Album review: King Stingray’s For the Dreams showcases bright, confident indie rock
The Arnhem Land band’s celebration of Yolngu Matha language feels right at home with its evolved sound, which ties its rollicking rock energy with new synth-leading influences.
Album reviews for week of December 6 2024:
ROCK
For The Dreams
King Stingray
Civilians
The King Stingray journey is one that any Australian act could envy; it is one that any Australian act and music fan can certainly celebrate. The rock group from northeast Arnhem Land has proved its staying potential after a watershed year in 2022, marked by the release of its self-titled debut album. In the music, there was a fusion of contemporary influences and traditional Yolngu Matha language; built on a foundation of optimism, spirit and joy for the creation of music itself. In the years that have followed the release of that ARIA Award-winning debut, the six-piece act has continued to elevate; sold-out headline tours, lucrative festival slots and its first forays into the international market have confirmed it as one of Australia’s best live bands. And when it comes to its evolution of sound, King Stingray has retained its enthusiasm for the craft, but has now brought more lived experiences to its style of storytelling. The band’s second album For The Dreams stands as another celebratory addition to a growing and accomplished catalogue. A bright collection of surf-rock and indie rock clash together with confidence; a haze of nostalgia threaded through moments of lyricism that offer insight into the past few years of growth, both within the band and as individuals.
A perfect album to get lost in, these 12 tracks see the musicians chasing simpler joys (What’s The Hurry?) while reflecting on life before national attention and the disruption of touring (Southerly). A record that is beautifully balanced with melody and sonic textures, For The Dreams does well in tying its rollicking rock energy with new synth-leading influences (Soon As). Nodding towards the bolstered chemistry within the band, the album is stacked with big singalong choruses (Through the Trees, Light Up the Path) that are impossible not to get caught up in. As with songs like Cat Five (Cyclone) and Nostalgic, King Stingray knows the power in using language to uplift and empower. Its celebration of Yolngu Matha language feels right at home with the band’s evolved sound; it is exciting to consider that these albums could very well set new precedents for First Nations artists to thrive further within the mainstream. This band was formed between childhood friends Roy Kellaway, Yirrnga Yunupingu and Dimathaya Burarrwanga as a way to jam and to explore music together, in one of Australia’s most remote areas, and it is remarkable to hear the continuation of its story here. The group — completed by Lewis Styles, Campbell Messer and Yimila Gurruwiwi — found its rhythm early with one another, and For The Dreams shows that rhythm’s definition and strength.
Sosefina Fuamoli
INDIE/ALTERNATIVE
My Method Actor
Nilufer Yanya
Ninja Tune/Inertia
With her swooping vocals and angular arrangements, singer-songwriter Nilufer Yanya has occupied a unique space in the British indie landscape since her arrival on the scene as a guitar-wielding teenager nearly a decade ago. My Method Actor, her third album in five years, is also her most subdued, but dialling back the aggression only enhances Yanya’s songwriting. Her expressive voice floats over the trip-hop rim-shots of Like I Say (Runaway), while album highlight Call It Love is a yearning, MTV Unplugged-style ballad that delights at each turn. As usual, the guitar playing is fantastically inventive across the board, effortlessly snaking and slithering into unusual voicings and modes. When starting out, Yanya was sometimes accused of trying on too many styles at once. Now, her adventurousness has been rewarded with a rich record that sounds instinctively like her.
Jonathan Seidler
ROCK/GARAGE
Heavy Weight Heart
Polish Club
Independent
A decade on from their formation, Sydney duo Polish Club release their fourth album, wherein vocalist/guitarist David Novak and drummer John-Henry Pajak present a bright and often jangling homage to life and the changes which imbue same. Having recently parted ways with both management and record label — not to mention both players recently getting married and Novak undergoing open heart surgery back in January — Heavy Weight Heart marks for the duo the dawning of a new era, which, as one would suspect, also heralds something of a change in sound. While retaining the harder edge of past releases, the songs that make up this record are also permeated with a softness, perhaps more intricate in make-up; the melodies prevalent in the likes of Heavyweight and Fool on the Weekend take centre stage and lend their sound a new depth. Where the album stands tallest is in the combining of hard and soft: Heavyweight builds and builds, How Dare You Fall In Love With This City grows to anthemic proportions, and Repeating Repeating undulates like summer seas. Subtle use of synth and horns adds to what is a solid record.
