Scant information available on this release, other than it was recorded at Birdland and released on Paper Mill Records (PMILLCD.721380). The band is ostensibly LUL as that's what the booklet and inlay have labelled in common - the spine reads 'Automatic Girl', so either this was the tentative title of the release or I just got a copy with the wrong booklet. The disc itself has three signatures on it! Another delightful purchase from the Kilsyth salvos, where I was hoping for the kind of records advertised in the seminal Beanz Baxter fanzine. This isn't quite up to that ilk, but is actually pretty good indie rock, once you get past the Bono-isms of the lead singer (that voice just doesn't sound right!) There are even some Sonic Youthisms on the title track. Even 'Lost Soul' is kind of Jawbreaker-esque! Any info on this group much appreciated in the comments.
1. Automatic Girl 3:45 2. Stuff U Round 3:10 3. Whats For Sale 2:56 4. Lost Soul 3:59 5. I Feel Fine 4:17 Whats For Sale (1996) - LUL
Just a quickie post this evening because it's getting to my bedtime... I stumbled across this band and their impending reformation gig tonight, and was enamoured enough to post a bunch of YouTube links to their songs (it seems to be the only way of accessing much of their material without resorting to dodgy forum and blog posts...) There's scant information on them on the internet (such as their Discogs entry, which only lists a few apparent comp appearances), a J-play page, and this Tripod band history page. Oh yeah, they were interviewed in Issue #7 of Beanz Baxter. Nice melodic hardcore that just about slots into the desired emo paradigm.
Stay tuned for when I can actually dig up some releases...
Actually stuff linking all of those videos, just use the playlist I made here.
One of the first CDs I sought out when I started this odyssey, Diolene (from Perth!) was part of the Fellaheen Records stable that featured the likes of Sandpit, Fur, Budd, Noise Addict and early Gerling (which I'm still trying to track down). Their page on the period-era Fellaheen website describes frontwoman Silvana Delbene as 'a songwriter on par with the Malkmus' [sic] and Deals of the world'. While this is a bit of hyperbole (and I'm not very keen on Pavement at all, by the way), the album's got a nice sound with surprising variety in some of the guitars, slotting into the indie paradigm pretty well.
The band (to my ears) is a bit like a more hi-fi ninetynine, though without the worldly excursions. Maybe it's just the voice? In any case, definitely worth a listen, even if just for the amusing nang effects in the closer.
I picked this up ages ago! Before this little incessant archival project was even a twinkle in my eye! Where and when I'm not sure exactly, it would have been some kind of op-shop and probably sometime in the past six years.
Way Over There records doesn't feature prominently in my excavations. Perhaps due me immediately passing them off as 'swampy folk punk' or something, which doesn't adequately describe the compilation. The music on here is a lot more diverse. That said, there's a fair amount of post-Mad Season folk-grunge going around - 'Song In D' by Sickbay is pretty good. Admittedly, the only bands I'd heard of on this comp were Machine Translations and Blue Grassy Knoll. Also, the Ergot Derivative's singer sounds a little bit like Guy Picciotto!
Interestingly, the Way Over There homepage is still online! They also have a Facebook page, being active in the capacity of supplying 'music programming' to various Australian festivals, including that most cherished by Triple-J-core-worshipping would-be hipster tweenies, Groovin' The Moo. It appears that the agency closed down in 2014, being absorbed under the Corner Presents umbrella.
Also included in my copy was this newspaper clipping detailing the release of the comp and interviewing label boss Richard Moffat:
1. Intestinal 5:32 Breather Hole 2. Shiteyes 3:17 Three 3. Brainded 4:17 The Ergot Derivative 4. Song In D 3:54 Sickbay 5. Drifter 4:47 James Dixon 6. Errol's Pad 4:17 P. Harness 7. Dear Michelle 3:19 Wild Pumpkins At Midnight 8. Blue Throat 3:43 Circushead 9. We Connect 5:25 The Body Electric 10. Hold My Breath 3:47 Wally Gunn 11. Armageddon Nothing 5:22 Mississippi Barry 12. On My Way Home 4:35 Mighty Servant 13. Rumpy Pumpu 5:17 Snuff Puppets Band 14. Leonard Cohen's Suzanne 4:08 The Dead Salesmen 15. Love Theme 2:13 The Blue Grassy Knoll 16. Tribal 4:29 Fimo 17. Abstract Poverty 4:22 Machine Translations
18. Misfortune 3:18 Disaster Plan Way Over There Catalogue (1998) - Various Artists
One of a small handful of CDs I picked up from a record fair a couple of years ago, the same fair where I purchase the Shock sampler I put up a little while back.
