to me." Other lines poke fun at the NME and the fact that there's nothing good on the television. Anyway, I found a live recording of it this week. At the end, Argos stops singing and delivers a long-winded rant. And this is what he says:

"Normally, at this point in the set, I'd tell you all to go home and form a band. But maybe you're like me, and not very musical. So you don't have to form a band. But at least write a fanzine. Or an article for a magazine that I'd like to read. Or a book I'd like to read. Or a sitcom I wanna watch. Or a film I'd buy a cinema ticket for. I don't wanna sound like a hippy, but you can't complain about it! You can't complain about it unless you're doing something about it! So when I come back here in a month's time I'm gonna grab you by the arm and say: 'Where is it? Where is this thing you're supposed to have made?' And if you have nothing for me... if you have nothing for me, then I will be very disappointed."

Ugly Casanova

2009-05-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

Sharpen Your Teeth
Sub Pop, 2002

A few years before Modest Mouse released their fourth album, the moody and wonderful Good News For People Who Love Bad News, Isaac Brock indulged in a side project. He recruited Pall Jenkins from Black Heart Procession, a band who sound exactly like their name would have you believe – all slow, thumping marching beat drums and melodrama – a singer from another indie band, a drummer with a fondness for using found objects and, finally, a fifth musician called Tim Rutilli, who was known for the strangeness and gravity of his work. The others drove to pick Rutilli up at the airport in the middle of the night, where he had flown straight from his grandmother's funeral wearing a brown suit that he stayed in for the next four days.

The ramshackle band was christened Ugly Casanova. Because the story of their getting together wasn't weird enough, Brock invented a character called Edgar Graham who, so the story went, had broken through a backstage window after a Modest Mouse gig to introduce himself to the band and play them his music. He had then started opening for them on tour, playing a few rough songs before stumbling off stage filled with anger and shame. After the tour ended Graham disappeared, leaving behind a collection of demo tapes and scribbled notes that, Brock later decided, should be fleshed out by him and his friends "until such time as Graham resurfaces to take credit for his work and add a bit more to whatever understanding of him still exists".

The result – of whichever story you want to believe – is a sort of American Gothic mix of pop songs built from bizarre scrapes and clangs and rhythms that sounds like they were whistled out on the top of a moonshine jug. The vocals are the most striking – they move between squeals and shrieks and wails. Then, when you're least expecting it, a song will come where Brock gives up all pretence and sings in a plaintive voice that sounds like a friend retelling a sad memory. He is almost completely naked on 'Smoke Like Ribbons', among the whistling and the twangs of the banjo and the fiddle: "Songs were pulled like ribbons from the window of the car/ Lost along the shoulder of the highway..."

Modest Mouse

2009-04-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Good News For People Who Love Bad News
Epic, 2004

What fantastic mood swings. The fourth album by indie rock band Modest Mouse, Good News For People Who Love Bad News, starts off with an ambling song about leaving home. It's full of those useless but interesting philosophical thoughts that fill our minds when they're idle or distracted, and rhymes about the change of seasons, and the feel of the breeze, and words and music. "I like songs about drifters and books about the same/ They both make me feel a little less insane." The insanity does come, eventually, but for the moment it's kept at bay. The second track is an upbeat pop song about a life without sadness or regret that repeats the mantra "it's all okay" and sounds like skipping down the street.

And then, about a third of the way in, there's a track called 'Dig Your Grave' that would win a contest for the most vicious 13-second song in existence, should there ever be one. It has just two lines: "I'm already digging/ I hope you're dead." It's followed up by an ode to nihilism with lyrics about firing shots into mounds of dirt and staying out all night drinking. At around this point you realise there's something strange going on musically as well. The songs seem overly referential. They sound like tributes to the band's idols – 'Dance Hall' mimics Pere Ubu (in fact, I discovered this album after asking someone in a record store if they were playing the new Pere Ubu record), 'This Devil's Workday' does the same with Tom Waits, 'The View' with Talking Heads, and so on.

I suppose that makes it sound cheap, but frankly, the songs are so good it matters very little whether they're tributes or not. The last third of the album returns to what you would say is a take on the band's own style of music, a sort of revisiting of the dreamy indie rock – one part outer space, one part trailer park – they mastered on The Moon And Antarctica. The last song is called 'The Good Times Are Killing Me' and, I'm sure, you can figure out what it's about: "Have one, have twenty more 'one mores'/ And oh, it does not relent/ Jaws clenched tight, we talked all night/ But what the hell did we say?" It sounds like falling asleep at daybreak, before the high has faded.

Genesis

2009-04-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Invisible Touch
Virgin, 1986

When I was a child, my father wanted me to grow up. One day I came home from school excited after learning about the inner workings of medieval castles and the role of the gongfermor, who had to empty the chamber that the toilets drained into. "Dad, what's the worst job in the world?" I asked, expecting the chance to tell him all about the poor shit-farmers. Instead, he replied: "Burying dead children in Bosnia." He was right, I suppose, but it wasn't exactly what I had in mind. That year for Christmas he bought me a copy of My Hiroshima, a picture book about a young girl who survives the nuclear bomb attack and returns home to sift through the bones of her friends. I had nightmares for months.

Around the same time, I began listening to a cassette of Invisible Touch by Genesis that I found in one of my parents' cupboards. When it was released five or six years earlier, it had spent weeks at the top of the charts and sold millions of copies – but I didn't know any of that. To me it was unusual and secret. I had never heard of the band before, or heard my parents play it on the stereo. I listened to it in my room, on my Walkman, and became fixated on a creepy song on Side B that had lyrics about some sort of futuristic nuclear war with children screaming and blood everywhere. I remember it seemed more like a story than a pop song, and I listened to it over and over even though it scared me.

Today I listened to that song, called 'Domino', for the first time in more than fifteen years. My memory was half-right. It is like a story – at ten minutes long and with more than a dozen verses. In fact, it's even broken into two parts, which were originally included on the flip-sides of the album's singles. Musically, it's not so much creepy as indulgent. It sounds like an '80s pop take on the sort of fantastical epic you'd find in prog-rock. The imagery is just as strong as I remember, though. In the opening verse there is rain running down a window. Four minutes in, the song turns nightmarish and the water is replaced with red. Then it turns into a "beautiful river of blood", where children swim and play before their bodies dissolve into the stream.

Hard To Beat

2009-04-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Various Artists
Hard To Beat
Au-go-go, 1989

Okay, this is the final week of rummaging through my favourite rock and roll compilations – but I've saved the best for last. Hard To Beat is a double LP of Stooges songs played by Australian rock bands from the 1980s, including the likes of God, Exploding White Mice, Harem Scarem, Celibate Rifles and the Hard-Ons. In other words, possibly the coolest record ever. Put together by Dave Laing and Bruce Milne, it also comes with a full size, 10-page booklet featuring bios of the bands and a long essay by Murray Engleheart on the influence of the Stooges on the Australian music scene. Rock nerd heaven.

Side two, track one. Stress of Terror, 'Not Right'. I know I said this compilation was full of rock bands, but Stress of Terror are the exception. Formed by John Murphy, drummer of the post punk group Whirlywirld and a member of about a dozen other underground and avant-garde bands, their cover of 'Not Right' sticks out like a sore thumb – a muffled mess of squeals and clangs and the scraping of steel on steel with only the barest trace of melody. Perhaps closer to industrial band Skinny Puppy than the Stooges, but great nonetheless.

Side three, track one. Hard-Ons, '1970'. The single that gave Radio Birdman their name (after they misheard the lyrics) was one of the catchiest in the Stooges' catalogue – a rock song with swagger and swing about getting fucked up on a Saturday night. Hardly a surprise, then, that Australia's enduring punk heroes the Hard-Ons take it, shove a rocket up its arse and watch it spiral out of control. They thrash it out at almost double-speed and somehow manage to make it even catchier in the process. Dear Hard-Ons, I love you.

Side three, track five. NRG, 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'. One of the several super groups on this record, NRG featured Neil Rogers from the Bo-Weevils and Bill Walsh and Peter Jones from the Cosmic Psychos, along with a mysterious person called "Dog Meat" on vocal duty (who I can only presume is Dave Laing, but don't quote me on that). They're pretty faithful to the original on this track – it's not as exciting as, say, 'Ann' by Feedtime, which comes up next – but that's hardly the point. As we all know, the point is simply to play some fucken Stooges.

The Missing Link Story

2009-04-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

Various Artists
The Missing Link Story
Missing Link, 2004

Another rock and roll compilation, this time from legendary Melbourne label Missing Link. The label was originally based in the record shop of the same name founded by David Pepperell and Keith Glass in the seventies, which still exists today in a different building and with different owners. In the liner notes, Glass describes how the label came to be at the forefront of punk and new wave in Australia, releasing records by The Go-Betweens, The Birthday Party and Laughing Clowns: "The shop was the nerve centre, where trends could not only be detected but also started."

Track four. Laughing Clowns, 'Holy Joe'. One of my favourite songs, and probably one of my girlfriend's least favourite. An incredibly dark and arty pop song with strange rhythms and the wails of an atonal saxophone. The music video is a classic, showing a young Ed Kuepper and drummer Jeffrey Wegener made-up like new wave mannequins, along with the rest of the band playing in a small studio surrounded by paintings in shades of black, blue and white. Wegener looks infatuated with the kit, pulling a million faces a minute.

Track five. The Go-Betweens, 'By Chance'. A fair way from the fey pop that "the Gobs" are best remembered for, 'By Chance' was originally recorded as a B-side for the single 'Hammer The Hammer' and later ended up in a different incarnation on the album Before Hollywood. A slightly tortured song with a catchy melody but a metallic sound: "My head fits into my hands/ I roll it around and nothing comes out." It serves as a warm-up for the next track by The Tuff Monks, a once-off supergroup featuring members of The Birthday Party and The Go-Betweens.

Track fourteen. The Dynamic Hepnotics, 'Hepnobeat'. Honestly, I don't really know what to say about this one. A bizarre hip-shaker inspired by swing or samba or whatever, with a big, juicy beat and the presence of weird and wonderful singer "Continental" Robert Susz. Here's what the liner notes say: "Susz was the front man of one cool R&B / soul group at a time the passion of punk threatened to swamp anything cool." I like it mainly because it doesn't fit in with all the other cuts by po-faced punk rockers. I played it once during a DJ set and everyone danced, so that's enough for me.

Rock And Roll 01

2009-03-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

Rough Trade Shops Rock And Roll 01
Rough Trade Shops, 2002

My favourite thing to listen to after a big night out is Rock And Roll 01, compiled by the staff at Rough Trade Shops, a pair of record stores in London. My friends think this is slightly insane. Why on earth would you want to treat a hangover with squealing rock and roll?, they ask. Oh, so many reasons. To clear the clouds from my head, for one. Possibly also to punish myself, just a little. But mostly, because I feed off the energy. Here are a few of my favourite songs.

Disc one, track one. The Stooges, 'I Got A Right'. Available for years only as a bootleg, 'I Got A Right' was originally recorded as a demo for Raw Power, the band's last album before they split, and then discarded. It was reissued on CD in 1990. A furious thrash of metal and attitude, it opens with one of Iggy's howls and then the screamed declaration: "Any time I want, I got a right to move, no matter what they say! Any old time!" Damn right you do, Iggy. Damn right you do.

Disc one, track twenty-one. The Fall, 'Dr Buck's Letter'. British post-punk band The Fall inspire a sort of feverish devotion among record collectors that scares even obsessive-compulsives. They've released about five thousand records (or so), and while only a fraction of them are any good, that still makes for a lot of decent cuts. 'Dr Buck's Letter' is one of them – a futuristic funeral song with a drumbeat like trudging through mud and spoken word lyrics that paint a mad scientist character as rich as you'd find in any audiobook. Creepy.

Disc two, track fifteen. Rocket From The Crypt, 'Born In '69'. Horns in rock music are a controversial topic, and for the record, I think they should be mandatory. This one's on the same disc as another good brass-in-rock song, that wonderful fuck-you to the advertising industry called 'Know Your Product' by The Saints. 'Born In '69' continues in a similar vein. Opening with a drum roll and a blast of noise, it mixes trumpets with call-and-response vocals and the gloriously bratty chorus: "I want it. I need it. I steal it. Alriiight!" San Diego shoplifters, unite!

Arab Strap

2009-03-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Last Romance
Chemikal Underground, 2005

"If you can love my growing gut, my rotting teeth and greying hair/ Then I can guarantee I'll do the same as long as you can bear."

Perhaps, on first glance, they're not the most romantic lyrics in the world – but it's all about context. Arab Strap are quite notoriously unromantic. Their songs are filled with late-night ramblings, alcoholic odes, stories of bad sex, break-ups and being burdened with regret the morning after. Playing one of their records is like listening in on a conversation at some dank and miserable pub – but you wouldn't want to get caught eavesdropping. "If I saw another man touch you, I'd break his fucking wrist," hisses Aidan Moffat on one track.

Moffat and Malcolm Middleton formed Arab Strap in 1995 and released six albums with names like The Week Never Starts Round Here and Monday At The Hug And Pint over a decade before calling it a day. They collaborated with musicians including Stuart Murdoch of Belle & Sebastian, Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes and Barry Burns from Mogwai. The duo were adored not least for their talent with lyrics – carefully literate but delivered in a deceptively shambolic drawl, like accidentally honest drunks wrapping personal flaws around four-syllable words and rhymes.

The Last Romance saw the pair exploring the highs and lows of their usual terrain. The excruciating 'Chat in Amsterdam, Winter 2003' details the lowest of "last night" lows, a spoken-word piece in which the terrible anxiety of a hangover is just a temporary break from misery. In 'Speed Date' and 'Dream Sequence', tattooed bikers use euphemisms for polygamy, one-night stands use half-hearted erections at their own discretion the morning after and eventually, maybe, it's possible, right?.. someone will fall in love.

But the most notable track is the last, 'There Is No Ending', on which the band combine their usual grotesque realism with a distinctly upbeat message: “Not every lover’s pact decays, not every sad mistake replays… I'm a huffy prick the best of times, I love to sulk and shout and squeal/ But please don't doubt the way I feel." And what inspired this brief moment of optimism? Well... "Everybody likes a happy ending," Moffat said a few months later, when announcing that the album was their last.

Le Tigre

2009-03-09T08:00:00.001-07:00

Le Tigre
Mr Lady, 1999

After the break-up of Bikini Kill, singer Kathleen Hanna began to take stock of what had happened to the "riot grrl" movement the band helped create. In an interview with Punk Planet in 1998, she spoke about being "fed up with rock music" and being a public figure that people felt free to gossip about and "treat like shit". But she also started to question some of the politics the band had espoused and that the independent music scene took for granted. For example, its opposition to mainstream media. Rolling Stone may have turned her ideas into sound bites, but the coverage also helped inspire more young listeners to get interested in politics. Then there was the strange expectation that to be an activist, you had to act like a victim. "I think it's a joyous thing to fight back," she said.

The one idea Hanna remained firm on was that she wanted revolution, not just the same opportunities as men to climb up the corporate ladder. "I don't believe in trying to change the system as it is, because the whole system has to change," she said. The following year she founded a new band called Le Tigre with friends Johanna Fateman, a zine-maker, and Sadie Benning, who created experimental films. Their debut album sounded very little like the vicious punk rock of Bikini Kill. It was filled with pop melodies, cheap synthesiser and quirky samples. On 'Hot Topic' the band reeled off the names of almost sixty of their heroes on top of a drumbeat, drawing on the sounds of hip-hop and retro girl groups.

But the most notable thing about Le Tigre was its merciless critique of other musicians. On opening track 'Deceptacon', Hanna didn't mince words while taking a nameless pop star to task over trite lyrics: "I'm so bored that I'd be entertained even by a stupid fucking linoleum floor/ A linoleum floor!/ Your lyrics are dumb like a linoleum floor!/ I'll walk on it/ I'll walk all over you." On 'The The Empty' she went a step further, spitting acid in a high-pitched squeal over electric guitar and a skittering drum machine: "I went to your concert and I didn't feel anything/ I went to your concert and I didn't hear anything!" And then, when the discordant sound drops off for a second: "Oh, baby, why won't you talk to me?/ Oh, baby, you just wanna entertain?/ Oh, baby, you don't say ANYTHING!"

Bikini Kill

2009-03-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

Pussy Whipped
Kill Rock Stars, 1993

When Crass, the anarchist punk band I wrote about last week, appeared on stage they did so in matching black military-surplus outfits, supposedly as an "attack on the cult of personality" but also, no doubt, to highlight their discomfort with mainstream culture and the oppressive nature of women's fashion. The opening track on their third album Penis Envy, 'Bata Motel', was filled with sexual imagery – romance, high heels, make up – that became sadistic and grotesque as the song went on. "My breasts to tempt inside my bra/ My face painted up like a movie star," sang Eve Libertine with mock histrionics. "Trip me over, show me the floor/ Tease me tease me, make me stay/ In my red high-heels I can't get away."

Ten years later, the face of radical feminism in pop music looked closer to the character in those lyrics than the band in their shapeless uniforms. Kathleen Hanna, the singer of Bikini Kill and the woman most widely associated with the "riot grrl" movement, rejected the notion that glamour and feminism couldn't mix, appearing on stage and in photos wearing short dresses, lipstick and boots. She had formed the band with Kathi Wilcox, Tobi Vail and Billy Karren, after the group began creating a feminist fanzine of the same name. Their first album, a cassette demo called Revolution Girl Style Now, set the tone for their work – furious and rough-around-the-edges punk rock mixed with gender politics – before they signed with the then fledgling, and now very famous, Kill Rock Stars label.

By the time they released their signature album Pussy Whipped, Bikini Kill and Hanna had become rather infamous and, thanks in part to the success of Nirvana's Nevermind, underground movements such as riot grrl had become topics of intense interest for the media. There was a standoff, of sorts, as riot grrl advocates called for a media blackout (meaning that no one should speak to journalists), while every magazine from Rolling Stone and Newsweek to national school newspaper Scholastic Update wrote about it. Hanna's combination of fashion and politics proved to be more popular than, perhaps, it was intended to be. A few years later, the slogan "girl power" – which had adorned the cover of Bikini Kill zine #2 – was plastered across the chests of The Spice Girls. Bikini Kill released one more album and broke up in 1998.

Crass

2009-02-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

Penis Envy
Crass Records, 1981

Legend has it that the third album by Crass, Penis Envy, climbed to the top of the British independent charts despite not containing any singles. This is not entirely true. Teenage girls flicking through the May, 1981 "Bridal Special" issue of Loving magazine might have noticed a small coupon, nestled between stories like "Dreamy Wedding Dresses and Magical Make-Up" and "How Revealing Is Your Underwear?", advertising a free mail-order flexi disc. "Yes, folks, we've got together with Creative Recording and Sound Services* to offer you the chance to make your wedding day that extra bit special with this romantic song," the offer read. The song, titled 'Our Wedding', was so cheesy as to be absurd. Over pipe organ and church bells, a trembling female voice promised: "All I am I give to you/ You honour me, I'll obey you."

If anyone had looked for other records featuring the singer credited on the disc, Joy De Vivre, they would have stumbled upon on an album sleeve picturing a blow-up sex doll on one side and, on the other, a biblical quote about the creation of woman from man's rib laid over a photograph of pigs hanging in a slaughterhouse. And look for it they did. Especially after NME reported the hoax the following week, on the cover of its own facetious "Bridal Special". At the same time, a pamphlet was making its way around the English music scene – created by the band – which poetically (or melodramatically, depending on your point of view) explained feminist concepts such as the male gaze and accused Loving magazine of selling its readers fantasies of "pure unadulterated shit".

The album behind it all, Penis Envy, must have sounded like an industrial version of hell to listeners who weren't prepared. Far more confronting than the sound of most post-punk bands at the time and only mildly tempered by age, it is an acerbic and thrilling collection of what would probably be known nowadays as "electroclash" – punk vocals mixed with drum machine beats and primitive sound collages, funk bass and electric guitar made to sound like an emergency siren. On 'Health Surface' Joy De Vivre sang in the same satirical feminine voice as on 'Our Wedding', interrupted every now and then by giggles, about hospitals and death. For the rest of the album her counterpart Eve Libertine took over the microphone, spitting lyrics about gender constructions like razor blades: "Poor little filly/ They fuck her mind/ So they can fuck her silly."

* Note the acronym.

Aleks And The Ramps

2009-02-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

Aleks And The Ramps
Independent, 2005

Of the sexiest songs in pop music, few are as dark as The Birthday Party's 'She's Hit'. Built around a funereal bass line and a guitar more splintering hook than sinker, it conjures a film scene that doesn't exist – a couple, fitted in black and fishnet, slow-dancing to the jukebox in some ugly, orange-tiled suburban pub.

It seems trite to reference The Birthday Party nowadays, prominent as they are in the currently fashionable post-punk canon. But few could deny singer Nick Cave's twisted sexuality, for better or worse – from the crudely scratched illustrations of strangled women in the liner notes of Tender Prey to the housewife-melting 'Into My Arms'. The first track from Aleks And The Ramps' self-titled debut, a strange epic titled 'If You Want It Come And Get It', is propelled by the same hip-grinding, gothic funk rhythm as 'She's Hit', but louder and interspersed with... um, a banjo?

Yes, a banjo. And a piano, and a xylophone, and a viola, and some other things I'm not quite sure about at all. It's thoroughly disorientating upon first listen, combining experimentalism, story-telling and snippets of pop melody into an (in?)coherent whole. The lyrics are both sinister and erotic, as Aleks's voice seeps into the jumble: "At first you thought it was a coincidence/ Your bedroom window was in line with the hole in our fence/ And I could tell you were pretending not to know/ That late at night I could see you perform your little show..."

The four-track record captures the same sense of perpetual creation as the band's live show, but proves to be a much darker experience. Final track 'Graveyard Etiquette' is an innocent, off-kilter blend of electronica and folk that collapses on itself half-way through. From the subsequent mess of guitar and percussion blooms an ominous "doo-wop-bah" refrain, like a carnivalesque mushroom cloud. It ends, two minutes later, with an accidentally recorded cough.