Samuel J. Fell
REGGAE/ROCK
Mayawa
Ripple Effect Band
Independent
Hailing from the heart of Arnhem Land, Ripple Effect Band is a female-led ensemble paying joyful homage to culture and Country. This debut album takes its name from the Na-kara word for beach, nodding to the band’s coastal hometown of Maningrida. There’s an engaging mix of stylistic cues here, with surf, psych and spaghetti western touches creeping into the guitar alone. The centrepiece Loving and Caring even updates its retro reggae spirit with twinkling synths, fleeting vocoder and a quasi-rap section. True to its title, it’s an earnest plea for listening and togetherness. Horns give the closing People From Maningrida a frisky ska feel alongside call-and-response vocals, while Banatjarl hinges on the timeless refrains “We are country” and “Rise up”. It’s all recorded with a live-in-the-room feel that speaks to communal jam sessions, and Ripple Effect Band has already devoted time to mentoring emerging Indigenous musicians via the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Especially striking is the presence of the aforementioned Na-kara language, spoken by fewer than 60 people today.
Doug Wallen
JAZZ
Waves
Ross McHenry
Earshift Music
As with bassist Ross McHenry’s albums The Outsider (2017) and Nothing Remains Unchanged (2020), it’s difficult not to think of Waves as a Matthew Sheens album. From Adelaide, but now living in New York, Sheens’ piano is the lead voice, and as always his brilliance shines through. With great US drummer Eric Harland on hand again these three musicians are a sensational rhythm section, providing a highly sophisticated reading of the jazz/rock genre. Note McHenry’s very hip electric bass sound, strong but never too loud, consistent with past great recordings in this genre. McHenry has enlisted three additional Americans, Ben Monder (guitar), Donny McCaslin (saxophone) and Adam O’Farrill (trumpet). They play McHenry’s seven compositions strongly, with typical American authority, but in my view their improvisations are not distinctive enough to enhance McHenry’s musical vision. That vision is impressive, inspired by the impact of “seismic personal and existential events” such as Australia’s devastating 2019 summer fires. McHenry regards Waves as a “poignant love letter to the landscapes and relationships that shape our stories”.
Eric Myers
Album reviews for week of November 29 2024:
ROCK
Fever Longing Still
Paul Kelly
EMI Music Australia
Paul Kelly = sex machine. It may not be an obvious equation for Australia’s unofficial poet laureate. But there you go: hot pants, fire-sweet mind, the 69-year-old PK is back on what is, astoundingly, his 29th studio album. Houndstooth Dress opens Fever Longing Still with such a horny charge it’s a wonder the record got finished. Dedicated to a girlfriend’s op-shop outfit, Kelly sings: “That dress sticks to you like a judge sticks to the law.” Cameron Bruce offers hard-pulsing piano; nephew Dan Kelly’s electric guitar distorts with want; drummer Peter Luscombe conjures a rhythmic stagger-and-strut to the bedroom. It’s a first-take recording and the band is simmering from the outset; one of the most unexpected things this old hound dog has recorded. At album’s end, Going to the River with Dad emerges so tender and bare it’s heartbreaking, beautified by the love of a man still travelling with his father’s spirit. The writing credit is shared with Noel Pearson, whose autobiography inspired Kelly’s lyrics. The narrator relates boyhood memories of “driving down a bumpy track, between us a thermos of sweet tea steaming … I’m going to the river with dad, all my brothers and sisters are still sleeping.” A jazzy piano motion builds, cradle-rocking the words before Kelly makes a few ghost-sweet moans. It’s accompanied by bell-like notes picked on a guitar headstock, evoking a kettle on the boil, a boat creaking on water. Textural early morning pictures – “that old river appearing and disappearing” – as Kelly establishes the lost yet eternal scenery.