An odd blend of stuff, drawing on bits of metal, original UK punk and even what sounds like a few gothic nods (particularly in the vocals) to Crow. Overall, it fits into the para-britpop spectrum. Not quite my thing, but you might like it.
"The band formed in 93 when Al Lynch and I (who both though each other
was still in Melbourne) happened to meet up in a pub in Launceston. We'd
both run out of cash and come "home" for a while. We recruited Rod
Fulton on drums and quickly got a set happening doing stuff like Iggy
Pop, The Godfathers, Buffalo Tom,Status Quo, Cheap Trick, MC5 etc...
then we started writing songs. Our home in Lonny was The Trades...it was
more or less the "alternative" venue and used to get packed.
You knew everyone which I liked. From 18 year olds to over 50s...they
were great days. We played other joints btu The Trades was the biz.By
the end of 93 we'd written a bunch of tunes and were offered some free
recording time at the TAFE studio...yes please...Jolly Walter engineered
12 songs in two days and that became Glamnesia. david Williams at Shock
like dit and released on their Current label. We moved to Melbourne but
Rod stayed behind due to family/work stuff. Phil Lally from Al's main
band Fridge joined us. Phil was the most handsome man in rock so that
was a bonus. Then we started playing the pubs...you might have seen
us...."
1. Air Mail 5:17 2. Haywired 4:20 3. One Of Your Bets 4:29 4. Surrender 4:49 5. Tell Your Sister 3:59
Continuing the theme of my research into Scenestar and young people involved in a local scene, we have Rock'N'Roll High School. Possibly named for but not related to the movie or song by the Ramones. Alas the former is all I can usually turn up when looking for their comps on eBay.
There's a link between the two groups, as Scenestar co-founder Pheona Donohoe played in the band Tuff Muff who were part of the RnRHS stable. Unfortunately their contributions are not documented on this release, but likely appear on an earlier volume of the comp (two of the members were interviewed about their RnRHS involvement around the time of release of Volume 3). For a zine tangent, take a look at the page for the THUNDERPUSSY zine, whose issues featured interviews with Tuff Muff and Sheraw.
The institution was not exclusively for young women, with young men in bands such as Melissa's Partisan also cutting their teeth (and three-track demos) at the venue. One of their tracks, again one of the better ones, appears on Volume 4 below. Said band also, frustratingly, appears on the elusive Volume 3. They also played with Skip Tracer, which is cool.
The creation of Hecate drummer Stephanie Bourke, RnRHS was set up as a venue to promote rock music and DIY principles to a primarily female cohort, happily coinciding with the height of the riot grrl movement. Bourke also played in Litany, who feature alongside Hecate on Volume 4. According to that link (replete with a rather dumb sumamry of the band at the bottom as being unable to wedge into either of two fem-band stereotypes), you can still get Litany's release on Time Bomb Recordings on iTunes. Worth browsing the Time Bomb site, apparently they released Screamfeeder's landmark Kitten Licks.
RnRHS was based at a former Milk Bar in Collingwood (I think) and hosted regular all-ages shows there through the RnRHS heyday. Fugazi even played the venue during their 1993 tour (I think, or was it their 97 tour?), as apparently did the Melvins, Juliana Hatfield and Veruca Salt. Though presently a private residence, all-ages gigs are still occasionally held there to this day (as far as I know). Not long ago I saw World At A Glance play there, the first time I saw Becalm (I think).
Perhaps the most famous RnRHS alumnus is Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle. I find the mention of Rancid's visit to the venue in this article particularly amusing given the later relationship beween Dalle and Tim Armstrong. Dalle's band at the time (recounted by herself here) was called Sourpuss and also featured Cobina Crawford (later of the fabulous Effigy). I'm trying to hunt down those Sourpuss releases if you can help me out (a split EP with Janelle 7 and a self-titled (?) 7"). Her opinions of RnRHS are mixed:
“We
started rehearsing at this place called Rock ’n’ Roll High School,
which is run by these psychotic feminists in Melbourne — I mean
psychotic feminists, like Nazi sows, out of their fucking minds,” she
remembers. “It’s a rock & roll girls’ school, designed to help young
women learn how to set everything up and plug shit in, which is great.