Aleks And The Ramps isn't the most polished record of the last year, but it is one of the bravest and — by no coincidence — the most interesting. It's a pity we're only catching up with it now. Aleks, like his exhibitionist female lead, just happened to get lost along the way: "I saw your missing persons photo again/ The thought of you with devil horns made me wish I had a pen..."

Andrew Ramadge is on holidays. This review was first published in Mess+Noise.

The Cramps

2009-02-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Live At Napa State Mental Hospital
Target Video, 1984

It's one of the more unusual gigs captured on film. The singer, Lux Interior, shakes his body and runs up and down the steps at the front of the stage trying to get the crowd to dance. The guitarist, Byron Gregory, sneers at them while chomping on a cigarette and pausing occasionally to blow a cloud of smoke in someone's face. Poison Ivy stands off to the side, looking at the neck of her guitar, her hair puffed up and knees bent, perched on high heels as if she was ready to pounce. The footage is blurry and black and white, taken on an old hand-held camcorder that pans clumsily around the room.

It takes a while for the crowd to warm up. Near the front, at the top of the steps, a shabby man in a suit and tie begins to jog on the spot as if he was exercising. He glances over his shoulder every now and then to see what everyone else is doing. Next to him a young man in a shirt and jeans starts to double over in time to the rockabilly beat, lurching back and forth with growing momentum until he looks as if he's about to hurl his body into the drum kit. Lux drags a guy in a cowboy hat up the stairs, but he scampers back into the crowd as soon as the singer lets go of his hand.

"We're The Cramps and we're from New York City," Lux announces to the recreation room of the Napa State Mental Hospital in California, "and we drove 3000 miles to play for you." A woman somewhere at the back cuts through the cheering. "FUCK YOU!" she screams in a nasal accent. "Somebody told me you people are crazy," Lux continues, "but I'm not so sure about that." The band fire up the next song and Lux, tall and thin and dressed in black, bent over with his greasy dark hair and his deranged wide-eyed smile, pushes his face right up to a young man in a leather jacket and sings: "The way I walk is just the way I walk/ The way I talk is just the way I talk/ The way I smile is just the way I smile/ Touch me baby and I'll go home wild!"

Lux Interior died last week of a heart condition aged 60.

Broken Social Scene

2009-02-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

You Forgot It In People
Arts & Crafts, 2002

It's no coincidence that the opening track on Broken Social Scene's second album, You Forgot It In People, sounds like an underwater scene – an instrumental with shimmering chimes, muffled echoes here and there and horns like far-off whale calls. It only lasts for a minute or two before the rock and roll kicks in, but that sense of fluidity never leaves. It is an album obsessed with the flow of liquids, from the barrage of images of mouths and lips and teeth and kissing, to ships sailing off into the horizon, menstrual blood and dick-sucking and finally, the wonderful piece de resistance, the climax of a song near the end of the album called, with such fantastic and brutal brevity, 'Lover's Spit'. "All these people drinking lover's spit/ Swallowing words while giving head," Kevin Drew croons over fuzzy guitar and piano keys, his voice lazy and gorgeous and effortless, seeping out of him like the tides in his lyrics. "He is a very fluid person," said guitarist Andrew Whiteman when I asked about the singer during an interview a few years ago. "As such, he is very fond of fluids – piss, vomit and cum being his favourite three."

Broken Social Scene were involved in two notable shifts this decade. They were first introduced to an audience outside Canada by Pitchfork Media critic Ryan Schreiber, who slogged through "boxes upon boxes" of promo discs looking for the next decent band to write about before stumbling onto their wonderful second album, and, in turn, ensuring that his online magazine would be touted as an influential tastemaker for the next ten years. The band, a collective of Toronto musicians from bands such as Stars, Feist, Apostle Of Hustle, Do Make Say Think and a dozen or so more, also made popular the idea of the indie ensemble – the super-group of musicians from a particular town or city who collaborate as a whole and as individuals, most notably represented since then by Animal Collective from Baltimore. It didn't hurt that Broken Social Scene were amazing on stage, either. When they played in Melbourne to promote their third, self-titled album, the musicians seemed to have more stamina than the audience. The crowd seemed to be enduring it by the end – more than two hours of relentless and pitch-perfect orchestra pop with lyrics about desire and bodily fluids.

Sleater-Kinney

2009-01-26T08:00:00.001-08:00

Dig Me Out
Kill Rock Stars, 1997

By the time Sleater-Kinney made their third album, Dig Me Out, singer Corin Tucker had learned to well and truly belt it out, starting off on the title track with a common enough whine and building up to a wail that sounded like a banshee sitting on a sewing pin. She had honed her talents in an earlier band, Heavens To Betsy, a group familiar with songs about sexual abuse and a particular imagination of the female body as, in the words of journalist Johnny Huston, "a battleground to be torn apart by abortion, menstruation and molestation". Later she had taken vocal lessons from a retired opera singer who didn't entirely understand her in return for doing the household chores – taking on shit-kicker jobs in order to better kick the shit out of her audience. Tucker's partner in crime Carrie Brownstein once said to Spin: "I can't relax when our music is playing – I don't know how anyone can." The fact that a band once known for clearing entire rooms of men with their ear-splitting screech can be so loved by someone like myself, who, it should be clear by now, generally fails to relate to female musicians, is one of the more wonderful mysteries of life.

Tucker and Brownstein started playing in Olympia, Washington in the wake of the media circus over "riot grrl" bands like Bikini Kill in the early nineties and cut one single before deciding, after watching a television show about kangaroos, to travel to Australia. By that point they were, in Tucker's words, "really good friends" (if you catch her drift – they split, romantically, but stayed together, musically, a year or two later) and contacted everyone from Australia who had sent them fan mail in preparation for the trip. One guy, named Ian, put them on to a woman called Lora Macfarlane, who ran a zine with him and played the drums, and who joined the band for their first two albums, Sleater-Kinney and Call The Doctor, before returning to Melbourne and founding her own band, ninetynine. After Macfarlane's departure, Tucker and Brownstein found Janet Weiss, who would become their more permanent third member, and signed to the young indie label Kill Rock Stars. They ditched most, but not all, of the politics for their subsequent record, Dig Me Out, to focus instead on the idea that playing music was worth being alive for: "Take take the noise in my head/ C'mon and turn turn it up/ I wanna turn turn you on!"

Tori Amos

2009-01-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

Under The Pink
Atlantic, 1994

My bedroom was at the front of the house, a large brick cottage styled on the homes in California and built with the remnants of an ancient ship for rafters. At night I could hear them arguing through the walls – enormous double-bricked things that stayed cool to the touch no matter how hot the summer was. When the temperature became unbearable I would push my body and my face up against them and suck the cold out of the mortar and the paint. I slept on top of an empty bunk-bed with a dark blue frame that matched the aluminium blinds hanging over the window. There were stars stuck to the roof that glowed in the dark.

After dinner I would climb up into to bed to listen to the radio and read John Marsden's Tomorrow When The War Began. It was the first novel I had ever chosen from the store myself, one of those "young adult" books with a particularly bleak story about a group of young teenagers, led by the narrator Ellie, who go camping and return home to find their families missing and the town invaded by soldiers. Once or twice a night the radio would play 'Cornflake Girl' by Tori Amos, which had been released the same year – a dark pop song with cascading piano and melodramatic lyrics, which, with a strange sort of desire, I would always imagine being sung by the character in the book.

At night, when he was at work, they would continue their arguments punctuated by the slamming of the telephone. When it got too bad I would barricade myself inside the room – back up against the pale wooden chest of draws, trying not to slip on the floorboards, pushing it across the doorway. The door would bang against the chest, again and again, and finally rattle back into place. One night she stopped and then returned with a bucket full of my old toys and smashed them, one by one, against the blocked door as I pushed on the chest from the other side. She stopped and broke down crying. I never listened to the radio again.

The Go! Team

2009-01-12T08:00:00.000-08:00

Thunder, Lightning, Strike
Memphis Industries, 2005

I am writing this week's column from a motel room somewhere between Sydney and Melbourne at three in the morning, after having spent all night ricocheting down the Hume Highway in a steel canister with no suspension. This trip will include seeing The Saints, Laughing Clowns, X and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – all those classic Australian underground bands that appeared in this space last year, after I made a new year's resolution to spend more time discussing local music history. Half of them I never expected to see with my own eyes, until the announcements of the All Tomorrow's Parties music festivals and a new round of the related Don't Look Back album performances. All in all, it's a pretty awesome way to begin the year.

In the morning, we file back into the car and hurtle along the motorway like a ping pong ball down a drain pipe. Dead trees on one side and pale yellow grass on the other slowly give way to green as we approach the mountains and make our way one and a half kilometres above sea level to Mt Buller. My choice of road-trip record is Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team, possibly the best summer party album made since Primal Scream's Screamadelica. It's a thundering mix of cartoon theme music and hip-hop block party jams, with a few air raid sirens thrown in for good measure. It was also the subject of my first ever cover story for a music magazine, four years ago.

I suppose I should use this space to make a resolution for 2009. Reading back over last year's columns, I noticed how often the words I and my appeared. This is a fairly big no-no of recent times, as "proper" journalists seek to define themselves against those filthy amateurs otherwise known as bloggers, who write unashamedly about their own experiences (how dare they!) and, as the pool of jobs for niche writers dries up, budding critics attempt more than they should to prove that what they write about is "serious business". As it always has been, my gut reaction to such nonsense is to do the exact opposite. This year I will write about music in the first person whenever and as often as I damn well please. There is no such thing as an objective journalist, let alone an objective critic, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or an idiot.

Die! Die! Die!

2008-12-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

Promises, Promises
Etch N Sketch, 2008

In 2005 Dunedin punk band Die! Die! Die! opened their debut album with a spiteful clang of noise and a blistering song called 'Disappear Here', which featured the chorus: "I love you/ I love you/ I love you/ 'Til I find somebody better!" The whole thing was shrill, churlish and noisy. Three years later and their tune has changed, in more ways than one. "I could never forget her if I tried," Andrew Wilson cries in the opening seconds of Promises, Promises, their brilliant second album. The difference between those introductions is no coincidence. Promises, Promises is a record about love, or more accurately, the losing of it. Soaked in heartbreak, it is darker and more melodic than anything the band have made before – but just as ferocious. The notes jut and stab and splinter, leaving a melancholy aftertaste in their wake.

There is some confusion when it comes to critics choosing the "best" albums of the year. Are records that break some sort of new ground, or play with a new idea, more important than the rest? Promises, Promises does nothing of the sort. It's a break-up album with a song called 'Death To The Last Romantic', for fuck's sake. You'd actually struggle to find anything more straightforward and overworn. But this album has something most of the others don't – a soul. Promises, Promises is, just like the event it's based on, a turbulent and passionate and vicious and beautiful mess. My favourite moment is when Wilson just screams the letters of the word "attitude" over and over again while the band warm up their instruments in preparation for the unavoidable lashing-out that comes next. He doesn't spell it right, either.

Released in New Zealand in the final months of last year, Promises, Promises has slowly been making its way to the rest of the world during 2008 (and I suppose here I should address the fact that yes, they are Kiwis, though I count that as "local", and technically it was first released last year, though very few people got to hear it until this year – however if you really truly care about any of this you're probably too close to the comic book guy from The Simpsons for anyone to take you seriously). I have no idea if it's the "best" album of the year – all I know is that it's my favourite.

This is the final column in a three-week series on the best local releases of the year.

Snowman

2008-12-15T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Horse, The Rat And The Swan
Dot Dash, 2008

My favourite records of the year have all been albums. They have all had themes and a sense of continuity, with songs that - while not so similar as to be boring or repetitive – never stray too far from a central sound or style that ties them together. But The Horse, The Rat And The Swan, the second full-length from Perth band Snowman, is the only one that drives home that albumness like a sledgehammer. It is a concept record in every way, even if the concept itself is open to interpretation. Pretending pop music was an art gallery, this record would be located in the modern wing – a conceptual piece that you're not entirely sure you really enjoy, but that you won't be forgetting any time soon.

Earlier this decade it became popular to raid the sounds of post-punk bands from the late 1970s and early '80s, leading to the success of bands like Franz Ferdinand and The Rapture and the overuse of the word "angular" in music magazines everywhere. While this little trend was highly derivative, it was also highly selective. There were plenty of cowbells and catchy bass lines, but very little that engaged with the darker aspects of the original genre – nothing that aspired to recreate, for example, the terror of Public Image Limited's bleak 'Careering', in which John Lydon asked "is this living?" and wailed evocative non-sequiturs like "there is bacteria, armoured machinery mangled" between anonymous screams and brittle clanging.

This is the musical precedent to which The Horse, The Rat And The Swan owes the most. But back then, now a quarter of a century ago, the dystopian themes of post-punk were still slightly futuristic. Today, many of that era's fantasies are fact. The world is wired, our Government is trying to fight underground cyber criminals and the human race is facing the question of whether it will be responsible for its own demise. "We are the plague/ we are the virus," screams the narrator of this record, among squeals and piston-thumps and distortion – and it sounds like more than just words. A few years ago, journalist Craig Mathieson asked why no one in the Australian music scene was truly engaging with the period that we were living through. This album is the unwitting, and perhaps unwanted, reply.

This column is part of a three-week series on the best local releases of the year.

Witch Hats

2008-12-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

Cellulite Soul
In-Fidelity, 2008

There is something inside of me that is rotten. It's what made me enjoy cough syrup too much as a child and what makes me drink more than I should on weeknights. It's why there are scars all over my body and tears in my clothes. It's violent and petulant and it's the reason that I love Cellulite Soul. Witch Hats appeared three years ago with a noisy demo and a giant fuck-you of a song called 'Jock The Untold' – the kind of song that spat in your direction and then sneered with contempt when you wondered why. It had a bass line heavier than a lead pipe and nonsense lines like "your sh-shit it sh-shivers in the moonlight!" snarled out between crashes of noise.

Cellulite Soul is an entire record's worth of that song, and it is fucking wonderful. Every smack of the drums and crash of the cymbals is a jab at the juvenile little brat inside me. Guitars are played like they're to be tossed out after each song; harmonies are sung like a protest cry. It is pop music from the junkyard of human emotion – grimy, angry and loud as a bomb blast. Formed in Melbourne by a bunch of kids from Tasmania – Duncan Blachford and brothers Kris and Ash Buscombe, with second guitarist Tomas Barry coming later – Witch Hats take inspiration from the swamp-rock bands of Australian music history. You can catch glimpses of Beasts Of Bourbon and Scientists in their racket.

The very best song on Cellulite Soul is a short but fiery tantrum at the end, a track called 'Doors Film' that opens with a blast of childish dissent. "I DON'T WANNA GO TO SCHOOL TODAY!," one of the Buscombes screams, backed up by the rest of the band brandishing their instruments like makeshift weapons. It is a protest against everything and nothing, a celebration of saying "no", and it sounds like whatever you dislike most being torn apart. 2008 has been an excellent year for local music. For whatever reason, or perhaps just coincidence, my favourite albums have all explored the darker side of things – those feelings not expressed in day to day life. In that sense, Witch Hats represent rage. If you've ever been pissed off about something that you couldn't change, this record is for you.

This column is part of a three-week series on the best local releases of the year.

Punky Brüster

2008-12-01T08:00:00.000-08:00

Cooked On Phonics
HDR, 1996

A few years after Green Day and The Offspring introduced a new generation to pop-punk and racked up album sales in the tens of millions, the baton was passed to another bunch of kids with simple guitar riffs and attitude to burn who went on to change the music industry forever under the name of Punky Brüster. Well, sort of. That's the plot of satirical concept album Cooked On Phonics, a rock opera following the fortunes of an unpopular death metal band who get tired of playing to empty rooms and decide to reinvent themselves as a punk rock band to earn some money instead.

Each song follows the players as they go from pretending to be menacing occult figures from central Poland to posing as angry kids with a chip on their shoulder. Their first task? Learn how to write a punk song. "I've got to be more punk/ And forget about writing love songs/ Because even though I'm a middle-class white Canadian/ God knows I've been done wrong," the singer convinces himself. From there on in it's smooth sailing for the band, who hit it big with an ode to wallet chains and become the new darlings of "the biz".

Having been around for a couple of weeks, Punky Brüster get nominated for a "Granny" award. Despite a few bumpy patches before the ceremony (such as when a member takes an adoring fan home only for her discover a heavy metal poster in his bedroom and storm out in disgust), the group triumphantly take out the Lifelong Achievement Award For The Best Punk Rock Band. On stage the band thank "all the pioneering punk bands of 1994" in voices squeakier than those of Alvin And The Chipmunks before launching into a truly woeful acoustic emo song that morphs into a surprise death metal offensive. Fade to black.

Obviously, Cooked On Phonics was intended as a statement on the shallowness of punk rock at the time. It was written by metal icon Devin Townsend, of the band Strapping Young Lad, who bragged that the whole thing only took him a few days. However one of the most amusing things about it is that the punk rock songs aren't half bad, whereas I don't think much of Townsend's actual metal work. The album was a big hit in Japan and almost nowhere else. The following year Blink 182 went platinum with Dude Ranch.

Eels

2008-11-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

Electro-Shock Blues
Dreamworks, 1998

This is the record that consummated my love affair with pop music as more than simply sounds and words – that cemented my belief in it as an art form, and as an always-unfolding story, and forever broadened my focus from catchy songs to albums and themes and meanings. To put it simply, Electro-Shock Blues is why you're reading this column.

Mark Oliver Everett began his career under the moniker "E", releasing two solo albums in the early '90s before joining with Jonathan "Butch" Norton and Tommy Walker to form Eels. Their first album Beautiful Freak was a modest success thanks to quirky songs with disaffected characters such as 'Novocaine For The Soul' and 'Susan's House'. The year it was released, Everett's sister Elizabeth committed suicide and his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Those two events became the tragic inspirations for the band's next record, Electro-Shock Blues, a concept album about illness, family and, above all, death – which Everett described as "the greatest American taboo since sex". It mixed childlike drawings and nursery rhyme melodies with songs about hospital wards and despair.

If the album sounds like a bit of a downer, well, it is. The first song is called 'Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor', following the thoughts of Everett's sister in her final moments. The next is called 'Going To Your Funeral'. Musically there are elements of jazz, bass-heavy rock and sounds of machinery, especially in the heavier numbers 'Cancer For The Cure' and 'Hospital Food'. The quieter tracks are minimal and eerie.

But the darkness doesn't last forever. The album isn't only about death but our coping with it, and so sunlight slowly begins to seep into the second half. In fact it is only the extraordinary gravity of the album's inspirations that make its final moments so very touching – a series of love songs in which the deadpan opening lines "I hate a lot of things/ But I love a few things/ And you are one of them" appear as hopelessly romantic. The last track is titled "P.S. You Rock My World" and begins: "I was at a funeral the day I realised/ I wanted to spend my life with you." The band's next record, Daisies Of The Galaxy, came out two years later. It was a much happier affair.

Sufjan Stevens

2008-11-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

Illinois
Asthamtic Kitty / Spunk, 2005

Perhaps it was being raised by strict atheists that led to my intense fascination with pop songs about faith, both the finding and losing of it – as if religious belief was some great and turbulent love affair that I was missing out on (which would be a terrible pity, as all writers thrive on having their hearts broken). The most interesting are those songs set in the middle ground, in which someone's faith is tested or ugly questions are raised. It is for this reason that I love the albums of Pedro The Lion, which among other things follow the journey of singer David Bazan's troubled relationship with morality and religion.

Another prominent indie musician who touches on such issues is Sufjan Stevens. The title of 'Casimir Pulaski Day', from his album about the state of Illinois, is taken from the state's public holiday to remember an officer who fought in the American Revolution. It is a love song, but a very sad and complex one filled with the smallest of details, like shirts being untucked and light coming through the window, that make it feel all the more tangible. In it, the singer watches a friend die of cancer and feels powerless to stop the illness. "Tuesday night at the bible study/ We lift our hands and pray over your body/ But nothing ever happens," Stevens sings.

When the character finally dies ("on the first of March, on the holiday"), there is a moment in which the singer seems to question his faith. It's nothing definitive – the whole song thrives on understatement – but is portrayed as simply an intensely vulnerable moment. "Oh the glory that the Lord has made/ And the complications when I see his face/ In the morning in the window," are the lines. Some writers have argued the song is about theodicy, the debate that God is good despite the existence of evil in the world, but I hear something different in it. I think of 'Casimir Pulaski Day' as a love song with more than one subject – the dying girl and also a divine figure – and the tension between the two. In the end, I think, it thanks the Lord for the creation of the characters in the first place, but also describes the anger and doubt felt when one of them is taken away.

Belle & Sebastian

2008-11-10T08:00:00.000-08:00

The Life Pursuit
Rough Trade, 2006

My favourite love song of recent years is 'Funny Little Frog', the lead single from cult band Belle & Sebastian's most recent album, a gorgeous three-minute pop song with piano and horns and handclaps that makes me want to dance in the kitchen. I adore it not least for reminding me of someone special, but also because it is such a magnificent puzzle – a song so upbeat and ridiculously heartfelt that it approaches parody, with what seems like a shopping list of references to older Belle & Sebastian songs and singer Stuart Murdoch's trademark lyrical obsessions (religion, girls, poetry) and, above all, an object of affection that doesn't seem to exist. "You are my girl and you don't even know it," Murdoch sings in the chorus, and later, almost triumphantly: "And I don't know how you smell!"

This mysterious non-person in the song is claimed to be perhaps the greatest and most inspirational partner that a person could ever have, a mythical romantic superhero that enables the singer to be truly happy ("Honey, loving you is the greatest thing/ I get to be myself and I get to sing") and who never requires an explanation after a late night at the pub. I have always imagined the figure as a religious icon, perhaps an image of the Virgin Mary, an idea floated by Belle & Sebastian's record label at the time, but others have seen it to be a girl viewed from afar and taken as a muse, a model on the cover of a magazine or even the band itself.