One of our most underrated and seductive singers, Kelly is in top form, telling every story with expressive strength – and sly humour on the countrified and lovesick Harpoon to the Heart. Vocally he shows no sign of ageing, though his songs are adorned with remembering. Northern Rivers again shows Dan Kelly in peak form on acoustic guitar and mandolin, amid PK’s lyrical references to water, weather and birds embodied in a woman mightily loved, as seen through the eyes of a man entranced with her earthy “dreaming”. The long-term influence of Aboriginal Australia is evident in the lyrics – and a feel across much of Kelly’s music that is difficult to put a finger on. It has been going on for a long time, taking Kelly over, embedding him into the country’s soul. Now and again, Kelly can be self-conscious in meeting that voice, but not here. Every song is markedly different in that deep appeal, with a classic — arguably conventional — Kelly leading Taught By Experts, a galloping pub singalong that could have come off an early album such as Gossip. This means Fever Longing Still can sound scattered, marred by Kelly’s something-for-everyone craftsmanship. It takes a few listens to appreciate how rich the album is, a journey though love’s many forms – lustful, spiteful, familial, lonesome – coming together as the secret river flowing through all our lives.
Mark Mordue
ELECTRONIC
SMILE! :D
Porter Robinson
Sample-Sized/Mom+Pop
An EDM wunderkind of the mid-2010s, Porter Robinson re-emerged in 2021 with the utopic, blissful Nurture, a gentler, more textured approach to electronica that promptly elevated him from anon-obscurity to public-facing stardom. For his third album, the US producer pivots again – this time in a variety of directions, which has its good and bad points creatively. SMILE! :D (its actual title, emoticon and all) offers more of a human touch: Robinson leaving his vocals untreated and incorporating more non-programmed instrumentation. This allows for songs such as the electric, poppy Cheerleader to blossom, but simultaneously leaves tracks such as emo waltz Year of the Cup spinning their wheels. For every highlight, such as the bubbly Knock Yourself Out XD or lighter ballad Easier to Love You, there are songs such as Russian Roulette that suffer from being overly long and too invested in their own metanarrative. Much like the producer, singer and songwriter responsible for it, SMILE! :D is enigmatic, sometimes complex and occasionally frustrating. Never, however, is the album boring. At the very least, it’s more :) than :(.
David James Young
INDIE ROCK
Manning Fireworks
MJ Lenderman
Anti-
“It falls apart, we all got work to do.” On She’s Leaving You it’s hard to tell if MJ Lenderman is writing a wounded love song or an anthem for music itself. Officially, Manning Fireworks is the 25-year-old’s fourth album. There’s also a crackling live release and – buried online – a wonderful home-recorded album from when he was just 17. Critics say Lenderman collapses under his influences; his shambling vocal slides and rock ’n’ roll guitar hearkens up Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Sparklehorse, Pavement, Jason Molina and David Berman. But derivation equals inspiration here, even soul. Lenderman comes through with lyrics blending the prosaic with an impressionistic grasp of young American life: learning to be a musician from Guitar Hero; smart watches that remind him he’s alone; references to basketball, scooters, ice cream and getting drunk, Catholicism at his singalong heels. The ragged glory of his musical stories have made him 2024’s unexpected indie rock superstar. You almost feel frightened for him getting so much love. But love is what he’s made of. It’s holding him together.
Mark Mordue
CHORAL/EXPERIMENTAL
The Undreamt-of Centre
Laurence Pike
The Leaf Label
Laurence Pike boldly envisioned his fourth album as a requiem mass for drums, electronics and choir. That may sound like an odd coupling, but the Australian percussionist and composer crafts an engaging, emotional bridge between modern and ancient forms. Dedicated to Pike’s father-in-law, who died in 2021, the project explores how humanity entwines with the natural world while taking inspiration from Rainer Maria Rilke’s mythology-derived Sonnets to Orpheus. Pike doesn’t approach the concept half-heartedly: he recorded this in a gothic church with the Vox Sydney Philharmonia Choir, conducted by Sam Lipman. Male and female voices provide haunting counterpoints on Orpheus in the Underworld, echoing the tale of a lover stranded in the afterlife. Mountains of the Heart then evokes the dynamic repetition of Philip Glass, before the album’s second half grows more amorphous and unnerving while those choral elements resurface. Conceived to honour the transition from human existence to whatever lies beyond, this is a richly rewarding suite of music.
