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‘I want to be in this band’: Adelaide’s Wireheads
‘I want to be in this band’: Adelaide’s Wireheads Photograph: Supplied
‘I want to be in this band’: Adelaide’s Wireheads Photograph: Supplied

Music you missed: 10 Australian underground releases from Deep Heat to Dispossessed

This article is more than 7 years old

Our quarterly music column returns to dig up the best under-the-radar Australian releases from April, May and June

“Time’s the revelator,” country musician Gillian Welch sings in her song of the same name. I assume she meant things such as love and grief, but it applies to music more than anything. Only time can reveal which records will bloom, then shrivel and fall from the vine – and which will make a late great run towards eternity.

The records listed here will endure. At least I’d like to think so. But I’m still in the grip of obsession and that is no place to speak from sagely.

The best thesis I’ve heard as to which records date and which grow timeless is that the former are “followers”, and the latter are pioneers, which sounds about right.

And does it even matter? Why this conviction that music is better if it lasts a long time? Of the below: Deep Heat broke up after their record launch. Four members of Dispossessed bailed three days before their debut album was finished. And there’s no talk of The Still being anything more than a one-off for an obscure “new music library” called Seriés Aphōnos.

If you like what you hear, buy the record. Most digital copies cost less than a craft beer. And please share with me what I missed in the comments.

Dispossessed – Insurgency

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“I was sick of time and again seeing four white people on stage singing about fuck all,” said guitarist Birrugan Dunn-Velasco (of Gumbayngirr and Mapuche descent) to Noisey last month. He and vocalist Harry Bonifacio (Filipino) met at a rally in Sydney, then formed metal band Dispossessed as a conduit for the “violent themes … of white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism”.

Black Panther starts with a sample of a 1968 Black Panther chant, “no more pigs in our community”, before dropping into a curdled mess of stoner doom. By the song’s end, the instruments lurch from bar to bar, barely in time, but with everything on the line.

Made in a basement over five sessions during which four members quit, Dispossessed’s line-up has settled on Dunn-Velasco, guitarist Serwah Attafuah (Ghanaian) and drummer Jarrod Smith (Wiradjuri). The record’s production is bottom-heavy, lumpy and rough-as-guts, its tempo speeding up from sludge-slow only in reluctant bursts, yet it still packs the punch of a swift fist to the throat. It’s both cathartic and bottled-up, though it’s bottled something potent: an eternally raw document of time, place and unapologetic fury.

Wireheads – Arrive Alive

By the time singer Dom Trimboli drops to the dusty earth to breakdance in the video for Arrive Alive, it’s already happened: I want to be in the band. And I’m not alone in wanting in on Wireheads’ aura of loose spontaneity – this record has 20 names credited, including Adelaide pals Bitch Prefect and Fair Maiden, and Sydney band Day Ravies.

The songs veer from thickets of brisk jangle-rock a la The Modern Lovers to the doldrums of Melbourne’s Lower Plenty. There’s the horn-crazed party jam of Organ Failure, the psych garage rock of Isabella Says, and a duet with Ellen Carey (Fair Maiden) called Bananafish.

In each, Trimboli’s yell-y vocals are held high, dry and determined in the mix, similar to Courtney Barnett in that his ennui is barely masked by a nonchalant tumble of words and heat-hazed Australian imagery. And after every comic turn in the road, it seems a black dog comes loping, as on Ice Cool Flavor Aid where Trimboli slurs: “The higher you get from the level of the sea / The harder it gets to breathe”.

Medicine Voice – I And Thou

Sydney’s Sar Friedman of Medicine Voice Photograph: Jessica Chapnik Khan

In a Peruvian ayahuasca ceremony, your shaman drinks the hallucinogenic brew too, to guide you through the spirit world with medicine songs. The cool, clear and ultra-present voice of Sar Friedman has a similar sense of ushering.

Perhaps it’s because her mantra-like repetitions burrow into your consciousness, or because her inhalations on Meeting The White Spirit draw you into her body. On Friedman’s debut as Medicine Voice, she’s by your side on the journey this record invites you on.

Helping to make its landscapes is guitar manipulator and drone dude Oren Ambarchi, and multi-instrumentalist Joe Talia. Themes of wilderness, insight, free will and creation are explored to twinkling ambience, drone, Hindi-like chants, treated guitar and rainshakers. Unexpectedly, a pop song in the vein of St Vincent, Realm Of The Wild Woman, has a cold sacrificial drum circling Friedman’s voice at its most persuasively all-knowing.

“Off with your head,” she sings, quoting the Queen of Hearts. It’s more incitement than song, really, but to what? No matter: I’m in.

Police Force – Formula 1

In the video for Freaking Out The Squares, Brisbane band Police Force trash guitars in a carpark. They hurl a laptop from a roof and do ollies over the mess. On their third cassette, Formula 1, they drown their songs in reverb and delay and dunk the vocals beneath the fuzz too. Their label, Tenth Court, has no band bio and on their Facebook page, “huh” is written where the description should be.

Despite their best efforts, Formula 1 is more beautiful than bratty. Arousing, too, with nods to Poison Ivy’s slinking rockabilly and the robot rock riffs of Josh Homme (Sex Scene’s prowl is pretty good, but the getting-back-to-biz pacing of Peace In The Hood is even better). Ghostly samples bookend songs so the smoke-haze is still thick when the next song revs out of the pit. And with this much delay, it was always going to get proper dubby, like the echoes of last night’s Police Force gig are playing in your confused hung-over head.