When asked by Drowned In Sound, Murdoch would say only that the subject was a real person and that the song was "about someone who thinks they're in love with an actual person but is actually in love with an imaginary person". The film clip played up the same idea, showing the singer dancing around his apartment with a woman in a blue dress before waking up in his bed to discover that he was in fact alone. Perhaps it was written simply to be puzzling, and that's the whole point. I especially love the last line, a sort of knowing wink that leaves everything up in the air. After reeling off a list of things he would like to do with this strange someone, Murdoch announces wistfully: "I'll maybe tell you all about it someday..."

The Magnetic Fields

2008-11-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

69 Love Songs
Merge, 1999

Stephin Merritt came upon the idea for 69 Love Songs, his triple-disc concept album about love songs (and not love itself, as he pointed out to writers), while sitting in a gay piano bar in New York watching a man performing songs by musical theatre icon Stephen Sondheim. "I'm a show tune kind of guy," he thought, and then decided to embark on an ambitious project to write one hundred love songs as a kind of grand melodramatic statement. "Then I realised how long that would be, so I settled on sixty-nine," he said.

The stunt worked and Merritt became the darling of New York and San Francisco journalists who found it impossible to resist such an alluring subject – a plain-looking gay man of an ambiguous age who expressed no emotion whatsoever, collected bizarre musical instruments and brought his pet Chihuahua (named after Broadway songwriter Irving Berlin) along with him to interviews. Between questions, Merritt would pause to compose his thoughts before slinging some deadpan answer back across the table as if the whole event deserved to have been scripted.

The album itself was just as eccentric, and occasionally wonderful – a three-hour collection of not entirely serious love songs in different pop styles, sung by a rotating cast of singers, with often hilarious lyrics. Merritt, himself a music critic in his spare time, tore apart the clichés of romance and love songs like candy wrappers. Opening track 'Absolutely Cuckoo' contained the warning not to "fall in love with me" because "if you make a mistake/ My heart will certainly break/ I'll have to jump in a lake/ And all my friends will blame you/ There's no telling what they will do".

It's funny enough on first listen, but Merritt's incessant cleverness can begin to drag over the course of so many tracks (the titles of which would fill up this column on their own). Perhaps that's why my favourite cut on 69 Love Songs is one of the rarest – 'Sweet-Lovin' Man', a number originally written for a different album and one of the only inclusions that has a straightforward romantic theme without any of the backhanded jokes that dominate the rest of the album. It's sung by Merritt's close friend Claudia Gonson and sounds like the best sugary eighties pop ballad you never grew up with.

Radiohead

2008-10-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

Kid A
Parlophone, 2000

Not today but soon I will spend an entire month writing about love songs. It occurs to me this column is very often filled with stories about junkies and suicides and rock 'n' roll tragedies, none of which can be particularly pleasant to read about on a Monday morning. However right now I have just finished reading Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live, so bear with me a little longer.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It's about Klosterman's road trip across the USA, visiting the sites of famous rock 'n' roll deaths (Elvis, Cobain, the Big Bopper, etc) for an article in Spin. Except it ends up having more to do with the women he thinks about on the road, and the evangelical Christian movies he watches in motel rooms while getting stoned. It also has many asides about the author's thoughts on various records.

Now chances are you're not a Radiohead obsessive (because you're reading this magazine and not snoring through Drum), so perhaps you haven't heard this theory yet: that Kid A matches up to the September 11 attacks like The Dark Side Of The Moon to The Wizard Of Oz. Klosterman reckons each track represents a period of that day, in sequence, with the tragedy occurring during 'The National Anthem' (relevant lyrics: "What's going on?") and the following song representing the immediate shock ("This isn't happening"), and so on.

This is fairly interesting, but it is Klosterman's argument and not mine. What it reminded me to do was say that the last track on Kid A, 'Motion Picture Soundtrack', is one of the saddest songs ever made. It is set to what sounds like a wind instrument electronically distorted and slowed down. "Red wine and sleeping pills/ Help me get back to your arms," are the first lines, and "I will see you in the next life" is the last.

You could take it to be a fictitious suicide note – Thom Yorke was suffering from depression and rebelling from the success of OK Computer when it was recorded – and I guess in the context of Klosterman's thoughts about celebrity and death, and how the two are entwined, that would make sense. But that doesn't do it justice. In fact, such a reading may miss the point altogether.

'Motion Picture Soundtrack' is one of the saddest songs I have ever heard, but it's not about death. As much as one can say it is about anything (Yorke told journalists he pulled the lyrics to Kid A from a hat), it is about mourning. The opening lines, "Red wine and sleeping pills/ Help me get back to your arms", are a profound expression of loss. And that is something that dead people do not feel. They don't feel a thing. Nor do they drink red wine.

Saturday Looks Good To Me

2008-10-20T08:00:00.000-07:00

Every Night
Polyvinyl, 2004

My favourite tools in the trade of twee pop are whimsy and wordplay, and of course any such song worth its weight in second-hand cardigans would also have to be written by a well-off white kid who bruised liked a ripe pear. It has been a guilty pleasure of mine ever since falling in love with Belle & Sebastian, who inspired a revival of the genre in the late '90s with a series of records about love and books and minor dramas given motion-picture proportions with lush pop orchestra soundtracks to boot.

Another guilty pleasure, which seems to have become popular in indie music at around the same time and since, is self-referential lyrics (oh so po-mo, I know). Like wordplay it is the sort of thing that appeals to bookish types with fidgety minds who love nothing more than to get swept up in the analysis of everything and anything, as long as there is some minor detail to debate. And for such a person who also loves music, what could be more fascinating than a pop song that deconstructs itself as it spins?

And so we come to a track by Michigan indie band Saturday Looks Good To Me called 'When The Party Ends', from their third album Every Night, which combines all of the above to create four minutes of delightful nerdiness. It's written like a letter between young lovers who constantly miss the bus in the morning and feel misunderstood at night, with eloquent lines that keep becoming longer and more frantic as the tempo picks up and the sappy string instruments kick in.

About half-way through the song trips over its tongue for a second and then changes tack entirely, to become a diatribe on marketers who "know the demographic that we represent/ Because they heard all of our secrets through the heating vent" and, then, the songwriter himself. "So write another song about your discontent/ And wax nostalgic for a time less turbulent," he sings, like a jab in his own ribs, and then, my very favourite taunt: "And you can use your list of words that rhyme with opulent." It is a tiny, private protest, the musical equivalent of thumping your pillow and then feeling a bit silly at how ineffective it was.

Died Pretty

2008-10-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

Next To Nothing
Citadel, 1985

It'd be easy to spin this record at 33rpm without realising it was a 45, and that's exactly what I did the first time I played it – the undulating carnival keyboard of 'Ambergris' oozing out of the speakers like treacle instead of, had it been at the right speed, something closer to honey warmed up and turned liquid. It wasn't until the chorus kicked in that I realised the mistake. I just assumed Died Pretty had taken too many downers like every other underground band in the late eighties.

When you play it properly, 'Ambergris' and its pairing on Side A 'Plaining Days' are less miserable than simply well-paced. Both are driven by a keyboard that rises up and down like the tide over a gently-thumping bass heartbeat. When something happens, some small change in the wind sets a song into action, it swells up without any warning. You barely even notice until all of a sudden Ron Peno's singing from the top of the thrashing whitecap, his voice broadcast like a siren.

By the time you do notice it, the song is ready to fall again – receding back into the steady up and down of its rhythm. It's that organic feeling, those seamless shifts in motion, that I like most about the first side. On the other you get a hint of where Died Pretty would end up. 'Desperate Hours' is much more mechanical, an enormous rock track with hoarse vocals, abrupt stops and starts and a clanging guitar that eventually explodes in noise. It's paired with 'Final Twist', which begins with a keyboard but turns into another boisterous rock song.

It's not only the aural spectacle of 'Desperate Hours' that hints at the power of Died Pretty's later work. Both of the tracks on Side B sound like they belong in the world from the cover of Doughboy Hollow, the album that Died Pretty would become renown known for six years later – a rusted-out old car and a steel wind vane fallen in a paddock, with a mass of black clouds bearing down on them from behind. But for me that album is too blokey. Too rustic and too deliberately crafted. My favourite Died Pretty songs are on the first side of their first record – 'Ambergris' and 'Plaining Days', which flow like the water in the sea behind the storm.

Ed Kuepper

2008-10-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

Electrical Storm
Hot, 1985

When the bricks and concrete heat up in the inner west the streets get tinted orange and the rooftops cascading down from Annandale burn like the columns of an electric heater. There is no respite on this side of Sydney – no canopies of leaves forming an arch over the streets, no refreshing wind blowing up from the water. Just exhaust fumes and radiating sidewalks. Eventually dusk brings a cool change and there's a moment half-way to night which is the most beautiful hour anywhere in the city. That's the time when you should play Electrical Storm.

Laughing Clowns, the arty post-punk group formed by Jeffrey Wegener and Ed Kuepper after he left The Saints, were a Sydney band. It's hard to imagine their dark blend of jazz and punk existing outside of the Sydney avant-garde scene that fostered the likes of Tactics and Voigt/465 around the start of the 1980s. But after that band broke up, Kuepper returned to his roots for musical inspiration. His first solo album was called Electrical Storm, in dedication to the wild displays of nature during the Brisbane summer.

The stories told both by key tracks are set at night, but they sound as if it's noon on a scorching day. The opening song 'Car Headlights' is dominated by a flickering acoustic guitar that conjures up more electricity than if it had been plugged in – the type of spark that carries in the air before a violent change in the weather – and lyrics about cars heading down a street surrounded by bush. The feeling it evokes is reprised for the title track, which is about being paralysed by heat in the middle of the night.

A few years ago in an issue of literary journal Meanjin – based in Melbourne but named after the Aboriginal word for the area that Brisbane is built on – writer Ross Gibson explored the ideas behind 'Electrical Storm' in an essay called 'Subtropical Rock'. Like Iggy Pop, who had made The Stooges unique by turning the sounds of his own "motorised landscape" into pop music, Kuepper took the electricity in the Brisbane air, the sputtering of refrigerating units and the relentless heat and somehow turned it into a song. "In three minutes or so, the song encapsulated what goes on in your own spirit and in the air when a Queensland storm finally breaks," he wrote. Perfect summer listening.

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds

2008-09-29T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Firstborn Is Dead
Mute, 1985

On afternoons I would ignore my mother's instructions to walk home and catch the bus instead. Walking was boring – there was a racetrack that went on for too long and some houses I'd seen before. Anyway, most kids caught the bus. They would pour down to Nine Ways after the school bell in a stream of blue shirts and white blouses and condense outside the fish and chip shop. Sometimes I would wait with them there, loafing in the tiny car park around the corner next to the doctor's office, as the crowd gradually peeled off in twos and threes onto buses packed with other school kids headed up the hill towards the suburbs.

Eventually I would cross the road and wait for a normal bus to take me into the city. There would be a few down-on-their-luck types up the front and the back half would be empty. Sometimes a girl called Rowena would catch the same bus and get off at my stop to catch another one back across the bridge to Mayfield. I had a sort of unfocused crush on her that was dampened by some impossible truth – she was tall and thin and had perfect hair and a nice smile. One day she got on board with a girl from school who lived in the same suburb and was a year or two above us. Her name was Lauren. She had badges and pins on her clothes and wore her spiky red hair in pigtails.

We got off on the dead end of the main street, filled with boarded up shops and pubs with newspaper over the windows. The stop was in front of a giant building that looked as if it had been a department store at some point. I was never sure – it had been empty since I could remember. As we crossed the road Lauren spied on my bag the name of a Nick Cave record that my mother's boyfriend had given to me. It was the title of The Firstborn Is Dead, scrawled in black marker around the points of a pentagram. She was so excited that she gave me my first cigarette – a menthol – and her phone number. The following week she gave me a love letter written in blood. I drew her a picture of a hand puppet singing a Mr Bungle song.

Sodastream

2008-09-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Take Me With You When You Go
Trifekta, 2005

People become music journalists to tell stories like this. A few years ago I got to sit down with Karl Smith, one half of Sodastream, and talk with him at length about how he came to write one of my favourite songs. Sodastream was formed by Smith and double-bassist Pete Cohen in Perth in 1997. They relocated to Melbourne the following year and recorded ten or so records before breaking up in 2006. One of their last releases was called Take Me With You When You Go. On it was a gorgeous and gentle song with lyrics like something from Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, about a man in gaol writing a letter to his wife and recalling the events that led his to incarceration in detail so awful it still makes me wince. The story behind it was even bloodier.

The song, called 'Keith And Tina', was inspired by Smith's memories of growing up in a neighbourhood where tragedy was commonplace. The memories had come flooding back after he and Cohen were confronted by two drug users in a small town in Texas during a tour of North America. Sitting in an upstairs bar slowly making his way through a beer, Smith told me about looking into their eyes and having no idea what they were capable of or what they would do next. He remembered that he'd seen eyes like that before - in the woman who "slashed herself up" in the half-way house next door, and the man who called his mother for help one night after slitting his girlfriend's throat.

Smith kept talking, and the blood kept flowing. The final story he told me was of a murder at his high school. A boy had found and read his girlfriend's diary, and discovered that she had been having a romance with someone else. Soon after he went to school with a knife taped to his back and stabbed her during an English class in front of the other students. Smith hung on a particular memory – of consoling his shaken friend, who hadn't been able to retrieve his possessions from the school because they were covered in blood. I took another sip of beer and looked at the small, quiet and incredibly polite man sitting next to me and had no fucking idea what to say.

Jennifer Paige

2008-09-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Crush
Edel / Hollywood, 1998

In the film clip for Jennifer Paige's song 'Crush', which spent a fortnight at the top of the Australian charts about a decade ago, Paige drives around in a convertible on a sunny day with a group of men in open shirts who drag their arms across her and recline backwards over the ridge of the rear seat to show off their hairless and muscled chests. Perhaps deliberately, it cuts between that fantasy and a far more wholesome one without the subtle implications of group sex. In the other sequence Paige is pictured sitting on a swing in the forest being pushed by a comparatively mature man wearing a grey vest and a buttoned-up shirt who never gropes or flirts with her the same way as the others do. Kind of like he was her father or something.

If it sounds like I'm reading too much into the video clip, keep in mind that it is a particularly sexual song – even more so than the parade of thinly and not so thinly veiled odes to physical pleasures that march through the pop music charts and into the bedrooms of young girls and boys each week. The memories of my own that it recalls are just as lascivious, though nowhere near as showy – driving around town at night, sneaking alcohol into pool halls and having fumbling teenage sex with girls who lived in colourless and menacing industrial suburbs. For one reason or another they are always set at night. The closest thing to Paige's video clip fantasy the song ever approached in my own life was the tacky glow of neon.

Two years after 'Crush' was released it was covered by creative indie-rock band The Dismemberment Plan, who slowed it down to half the original speed and stripped away all of the instrumentation except for a guitar that chimed like clanging metal. It's an excellent cover. Without anything else to distract from it, the melody becomes hypnotic and the words take on a very different meaning. Singer Travis Morrisons sings the denials of the chorus ("It's just a little crush/ Not like I faint every time we touch") in a sort of piercing drawl that can be painful on first listen. It's the exact opposite of the original – not a celebration of lust and flirtation but the torture of tension without release.

Alice Cooper

2008-09-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

From The Inside
Warner Bros, 1978

Alice Cooper had his first hit single in 1971 with the song 'I'm Eighteen'. By the middle of the decade he had released six albums, most of which broke the top ten, and become the first artist to make more money on a tour than The Rolling Stones. Only one of Cooper's personas is remembered now, but during his peak he ran through wardrobe changes as fast as recording studios. Muscle Of Love told the story of a naive boy from the country moving to New York and becoming a prostitute, Welcome To My Nightmare was a concept album that mixed imagery of suburban America with that of night terrors and murder, while Lace And Whiskey was inspired by pulp crime novels and Frank Sinatra.

As Cooper's fame skyrocketed, so did his drinking habit. By 1976 he had begun appearing intoxicated on stage and was, according to those on tour with him, regularly throwing up blood. At the end of his 1977 North American tour, Cooper voluntarily admitted himself to a sanatorium in New York to be treated for alcoholism. The experience formed the basis of his next record, a concept album called From The Inside. Each track tells the story of a different inmate, beginning with Cooper himself: "I got lost on the road somewhere/ Was it Texas or was it Canada?/ Drinking whiskey in the morning light... I never dreamed I would wind up on the losing end."

But, for once, Cooper isn't the focal point of this album. More interesting are the other asylum inmates whose stories range between bizarre and heart-breaking – a rich girl from Beverly Hills who "lost it", a priest who hates himself for lusting after a nurse ("to check my pulse she gotta hold my hand/ I blow the fuse on the encephalogram") and a down-on-his luck gambler. The very saddest story on the record is perhaps the least expected – not the man who wonders what his wife will think of him when he returns home, or the patient who wants to die locked in a padded room where he can't kill himself, but the inmate whose thoughts are, in contrast, rather normal. The song is called 'For Veronica's Sake', and it is about a man who knows that the pound is going to put his dog to sleep because he's been taken away.

Death From Above 1979

2008-08-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

You're A Woman, I'm A Machine
Last Gang, 2004

I was living in Melbourne listening to twee indie records a few years ago when a really hot drummer friend of mine who had a mop of black hair and wore bracelets on his wrists invited me into his bedroom and pulled out a little pink album full of heavy-metal love songs. It was really quite sexy, now that I think of it. Anyway the album was called You're A Woman, I'm A Machine and had a picture of two men with elephant trunks instead of noses on the cover. It blew me away – all the more for having binged on nothing louder than Belle & Sebastian for God knows how long beforehand. The first song that I remember being able to actually hear, after the ringing in my ears subsided, was a menacing grind of bass and testosterone that sounded as if it had burst from the loins of someone in exceptionally tight jeans, set to lyrics about... falling in love and settling down? Sure, why not. "Come here baby, I love your company/ We could do it and start a family," panted drummer and singer Sebastien Grainger, like he was overdubbing a porn film. The track was 'Romantic Rights' and the band was a duo from Canada called Death From Above 1979.

A few months later Death From Above 1979 played their second and last Australian tour, to plug their first and only album. I went along to the Ding Dong Lounge with a few of the other journalists from Beat and argued my way inside with them. It was just Grainger and bassist Jesse F. Keeler on stage. Their set was the loudest thing I have ever heard. People moved to the back of the room and clamped their hands over their ears. Some took refuge in the stairwell. One guy, who hadn't been drinking, threw up from the bass. Somehow, and I'm still not sure how this is even possible, petite deputy editor Melanie Sheridan spent the whole night in the front row. The next day none of us could get it together to write a review, so Sheridan printed a copy of the emails that had been sent between us complaining about the door bitch who didn't have our names written down and how much the music had made us want to fuck. Soon afterwards Death From Above broke up. We lived with nasty looks at Ding Dong, while Grainger and Keeler began making electronic music under the names MSTRKRFT and The Rhythm Method respectively.

Iggy Pop

2008-08-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

Lust For Life
RCA, 1977

David Bowie and Iggy Pop met each other as one was on the way up and the other was on the way out. Bowie had just released Hunky Dory and started work on the record that would catapult him to fame in the guise of spandex-loving space alien Ziggy Stardust. Pop meanwhile was in limbo. His band The Stooges had been dropped from the Elektra record label a few months earlier, after two albums of dark and guttural rock and roll that were critical and commercial flops. Decades later The Stooges and Fun House would be hailed as one of the major inspirations for a generation of punk and heavy metal bands, but in 1971 Pop was just another misfit with a heroin problem. Bowie encouraged the Detroit musician to move to London, where The Stooges reformed to record their third and final album of the period, Raw Power. Bowie's input as producer failed to make it much more popular than the previous two, and in 1974 the band called it quits (before suffering a collective mid-life crisis and reforming in 2005).

While The Stooges were embarking on their final tour, Bowie was reinventing himself after having retired his persona of Ziggy Stardust. He recorded an album inspired by George Orwell's sci-fi dystopia 1984 called Diamond Dogs, and then plundered Philadelphia soul music to create the pure pop of Young Americans. Rumours circled of his heavy cocaine use. He appeared on television shows gaunt, pale and nervous and began embodying a new character called The Thin White Duke. In 1976 he and Pop, who had tried to kick his heroin habit in a mental institution after the break-up of The Stooges, relocated to West Berlin together to dry themselves out. Sharing an apartment they created Pop's first solo records The Idiot and Lust For Life, with Bowie writing much of the music and Pop the lyrics. They charted higher than any of The Stooges records had and made him a bonafide rock and roll star, especially in Britain. In 1996 the title track of Lust For Life was introduced to a new generation as the theme song of sorts for heroin-chic film Trainspotting. Later still its drum beat – which was itself largely pilfered from the Motown classic 'You Can't Hurry Love' – was lifted without alteration and used by Jet in their 2003 hit 'Are You Gonna Be My Girl'.

David Bowie

2008-08-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Changesbowie
EMI, 1990

Every year another critic decides it is their turn to announce the death of pop music, or at least its impending demise. Such articles are infinitely boring and more often than not mean the author is getting old and wishes they were young again, or simply couldn't think of anything more interesting to write before deadline. Sometimes they do make me wonder, though. Will we ever get to see another group like The Beatles, or more importantly, another David Bowie? I should stress that even if we don't, it doesn't mean the end of pop music. Perhaps it just means the end of rock stars, and by that I don't mean whichever singer is on the cover of Rolling Stone this month. I mean the kind of rock and roll deity that can inspire an entire generation, or inhale ridiculous quantities of drugs and play to sold-out stadiums for five decades running, or, in Bowie's case, have twelve records in the top ten charts in eighteen months and who can be equally famous as a cross-dressing space alien in London, a white man playing funk music on Soul Train in Chicago and an experimental pop composer writing songs about the wall in Berlin.