Doug Wallen
INDIE POP
This Is How Tomorrow Moves
Beabadoobee
Dirty Hit
The bedroom to the global stage is not an easy commute, but Filipina-British artist Beatrice Laus (aka Beabadoobee) has managed to make the whole thing seem like a cinch. Affable, relatable and whimsical, her first two albums belied her years and made for some of last decade’s best indie rock listening. This is How Tomorrow Moves, album No.3, is a portrait of the artist at the ripe old age of 24: still figuring out life at large but with dreams to “see the world in colour”, as described on dreamy opener Take a Bite. Though working at a slower and more methodical pace, the music of Beabadoobee has not lost any of its exuberance or intrigue. Rather, it simply presents in different ways – see the tender piano balladry of Girl Song or the Lilith Fair-ready Beaches. Her ambitious new direction is guided by producer Rick Rubin, who knows a thing or two about creative risks and ultimately serves as Laus’s most valuable sidekick. Tomorrow never knows, but for today Beabadoobee has proven her staying power.
David James Young
Album reviews for week of November 22 2024:
INDIE/ALTERNATIVE
I Just Need To Conquer This Mountain
Sarah Blasko
Independent
For much of her early life, Sarah Blasko was beholden to something else; growing up in the apocalyptic Pentecostal church, marrying and divorcing young, struggling between an archaic belief system and a wont to create. She has, over the course of her life thus far, been climbing a mountain as she looks to escape from it all and as it stands — after enduring all manner of personal torment — perhaps that climb is over. Her latest album is an unfurling and a rebirth; the mark of someone moving on. These 10 songs are, essentially, a howling paean to freedom; they’re about discarding the shackles of a life spent obsessing with what comes next, with what comes after, and embracing – despite the pain ubiquitous with such wrenching emotions – the here and the now, the life that’s unspooling before our very eyes. I Can’t Wait Anymore, with its soaring strings over simple piano and percussion and in which Blasko powerfully laments “I want to live like I’m reborn” is perhaps the turning point song, as she accepts that the life she’s lived is done. In My Head is the natural follow-up to this as, over an almost jaunty, bluesy motif, she “has a chance to start again”. As one would expect, it’s Blasko’s voice that drives the record, as beguiling and strong now as it was when she released her debut 20 years ago.
Foil to her vocal across the majority of the record is simple piano along with astute percussion, occasionally accompanied by almost orchestral strings and smatterings of horns that lend the songs a poignant depth, giving them power with which they underscore the subject matter. And so, in order to make an album like I Just Need … work, brutal honesty is the watchword, and it’s this quality which Blasko indeed brings in spades. On the likes of To Be Alone, she confronts the break-up of her first marriage (“I came out of a marriage when I was only 26,” she sings, “I vowed I’d never give up myself that way again”), and on Goodbye! — which features vocals from Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Ryan Downey — she sings, “I’m gonna run out of this place / Leave the hurt and the disgrace / It’s destroying me, I am longing to be free.” While a good deal of the album, then, deals with all Blasko is no longer, this isn’t to say it doesn’t also celebrate what she’s become; which is to say, happy – with where she is, how she is, with what she’s left behind and how she’s used that to transcend. Fittingly, the song Divine closes out the record, the most vivacious track on the album, and one which basically celebrates all that’s been encapsulated thus far – “Oh this life,” she sings, almost in disbelief, “Oh this life is divine”. This is the sonic moment where Sarah Blasko reaches the peak of the mountain, and sees beyond it her promised land.