There are no showy solos, drum fills or sing-along choruses. The guitarist doesn’t have “chops”. Police Force sure bring the weather, though, and I’d like to see them do that in a small room very soon.

Gawurrra – Ratja YaliYali

Stanley Gawurra Gaykamangu is playing at Garma next month, an Indigenous festival in Arnhem Land. Perhaps Garma’s most magical spell is how far the men’s evening song carries: straight and powerful through the stringybark trees like a spear. I can only imagine how Gawurra’s husky voice – justifying comparisons to Gurrumul – will pull people from their campsites to him to feel in full what I do just hearing him on record: as though everything is going to be OK.

Described as a “gentle and genuine young leader”, this is the East Arnhem Land singer’s first album, produced (with a fairly heavy hand) by Darwin’s Broadwing. Gawurra sings exclusively in the Gupapungu language of his culture and family history in places like Gove Peninsula, Yathalamara and Milingimbi Island. The title track is a traditional Yolngu songline about the vine of love that keeps everything connected.

“Ratja Yaliyali is a spirit, like the wind,” reads his bio. “A melody Yolngu listen to when they want to feel spirit in their hearts”.

Palm Springs – Flowers In A Vase

For years I’ve admired the voice and poise of Erica Dunn as one of rock band Harmony’s trio of gospel singers. Turns out Dunn has a trio too, called Palm Springs, with Raquel Solier and Sara Retallick (both of whom also have solo acts, because no Melbourne musician deigns to stoke a single fire).

Palm Springs write spare and moody country-folk that escalates on occasion into an electrified crescendo that you know would be a lot more bracing live. Live, the classic train-chug drums on Flowers In A Vase would fill the room and that whammy would really twang. This what I like most about these songs: they seem versatile and road-ready, expandable or contractible depending on who’s around to play and, even then, could be sung sweet or real blue, weathervanes to a prevailing mood.

Mostly, though, Dunn’s voice is steady and unaffected so when it wavers – or breaks open as the thunderclouds gather on the Winning and Losing – you really feel it.

The Still – The Still

The Still is two Australians – pianist Chris Abrahams of The Necks and percussionist Steve Heather – with Canadian Derek Shirley on double bass, and German Rico Repotente on guitar. Their loosely woven instrumentals are not very “now”; they could be from ten years ago, or 20. They don’t seek your attention or attempt in any obvious way to hold it – but as the name promises, these six songs create a stillness, or space, in which time seems to slow. More therapy than mood music.

Themes on all four instruments circle back lazily, with every note or melody simply giving way to the next. Repotente’s noodling nods to blues, surf and jazz and Abrahams, as always, can’t put a finger or foot wrong (fans of The Necks fans will enjoy hearing him play more sentimentally too, as on The Descent).

Throughout, there’s a horizon glow of The Dirty Three’s combustive din, which flares into flames on the grandiose final track The Ecstatic, the screech of feedback even resurrecting Warren Ellis’s wrung-out wall of fiddle.

Pikelet – Tronc

For two years, Evelyn Morris – the Melbourne musician behind long-running experimental pop project Pikelet – has been busy on a different stage: as a speaker, writer and figurehead of LISTEN, a group she formed to “cultivate a [feminist] conversation around the experiences of marginalised people in Australian music”. Lyrically, Tronc distills many of the themes Morris has been writing about: self-interrogation, disillusion, being a survivor, being silenced.

Musically, it’s a delight, shedding the weight of her previous full band for a jumble of airy sounds – flurries of piano, castanets, hand-clap flutters, minimal beats – that she corrals into songs with a wand that works when only she waves it. Her recent piano explorations are finding homes in her pop songs too, as on Dear Unimaginables, murmured as if to herself. The despondent campfire strums and untethered verses of Harder, Heart, Harder evoke the lo-fi folk of The Microphones – but after all these years, Pikelet just sounds a lot like Pikelet.

Deep Heat – Still Life

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Deep Heat are no longer a band. They broke up after they launched Still Life, their first full-length release. Guitarist and singer Gus Lord presumably turned his attention back to The Stevens, Tyrannamen and Twerps, while guitarist Alicia Saye and bassist Jacquie Hynes returned to their band Infinite Void. The irony here is that Deep Heat’s sound is defined by how welded together it is.

Still Life is a dense nugget of grungy garage-punk that inspires furious head-nodding. Sonic Youth are clearly a big influence, with the guitar on Pick Up The Pieces sounding a lot Silver Rocket from Daydream Nation. There are lots of notes between the notes yet not one wasted, and the drums have a knack of coming in a few bars before you expect. Lord’s vocals have a brutish classic punk hue, while the two women’s voices are all swirling light and shade. Just don’t expect tempo changes or any curveballs at all.

Reuben Ingall / Logic Lost – Tandem Tapes 002

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DIY cassette label Tandem Tapes began after experimental musician Morgan McKeller moved from Canberra to Jakarta. It specialises in split releases between Indonesian and Australian artists; here, Canberran Reuben Ingall and Indonesian Logic Lost (Dylan Amiro).

I knew of Ingall from his weirdly captivating Microwave Drone Ritual – made cooking a meat pie in a microwave – but I didn’t know Amiro. Such door-openings are part of Tandem Tapes’ goal: “The music – even instrumental music – we experience is still largely defined by language barriers,” says Ingall.

Both sides could be considered ambient – though Ingall’s is glitchy and playful, his goal to make it sound like “a cluttered room with a comfy bed” solidly achieved. Amiro’s two compositions are more new age than ambient: spacey and spectral enough to soundtrack Carl Sagan’s drift through the cosmos on his Spaceship of the Imagination.

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