Bowie, born David Robert Jones, had his first hit in 1969 with 'Space Oddity', a fey acoustic song about an astronaut with overtones of drug use released a few days before the Apollo 11 moon landing. He returned a few years later in the guise of Ziggy Stardust, a glam-rock sex god from outer space who came to Earth to offer hope in the face of the Apocalypse, and after giving up that persona attempted to write a musical based on George Orwell's 1984. He then travelled to the US and reinvented himself as an icon of "plastic soul", a sugary mix of black funk and soul music, and later to Berlin where he recorded a trilogy of low-key works with minimalist composer Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti. And that's just the first half of his career. As a teenager I used to lie in my bedroom listening to the singles album Changesbowie on repeat, underneath a giant poster of Aladdin Sane. It was one of the records my mother's boyfriend lent to me and I think I wore it out. To this day I have never heard a more perfect collection of pop songs. Bowie forever.

Lost Highway

2008-08-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

Various Artists
Lost Highway
Nothing / Interscope, 1996

The Smashing Pumpkins, wallowing in the hangover of their hit album Mellon Collie and dealing with the fallout from a touring member's heroin overdose, weren't the only band in flux in 1996. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was suffering from a similar affliction in the wake of The Downward Spiral, an album that had turned him into the pin-up boy for malcontent but that was so overwrought it couldn't possibly be topped. He had begun working instead with David Bowie, who was mid-way through one of his own regular musical reinventions. Lurking in the shadows was Brian Warner, who was about to go from Reznor's session musician and part-time freak to the world's most hated man as Marilyn Manson. All four names came together to contribute to the soundtrack of David Lynch's Lost Highway.

The film was about a paranoid musician who murders his wife and suffers a psychotic break while in jail, imagining himself as – or to take it literally, transforming into – a young mechanic who has an affair with the same woman in an earlier life. The alternate reality plays out like the sexual subconscious of a traumatised boy, awkward in some parts and sadomasochistic in others, shot in a lush visual style that could be classed as artistic erotica. The soundtrack was just as extravagant, alternating between dark pop songs and the sultry jazz pieces of Angelo Badalamenti and Barry Adamson. There is one saxophone solo in particular that, I sometimes think, would actually drive someone insane if they didn't already have a tolerance for sound – like what would happen if a person drank twenty cocktails on their first ever night out.

The most decadent songs were from The Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson. The former's contribution, 'Eye', was a bittersweet electronic track with a slow pulse and a synthesiser designed to sound like a harpsichord that bloomed into pure aural ecstasy. Manson's 'Apple Of Sodom' was predictably sacrilegious, but unlike most of his later work went for a sustained feeling of revulsion over flashy shock value. The most disappointing were Reznor's two original pieces 'The Perfect Drug' and 'Driver Down'. The songs themselves were fantastic, weaving the sounds of drum'n'bass and jazz into his trademark industrial noise. The problem was that instead of elaborating on that style on his next album, Reznor tried to recreate his persona as the most tortured man alive and made a mockery of himself along the way.

The Smashing Pumpkins

2008-07-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

Adore
EMI, 1998

In 1995 The Smashing Pumpkins released a bloated double album called Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and became, at least for a year or two, the biggest rock band in the world. Older fans and critics chose sides over whether the album was brilliant or indulgent (it was without a doubt both) and more than a few hung up their Siamese Dream T-shirts because the group had allegedly "sold out". Mellon Collie sold in the millions, the videos for singles '1979', 'Tonight, Tonight' and 'Bullet With Butterfly Wings' were played to death and there were so many songs from the sessions still left over that they filled a five-disc, 33-song box set called The Aeroplane Flies High.

The band, led by Billy Corgan in his silver trousers and freshly shaved head, went on a world tour to capitalise on their success. What was meant to be a victory lap became the beginning of the end. Before a show at the Madison Square Garden in New York, touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin overdosed and died while shooting heroin with drummer Jimmy Chamberlain in a hotel room. Chamberlain was fired and the band resolved to go on with the show. Corgan later said it was the worst decision they'd ever made. Whether or not he was right, the band that came home from the tour was a very different creature indeed.

The first new song to be released after Mellon Collie, two years later in 1997, was a creepy electronic track called 'Eye' which appeared on the soundtrack to David Lynch's film Lost Highway alongside cuts from Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor. It was followed by the first single from Mellon Collie's successor Adore, an album recorded with a rotating cast of guest drummers that did away entirely with the alternative rock format that had made the band famous. In the video clip to 'Ava Adore' Corgan sang in a full-length black outfit like a camp version of Nosferatu's Count Orlok, weaving in and out of scenes from asylums and porn movies. The rest of the album was a gorgeous but unusual mix of gothic orchestra-pop, haunting acoustic melodies and electronic sounds. It sold about one tenth of the copies its predecessor did and the band started to fall apart a few years later.

Ned's Atomic Dustbin

2008-07-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

0.522
Sony, 1994

Ned's Atomic Dustbin were an indie rock band with two bassists who recorded their debut album God Fodder as teenagers in a town in central England. It was released on Sony's Furtive label and made an appearance in the charts thanks to the singles 'Kill Your Television' and 'Grey Cell Green' – the title of which was a faint reminder of the chorus from New Order's famous indie hit 'Temptation' a decade earlier ("Oh you've got green eyes/ Oh you've got blues eyes/ Oh you've got grey eyes"). It sounded like a mix between that song and the college rock records coming out of North America.

After God Fodder it was all downhill for the Neds. Their second album Are You Normal? was more of the same but without any memorable singles, and a bid to reinvent the band's sound a few years after that with the heavy techno and industrial beats of Brainbloodvolume failed to convert many new fans. Sony had hoped the band would prove as successful as their peers Pop Will Eat Itself, who hailed from the same town of Stourbridge, and so tried to squeeze a little more cash out of the first two albums by releasing the compilation 0.522.

Now compilations like this are usually utter garbage, and in a way 0.522 was no different. It contained pretty much nothing to excite fans beyond a reworking of the band's first single, 'Kill Your Remix', and a few outtakes and B-sides. It would have been entirely useless, were it not for the band deciding to embrace the commercial aesthetic and record two covers of trashy pop songs to spice things up a bit. And embrace it they did, kicking things off with a cover of The Bay City Rollers' kitschy 1976 hit 'Saturday Night'.

The second cover, and the highlight of the record, was Charlene's 1982 single 'I've Never Been To Me'. If you've never heard the original, imagine the least offensive thing you possibly can and then picture it through a soft-focus lens. The remake began with samples of a crowd cheering and a cry of "motherfucker!", before a thumping beat and rave club synths kicked in and got mixed up with distorted electric guitar and snippets of humorous film dialogue. It's the best dance hit of the 1990s that never was. If only they'd done that shit from the start, the Neds could have been bigger than the Happy Mondays.

X

2008-07-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

At Home With You
Major, 1985

X are a band with a story, most likely exaggerated in parts and all the more amazing for being true in others, that old Australian rock fans enjoy recounting to each other and nobody else seems to have heard of. Those two facts are hardly coincidental, as the story is – with only minor variation – an explanation of X as the ultimate outsiders of local underground music history. Not punk, nor rock, nor for that matter anything else, more notorious than any other band at the time or since and probably the one most deserving of recognisable acclaim or inclusion in a hall of fame and the least likely to ever get it. "X stood alone," is the motto of this mythology and the one said to interviewers by members of the band almost as if they were speaking about something separate to themselves and outside of their control.

X came up with their name shortly before their first gig in Sydney in 1977, at a pub in Bondi they were never invited back to, by slashing a giant cross in red paint on a piece of newspaper and sticking it to the door of the hotel as a makeshift poster. At the time the band consisted of Steve Lucas, Ian Riley, Steve Cafiero and Ian Krahe, who the following year took heroin after a gig and died in his sleep. The other three continued to play and recorded the ferocious punk album X-Aspirations, gathering themselves a troublesome following of violent skinheads in the process. At one point, so the story goes, they were banned from 32 venues in Sydney and still managed to play regularly.

X split in 1980 and reformed a few years later, eventually settling in Melbourne where new drummer Cathy Green brought a looser style to their music and mediated the volatile relationship between Lucas and Rilen. She showed up to the first rehearsal to find both of them incoherently drunk. In 1985 the band recorded At Home With You, their second and more diverse album including the brilliant art-rock cut 'TV Glue' and slovenly punk track 'Degenerate Boy'. The trio continued to play music, and Rilen continued to drink people under the table, for the next two decades. In the preface to the 2005 reprint of Inner City Sound, Clinton Walker wrote: "As long as Ian Rilen's alive, after all, anything is possible!" He died of cancer in 2006.

The Good Life

2008-07-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

Album Of The Year
Saddle Creek, 2004

This is one of the worst albums I own, a collection of forgettable minor-key songs about minor dramas with lazy lyrics like: "She said she'd never seen someone so lost/ I said I'd never felt so found." It's about a break-up – what else? – and combs over the minutiae of desperation and guilt in an American college town where boys and girls make love listening to Aimee Mann records before one of them cheats on the other with a bartender and pores over the betrayal like it was a puzzle; painted with a brush soaked in nostalgia and self-pity that leads the narrator to use far too many metaphors involving the change of seasons and dead leaves on trees. It is quite shockingly bad. I'm serious. I wouldn't recommend that anyone, ever, buy a copy of this album.

And yet when it comes on by accident, because the playlist runs over or by some unfortunate slip of the hand when I'm at home, drunk or alone, it ends up in the stereo, a sort of beautiful warm feeling washes over me and I feel quite, well, at home. It's because of his voice: that of Tim Kasher, the songwriter responsible for this crime against self-respect, who also happens to have written many brilliant songs with his other band Cursive. It's a pity that there is none of Kasher's usual wit about this record, for in the past he has always been the first to point out his inadequacies – often rather brutally – which makes his tendency towards indulgence much easier to swallow. "I'm not an artist/ I'm an asshole without a job," he reminded his fans on 'Entertainer', from the record just before this one.

But there are no humorous asides on this album, just an ugly slog of diary entry after diary entry about all the stupid things people do when they fall out of love. The music is no more eloquent than the words. I love especially that it is called Album Of The Year, surely a joke to begin with, but one which is given a particularly cruel punchline in light of just how awful it really is. I like it in the same way I like bad poetry and intimate letters from friends – because life is sometimes ugly, and songs are sometimes rubbish, but that doesn't mean you have to stop singing. Thank the stars for bad records, even if you turn them off half-way through.

Bedhead

2008-06-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

Beheaded
Trance Syndicate, 1996

For a group with three guitarists, Bedhead were remarkably gentle. They were one of the slowcore bands who sprang up around North America in the early '90s – though, like most musicians, they disliked the label given to them. Perhaps they were right. For every comparison to Low, the genre's most iconic band, and each song like theirs that lulled the listener into a dream-like state, there was another that woke them up. The best track along these lines was 'The Rest Of The Day', a song about waking up depressed that began with the band's trademark vocal delivery – slow and passionless, like the drawl of a drunk man but with none of the slurring – and bloomed into euphoria. "Since there's a dead black cat scattered on my street/ I'd rather stay here under the sheets," murmured Matt Kadane, before the song suddenly shifted tempo and the guitars started to chime in sync, playing the same melody over and over for at least ten repetitions, getting a little louder and more forceful each time. Listening to it still gives me a rush of blood.

Bedhead were founded in Texas in 1991 by brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane, who had played together since they were young. They were joined by drummer Trini Martinez, bassist Kris Wheat and guitarist Tench Coxe, and released a string of gorgeous singles, EPs and three albums before breaking up seven years later. Apparently the idea behind the band was to recreate the texture of classical string instruments like the violin and viola, on which the Kadane brothers had experimented in their earlier projects, with guitars. It probably helped that they had a knack for incredible pop melodies as well. Beheaded, their second album, took eight months to mix until the band was "happy with every single second". It paid off. While their more-famous peers like Galaxie 500, Codeine and Low recorded the most recognisable songs of the slowcore sound, Bedhead made the best albums – as in, a cohesive collection of songs. After they broke up, the brothers formed The New Year with an ensemble of other underground musicians, while newcomer on the scene David Bazan picked up their gently layered guitar sound and incorporated it into his stories about falling in and out of love with girls and God under the name Pedro The Lion.

Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side

2008-06-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Sober Light Of Day
Spooky, 2005

Sixfthick are a monstrous rock'n'roll band from Queensland who roar down the east coast every six months or so and leave a trail of broken glass from Byron Bay to Brunswick Street. Their live shows are infamous. Fronted by brothers Geoff and Ben Corbett, the band churn through cacophonous songs with names like 'Dogshit Blues' and 'Beat Myself' that sound like they were written during a fit of rage in a gutter somewhere. Geoff, the older brother, tells stories about alcoholism while his younger sibling variously stalks the stage, dives or slips and falls into the audience, covers his chest in shaving cream and lights it, smashes glasses against his head, picks fights with hecklers and as often as not ends up shirtless and streaked with blood.

When he isn't hanging over the side of the stage writhing in piss and sweat, Ben is a strikingly handsome man – a mix of tall, dark stranger and weather-worn farm boy, one part sensual and two threatening. He fronts his own band, Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side, dressed in tight silk shirts and snakeskin boots, gyrating his way through love songs and tales of heartbreak like a sinister version of Elvis in his youth. The name of the band is only half-sarcastic. Gentle Ben is a mix of Corbett's Sixfthick persona and a man struggling to be a thoughtful suitor despite himself. "If I lose my self-control and some cunt ends up bleeding," he coos sweetly to his lover in 'Help Me Make It Down The Street', "Please don't let it run your evening."

One of the best tracks on The Sober Light Of Day is a cover of Spencer P. Jones's 'Execution Day'. The original Beasts Of Bourbon version is one of their more deafening numbers, a relentless and melancholy churn of guitar noise with muffled lyrics about a failed romance. Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side pluck out the main melody and turn it into a sultry flamenco track with maracas and acoustic guitar. When the chorus comes around, the band let loose with a trash-rock blast of noise in the spirit of both Sixfthick and the Beasts. It's the most elemental expression of the band's raison d'etre, a strange but captivating mixture of sexuality and violence.

Praise

2008-06-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Various Artists
Praise
Best Boy / Festival, 1999

There is a shot in the opening sequence of 1998 film Praise that is burned into my mind. It's a close-up of a spinning Holden hubcap on a car driving along a dusty road at night, set to The Dirty Three's 'I Remember A Time When Once You Used To Love Me'. It isn't blatantly jingoistic, but it carries an unmistakable message that this is the opening shot to an Australian film – one that couldn't possibly be made anywhere else. The man behind the wheel of the car is Gordon, played by Peter Fenton from the rock band Crow, a maliciously passive asthmatic who lights each cigarette with the last and becomes caught in an ill-fated affair with a tornado of a woman, played by Sascha Horler, who is as determined and single-minded as he is useless.

It was Praise, based on the 1992 "grunge lit" novel of the same name by Andrew McGahan, that first piqued my interest in Queensland as a sort of mythical wasteland north of the border – a humid and sinister place imagined by Sydneysiders in the same way New Yorkers have nightmares set in the swamps of Louisiana. The whole film is shot in shades of orange and set variously in Gordon's empty boarding house room, where the heat seems to condense in the paint on the walls, and a mixture of pubs, beer gardens and bottle shops. When a character appears and says he is from Melbourne, the southern metropolis seems as far away as Antarctica.

For the last decade that idea of Queensland has been kept alive, for me, by other works such as Andrew Stafford's extraordinary history of the Brisbane music scene, Pig City, the records of "canetrash" punk band Sixfthick and McGahan's other books, including 1988 and Last Drinks. It is also now what comes to mind whenever I listen to The Dirty Three, who feature heavily on the soundtrack to the film, along with Crow and John Ellis. They may have been from Melbourne, but there is something about the compressed tension in their songs and the flailing outbursts of Warren Ellis's violin that, in my head, only seem to make sense when placed in the hopeless nowheresville of Praise.

Mclusky

2008-06-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

Mcluskyism
Too Pure, 2006

If Mclusky were still around I would overcome my fear of flying, jump on a plane to Wales and have a sex change in the hope of carrying their children. I love the way that, in 'Whoyouknow', vocalist Andy Falkous alternates between the descriptions of someone's heart as "the colour of Coca-Cola" and "the colour of a dust-bin" in a childish sort of sing-song rhythm, as if it was such a brilliant insult that he should be crowned king of the playground. And in 'There Ain't No Fool In Ferguson', where he just reels off unrelated naughty-words while his voice hurtles up and down like a rollercoaster: "Hopeless!/ Hepatitis piss-rag!/ Molotov cocktail!/ Monobrow shit hole!" It's no surprise that their deranged mix of humour and scattergun malice led to constant comparisons with the Pixies. I would go so far as to say they were the second coming.

Mclusky formed in Wales in the late '90s and released three brilliantly-titled albums before calling it a day: My Pain And Sadness Is More Sad And Painful Than Yours, Mclusky Do Dallas and The Difference Between You And Me Is That I'm Not On Fire. The second and third are the best, but if you haven't heard any of them before go instead for Mcluskyism, a compilation released in 2006. I know it's not very cool to champion a "best of", but seriously it is the best 30 minutes of noisy rock and roll to be released this decade.

After Mclusky broke up, Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone went on to perform in Future Of The Left while bassist Jon Chapple relocated to Melbourne and formed a new line-up of his outfit Shooting At Unarmed Men. Neither are quite as good. One of the biggest disappointments of 2007 was Future Of The Left's much-anticipated debut album Curses, a giant pile of averageness that seemed to earn favourable reviews from all corners of the globe without even lifting a finger. With the exception of one or two good tracks, especially the rollicking 'Fingers Become Thumbs!', the whole thing sounded stale and staged in comparison with the spontaneous combustion that was a typical Mclusky song – perhaps it's just that no one had the heart to tell them.

Xiu Xiu

2008-06-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Air Force
5RC, 2006

Xiu Xiu records are some of the most consistently bleak to pass through magazine review piles. The themes they cover are often personal and uncomfortably frank, including such party favourites as suicide, AIDS, sadomasochism, war, sexuality and emotional desperation. Jamie Stewart and Caralee McElroy's history is as disturbing as the music, which goes some way as an explanation. Shortly after the release of their first album Knife Play, Stewart's father – who was also a singer – killed himself. Since then the pair have revelled in the grotesque. On the cover of 2004's disturbing Fabulous Muscles, Stewart was seen posing with a stuffed toy named Dr Phil that he used to teach pre-school classes with. The refrain of the title song was: "Cremate me after you cum on my lips/ Honey boy, place my ashes in a vase/ Beneath your workout bench."

Over the last eight years the pair have hollowed out a unique space in the indie soundscape with a mix of electronica, experimental noise and folk. The Air Force continues in the style of its predecessor La Foret, with the band's electronic clangs and more traditional rock and acoustic sounds swirled together rather than separated. It’s also slightly more accessible than usual, produced by Greg Saunier from fellow Californian experimental band Deerhoof. McElroy, Stewart’s cousin, flautist and percussionist, sings on 'Hello From Eau Claire', a tinkly, jewellery-box tune with a dose of childish bravado and gender-bending: "I can buy my own cigarettes, I can pluck my own moustache/ I read it's lame to wish that you won’t walk out on me."

Stewart is at his best on 'Boy Soprano' and 'The Pineapple Vs The Watermelon', an obscure track that seems to be about his father's death. "Someone felt something pure and told it all to you," he reasons, and "that was why you killed yourself, to prove it wasn’t true." The lines which follow sum up the world Xiu Xiu inhabit: "Say hello to Cory's mum, say hello to Freddy's mum, say hello to Ryan's mum..." It is plainly odd that a record like this should be plastered with an endorsement from The New York Times. For a group who were once described as having to worry less about selling out than losing their fans to suicide, Xiu Xiu have come further than anyone anticipated.

Andrew Ramadge is on holidays. This is a mash-up of pieces written about Xiu Xiu between 2004-06.

Death Mattel

2008-05-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

DAN1386
Nonzero, 2005

I get anxious a lot. Today it's because I have a story due for a magazine and not enough time to write it. I haven't written an in-depth music feature in a year or two, and I'm worried that I've forgotten how to do it. This morning I sat staring at my blank computer screen for a good four hours, shaking and struggling to breathe, before giving up and deciding to write this column instead. Anxiety seems to be a difficult sensation to express in pop music. Unlike anger or excitement - or even paranoia - I've never heard it captured very well in song. There are a few tracks that come pretty close, though. One of them is called 'Free', by Sydney band Death Mattel, from their album DAN1386.

'Free' opens with a happy little piano melody and imagery straight out of a suburban fantasy. It only has a few lines of lyrics: "There is the sun, it's out/ A symbol of warmth and happiness/ Your shopping is done and rent is paid... you're free." On the first iteration, the words are sung in a relaxed voice and the keys prepare you for a quirky pop song in the vein of Ben Folds Five. There's no warning about what comes next. On the forty-eighth second, right on the enunciation of "free", an enormously loud drum loop and electric guitar crash down like the sky falling to earth. The effect is paralysing. In the background you can hear a woman singing the original lines over and over again, just too far out of earshot to hear the words properly, while layers of impenetrable noise build up over the top and a drum machine goes tst-tst-tst-tst-tst like a skipping CD that you can't turn off.

That description probably makes it sound horrible, but 'Free' has been one of my favourite songs since I heard it a few years ago. Needless to say, it reminds me of anxiety – the claustrophobia, the person's voice just out of reach, the nervous tic of the drum machine and especially the sheer irrationality of it all, as if the original song was crushed beyond recognition for no discernable reason. Most of all, I like 'Free' because it is so incredibly loud that when I put it on it drowns out every thought in my head. Noise as silence. You used to be able to hear it on Death Mattel's MySpace page. Maybe they'll put it back up.