It was a cool setup — American bands like Sonic Youth and Babes in Toyland would come in and donate instruments and money to the cause, and they’d watch us play.”
But the consequences for frequenting the place were not so good: “I
hated playing under this banner of a girls’ school,” she says, “because
it did more damage than it ever helped us. We weren’t taken seriously at
all, and I resented it so much that I just didn’t want to be a part of
it anymore.”
Alright, so how does the actual comp sound? The overtly metallic first three or four tracks (including the Hecate cut) don't rub me up the right way - as usual, it's the punkier tracks that tickle my fancy. The good stuff starts with the Aspasia track, with a chorus saving the day, followed by a typically upbeat (and very early!) cut by the Spazzys that completes the Ramones worship theme. Having tracks by bands called Litany and Tirany serves to confuse us, but are similarly solid. The vaguely Art Of Fighting-esque intro to Myagi's first track was the most endearing part of the comp for me, but loses it with the metalisms further in (still good though). Probably the standout of the bunch for me is Screamfeeder/Effigy-esque Lego with 'Sharpshooter'. Similarly Transatlantic's 'Cobalt' gets my thumbs-up.
Also, Oi Ska!'s 'Front Bottom' is bloody catchy. Enjoy!
1. High And Dry 4:48 Tribal Clown
2. Internal 3:58 Resistica
3. Cathedral 3:31 Hecate
4. Dicky Di Do 3:17 Aspasia
5. I Wanna Cut My Hair Just Like Marky Ramone 2:10 The Spazzys
6. So Long 3:17 Tirany
7. Volunteer 3:55 Litany
8. Kool Kat 3:46 Bindi
9. Differential Images 2:07 Matramuta
10. Cowboy 2:26 Firesign
11. Front Bottom 3:31 Oi Ska!
12. From The Inside 4:43 Myagi
13. Starshooter 4:22 Lego
14. Cobalt 4:15 Transatlantic
15. Almost Gone 6:04 Melissa's Partisan
16. Dishes 2:38 Unfolding Mud
17. Cartwheel 2:23 The Cartwheels
Post-rock in the age of Regurgitator. Breaking up the grungy echoed guitars are washes of buzzsaw synth, the occasional arpeggiated gurgle and other verbal attempts of music critics to appear theoretically credible. The first three tracks are somewhat more contemplative than what comes next. 'G-Force' is a short gurge-esque rocker breaking up the affair, whereas the subsequent '3-Stripe Babe' has a few more of those echoey wavetable synths to play around. With the tremolo and Morricone-synth-whoosh on some tracks I think the label 'desert rock' is far more applicable here than applied to 2 Litre Dolby, with whom they didn't share space with on the Wonder From A Quarter Acre comp and instead appeared on the later Musikal Identikit.
Information on the group is scarce, though I'll enter it here as I scrounge it.
I found this particular disc at the Rowville Salvos around the same time I picked up the Suburban Superheroes comp I posted not long ago. There are no album credits to be found anywhere on the back or within the CD inlay, making tracing the band difficult. I've so far turned up a single album from the group (1999's 'Lonesome High', also apparently self-released). If I can obtain a copy of this, I'll upload it in due course.
Crow piqued my curiosity when browsing the Half A Cow Records bandcamp page and noted 1.) the appealing cover artwork for Crow's 1990 debut EP Sunburnt Throats and Happy Thunderclouds and 2.) that their debut LP My Kind Of Pain was recorded by none other than Big Steve himself. Evidently, Albini's minimalist live approach wasn't quite to the band's taste, as songwriter Peter Fenton recalls in this Mess+Noise article.
I had a fair listen to aforementioned debut LP and as much as I appreciate some of the song writing ('Railhead' is a killer classic, 'Never Said' is brilliant Dino J-esque indie rock) I can't get past the unfavourable comparisons with Little Nicky Cave and the Bad Seedlings. Still, their second offering (with the wholly charming title Li-lo-ing, which in my mind involves floating down an outback waterway on an inflatable mattress) is to my ears the more coherent of the first two albums. Don't ask me why exactly, I didn't listen to it for as long as I should have, but I did form that opinion when it was on rotation on my Music Device a few months prior.