Sonic Youth

2008-05-23T03:43:00.001-07:00

Goo
Geffen, 1990

Just as LL Cool J was starting to remake himself in the eyes of his estranged black male fans, who had given him a right kicking after the sappy crossover hit 'I Need Love', he got a kicking from the white kids as well. Sonic Youth's 'Kool Thing', the lead single from their major label debut Goo released a few months before Cool J's comeback record Mama Said Knock You Out, was a not-so-subtle dig at the rap star's masculinity that became the New York art rock band's most recognised tune. Singer Kim Gordon, who used to name the rapper as one of her favourites alongside Run DMC and Schoolly D, became disenchanted after interviewing Cool J for Spin to discover that the tough guy act he maintained in his songs didn't come off when he left the stage.

With lyrics derived from the titles of Cool J's records and a spoken word diatribe smacked in the middle, 'Kool Thing' was like a rusty little needle aimed at the balloon of the rapper's sex symbol status. Gordon took the signature line from his most recent single, "I don't think so...", and slipped it between mock sexual invitations. The film clip showed her dolled up in various combinations of go-go boots, silver hot pants, leopard print tights and a feather boa, striking poses from Cool J's album covers. On his third record, the rapper appeared squatting in an alleyway with a black panther, a symbol of black militancy. In the clip, Gordon reclined on a couch petting a young black housecat as she mouthed the line: "Kool thing, sittin' with a kitty..."

However there is another film clip, of sorts, for 'Kool Thing' that is even more memorable. A few years after it was released, the song was used in the film Simple Men by director Hal Hartley. As in most of Hartley's films, the characters are odd and uptight, and express little or no emotion. The whole thing has a air of deliberate stiffness to it. But about half way through, for no discernable reason, one of the minor characters hurtles down a dirt road in a truck, skids to a halt and throws himself out of the cabin. "I can't stand the quiet!" he screams, and the camera cuts to a single three minute shot of everyone performing a choreographed dance to 'Kool Thing'. Absurd but brilliant.

LL Cool J

2008-05-12T08:00:00.000-07:00

Mama Said Knock You Out
Def Jam, 1990

One of the most striking examples of gangsta rap's rise to the top of the hip hop food chain in the early '90s was the reinvention of LL Cool J from teen magazine pin-up to street thug, pivoting on his best-selling album Mama Said Knock You Out. James Todd Smith III made his name as a teenager, under the acronym for Ladies Love Cool James, with a series of rhymes about how good he was at rhyming. And he was good. On his first album Radio he boasted incessantly and threw around disses that walked a fine line between stupid and hilarious, like: "Why are you so stiff? Is it something that your mother did?/ Maybe you grew up around can't-dance people when you were a can't-dance kid."

In his eyes, the only thing Cool J did better than rhyming was loving. He pioneered the sort of sensitive rap ballads that would become regular crossover hits in the pop charts with early cuts 'I Can Give You More' and 'I Want You'. In '87 he nailed it with 'I Need Love', a sappy single with a soft-focus film clip that painted him as a lonely artist trapped in the eye of the storm that was his fame, and ended with a heartfelt plea to the camera: "I need true love, and if you want to give it to me girl, make yourself seen. I'll be waiting for you." It went straight to number 1 on the R&B chart.

But such sentimental crap wasn't going to cut it for much longer, as black fans and critics began to embrace the heavier sounds of radicalised groups like Public Enemy and NWA. Just three years after 'I Need Love', Cool J found himself out of touch. He remedied this, quite successfully, with the comeback record Mama Said Knock You Out. The title single's eloquent rhymes were a reminder of how he'd made it to the top in the first place, but something was different. Mixed in with the jokes and boasts were constant references to violence and imagery of towns being bombed. By the time his next record was released, the transition was complete. It was called 14 Shots To The Dome and featured the heartfelt lines: "I fuck you in the head just to let you know/ Stick you for yo' dough and spit on your flo'."

The Mark Of Cain

2008-05-05T08:00:00.001-07:00

The Lords Of Summer
Phantom, 1988

Joy Division have been so successfully canonised this decade that it's hard to imagine anyone possessing enough balls to challenge or tamper with their legacy. There are now umpteen books, films and essays detailing the rise and fall of Ian Curtis, as well as a range of products plastered with the cover art from Unknown Pleasures, from shirts and posters to sushi boxes and sneakers. Last week I read a review that ever so gently criticised the release of yet another "best of" compilation, but backed up by saying that any of the band's songs on any record had to be a good thing – not once, or twice, but three times in as many paragraphs. Talk about walking on fucking eggshells!

Of course, I'm probably as guilty as the next person of buying into the story of Joy Division As Untouchably Brilliant Artistes, or at least I have been in the past, so when I heard The Mark Of Cain's first single 'The Lords Of Summer' - a reimagining of sorts of the British post-punk band's 'Dead Souls', released just a few years after the original - I was mortified. How dare some dudes from Adelaide rip off Ian Curtis so blatantly, I hollered (though at the time they recorded it, circa 1988, it may not have been so controversial). It took me a full year or so to pull my head out of my arse and give it another spin.

I actually now enjoy that song more than 'Dead Souls', and not just because The Mark Of Cain are Australian and I've been banging on about the virtues of local music so much lately. For one thing, I like it simply because it couldn't possibly be recorded today, for fear of offending pretty much everyone who owns a record player. The other reason is because once you get over its initial wrongness, the idea of Ian Curtis being reincarnated as the frontman of a suburban heavy metal band from Adelaide is actually pretty cool. The Mark Of Cain went on to hone their own sound and become widely respected, but I like 'The Lords Of Summer' more than most of their later work, which is generally too loud for me. You can find it on the Tales From The Australian Underground record or the reissue of their debut album Battlesick.

The Shins

2008-04-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

Oh, Inverted World
Sub Pop, 2001

There is nothing more pathetic than watching local music critics scramble over one another for review copies of the latest trendy North American indie album. It's not that I think all Australian critics should be obligated to write about homegrown bands, but there is something tragic about the delusion that their opinions are important or even relevant when it comes to the Next Big Thing from overseas. As a general rule, no one cares what Australians think about the music scene in New York any more than The Beatles agonized over their reviews in The Times Of India. And in the age of instant access to overseas tastemakers like Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound, there are fewer and fewer reasons for local readers to either.

There are a hundred albums I could have picked as examples for this week's column but for some reason The Shins stood out the most. The consummate band for middle-class white kids who fret over boys and girls they haven't met yet while sipping tea and trying on cardigans, The Shins somehow became Bigger Than Jesus among local critics on the strength of their debut album Oh, Inverted World, before Natalie Portman stomped all over their credibility in the film Garden State. "You've got to hear this one song, it'll change your life," she urged, in the least sincere performance of her career, managing in the process to highlight what an absurd suggestion it was that a flaccid 1960s pop regurgitation could be life-changing! anyway.

The point isn't that The Shins are bad, it's just that they're not all that good. It is amazing, but sadly also quite commonplace, that some sub-par band from overseas can manage to enthral music critics thousands of kilometres away with one or two unremarkable albums. What lies beneath the gushing reviews of The Shins and other trendy foreign bands is the subconscious belief that real pop music can only be made in North America or England, and thus the uncritical acceptance of what's hot and what's not from those who are based there. For at least the last few years, local "best of year" lists have read as if they were taken straight from the pages of Spin or Uncut. Even if you don't take that as a sign of our cultural cringe, isn't there a good argument for doing something different?

The Slits

2008-04-21T08:00:00.002-07:00

Cut
Island, 1979

"Electrifying" is one of those dreadfully overused words hauled out at every opportunity to sell bands and their records (usually by writers on consignment and full-time publicists, who are responsible for wearing out most good words, rather irresponsibly if you ask me) and so it doesn't really mean what it should anymore, which is that facial twitch of a smile that pulls your cheeks back across your face without warning and comes with a flutter of nerves over the top of your brain like a tiny rain of pins and needles - that feeling you get when you hear a band that are just something else, and that I got last when I first heard post-punk band The Slits take apart the classic Motown track 'Heard It Through The Grapevine' and put it back together again as a demented disco-reggae floorkiller.

Like a lot of people my age, I was introduced to Marvin Gaye's version of 'Heard It Through The Grapevine' on the various copies of The Big Chill soundtrack that my parents wore out while I was growing up. It was a proper song, elegant and full-bodied, with so much heart, a premise so universal and a melody so infallible that it rose above petty concepts like taste to become one of those tracks I simply couldn't imagine being fucked with, which is of course exactly what The Slits did in 1979 by turning it into a dancefloor hit by humming the rhythm into a microphone and looping it, replacing the chorus with a hissed "I heard it through the ba-ss!line" in one spot and skipping a beat in another and, you know, just generally trampling all over the damn thing like it was a throwaway collection of hooks and words to be reorganised at whim by whoever had a passing interest in doing so. It was released as the B-side to their first single 'Typical Girls', which I don't imagine is particularly easy to track down anymore, but you can also find it tacked onto the latest reissue of their debut album Cut, along with the rest of their thrilling crimes against proper music that, sadly, I've run out of space to talk about. Check out the sample on 'Newtown' that sounds like a match being struck in slow motion.

Weezer

2008-04-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Blue Album
Geffen, 1994

The modern successors to The Modern Lovers were Weezer. The Lovers grew out of singer Jonathan Richman's infatuation with gutter chic pioneers The Velvet Underground, but plied a more accessible and radio-friendly style of rock and roll about girls, cars and Pablo Picasso. Twenty years later Weezer sprung up like a dorky flower in the wake of the grunge explosion and plied a more accessible and radio-friendly style of rock and roll about girls, surfing and Buddy Holly. Their eponymous debut, commonly called The Blue Album, was released a few weeks after Kurt Cobain's death and together with that event signalled the end of the collective downer that had spread outwards from Seattle like spilt chloroform during the early '90s. Ethan Hawke's woeful performance in Reality Bites probably didn't help either.

The Blue Album's first single was a nonsensical pop hit called 'Undone - The Sweater Song', which seemed to be about clothes unravelling at a party. Between sing-along choruses, the song had a tender guitar chime that echoed around the studio and allowed it to pluck at more heartstrings than a track about knitwear should. Singer Rivers Cuomo later said he was frustrated by the public's reaction to it. "It was supposed to be a sad song, but everyone thinks it's hilarious," he told a biographer. The confusion over whether Weezer were a novelty band or misunderstood nerds continued with the film clip to their second single 'Buddy Holly', which showed them performing on the set of Happy Days tottering up and down in matching outfits like bobblehead dolls.

But the third single, a heavy rock tearjerker called 'Say It Ain't So', was more straightforward. With crunching guitars and open-ended lyrics about a misfortune of one sort or another, it was vague enough to become the anthem for the woes of a million teenage boys and girls and is still remembered fondly by almost everyone I know. Unlike the grunge songs of the generation before, at the single's heart was the same crisp and unashamedly catchy pop melodies that drove the rest of the album. It set the style for Weezer's second and best record Pinkerton, which was released two years later to far better reviews and far fewer sales.

The Modern Lovers

2008-04-07T08:00:00.001-07:00

The Modern Lovers
Beserkley, 1976

The Modern Lovers pass the living room test. They are one of those esteemed and regularly namedropped old bands who are actually fun to listen to as well – enough that my girlfriend, whose last purchase was a Coldplay album, doesn't reach for her ear plugs when I put them on. Record shop nerds and music critics are always trying to convince people who will listen to them to learn about boring – "but important!" – old bands to get their pop music fan club membership, or "know" where some sound came from, or whatever. Unless you're a big fan of their respective genres, or you know you'll actually enjoy them, you really don't need to own anything by The Stooges, The Byrds or Captain Beefheart to enjoy contemporary music. The only exception to this rule is the Pixies. Everone reading this column needs to own a copy of Surfer Rosa, otherwise you're out of the club.

But back to The Modern Lovers. They were formed in Boston in 1970 by Jonathan Richman, a wide-eyed kid infatuated with The Velvet Underground but who was far too nice to follow in the footsteps of his gutter-dwelling idols. Instead of heroin and hookers, Richman wrote about pining after girls and listening to the radio. The band recorded most of their debut The Modern Lovers in '73 but it wasn't released until three years later, by which time Richman had already grown tired of it, broken up the band and swapped his electric guitar for an acoustic one. He released a few later albums with another band called The Modern Lovers, but none were as good as the debut.

On one track Richman concocts an absurd story about Pablo Picasso cruising through the suburbs picking up girls in a Cadillac Eldorado, that famous American car with little fins above the tail-lights. "Some people try to pick up girls," Richman complains, "and get called assholes! This never happened to Pablo Picasso!" The other great songs are 'Roadrunner', a bouncy pop remake of The Velvet Underground classic 'Sister Ray', and probably their best known cut 'She's Cracked' – an even better demo version of which, and I'm going to put on my music nerd hat here, recorded during the John Cale sessions in '72, is floating around on compilations. If anyone ever pressures you to listen to The Velvet Underground, get this instead. You'll actually enjoy it.

You Am I

2008-03-31T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hourly Daily
rooArt, 1996

So this guy wakes up when the radio flickers on, catches the bus into town and wonders how to pay the bond on a flat in the inner-west. Later on in the day he buys a six pack of cheap beer and gets nostalgic about some girl he opened a door for back in high school, swings by some record stores and walks back home over the Glebe Point Bridge (before it became a target in John Howard's blitzkrieg of symbolism and was renamed the Anzac Bridge) while the sun's setting over the Sydney skyline and the cars are streaming back into the suburbs. And then later still he winds up at The Annandale Hotel to see a band, steer well clear of fashionable indie types, get drunk, go home, get up and do it all again.

That's more or less the storyline on Hourly, Daily, You Am I's concept album of sorts and the second of their three consecutive records to reach number 1 on the Australian charts in the middle of the '90s. Actually, the above story is just a collage of things mentioned in the songs and stuff Tim Rogers was doing while he thought of them. You could probably make any story you like out of the lyrics – as long as it involved Sydney, public transport, a six pack of beer and a few heartfelt asides. It's the setting that sticks out more than the plot. The band recorded it after a stint in North America, when they returned to find that the nuances of life in Australia were more noticeable after they'd been away for a while.

Rogers described Hourly, Daily as a collection of "songs from different points of the day" and "diary entries from different people" about mundane activities after it was recorded. It's more subdued and melodic than You Am I's first two guitar-heavy albums, Sound As Ever and Hi Fi Way. My favourite track is called 'Tuesday' and has a gorgeous blossom of psychedelic strings and horns in the middle. It's not really about anything in particular, just a bus that comes late and some bread that goes stale. It sounds like the suburbs in summer, and it makes me think of the houses in Lilyfield, on the other side of the bridge.

Damien Jurado

2008-03-24T08:00:00.002-07:00

On My Way To Absence
Secretly Canadian, 2005

I’m sitting on the Lygon street tram, heading north, or south (but definitely not east). It’s sunny enough to notice the other passengers without seeing them, and my headphones have become a security blanket draped over a portable bedroom. Slouched and half-asleep, half-peering into the graveyard as it passes by and half-listening to the new mix-tape playing through my discman, the eerie, echoing guitar of 'Sucker' announces itself. Nestled seamlessly between The Silver Jews and Hayden, Damien Jurado paints a scene of regret and revenge in some distant country town, but the darkness wore off weeks ago. I can’t help but wake with a smile, knowing that this is the singer at his best.

“There comes a time in every artist’s career when he disconnects himself from the public,” begins the press release for Damien Jurado’s latest full-length. Supposedly, this record is his first to be free from the constraints of genre, critical opinion and audience expectations. I suspect, however, that this process started long ago. Jurado is no stranger to controversy. Missing from the release is any mention of Postcards And Audio Letters, an LP created entirely from found audio cassettes and answering machines which estranged almost as many fans as his previous work had gained. Nevertheless, his amazing voice, loyal following and knack for album titles have remained intact. Rehearsals For Departure fitted Jurado’s naïve and sorrowful 1999 record of folk-pop perfectly, I Break Chairs gave clear warning as to its indie-rock intentions, and now, to mark a new-found depth of introspection and darkness, comes On My Way To Absence.

Evelyn and I bought Rehearsals For Departure in different years, in different countries, in different seasons. Now we’re sitting on the same balcony sharing a bottle of wine, stopping occasionally to hear a chorus or climax from the new album. 'Big Decision’s lilting guitar twang rings out like a bell after the strummed acoustics of its predecessors, and we both try to sing along, unsure if we’ve heard it before but instantly familiar with the sound – possibly, it is an earlier track Jurado has re-recorded for this album. We talk over the beautiful, poignant 'Lion Tamer', which in any case is already so well-loved to play out in my head anyway: “Patience drips into the sound/ You are nothing to me now.”

Andrew Ramadge is away. This review first published in Beat in 2005.

Laughing Clowns

2008-03-17T08:00:00.002-07:00

Reign Of Terror, Throne Of Blood
Crown Prince Melon, 1981

After The Saints moved from Brisbane to Britain on the strength of their landmark album (I'm) Stranded, only to find that the punk scene had since been stitched up by a bunch of local brats called The Sex Pistols and that their label EMI was unsympathetic at best and incompetent at worst, they began to fall apart. Songwriters Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper, who had gone to school and formed the band together, both left. That is, Bailey said that Kuepper left and Kuepper said it was Bailey. The two didn't reunite for more than twenty years, until The Saints were inducted into the ARIA hall of fame. So in 1978, after both of them left the band first (I'm a big believer in balanced reporting), Bailey kept playing with a new version of The Saints and Kuepper went back home to form the Laughing Clowns.

Laughing Clowns sounded more like freeform jazz than punk rock. Kuepper took the swing of last record he would record with The Saints, Prehistoric Sounds, and founded a bizarre post-punk band with gloomy, off-kilter tunes that had as much saxophone as guitar. The group was hurtled along on stage by brilliant and unpredictable drummer Jeffrey Wegener, who had been pestering Kuepper to form a band since he returned home. In 1979 and 1980 they recorded three EPs, two of which were collected and released as an LP called Reign Of Terror, Throne Of Blood on their own label, Crown Prince Melon Records (titled after the nickname they gave to their manager, Ken West, who would later start the Big Day Out).

Reign Of Terror, Throne Of Blood, named as a wry reference to Kuepper's reputation as a control freak, captured the band in their different speeds: long and inventive jazz-punk excursions on 'I Don't Know What I Want', the humorous pop of 'Sometimes (I Just Can't Live With Anyone)' and my favourite, a wonderfully absurd track called 'Mr Ridiculous', in three parts, with a catchy piano-saxophone play-off bridging them. After Wegener's drug use led him to become increasingly erratic, the group split, reformed, split, reformed and gave up in 1985. Wegener went to join Bailey's still-going version of The Saints. Kuepper began his solo career and went back to taking pot-shots at Bailey by founding The Aints.

Voigt/465

2008-03-10T08:00:00.008-07:00

Slights Unspoken
Independent, 1979

There are many differences between Melbourne and Sydney and even more people who like to argue about them. In the last few years I have noticed some. The first is that the words "experimental" and "underground" have a distinct meaning in the Harbour City. Music outside the mainstream is usually played in suburban warehouses and decrepit inner-city apartment buildings that writers are afraid to name in print. Invitations are sent to mailing lists that are occasionally purged and compiled again to avoid detection. At most of these gigs watching a band comes with an anxious feeling that the police may arrive. Emmy Hennings wrote about one such confrontation last September, when kids filing out of a well-known warehouse in Surry Hills met with officers waiting downstairs.

Whether it is because of this tension or not, the music made in Sydney's underground spaces is more challenging and often more violent than anything I've heard previously. The other difference between the two cities is that, in line with popular opinion, Sydney really is quite soulless. If the eastern coast of Australia was a body, Melbourne would be the heart and Sydney the brain – and Brisbane, I guess, would be the brawn. You can hear it in the music, both mainstream and underground. There is a particular sound that has been running through avant-garde bands in Sydney since at least the late 1970s that I find alienating and anti-human. It can best be seen today in the work of Naked On The Vague and Castings, two bands that seem to have done away with emotion entirely.

I happen to work next to one of the most soulless places in the city, Darling Harbour, an enormous pre-fabricated tourist district with clinical lighting and overpriced merchandise. One of my favourite photos is of discordant Sydney post-punk band Voigt/465 playing an illegal gig on the Darling Harbour construction site in 1978. They only managed to play a few songs before the police arrived, but several photos of the occasion exist. One shows the band with their instruments set up between the pylons and against the backdrop of the Sydney skyline, playing to an audience of just one gleefully happy young child. Every time I walk through Darling Harbour now I think about that photo and it makes me smile.

The Crow

2008-03-03T08:00:00.001-08:00

Various Artists
The Crow
Atlantic, 1994

The Crow and its soundtrack tapped into the resurgence in goth culture during the 1990s in the same way The Big Chill had encapsulated baby boomers in mid-life crisis 10 years earlier. The film was an adaptation of an underground comic of the same name and was the first big hit for Australian director Alex Proyas, who cut his teeth making music videos for INXS and Crowded House. Its cult status began to build before it was released, when lead actor Brandon Lee was fatally injured on-set by a dummy round accidentally fired in a gunshot scene during the last week of filming. Lee's depiction of a man who had been violently murdered and then magically returned to life one year later to exact revenge on his killers was given a tragic and somewhat eerie quality in the wake of his actual death.

The film itself is rather incredibly dark and violent, set in a fictional city one part Detroit and two parts Gotham with a visual style similar to the sci-fi noir classic Blade Runner. Thanks to Proyas's background shooting music videos, some parts feel like a series of film clips strung together to make a story. The soundtrack includes The Cure, Nine Inch Nails covering Joy Division's 'Dead Souls', Pantera, Rage Against The Machine, Stone Temple Pilots, Violent Femmes and Rollins Band covering 'Ghost Rider' by Suicide. For years after it was released, it was one of those records you'd find everywhere you went.

What strikes me most about The Crow soundtrack now is just how varied the songs are. At the time it seemed like such a single-minded collection, but it actually captured a wide range of musical ideas circa 1994 – hangers-on from the decade before (The Jesus And Mary Chain, Violent Femmes, The Cure), grunge (Stone Temple Pilots), metal (Pantera, Rollins Band), the kind of industrial-gothic sounds that only ever made sense at the time (Nine Inch Nails, Machines Of Loving Grace) and last but not least the brilliant political rap-rock hybrid of Rage Against The Machine, who would play no small part in inspiring the insufferably lame likes of Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park to dominate "alternative" music charts for the next ten years. I still really like it as well. I can't imagine not owning a copy.

Machines Of Loving Grace

2008-02-25T08:00:00.002-08:00

Gilt
Mammoth / Mushroom, 1995

Last night I listened to the Jonestown "death tape". It was made during a mass suicide at a separatist commune established in South America by Reverend Jim Jones, the leader of the People's Temple movement, who fled from the US with hundreds of his followers. On November 18, 1978, a politician who had flown down to the commune to investigate allegations of abuse was killed at the airstrip while trying to leave. That night, about 900 members of the commune killed themselves – or were "helped" to a similar fate. Most of them drank from a bucket filled with a mixture of sedatives, cyanide and soft drink. The ones who struggled were forcibly injected with a similarly toxic mix. Many were children.

The tape was made by Jones as his followers lined up and drank the mixture and were led off to die on the grass around the pavilion. The only available copies of it have been edited, though it's not clear whether it was Jones or the FBI who altered it. On it you can hear Jones giving his final sermon and telling the crowd that the fall-out of the politician's murder would be worse than death and urging everyone to speed up the process before the soldiers arrived. In the background you can hear children crying and screaming, and in some parts, noises that let you know they've died. The impact of the tape didn't really hit home until I saw photos of the aftermath. Some of the few publicly accessible images on the internet show hundreds of dead people lying face down and piled on top of one another near a building, and a bucket with dozens of empty pill boxes strewn around it.

The Jonestown tragedy has been referenced in pop music several times, most obviously in the name of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The first time I heard of it was through a band called Machines Of Loving Grace, who were on the soundtrack to The Crow, and who used a sample of one of Jones's speeches from that day in the last song on the last album they made, Gilt. When I was younger I thought it was a fitting sample for a song about the end of a band. After hearing the tape in full, the idea makes my stomach turn.

Scientists

2008-02-18T08:00:00.002-08:00

Sedition
All Tomorrow's Parties, 2006

"Hello, we're the Scientists," says Kim Salmon before his band launch into the set that would be recorded and released as Sedition. His speaking voice sounds kind of funny, far too polite for a rock star and perhaps even a little eccentric. It sounds totally at odds with the band's songs, which are so loud – so gut-wrenching and visceral – that before seeing him I had always imagined Salmon as some monstrous seven foot juggernaut who headbutted people for a living and had a voice like the bottom-end of a truck engine.

The Scientists formed in Perth as a naff pop-punk group in '78 and released one album before breaking up. A few years later, Salmon relocated to Sydney and formed a new version of the band with a much darker sound. The first single recorded by the new line-up was 'Swampland', now regarded as one of their classics, which had a slowed-down rockabilly rhythm and a nightmarish "rural gothic" atmosphere inspired by bands like The Stooges and The Cramps. "Nobody knows so they never think to visit," Salmon wailed. "In my heart, there's a place called Swampland/ Nine parts water, one part sand..." It set the tone for most of the band's songs through the decade – dark, guttural and very loud.

The second version of the Scientists broke up in the late '80s and Salmon went on to form The Surrealists and play in super-group The Beasts Of Bourbon with Tex Perkins. Two years ago they were asked to reform for a show in London by US band Mudhoney and the resulting gig was released as Sedition. The track-list covers the best of the band's later work, including 'We Had Love', 'Swampland' and several tracks from the Blood Red River EP. During the second-last and loudest song of the night, 'Backwards Man', guitarist Tony Thewlis goes to town on his instrument. As the din dies out, Kim's funny little voice pipes up again. "Six strings in one song!" he yells, laughing. He sounds just as impressed as the audience must have been.

Regurgitator

2008-02-11T08:00:00.001-08:00

Regurgitator
Warner, 1994

For the last ten years I have kept a sticker promoting one of Regurgitator's concerts in Newcastle – on the 23rd of July, 1998 – that was given to me by a dear friend. It has a little devilish-looking dude with horns on his head wearing a shirt and tie and offering his arms out to the names of Regurgitator and Tism, which are spelt out up the top in multi-coloured capital letters like the signage of a strip joint. When I decided to write about the band, I couldn't find the damn thing. I went rummaging through boxes of letters from old girlfriends and wads of ticket stubs wrapped in rubber bands without any luck. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd seen it. Eventually, I found it about ten centimetres from where I'd started – under a mess of papers stacked next to my glass of wine and laptop.

For some people the soundtrack to Australia in the 1990s was You Am I, or Silverchair, or Paul Kelly. For me it was Regurgitator. The band formed in 1993 after – according to bassist Ben Ely – he saw future singer Quan Yeomans high as a kite at a hippy party outside the Sunshine Coast in Queensland licking the leaves on trees. Yeomans didn't usually spend his time in outer-space, however. He had been extremely disturbed by the inequalities of global economics during a trip to the World Economic Forum in South America one year earlier and was radically politicised by the experience. Which made it all the stranger when the band signed to a major label before having released anything.

"What the fuck is that piece of shit?" asked the head of Warner Australia after seeing the band's first offering, a bone-crushing stoner song called 'Like It Like That' set to a cheap film clip shot in a shower. To make matters worse, the band had emblazoned the Warner logo on the back of their debut EP as a passive-aggressive taunt. The logo was removed before the record went to print, but it was replaced by a shot of a hamburger on the front – a reference to the mass-production of music and the first blow in what would become a long campaign of mud-slinging against their label, fans and life in general. After sending this column to my editor, I am finally going to peel off that sticker and put it on my laptop.

SPK

2008-02-04T08:00:00.019-08:00

Auto Da Fe
Mute, 1993

Sydney in 1979 is usually remembered as thriving on the legacy of Radio Birdman, who had ushered in punk rock, nurtured a horde of guitar-heavy imitators and then suddenly broken up. In opposition to the Radios' descendants, however, another underground scene had formed based on experimental and electronic music and led by groups such as Severed Heads and Tactics. The most extreme and mysterious of these bands were SPK, named after a German anti-psychiatry collective and founded by psychiatric nurse Graeme Revell with a patient he had met (deliberately referred to by Revell in interviews as simply "the singer" and by journalists as either Stephen or Neil Hill, with the confusion over his first name possibly stemming from his pseudonym on record sleeves, "Ne/H/iL").

On stage, SPK would bang pieces of metal against the floor, shoot flamethrowers at the audience, project autopsy footage against the wall behind them and, rather infamously, swing an enormous chain over the heads of the crowd – usually missing everyone else but hitting themselves on the back-swing. They were quickly noticed in Europe, where Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten were pursuing similar ideas and laying the foundations for a genre called industrial. After relocating to Britain, Revell became a target for music journalists keen to express outrage over the band's stage antics. After one such question, Revell stood up and took his shirt off. "I'm the only fucking person who ever gets injured. There's 44 stiches in my arm from last night," he told the reporter.

In late 1984, Hill's wife died from illnesses related to anorexia. The singer killed himself the next day. SPK continued as an outlet for Revell and new singer Sinan Leong, who made slightly more accessible music for the rest of the decade. The best collection of the band's early work is Auto Da Fe, originally released in 1983 and reissued by Mute ten years later. In the 1990s Revell began composing music for films and TV shows, including The Crow, Tank Girl and Ghost In The Machine and more recently, Sin City and CSI: Miami. His scores have won awards from the AFI and Venice Film Festival, and in 2005 he was awarded for career achievement at the BMI Awards in Hollywood.

The Futureheads

2008-01-28T08:00:00.004-08:00

The Futureheads
Sire / Ada, 2004

“BEEP BEEP! You should be old enough, you should be – You! Should be old enough! You should be old enough! You should be! YOU! YOU! You should be old enough!"

You know, they’re right, but I just couldn’t resist. Anyone lucky enough to own this album will retain a sympathetic grin for my indulgence long after a hundred other readers have groaned and passed onto the next review. But here’s some good news for those still with us – The Futureheads’ self-titled debut has been released in the US, so we no longer have to pay for its import in pounds. Beep beep! (PS: I’m not sure the words are actually "beep beep", but I enjoy imagining as such and I’m fairly sure the band wouldn’t mind).

It’s not often that a contemporary punk-pop group warrant comparison with the genre’s progenitors. I mean, who wants to embark upon the humiliating task of tracing Sum 41’s influences? The Futureheads’ debut album, however, slides into a cloud of impressive references. Like The Clash and Buzzcocks before them, these Brits know that punk can eschew politics without becoming trite, doesn’t always have to be angry to be relevant, and can be accessible without losing its energy. Topics covered with an unapologetic naivety include that eternally dreaded first day at work, the nervous thrill of moving cities and the sustained loyalty of robots (it’s because they have a longer life-span, you see).

Despite the welcome inclusion of a doo-wop vocal harmony to vary the record’s pace, The Futureheads’ sound blurs each track together at first and benefits greatly from repeated listens. Each spin will move these boys a little closer to your heart, and your mother could fear a lot worse. The band was formed by tutors and students from a Sunderland charity organisation aimed at getting kids off the street by teaching them musical instruments. Isn’t that adorable? Well, get this – added to the US release is a rendition of Kate Bush’s 'Hounds Of Love'... and it’s really good. Hey, I’m surprised too.

Andrew Ramadge is away. This review first published in Beat in 2004.

The Notwist

2008-01-21T08:00:00.005-08:00

Shrink
Zero Hour, 1998

When The Notwist became popular in the US and Australia on the back of a favourable review of their fifth album Neon Golden in Pitchfork, some people dismissed them as just another folk band who'd discovered laptops. That description was half true. To the ears they may have sounded like just another folk band with an electronic bent, but they also happened to be a German folk band with an electronic bent. Which meant, in line with the strange habits of European musicians, that they had started playing as a metal band, dabbled in punk and grunge, then stumbled upon laptops, post-rock, jazz and finally folk.

The Notwist were formed in Weilheim in southern Germany in 1989 by brothers Markus and Michael Acher with Martin Messerschmidt. Their first two albums, The Notwist and Nook, were tremendously loud detonations of noise inspired by European metal bands and the various hardcore, punk and indie sounds coming out of the US in the early '90s. After being joined by keyboard programmer Martin Gretschmann – who has since made some ten electronic albums under the moniker Console – they released their third album 12, which hinted at the style of hybrid indie and electro pop they would go on to record.

It was on 1998's Shrink, the album before Neon Golden, that The Notwist hit their stride. Among other things it is one of the greatest and uncredited inspirations for Radiohead's reinvention as an experimental pop band with Kid A, which was released two years later. The first track, 'Day 7', begins with three minutes of a stuttered electronic beat set to an art-house collection of chiming and scraping sounds. When the song proper kicks off, it hurtles straight into gorgeous pop territory as Markus's vocal melodies dance around the tinkerings of Gretschmann. The interaction between those two drives much of Shrink – see especially the fragile glitch-pop songs that wound up re-imagined on Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac – but what gives the album its true soul are those sections where the band delve into freeform jazz and rock over the top of the electronics. That probably makes it sound like some kind of terrible muso wankfest, but it's not. No, really, it's not.

Young Charlatans

2008-01-14T08:00:00.004-08:00

Shivers
Independent, 1978

"I've been contemplating suicide/ But it really doesn't suit my style/ So I think I'll just look bored instead." You'd be hard-pressed to find a more fitting slogan for disaffected young rock stars than the opening lines of 'Shivers'. I first heard the song in its incarnation as a Top 40 ballad performed by local pub-rock heroes The Screaming Jets while growing up in Newcastle in the early '90s. It had been recorded 15 years earlier by Nick Cave's first group Boys Next Door and somehow survived the Jets' blokeish butchery to become a guilty favourite of mine on cassette. Neither version had anything on the original, though.

'Shivers' was written by Rowland S Howard and recorded with the Young Charlatans as a demo in '78. The version on Inner City Sound is drowned in so much tape hiss that it's impossible to listen to with headphones worth more than $10. When Howard reaches the chorus – "My baby's so vain she is almost a mirror/ And the sound of her name sends a permanent shiver/ Down my spine" – his voice becomes so piercing that it literally does give you shivers. His nasal wailing bursts out of the song and stabs you in the eardrums.

The year it was recorded, Howard found himself in a taxi with a singer wearing stovepipe pants and a polka-dot shirt boasting about "the best and loudest song in the world". The singer was Nick Cave and the song was 'Sex Crimes'. Howard was suitably impressed when the Boys Next Door played it that night at a Melbourne venue called Bananas and eventually joined the band, lending his guitar to the group's drug-fuelled attack on music.

With Howard on board, Boys Next Door recorded a version of 'Shivers' as sung by Cave for their album Door, Door. In comparison to the Young Charlatans demo it was almost embarrassingly melodramatic and hinted at the style of bombastic ballads Cave would spend his later years pursuing. After the band reinvented themselves as The Birthday Party, increasing tension between Howard and Cave contributed to the group's break-up. "The songs I used to write were really personal songs, and Nick said he couldn't sing them because it was too embarrassing," he told NME in 1983. They split the year after.

Inner City Sound

2008-01-07T08:00:00.006-08:00

Various Artists
Inner City Sound
Laughing Outlaw, 2005

When I'm feeling lazy and this column is due, which is occasionally, it's easy enough to pick some random US or European underground record from the shelf and look it up on Wikipedia or All Music Guide. I don't just re-write the synopses on those websites, but they serve as a handy reference for discographies and links to archived interviews and articles. One of the most frustrating aspects of writing this column is that those resources rarely exist for all but the most obvious Australian bands and personalities. Compare, for example, US producer Steve Albini's extensive Wikipedia entry with Australian producer Lindsay Gravina's non-existent one, or that of the US band X with the Australian band X.

In the last six years there has been an avalanche of CD compilations and reissues of Australian underground bands, including Guy Blackman's Can't Stop It! series on post-punk, Tim Pittman's two double-disc Tales From The Australian Underground releases and David Laing's Do The Pop! garage rock compilation, which has been expanded into a series of three double-disc Do The Pop!: Redux compilations to be available this year.

One of the best things about these CDs are the liner notes. All three series have come with booklets bursting with hard-to-find biographies, anecdotes and gig posters covering each band and song on the discs. My favourite of the lot has been the companion disc to Clinton Walker's republished book on Australian punk and post-punk, Inner City Sound. It's a bit more hit-and-miss than the others but contains arguably the best tracks, from the early Rowland S Howard version of 'Shivers' to Machinations' 'Average Inadequacy'.

I finished this column in December with some thoughts on the best local releases of 2007 and in the process remembered how much I love writing about Australian music. It fucks me off, as people at the pub will know, that Australian music remains underrated and under-documented. So, armed with a few of Clinton Walker's books, Craig Mathieson's The Sell-In, Andrew Stafford's Pig City and the contacts of some wiser journos, I will be writing about Australian bands here much more this year. It's my New Year's Resolution.

Devastations

2007-12-24T08:00:00.002-08:00

Yes, U
Beggars Banquet / Remote Control, 2007

The move to Europe is as much a part of the Australian rock 'n' roll story as the stretch of highway between Melbourne and Sydney. For the Devastations, it was a chapter that had been written too many times before. Their second album Coal was overshadowed by comparisons to expatriate icon Nick Cave and eager questions about living in Berlin. It wasn't until Yes, U that they broke away from the history and found their own identity.

Yes, U is one of those poncy art-rock records that takes a while to "grow" on you. On the first listen it sounds like a collection of aimless electronic pop tracks punctuated by two thumping rock songs, 'Rosa' and 'Mistakes'. Part of the appeal is hearing it change with each spin, as the minimal electronic-based songs unfold into odysseys. The effect is like looking at a patch of empty space and then discovering that you're actually staring into a black hole. The seductive opening pair 'Black Ice' and 'Oh Me, Oh My' sound as if they've fallen from another planet and landed on a record. Some critics have argued the album's darkness is a reflection of Berlin – if Yes, U was in fact a city, it would be located on an outer-space satellite sometime in the future and have more strip clubs than Kings Cross.

Yes, U is a collection of love songs, but one with a curious idea of what love is. It can be sexy and redemptive, but also something very dark. It is what brings the narrator of 'Oh Me, Oh My' to life and then leads them back to death. It is the motive behind a string of letters left for an estranged lover by a sinister down-and-outer in 'The Pest': "I've waited so long that whoever loved you is gone/ So things will be different from now on... You'd make a beautiful wife/ Have I made myself clear?" Love is painted as lustful and creepy, and it is captured so perfectly that listening to the album can make your thighs twitch. I like to think of Yes, U as a challenge to other Australian bands - if you're going to fuck off to Berlin for a while, you'd better come back with something as good as this.

This column is the last in a three-week series covering the best local releases of the year.

Aleks And The Ramps

2007-12-17T08:00:00.002-08:00

Pisces Vs. Aquarius
Cavalier, 2007

There is a cartoon I like called Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law which is constructed almost entirely through references to other pieces of pop culture. It has very little in the way of character development or traditional notions of plot. The characters are drawn as heroes and villains from older and sometimes very obscure cartoons, who seem to have been reincarnated as lawyers for some reason left entirely unexplained. Each episode is made up as a series of clichés from other television shows and genres – especially the law firm soap – which are turned on their head for comic effect. For pop culture junkies, it's hilarious. For everyone else, I imagine it appears confusing and probably pointless.

Like Harvey Birdman, Aleks And The Ramps require a well-stocked knowledge of other pop music to be appreciated and there is a certain humour in hearing them subvert the usual rules of pop songwriting and performance. But the Melbourne band's debut album isn't in my "best of year" list just because it's some sort of in-joke for music fans – after all the tricks, Pisces Vs Aquarius remains an excellent and almost prodigiously imaginative record with strange and often disturbing themes. In other words, it has smarts and soul.

For some reason left entirely unexplained, the characters in Pisces Vs Aquarius are always trying to kill one another. Each song is a fragment of the same story, told either before or after various tragedies with acerbic and black-humoured attention to detail. The funniest track is the last, 'Diary Of A Lizard Man', in which the narrator watches their lover choke: "An earring fell off your ear and into the cereal bowl/ I couldn't help stopping what I was doing to watch you eat it whole/ Your oesophagus and I didn't know what to do/ Apart from watching your face turn blue/ It filled me with regret, but what was far worse/ Was that I didn't get the phone number of the nurse/ That I met when I visited you in intensive care." In terms of both storytelling and experimental pop music Pisces Vs Aquarius is a masterpiece. It makes Architecture In Helsinki sound like The Wiggles.

This column is part two of a three-week series covering the best local releases of the year.

Young & Restless

2007-12-10T08:00:00.002-08:00

Young & Restless
Dot Dash, 2007

On stage before the election, Karina Utomo looked like John Howard's nightmare – an angry, female Muslim immigrant with plenty to say and a whole bunch of kids preparing to vote for the first time to say it to. The interplay between Karina and bassist Ross, a tall skinny white guy with a mop of black hair hanging over his eyes like the incarnation of the masculine rock 'n' roll dream, was magnificent to watch. About half his height, she would duck under Ross's arms while he was holding his guitar up to the crowd and then jump up on the foldback speaker and run her finger across her throat while screaming. After stage-diving into the audience, Karina would hang in the air on the kids' fingertips contorted into a weird position like she was having a seizure and belt out the next song.

Young & Restless's debut full-length captured the intensity of the band's live show better than most studio albums. It was a half-hour blast of metal-inspired noise with razor-sharp bass lines and track titles including 'Police! Police!' and 'Satan', on which Karina vented her very swollen spleen like a shrieking axe-murderer. "I'm sick of saying yes, oh I'm sick of saying yes," she chanted on the wonderful 'Black (Kids)' and "I'm not speaking your language, no/ Just don't tell me to!" during 'I Pointed At You And You Burst Into Flames'.

Released on a trendy label and accompanied by slick publicity shots, the band's album ended up falling into the gap between the mainstream and underground – too polished for bleeding-edge critics and too abrasive for the majority of casual listeners. But no other Australian group captured the pissed-off spirit of youth or released anything with as much balls this year, and the fact Young & Restless were overlooked for Triple J's end-of-year award after winning Unearthed is only due to the fact they haven't had 15 years to descend into middle-of-the-road drivel like Silverchair. I can't think of a better way to re-phrase the introduction I used for an article in July: "Indonesian siblings form metal band with maths teacher and advertising type, hire gangly bassist and blast out of Canberra playing songs about the devil." Young & Restless are 2007's Frankenstein.

This column is part of a three-week series covering the best local releases of the year.

Low

2007-12-03T08:00:00.004-08:00

Things We Lost In The Fire
Kranky, 2001

During the early 1990s, as grunge was building upon the aesthetics of punk and metal, another group of underground bands quietly took their art in the opposite direction. Finding inspiration in the dark, minimalist sounds of Joy Division, they encountered a single problem: the songs were too fast. A decade after Ian Curtis’s death, Galaxie 500 would release a cover of 'Ceremony' (originally performed by Joy Division, later to emerge as New Order’s first single), Bedhead a cover of 'Disorder', Low, 'Transmission' and Codeine, 'Atmosphere' – all of them played at half the speed of the originals. And even though this string of languid tributes would span six years in total, outliving half of the bands involved, it’s easy to imagine them as the single defining moment of slow-core.

Marked by skeletal music and the speed of its name, slow-core harnessed the drone of art-rock and shoegazing but allowed it to lap at the feet of fragile guitar melodies rather than coercing it into waves of noise. By the time Low formed in 1994, Galaxie 500 no longer existed and Codeine were to separate only a few months later. Bedhead went on releasing their beautifully simple guitar melodies until splitting in 1998, two years after Low had begun to receive attention for their low-key classic The Curtain Hits the Cast – which included a brilliant 15-minute ambient track called 'Do You Know How To Waltz?'

By the time Low released Things We Lost In The Fire in 2001, they had become the last surviving slow-core band. The album began with a track called 'Sunflower' that had a sweet melody and surreal lyrics: "When they found your body/ Giant Xs on your eyes/ With your half of the ransom/ You bought some sweet sunflowers/ And gave them to the night." It's the calm before the storm – second track 'Whitetail' is darker than most would enjoy – and one of the finest mixtures of sweetness and sorrow ever to grace my ears.