Incidentally, through doing a bit of Googling for this post I've found that someone (unsurprisingly) had the same idea for a blog as I. Much like trying to set up a local youth music outlet and discovering one had come and gone before. I will have my head nestled in there for a few weeks and suggest that you rummage also. Some awesome stuff in there, although the focus is more on the more gothy side of Oz-rock in the 80s and 90s (Triffids, NDW, Nicky Cave, Kim Salmon, all that jazz that gets the Caravan Music Club people excited). My blog is conversely looking for the sad teenage 90s wedge of the slice. Sadly, it looks like it's no-longer updated. There may be some doubling up, but it looks much more extensive than my collection - rummage away! I have no idea if the links work.
Since the mid-90s, various youth initiatives named 'FReeZa' and 'The Push' (I'm not sure where the delineation of duty lies) have gotten young people in the community involved in making music, organising events and generally avoiding drugs and street crime. I'd be curious to know how the degree of outreach and youth involvement has changed over the years - my impression is that there would be a general trend of decline since the 1990s with a brief resurgence in the mid-00s, due to the loss of prominent, charting guitar-based music in that time (subjectively, of course).
Each municipal council would often follow the FReeZa (UPDATE: period-era link) or Push outlay as part of their Youth Services obligation (explain how it actually works in the comments, I'm only speaking from my own experience) and occasionally such a Youth Service would put out a compilation like this, recording the bands from the Youth Hall often at a discounted rate and giving them something that they could take home and later stack the shelves of the local Salvos with. The Decimus Gnu comp I uploaded a while back is an earlier example of this.
Most of these compilations are, somewhat expectedly, pretty average and derivative of the major tropes of the day. More to the point, few are of historical mention as very few of the more enduring indies from the time (with a few notable exceptions) came from the South Eastern suburbs where these youth organisations were most pervasive. In fact, the relative dearth of alternative music coming out of this region is a continuing demographical fascination of mine, as we shall see if I ever actually persist with writing this bloody blog.
So, WHY have I uploaded this compilation, an overall quite average mix of suburban bands mostly of the Blink-182, Limp Bizkit and Live/Ugly Kid Joe schools? Because it came from ROWVILLE.
Yes, Rowville.
I grew up there. I lived in a
eucalyptus-lined cul-de-sac for 22 years, an entire eight more than
prescribed by TISM for various crimes. I now live in Mount Waverley, or at least wish I did.
Granted, most of these bands aren't actually from Rowville. One is, the Crettins Puddle-esque Gelatine, whose contribution 'Blue Collar' does kinda grow on you after a while. They actually use the word 'emo' when describing themselves in the booklet, which is another plus. After all, one of the overarching aims of this blog is to uncover any Australian analogues of the 90s midwest emo scene that I am so fond of and associated derivatives.
Most of the tracks are of course post-grunge nu-metal schlock (even ska gets a foot in with the Commissioner Gordon and Jaded Temple entries), but there are a few highlights here, mostly the pop punk offerings from bands like Gelatine, Underside, The Blindspot and Bugdust, who are probably the mostenduring of the bands on the comp.
I have another motive for this comp. Whilst the Greater Dandenong and Monash city councils have active FReeZa initiatives, Knox doesn't. I thought of rectifying this years ago by Getting Involved With My Local Community, but never summed up the energy to. It turns out that their was a Knox FReeZa/Push initiative, Mentor Productions, who put out this very comp. As to the fate of the group, I've never investigated further. It's like trying to create a scene in your home town, discovering that there was one long ago, but not finding out why it died out. I'm sure there's a parallel to a video game plot in there somewhere.
1. Other Side 3:04 Acetylene
2. Wrong Time 4:20 Lustre
3. Bend 2:12 Mighty Boy
4. Blue Collar 2:36 Gelatine
5. 21 5:46 Rush Hour
6. Psycho Ward 3:42 Polaris
7. Motive 3:32 Shagrin
8. Two For You 4:03 Underside
9. That Was Fantastic 3:04 Commissioner Gordon
10. My Best Friends 3:40 Jaded Temple
11. Taken Away 4:16 Taken
12. Design Desire 5:06 Passive
13. The Twist 3:22 The Blindspot
14. Step On Me 3:01 Bugdust
Also, an explanation as to where 'FReeZA' came from! Not Dragon Ball Z!
The name FReeZA was selected
from 200 competition entries by a judging panel of 13 young people aged
14-18. The two young Victorians who created FReeZA said the name highlights
the freedom the program offers young people to be themselves in a relaxed
atmosphere free of drugs and alcohol. The name FReeZA emphasises credibility
for young people, that it is cool to attend FReeZA events.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Acetylene is one of the bands in this piece of history (and it's an established fact that the more TISM a blog post has, the better)