Lightning Bolt

2007-11-26T08:00:00.003-08:00

Wonderful Rainbow
Load, 2003

Sometimes the most interesting musical ideas manifest as throw-aways tacked on to an otherwise average song. There were two songs at the end of the 1980s that seemed to bleed into one another: Nine Inch Nails' 'Ringfinger', the last track of their debut, and the first track of Nitzer Ebb's album Showtime released just a few months later. Neither song was amazing on its own, but they both had a similar concept. During the last minute of 'Ringfinger', a melody made from squealing samples and fuzzed-out guitar disintegrated into the kind of sound a giant Tesla coil makes. If you'd played it backwards, you would have heard the song gradually form from pure noise without an identifiable starting point.

'Getting Closer', the first track from Showtime, began the way 'Ringfinger' ended. A few thumps here, a few thuds there, a sort of growing electronic pulse underneath and then – all of a sudden! – a song. It seemed to come out of random sounds purely by accident, as if you'd walked into a factory and tweaked the timing of one piston to hear Beethoven. I spent the rest of the 90s chasing that idea and hoping it would infiltrate popular music. It never really did and so remained a preoccupation of avant-garde and electronic bands.

While I was looking, three notable bands formed at the Rhode Island School of Design in New York where Talking Heads had begun two decades earlier – Les Savy Fav, Black Dice and Lightning Bolt. Each had their own peculiar take on pop music. Lightning Bolt and Black Dice in particular had a preoccupation with noise, often played at volumes not intended for the faint of heart. Lightning Bolt seemed to have taken the idea of melody-from-commotion and, rather than incorporating it into pop songs, lifted its most extreme point – that split-second where melody and noise are indistinguishable – to use as the basis for everything they did. On their 2003 album Wonderful Rainbow, they took the noises of punk drumkits, heavy-metal guitar and the mechanical sounds championed a decade earlier by Nine Inch Nails and Nitzer Ebb and then fed them all into a jet engine. Every single second of that album is like walking a tightrope between music and chaos.

DFA

2007-11-12T08:00:00.002-08:00

Various Artists
DFA Compilation #1
DFA, 2003

It would have been fun to be in New York in 2003. Bands like TV On The Radio were just taking off, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were in full flight and the short-lived dance-punk trend was still, well... trendy. The basic formula for dance-punk seemed to be whiny vocals, dance beats and guitar riffs nabbed from late 1980s English post-punk groups like Wire and Gang Of Four. Cowbell and the occasional brass section didn't hurt either.

The dance-punk scene revolved around the DFA Records label, set up by the production team James Murphy (otherwise known as LCD Soundsystem) and Tim Goldsworthy with a mutual friend in 2001. Murphy and Goldsworthy produced most of the artists on their roster, including The Rapture and The Juan Maclean, and made imaginative remixes for other bands – including one for Le Tigre, where they turned the song 'Deceptacon' into a dance hit by slowing it down instead of speeding it up. The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem and !!! were the big names, and it was all greased with the adoration of Pitchfork's critics.

I wasn't in New York, however. I had just moved to Melbourne and was soaking up each new single at an indie club called Weekender, where my flatmate and I would float our Centrelink cheques on cheap beer and coins for the pool table and dance stupidly to old Madchester hits like The Stone Roses' 'Fool's Gold'. When !!!'s 'Me And Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard' hit the floor – dedicated to the New York mayor's introduction of dancing permits – it seemed like the late '90s had never existed and pop music had bypassed all that grunge bullshit and skipped straight from Madchester to dance-punk.

Once a week I'd skip whatever Arts lecture I was meant to be at and trek into the city to pick up the latest DFA 12" single from the record store Missing Link, and we'd dance to it at home on the balcony on weeknights. Our favourites were The Juan Maclean's 'Give Me Every Little Thing' and LCD Soundsystem's 'Yeah', which was a call-to-arms for bands to make better music that was released while the dance-punk trend was on its way out. Late that year, while I was out of town for Christmas, Weekender burned down.

Primal Scream

2007-11-05T08:00:00.002-08:00

XTRMNTR
Creation, 2000

Primal Scream opened the 1990s with one of the decade's most uplifting records, and closed it with one of the darkest. Bobby Gillespie founded the group after leaving The Jesus And Mary Chain – where he played drums and most likely picked up a few drug habits – in the mid '80s. Their first album was full of jangly guitar and psychedelic pop, before they switched gear and recorded a follow-up inspired by noisy US garage bands.

At the turn of the decade, Gillespie and co. changed wardrobes yet again and hit it big with Screamadelica, a spaced-out tribute to a drug high inspired by gospel music and dance beats in equal parts. It found a spiritual home in the early '90s "Madchester" scene led by The Stone Roses and perpetually-drugged layabouts The Happy Mondays, and became the soundtrack to millions of brain cells being slaughtered by ecstasy use.

Primal Scream spent the rest of the decade reinventing themselves on each new album, none of which lived up to critics' expectations. Then, in 2000, they released a bombshell by the name of XTRMNTR. The first track, 'Kill All Hippies', opened with a young child's voice ordering an air-strike over the kind of creepy synthesisers you'd expect to hear in a dystopian science fiction film. When the beat kicked in, it turned into a bombastic dance club hit with distorted bass guitar and an ear-splitting finale. If Satan was living on earth as a businessman with good looks and a slick car, I imagine it would be his theme song.

In terms of volume, the second song 'Accelerator' starts where the first left off – and then gets louder to the point of discomfort. It's followed by a string of apocalyptic dance tracks including 'Exterminator' and 'Swastika Eyes', a single originally released under the name 'War Pigs' and later sung as 'American Eyes' in live performances. A Chemical Brothers remix of the song closes the album along with 'Shoot Speed/Kill Light', an offering to the gods of white noise and quite possibly one of the greatest air guitar songs ever released.

Rand And Holland

2007-10-29T08:00:00.001-07:00

Caravans
Spunk, 2007

My favourite creative coupling in Sydney at the moment is the mismatched core of Rand and Holland, Brett Thompson and Stuart Olsen. Brett is the singer and Stu plays drums. The band's albums are good – full of sweet and spaced-out downbeat pop – but the real attraction is watching Brett and Stu play together live. They're like two halves of a whole.

Brett is very polite and clean-cut, with a straight-spined confidence that can charm and sometimes intimidate. When we talk, I feel unkempt and overweight. On stage he wears a nice white shirt and well-fitted slacks, with a neat belt and pointy leather shoes that shimmer amongst the dull tangle of cables around his feet. If you watch him closely enough, you can catch him thinking during songs. Sometimes, when the band break into a raucous number, he attempts a "yeah!" You can tell what's going through his nervous mind: "Things seem to be going well. I wonder if I can get away with a 'yeah'? Let's try."

I feel much more comfortable around Stu. At their gigs he wears second-hand clothes and an old grey jacket, like Brett's shambolic twin from the 1950s. He plays doubled over a guitar behind the kit – he's tall and gangly and the instrument almost disappears in the splay of his limbs – tapping a cymbal in the way one would ash a cigarette, with his eyes closed and slightly out of time with the rest of the band. Strapped to one of his dirty old shoes is a tambourine, which he hauls up slowly and lets fall in time to his own rhythm.

When one of the band's upbeat numbers comes around, Stu drags his arms back to the guitar in his lap and, for percussion, rocks back and forth smacking its head against a cymbal. He looks like he's in his own little world at the back of the stage. You get the feeling that were he to snap into consciousness at any point, he'd look up and ask: "Why is everyone else playing out of time?" The pair have a chemistry that's brilliant to watch.

Moby

2007-10-22T08:00:00.002-07:00

Play
V2, 1999

In 1999 I was living in a loft in the suburbs. It was a narrow room with windows on either end and a triangular roof. Enormous lengths of wood ran up the walls and met at the peak, like the upside-down hull of a boat. I wasn't really doing much at the time. I had a casual job and some "freelance" work, doing other people's uni projects for handfuls of pot. I'd usually stay up all night fiddling around with old computers and listening to music.

What I remember most about that loft are the late-night visitors. After midnight they'd sneak around the side of the house in front and make their way upstairs unannounced. One girl would come over to watch whatever dreadful programs were on television at that time of night and fall asleep in my bed. Another friend would always rock up with some cheap alcohol (usually a sickly-sweet bottle of port) and a copy of Moby's Play. He'd head straight for the stereo when he got there and spin, without fail, 'Find My Baby'.

I always hated that fucking song, and he knew it. It had a sample of an African-American singer bellowing "I'm gonna find my bay-beh/ Whoo!/ Before that sun goes down" over and over, set to a mainstream nightclub beat with a guitar solo smacked in the middle. His pressing "play" would be the start of a strange dance we'd act out. I'd tell him to turn the song off, he'd turn the volume up instead, I'd turn it back down and he'd tell me what a fuckhead I was. Then the bottle would be opened and before I knew it we'd both be singing along stupidly, taking special care to shout the "Whoo!" part as loud as possible.

Lately I've been thinking about my strongest memories of pop music and wondering how they've influenced my taste. I have no idea what the above anecdote says about me, but it's one of the happiest memories I have from that time in my life. Maybe it means sweet fuck all. When you're writing about music all the time, there's a danger of taking it all too seriously. So, I guess, I just hope you liked the story. And I still hate that goddamn song.

Sid Vicious

2007-10-15T08:00:00.002-07:00

Sid Sings
Virgin, 1979

I never joined the cult of The Sex Pistols. It may have helped if I was actually around at the time – but when I did go back and explore the collection of punk bands from the late 1970s, I came away confused as to why the Pistols in particular were so idolised. Their publicity stunts helped, no doubt. History might have been written differently had the Buzzcocks sailed down the Thames playing 'Orgasm Addict'. But it's depressing to think good PR was the biggest factor in the Pistols' success. I'd always wanted to know more, but it was impossible to sift through all the bullshit and mythology. Until I read Nick Kent.

Kent's account of the Pistols also happens to be the least objective. From his foreword to The Dark Stuff, he makes it clear he's not a fan. "Maybe you'll wonder why I've kept from documenting my experiences with the band in a special chapter," he writes. "The answer is simple: they were all ungrateful, back-stabbing bastards." Kent was one of NME's star journalists at the time, and sums up characters like Steve Jones and John Lydon only in as many words as it takes to detail the acts of violence he was subject to while being near them. He does dedicate a chapter to Sid, though. It's titled "The exploding dim-wit".

John Simon Ritchie was christened Sid by John Lydon, to avoid confusion. His surname came later, after he was "dispatched" to beat the shit out of Kent at a Pistols gig in 1976. An accomplice stuck a knife in the writer's face to keep him still while Sid swung his rusty bike chain around, aiming for Kent's head and hitting the mark at least once. Lydon was delighted at the result, according to Kent, and granted him the moniker Vicious. For Sid, the writer's payback would only hurt his memory. He'd been dead for years when Kent published his particularly frank essay detailing Ritchie's early years as the son of a single heroin-addicted mother, and his failed suicide attempts, writhing around in blood- and urine-soaked sheets. "Children around junkies are given few options in life," Kent wrote. "He could stare at the wall, or he could throw himself against it. He chose the latter."

Tim Buckley

2007-10-08T08:00:00.001-07:00

Sefronia
DiscReet, 1973

I found Sefronia in a $5 bin, worn and creased. Not in the romantic way, with the marks of love roughed into the corners and the edges of the opening made soft by a thousand thumbprints, but in a much sadder state. The cover had been shrink-wrapped in a film of plastic at some point, and it had started to constrict in parts and peel away at others, leaving little white wrinkles over Tim Buckley's face and a see-through layer like dead skin hanging off one side. It didn't look like it had ever been anybody's favourite record.

Sefronia was one of the last albums Buckley recorded. He was born on Valentine's Day, 1947, and – like his son Jeff would several decades later – began his musical career as a romantic, doe-eyed singer "mothering young women swooned over". He soon grew out of his folk-singer image, and started to experiment with jazz and improvisation, alienating most of his fans along the way. He spent the most impassioned years of his career trying to escape from the shadow of his first two albums, Tim Buckley and Goodbye And Hello.

As Buckley's hatred of the music industry crystallised, he discovered avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian and became inspired to do away with conventional lyrics and use his voice as an instrument instead. His personal masterpiece, as long-time collaborator Lee Underwood remembers, was to be Starsailor. Buckley knew it was going to be a difficult album to sell, but put everything he had behind it anyway. "You know you're not going to fit in," he said to a journalist at the time, "but you do it because it's your heart and soul."

Starsailor bombed, and took Buckley's heart and soul down with it. His record label took back all creative control and venues stopped booking him. He took up drinking, and then heroin. When he ran out of money, he agreed to attempt a comeback with a series of soulless and clichéd white-boy R&B and rock albums, including Sefronia. To add insult to injury, they bombed as well. Buckley died soon afterwards of a heroin overdose, at the age of 28. And so there I was, feeling spent and worthless (readers of this morbid little column may wonder if I ever feeling anything but), and that's how Sefronia came home with me.

Pavement

2007-10-01T08:00:00.001-07:00

Slanted & Enchanted
Matador, 1992

Pinot noir tastes like horse piss, I've been told, to those who don't drink red. Try arguing that case at a wine club and you'd be out the door faster than a '79 Grange at half-price. Pop music isn't so different. Genres, and the ability to tell and traverse them, are an acquired taste. One of the most enduring mysteries to lovers of independent and avant-garde music is the failure of the mainstream to appreciate the sounds they hold so dear. "Why do people listen to Shannon Noll instead of The Drones?" they ask. Because most people haven't spent the last decade learning to drink red wine, is the obvious answer.

But there is another reason for the mainstream-independent divide, I think, that is more black-and-white. It has less to do with genre than production. When most listeners hear rough vocals or background noises in a song they think it's cheap. Real pop music is made in a studio, not in someone's garage. If there's anything worthwhile in that sort of music, they think, it'd have to be pretty amazing to break free from the awful cheapness it's mired in. Which is, of course, almost the exact opposite of how music fans like myself think. If there's anything decent on some pop star's album, it'd have to be the hardy little flower indeed to poke through the weeds of commercial interest blocking it from the sun.

So if that's the difference between "pop" and "indie", then what is it that makes people jump the fence? For me it was the Pixies. But for many others, especially in the US, it was Pavement. A few years ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Slanted & Enchanted's release, critic and musician Chris Ott hand-wrote an essay for Pitchfork (who uploaded scans of the pages instead of retyping it) about the impact of hearing the record for the first time when he was 16. "It was a midway point between the sounds I dreamt of and the sounds I was capable of making... the walkie-talkie guitar production sounded like our garages and our basements," he wrote. Reading it makes me wonder about the teenagers out there now, and which albums they'll be writing columns about in ten years.

Pete Shelley

2007-09-24T08:00:00.001-07:00

XL1
Genetic, 1983

Before Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto formed Buzzcocks, one of the first-wave British punk bands, they were members of an electronic music society together at university. So when the group broke up in 1981, it came as no surprise to Shelley's friends that he swapped his guitar for a synthesiser. For most Buzzcocks fans, though, it was quite a shock. Shelley's first single 'Homosapien' was about as punk as a gay disco. Literally. It was soon banned by the BBC for containing "explicit" references to homosexuality – which, by today's standards, were about as explosive as soft cheese – and led Shelley to talk about the "open secret" of his bisexuality previously hinted at in Buzzcocks lyrics.

After an album of the same name as the single, Shelley released his second solo record XL1 in 1983. While it was still largely electronic, a few tracks had guitars as well as drum machines and harked back to the Buzzcocks' later songs – 'Many A Time' sounded a bit like a funked-up take on the band's brilliant 'Lipstick'. Still, there's a reason why Shelley is remembered foremost for his role as lead singer of the Buzzcocks rather than for his solo work. Let me put it this way: unless you're still in the throes of puberty, you should have figured out by now whether glamtastic 80s new-wave records appeal to your taste.

The original pressing of XL1 also had a track at the end of the second side called 'ZX Spectrum Code'. If you try to play it, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner molesting a video game. It was a computer program written for the ZX Spectrum, one of the first widely-available home computers in Britain, sometimes referred to as the UK equivalent of the Commodore 64. The 'Speccy', as it was known, was a blocky keyboard that plugged into a television set and ran programs from a tape deck. To run the program on the record, listeners had to cover their ears, play the track on vinyl while recording it to a cassette, and then load it on the ZX. If you ran the program in sync with the album, it would bring up the lines to each song on the screen like a makeshift karaoke machine. Cool, huh?

The Jesus And Mary Chain

2007-09-17T08:00:00.001-07:00

Darklands
Blanco Y Negro / WEA, 1987

Sometimes it seems like my music taste is stuck ten years behind. In the middle of the 90s, while the other malcontents were getting into Garbage's single 'Only Happy When It Rains', I was just discovering The Jesus And Mary Chain track of the same name. The two songs had little in common beyond their sentiment, and it was difficult to explain to friends why I was into these "old guys" instead of drooling over Shirley Manson's mini-dress. Never-mind that JAMC had started more riots than Manson had make-up kits – they were still past their use-by date. From an aesthetic point of view, it's a tragedy that we have such a short collective memory when it comes to pop music. But commercially, it's wonderful. I mean, who'd buy new records if they knew it had all been done before?

The fact that Darklands was, by and large, an album of understated pop songs made it even harder to explain. When Jim and William Reid – the Scottish brothers at the core of the band – started playing in the mid-80s, they stirred up controversy like born publicists. Dressed in leather jackets and dark sunglasses, they would play only three or four songs at gigs, sometimes with their backs turned to the audience, and wait for a riot to ensue. Within a few years they'd been banned from several venues, four cities and the offices of their record label. As one reporter dryly noted, their rap sheet was a list of "the essential ingredients for success". When he asked Jim why the band were so infamous, the singer replied in his thick accent: "Because we're so guud. Because we're so much better than uverybody ulse."

To go along with the band's devil-may-care image was their first album Psychocandy, one of the noisiest pop albums ever released and the subject of countless love letters from music critics. Whether they'd got it all out by the time of its follow-up, or they just wanted to piss off their fans some more, Darklands was almost the opposite. Instead of being wrapped in razor-wire, the melodies were accompanied by backing vocals and a drum machine like handclaps. It still had the Reid brothers' venom though. There's a line on 'Happy When It Rains' that sums up the pair's ethos perfectly: "Talking fast on the edge of nothing."

Supergrass

2007-09-03T08:00:00.001-07:00

In It For The Money
Parlophone, 1997

In the middle of the 1990s, as the singles war between Blur and Oasis was heating up, Supergrass crashed the Britpop party like someone's kid brother outraged at not having been invited. Compared to the big boys, they were loud, silly and quite incredibly ugly and surprised more than a few people by wowing both NME and Melody Maker with a simple punk-pop song about being thrown into lock-up while still buzzing from a drug hit.

But how to follow such a great entrance? Dressing up as homeless people and naming their second album In It For The Money seemed to do the trick. Their first record, I Should Coco, was pretty straightforward pop, inspired by two of the more melodic first-wave punk groups, Buzzcocks and The Jam. The second time around, the three-piece got a bit more creative and messed about with horns and psychedelic pop influences.

The introduction is the three of them, on the cover, dressed in second-hand winter coats and those stupid hats with the ear flaps, playing their instruments – one of which is a trashcan – on a street corner in some town that could only be called Shitsville, chanting "we're in it for the money, we're in it for the money" on the opening track. After that the song breaks open into a sort of hallucinatory driving anthem. "I got my mind made up!/ I got my finger on the button!/ Got the sun turned down!," Gaz Coombes rants as a brass section booms and the band play like they're on the highway to drug-induced psychosis.

Most of the other tracks on the first half of the record are the normal pop song stuff – hey, let's go to a party and do fun shit! – but towards the end they get more interesting. On the final trio, the tempo slows down and the band start getting weird. Coombes opens the medley with a sad, surreal few lines about his new-found fame: "If you like me, you can buy me and take me home/ When you see me on the TV I'm alone." The closer, 'Sometimes I Make You Sad', sounds like a demented, late-night carnival rhyme.

The Sisters Of Mercy

2007-08-27T08:00:00.001-07:00

First And Last And Always
Merciful Release / WEA, 1985

"So dark all over Europe." The first line of The Sisters Of Mercy's masterpiece First And Last And Always comes in this booming rock-star voice belonging to Andrew Eldritch. The album would go on to fulfil its own prophecy and inspire countless goth poseurs across the continent – but in those first words there's no sense of pretension. They sound like the reaction of someone who looked up at the sky and saw the sun blocked out by a mushroom cloud. "Run around in the radiation/ Run around in the acid rain..."

When the band formed in Leeds in 1980 they were caught in the nexus between post-punk and goth rock, a new genre being carved out by fellow English group Bauhaus with singles like the brilliant 'Bela Lugosi's Dead'. Even though The Sisters used a drum machine, they had well and truly chosen goth rock by the time of their debut First And Last... The songs were romantic and majestic, if a little apocalyptic at times – and, of course, at least one track was sung in a mixture of English and German vocals.

One of my friends can't listen to this album anymore, because it's so closely connected with one of her old lovers. But those kind of memories seem to be what the record was made for. It's so passionate and sentimental that you can't help but listen to the seven-minute finale – where Eldritch croons "you're beautiful" over and over – without picturing some malcontent teenage girl or boy, lying in their bedroom, falling in love with misery.

After their debut album, the band disintegrated around singer Eldritch. Guitarist Wayne Hussey and bassist Craig Adams left in somewhat acrimonious circumstances to form their own band The Mission, who continued down the goth rock path while Eldritch made increasingly electronic albums under the original name The Sisters Of Mercy. The later albums by both bands are okay, but they always felt like two halves of a whole – as if the groups were two complementary lovers separated by insurmountable differences. As it turned out, First And Last And Always was exactly what its name said. How truly romantic and tragic.

Les Savy Fav

2007-08-20T08:00:00.001-07:00

Inches
Frenchkiss / Popfrenzy, 2004

I'm cheating a bit this week by writing about myself. Well, writing about myself more than usual, anyway. Last week I penned a rather unhinged review of Auckland's The Mint Chicks at The Gaelic Club for Mess+Noise. It was inflammatory and over-the-top and I was terrified of sending it off to print, because I'd become so caught up in this idea of "writing properly", in case The Age or whatever didn't let me in later on. But screw 'em.

Anyway, the review was about how we – both fans and critics alike – should be wanting more, and should stop being frightened of offending musicians or their bloody publicity agents. It met with a more passionate response than anything I've written in years. But there was something else in that review that was overshadowed by the politics, and that's what I'd like to talk about here: the feeling behind it, the feeling that I've only just found a way to put into words, and that was crystallised that Friday night at The Gaelic.

There's a song by Les Savy Fav – the only other punk band besides The Mint Chicks I know of worth a damn at the moment – called 'Yawn, Yawn, Yawn'. It's so brilliant and explosive that I can't really do it justice here. "Take a deep breath and waste sweet seconds/ The late day beckons, and if you save it, it will slip away," are the first lines of the chorus. And then, when the New York band's singer Tim Harrington really lets loose: "Spend seven nights like Saturday!/ Yawn, yawn, yawn, we're all long gone/ And if we get lucky we'll be dead by dawn/ So let's g-g-get it on!/ I WANT TO G-G-GET IT ON!"

There's a certain nihilism in that song like no other I know of. It captures a feeling hard to explain: that miserable, cursed feeling of being damned, as if you could wind up in hell at any moment and no one would bother going to your funeral, and like if you could only find the perfect expression of that feeling in rock and roll – and where else would you find it? – then you'd either be cured, or killed, in the flames. See, I get that feeling a lot.

Hayden

2007-08-13T08:00:00.001-07:00

Elk-Lake Serenade
Hardwood / Spunk, 2004

Elk-Lake Serenade is bookended by two very strange and beautiful love songs. The first one, 'Wide Eyes', begins with a desperate plea to a stranger on the bus: "I'm getting off at the next stop/ Will you leave with me, so that we can be seen/ By my old love, who's standing over there?/ She left me so stunned that I walk around scared." Hayden lets the lines flow out of him slowly, in a baritone deeper than the ocean, and as if all those hundreds of tonnes of water were weighing down upon his every heartbroken word.

"And so it went like that," he continues. "She agreed to get off/ With me by her side, three blocks from her stop/ As we stepped to the street, she kissed my cheek/ And whispered words that I won't repeat." The song reaches its climax not with a burst of fireworks but the smallest of small comforts. Hayden's voice lifts ever so slightly as the focus of his attention turns. "I think that she saw us, but I didn't look up to see/ Wrap your warm arms around me and let's go get something to eat," he sings to his saviour.

In contrast to 'Wide Eyes', the album's last track – a bonus tacked on to the domestic release of Elk-Lake Serenade and titled simply 'Australia' – is up-beat and confident. So confident, in fact, that it's about stealing someone's girlfriend. "When he brings you along to hear my songs/ He does not realise, that I'm looking in your eyes/ And every time I've been here, I've sung only into your ears," Hayden sings to a girl in the crowd. "So I'll use these lines to tell you that I'm/ Never playing this town again if you don't take my hand."

There's no machismo about the main character, though – no sense of competition with the girl's boyfriend. "I hope he loves you so much he just lets you go/ And comes to the show when we're back in town and I sing/ All the songs that I've written about you and I..." he daydreams. Then everything trails off and there's a pause. When Hayden's voice returns for the final two words, it's with an unexpected sense of warmth and affection.

"... And him."

Depeche Mode

2007-08-06T08:00:00.001-07:00

Ultra
Mute / Mushroom, 1997

Depeche Mode's heavier-than-usual album Songs Of Faith And Devotion was their attempt to ride the early '90s grunge wave, and also their first to debut at number one in both the US and UK. The subsequent 14-month world tour left the band fucked. Not so much high and dry as just high: singer David Gahan's consumption of heroin had reached true rock-star levels and songwriter Martin Gore had a series of breakdowns.

If you'd had to pick it, the English synth-pop group weren't an obvious choice to end up as junk casualties. After all, they were hardly The Rolling Stones. They'd made their name in the '80s with a string of kooky electronic pop songs playing off the contrast between extrovert Gahan and the reclusive, perverted Gore, and appeared in music videos clad in embarrassing, pseudo-bondage leather outfits. Simply put, they looked like an early boy-band dressed in gay club attire. Their definitive album of the period, Violator, captured all the best and cringe-worthy worst of the decade's musical whims.

Anyway, when it came to making a come-back record a few years after the implosion caused by Songs Of Faith And Devotion, Gahan had to enrol in singing lessons to rebuild the emaciated vocal chords he'd let wither away through drug use. The result, Ultra, ended up being one of their best releases – despite a pretty lacklustre reception.

On it, the band didn't bother glossing over their problems. If anything, they confronted them head-on. "Whatever I've done, I've been staring down the barrel of a gun," was the first song's chorus – though it wasn't clear whether the line referred to Gahan's problems with drugs or Gore's generally tortured psyche, which was already common knowledge.

The whole album was dark and somewhat other-worldly. The instruments boomed and echoed and were occasionally punctuated with an eerie guitar or piano solo. It sounded incredibly lonely, but also warm – as if it had been dreamt up in an empty detox chamber before that one last hit of smack had worn off. Listening to it a decade after its release, Ultra seems much more visionary than, I think, most people realised at the time.

Barry Adamson

2007-07-30T08:00:00.001-07:00

Oedipus Schmoedipus
Mute, 1996

An album named after Freud's Oedipal complex could only begin with a song about sex. On Barry Adamson's Oedipus Schmoedipus it's 'Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Pelvis', a play on the title of a famous Pink Floyd track, with Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker doing tongue-in-cheek guest vocals over Adamson's giant gospel-disco beat. The gangly Britpop singer groans and pants and pretends to be a devastating sex symbol while masturbating alone in a mess of "damp towels and asthma inhalers". "Can't you see what's on offer baby?" he bluffs. "Yeah baby, it's going cheap today/ And all the girls say, come on Jarv, can I be the first?/ You make us so hot we feel we're gonna burst!"

Adamson left his job as a graphic designer to join a punk rock band in the late 1970s. He was successful, sort of, and caught Howard Devoto on his way out of the Buzzcocks to form post-punk group Magazine. Adamson later played and collaborated with awfully-serious figures like Nick Cave, director David Lynch and experimental duo Pan Sonic. His solo records were never so po-faced as his colleagues', but never quite full of cheer either. They were a synthesis of his favourite sounds – punk, jazz, lounge crooners and especially film-noir soundtracks – with a strange mix of lascivious humour and sadism.

Adamson's first album, Moss Side Story, was a creepy, experimental jazz soundtrack to a fictitious film noir. Oedipus Schmoedipus kept on with the idea – the sultry 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' was later used in Lynch's film Lost Highway – but with more variation in sound and subject. Along with Cocker's cameo is one from Nick Cave, who appears on syrupy-sweet love song 'The Sweetest Embrace' with spiteful lyrics. "My desire for you is endless and I'll love you 'til we fall," Cave purrs to his lover, and then bluntly adds: "I just don't want you no more." It gets darkest on 'Business As Usual', where a series of deranged phone threats from an obsessed lover are set to drums and a few brittle, wiry strings. That Adamson can follow up something so evil with a sprightly little jazz number is impressive. Something tells me he's had a very interesting love life.

Panthers

2007-07-23T08:00:00.001-07:00

Let's Get Serious
Dim Mak, 2003

I like songs about breaking up. It's not because my love life is turbulent, though I have had an "atom bomb" moment in the past – you know, when two people are attracted to each other like oncoming trains. I like break-up songs in the same way as songs about God, even though I'm not religious, and political hip-hop, even though I'm not black or particularly hard done by. I like all of these kinds of songs because they have passion.

Brooklyn band Panthers formed out of another group, Orchid and yada, yada, yada. In fact, I don't know much about them at all. Look them up on Wikipedia if you're interested. I only want to talk about one of their songs, 'Thank Me With Your Hands' – though the others aren't bad either. There are two types of break-up songs. Sad, softly-strummed odes to lovers lost and gigantic fireballs of emotion. This is quite emphatically the latter.

'Thank Me' is an average pop song played with amazing ferocity. It's loud, fast and dark. When the chorus kicks in, it's impressive if only as proof the band can play louder than during the first verse. Jayson Green's emotions flail about back and forth between anger and denial. "Let's not talk about it/ We never did, so why start now?/ Let's just go back to your place/ And not talk about it there," he sings in an utterly defeated voice. It's like watching someone dying of thirst struggle with a bottle of water they know is poisoned.

But that's got nothing on the last 90 seconds. The drumbeat gets heavier – you can actually hear the kit being hit harder – and both of the guitarists lose it. One of them sounds as if he's ripping strips of flesh off the thing while it screams. "STOP FUCKING!," Green howls. "Stop fucking with me and I'll stop fucking with you too!" All five musicians explode in a maelstrom of noise and it sounds like a fucking atom bomb. It's brilliant.

Public Enemy

2007-07-16T08:00:00.001-07:00

Apocalypse 91
Def Jam / Columbia, 1991

The video was unequivocal. Rapper Chuck D sang in a room of men in red berets loading semi-automatic rifles and using human cut-outs for target practice. Black-and-white images of riots, giant attack dogs mauling black protestors and police removing likenesses of Martin Luther King, Jr and Rosa Parks from a public bus were contrasted with those shown in colour, of the red berets storming a government building, poisoning a senator and strapping a bomb to the Governor of Arizona's motorcade. It ended with a reenactment of King's assassination and a shot of Chuck D setting off a detonator.

In 1983, assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr became just the third person to be honoured with a US federal holiday – after George Washington and Christopher Columbus. Four years later, incoming Arizona Governor Evan Mecham overturned approval of the holiday in the state as his first act in office. 'By The Time I Get To Arizona' was Public Enemy's reply. It was a sonic juggernaut in three parts. The first had a pummelling beat like waves rising and crashing in a storm, overlaid with a gospel choir. The second used cut-ups of crowds screaming and a noise like an air-raid siren.

Public Enemy were already famous when they released Apocalypse 91 and the controversial single 'By The Time...'. Their earlier albums It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back and Fear Of A Black Planet had turned the group into unofficial media spokesmen for civil rights activism in the US. But Apocalypse 91 would be their last as a coherent group: one or two years later, the band went on hiatus due in part to Flavor Flav's drug use (the one who wore a clock) and they never hit the same highs again.

'By The Time...' was the band's swansong, at least for their "classic" period. A richer, heavier and more lyrically-pointed extension of their earlier work, it stands today as the best five minutes of political hip-hop on record. Arizona voted to celebrate MLK Day in 1992, after the song created a furore and the National Football League threatened to move the Super Bowl. Public Enemy continued to boycott the state until late last year.

New Order

2007-07-09T08:00:00.001-07:00

Movement
Factory, 1981

New Order spent the first few years after Ian Curtis's death trying to find their own feet. Between the end of Joy Division and 'Blue Monday', the ridiculously-popular club hit they would be remembered for, the band released a string of singles that captured them in transition: 'Ceremony', a minimalist recording of a track they had played live with Curtis; the twitchy 'Everything's Gone Green' which foreshadowed their move to dance music; and perhaps the best, 'Temptation', an upbeat pop song with cooed backing vocals. With each single, Bernard Sumner's vocals got a little bit more confident, a little bit more him.

Movement, however, seemed almost like a throw-back. Released between the three singles, the album sounded like a synthesis of Joy Division and something else – a style not quite solid enough yet to be tangible. It's the most subdued record in either Joy Division or New Order's discography, with both Sumner and Peter Hook trying to recreate Ian Curtis's gloomy vocals without daring to emulate his passion or paranoia.

It was released a year and a half after Curtis's death in November 1981, overshadowed by the compilation of Joy Division's unfinished work and rarities Still put out just a few weeks earlier. There are few discernable choruses or regular song structures and the vocals are so muted that it sometimes sounds like an instrumental new wave record. But what it lacks in emphasis – or perhaps even originality, considering Curtis's posthumous influence – it makes up for in consistency. Unlike New Order's later patchy albums, everything on Movement seems to fit together. Its best moment is 'The Him', an ethereal track with a cascading drumbeat that eventually breaks into a howling mess.

Two decades after the fact, it feels apt that Movement was so utterly different to the band's singles of the time – and certainly to all those that followed. It's warmer and more human than anything Joy Division released and more detached than anything New Order went on to achieve. If Sumner and co. were the last great singles band, this is their most cohesive album – the introverted flipside of their commercial pop career.

Antony And The Johnsons

2007-07-02T08:00:00.001-07:00

I Am A Bird Now
Secretly Canadian, 2005

The first time I heard artists like Bob Dylan and Nick Cave sing, I was too young to recognise anything peculiar about their voices. It's a wonderful thing to hear music like that for the first time – a feeling all pop fans wish they could revisit. Sadly, with the bastard by-products of experience, strange singers start to annoy as easily as amaze.

There's this moment on the opening track of I Am A Bird Now when the piano tumbles onto itself and teeters dangerously close to an enthusiastic rendition of 'Chopsticks'. It's a little childish and also quite thrilling, as if each note threatened to blow the whole act apart and expose it as some sort of second-grade joke. And the act does feel precarious. Antony's voice blends and eclipses all the usual clues of genre, race and gender, his music emulates early 20th-century blues, his dress takes inspiration from 1980s pop stars and his records come with the sanction of the New York art scene.

When the mainstream media took Antony to heart two years ago, it didn't feel quite right. It wasn't just Antony's injured vibrato that made him a star, nor that “Lou Reed thinks he’s cool” (as the Sydney Morning Herald felt it necessary to remind us). It was his penchant for drag and his blurred gender – could he be, possibly?, maybe! a transgender male – that proved alluring for journalists. It seemed as if writers had found Bowie all over again and were recycling their gender-bending stories like so many glass bottles and glam rockers.

At the time, I was so sick of the hype I almost threw I Am A Bird Now in the bin. It’s only recently I've listened to it again. I still don't think it’s as brilliant as most people claimed – the singer's exaggerated naivety pisses me off on at least every second track – but there are a few moments that are truly special. The best is 'Fistfull Of Love', a big-sounding track filled with horns and a momentum that makes you want to sing along in some warbled, half-made-up language. Antony lets his mutant voice run wild, and it gives you that feeling of hearing something totally new for the first time.

The Saints

2007-06-25T08:00:00.001-07:00

Eternally Yours
EMI, 1978

Only five months after Never Mind The Bollocks was released, The Saints were already deriding the punk aesthetic. "Now you think that you got a first in fashion/ New uniforms, we all look the same... a new profit in the same old game," Chris Bailey sang on 'Private Affair' from the band's second album, Eternally Yours. They had reason to be pissed off.

The Saints' first anarchic single, '(I'm) Stranded', part of an album of the same name recorded for $200 at an advertising jingles studio in Brisbane, had preceded every punk group in the UK. The British media called it "bloody incredible" and one paper ran their review under the heading "Single of this and every week". At the time, back at home, Bailey thought to himself, "that's odd, I don't recall becoming instantly famous in the UK".

But when the band finally made it to London, it was like stepping into a bear trap. The Sex Pistols had taken off in the capital and brought the de rigeur punk uniform with them. Reportedly, EMI wanted the Australian group to create a rival "Saints suit", with lime-green shirts, ripped pants and spiky hair. Critics were far less affectionate towards a bunch of angry brats from the colonies now they had their own punk heroes. And when the band did have a hit with the single 'This Perfect Day', EMI hadn't made enough copies.

The Saints recorded Eternally Yours at the same studios later used by The Clash for London Calling. It kicked off with 'Know Your Product', a caustic attack on the advertising industry with a prominent brass section that confused all the punk kids. "Cheap advertising, you're lying/ Never gonna get me what I want/ Smooth talkin', brain washin'/ Aint never gonna give me what I need," Bailey spat out between horn blasts.

It was one of punk's finest moments, especially in theme. But if you asked an Australian kid in a Ramones T-shirt who The Saints were today, they probably wouldn't have a clue. Sometimes it must really fucking suck to be in a band from Australia.

Dead Kennedys

2007-06-18T08:00:00.001-07:00

Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables
Alternative Tentacles, 1980

After a short hiatus, this column was supposed to return with a snappy analysis of some obscure pop record. Apparently providence had other ideas, because I ended up revisiting the much more enjoyable pastime of getting drunk and listening to The Dead Kennedys' Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables at an obnoxious volume. Oh well.

One of the defining records of punk rock, Fresh Fruit is a masterpiece of black humour. Jet-black humour. The Sex Pistols' 'God Save The Queen' was facetious, but 'Kill The Poor' made it look about as sharp as a pair of fluffy dice. "No more welfare tax to pay!" Jello Biafra screamed in a Republican persona, advocating the massacre of homeless people. "Jane Fonda on the screen today/ Convinced the liberals it's okay!"

When Biafra switched to singing in the underdog's voice, his world-view was even less romantic. On the second track of the Californian band's debut album, he belted out the chorus "This world brings me down/ I'm looking forward to death". It was followed by a cynical number called 'When Ya Get Drafted'. In Fresh Fruit's dystopia, the ruling class wanted deadbeats killed and the proles wanted to top themselves anyway. Listening to it is like watching a film about the horrors of the twentieth century set to a surf-rock score.

There are a few light-hearted moments as well, like when the band push their rebellion into the ridiculous. 'Stealing People's Mail' and 'Let's Lynch The Landlord', with its sunny, Beach Boys-esque guitar solo, make for good sing-alongs. Sample: "We ain't goin' to the party/ We ain't goin' to the game/ We're gonna cruise down main/ Stealin' people's mail!"

Fresh Fruit ends with two of the band's most famous tracks, the unsettling 'Holiday In Cambodia' and their cover of the American classic 'Viva Las Vegas'. Together, the two songs are the perfect account of The Dead Kennedys' take on the USA – a horrible, scathing attack on naive, left-wing trendies and a fat-bellied parody of the uneducated classes. Sometimes I wonder if there was anybody they liked at all. Probably not.

Q & Not U

2007-06-11T08:00:00.002-07:00

Power
Dischord / Popfrenzy, 2005

If this band can create an entire album’s worth of semi-coherent, occasionally rhyming, free association lyrics, then surely I can knock up a single review. Here we go:

“Boring lyrics and predictable indie-rock.” Love, it doesn’t need to be that way. Airplay. Triple J. DC hardcore. Left that last one behind! Whimsical lyrics and synth-pop bass lines. This could be serious. Duelling vocals. Falsetto voices. Playful guitar, but we don’t need feedback. There’s synthesizer, off-kilter, synthesizer horns! An impressive array of references, but it didn’t have to do with the subject. Is it sex? I’m dancing, then I’m thinking, and then I’m just confused.

Which urban district did you write a prayer for? These lyrics remind me of The Dismemberment Plan, but these sounds don’t ring a bell. Third album. Three members. Left the fourth behind! Who needs a bassist anyway? (Post) punk’s not dead – I read that on a T-shirt, so I’m pretty sure it is! A cappella. She said whatever, and left my heart behind. I’m looking for something beautiful. You know what it is, but you just wont say! 'Collecting The Diamonds' is a thankless task, but you make it so fun in the end! You do it all over with 'Beautiful Beats', and leave 'X-Polynation' for the end!

I’m an angry kid in a surrealist garden; these flowers just melt in my gaze. “Do we the pro-cess in our process?” Does anyone understand what you say? Letting me down easy. Coming down slow. 'Passwords' push-push-pushes me into introspection, but then I’m just confused. I put it on repeat anyway, no need to be confused! 'Wonderful People' opened the record, but I’m sure they stuck around! It’s interesting. I’m interested! Entertained and perplexed. Resonating but chasing resolve. Long-term playability? I’ll tell you in a month. On second thought, that T-shirt rocked. I’m leaving credibility behind.

Andrew Ramadge is away. This review first published in Beat in 2005.

Bright Eyes

2007-06-04T08:00:00.001-07:00

3 New Hit Songs From Bright Eyes
Wichita, 2001

I got in some great swipes at Conor Oberst last time he was on Australian stages, as I'm fond of boasting to company. I think my friends understood why I did it, as well – even though they'd been tortured by my collection of obscure Bright Eyes singles for years. There are few other contemporary songwriters whose work is so prolific and so consistently beautiful, if any. And none I've hated more. Not even bloody Jeff Buckley.

Oberst is, in his songs at least, a cute troubadour with a taste for flings matched only by his willingness to lament them from the next town as if they were meant to last forever, wandering about in constant amazement like he was switching eyeballs at the rate of contact lenses. He writes like someone stuck between the ages of six and 16, obsessed with wonder, heartbreak and outrage and trying his hardest to publicise every last sin. What makes Bright Eyes so notable is that Oberst can match his confessional and stream-of-thought lyrics with incredible music, seemingly without even breaking a sweat.

The problem is that few of us can live the fairytale Oberst complains relentlessly about. Most of us can't mope around stoned whining "life's shit" and expect to get a date, or have a song dedicated to us by a razor-fringed boy with an acoustic guitar. We have to learn how to make the boss coffee to pay the rent and give up writing poetry for, as John Birmingham describes the art of journalism, pouring saccharine ooze over cancer babies and beached whales. And to get ourselves through it, we learn to hate the part of ourselves that identifies with Oberst's tirelessly romantic, wide-eyed view of the world.

"Hooray, I like feelings and shit!" someone yelled when Bright Eyes played the Prince of Wales in St Kilda. It was a great gig, but I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. I got drunk, got a ride home from an extremely kind acquaintance and went to play – much to my confusion – 'Drunk Kid Catholic' from the obscure 3 New Hit Songs EP. I guess it's a love/hate thing. Conor Oberst is the perfect romantic and I, clearly, am a struggling one.