Samuel J. Fell
INDIE ROCK
Goldfeels
Dan Kelly
Golden Point
Apart from being a regular guitarist and sideman in his uncle Paul’s band, Dan Kelly has notched up an underrated songbook of idiosyncratic solo work. Produced by The Drones’ Dan Luscombe, his first record in almost a decade features a deep roster of supporting players as well as his signature sense of the absurd. The big change this time is Kelly’s focus on piano and other keyboard instruments, yielding the jaunty New Orleans boogie of Burn Up With the Trees and the swampy funk instrumental Regional Crisis. His vocal delivery still has a decided slacker air, but the amiable splay of his lyrics gradually showcases quite cultivated layers of invention — including delightful rhymes and witticisms. Amidst the diffuse detour Back to the Garden, he sings casually about acid rain and other environmental omens while imagining a return to nature that involves farewelling the trusty household Sodastream. The slow and wandering nature of Goldfeels makes it something of a niche proposition, but Kelly’s fans will rejoice in his playful return.
Doug Wallen
CLASSICAL
In A Landscape
Max Richter
Decca/Universal
Max Richter is a global phenomenon; an industry unto himself. Since his name first came to notice with those haunting film scores two decades ago, Australian audiences have experienced several of his noteworthy pieces, including Sleep in the night-dimmed lobbies of the Opera House and Omega Ensemble’s recent performances of his reworking of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Now his ninth studio album is being released as a prelude to his first world tour, which will take in most Australian capital cities in February. In a Landscape comprises 24 tracks totalling just under an hour, and interleaves original works with what he calls “life studies” of field recordings and “found musics” from Bach, Mozart and others, essayed in a laborious domestic manner. To some ears, the obsessive use of bass-driven Baroque counterpoint — mostly in lower registers and with tight, unremitting, glutenous harmonies — will sound tedious and commonplace. For his many fans outside concert music, it will be manna from heaven. Either way, this latest offering marks another triumph for the industry that is Max Richter.
Vincent Plush
ROCK
Luck and Strange
David Gilmour
Sony
Former Pink Floyd guitarist/singer David Gilmour has cited this fifth solo album as his best work since his alma mater’s 1973 blockbuster, Dark Side of the Moon, which spent almost 20 years on the Billboard album chart. But while Luck and Strange debuted at No. 1 on release, it’s unlikely to surpass the staying power of that ultimate stoner record. Still, after a short opening instrumental (with Roger Eno on piano), the next three songs evoke vintage Floyd, with the band’s late keys player Richard Wright even appearing on the title track. Luck and Strange features his Hammond organ and electric piano, recorded during a jam with Gilmour in 2007, a year before Wright’s death (all 13-plus minutes of this session are included on the Blu-ray version of the album). But most of us are here for Gilmour’s distinctive guitar solos, and he doesn’t disappoint. That signature Strat casts its creamy spell on every full-fledged track bar one, the orchestral Sings. The album’s largely a family affair: Gilmour’s wife, novelist Polly Samson, pens most of the lyrics, their daughter Romany plays harp and sings lead on Between Two Points, while sons Gabriel and Charlie also contribute backing vocals and lyrics, respectively.
Phil Stafford
ELECTRONIC / AMBIENT
Ritual
Jon Hopkins
Domino Recordings
From developing film scores with Brian Eno to collaborating with Coldplay and Charli XCX, British composer and Grammy-nominated producer Jon Hopkins has enjoyed a storied career that, in recent times, has dived deep into ambient electronica. Following 2021’s Music for Psychedelic Therapy, Hopkins’ seventh album is an epic 41-minute journey marked by pressure and release, where eight songs meld into one cohesive, immersive — and hypnotic — whole. Evolving from the pieces of London’s stroboscopic Dreamachine experience — itself a 50s-era psychedelic invention — Ritual is an almost ceremonial body of work that revels in its expansiveness and depth. Rolling, contemplative soundscapes elicit restless energy, enhanced by collaborators including vocalist Vylana, violinist Emma Smith and longtime partner Leo Abrahams on guitar. Part IV – The Veil charts an ominous path atop stuttered percussion and outerwordly blips and bleeps. In Part V – Evocation, a combination of whirring, droning synths and industrial percussion builds to a climax. Hopkin describes composing as a “mindless act”, where direction is less important than destination. In Ritual, he’s produced a compelling album that rewards — indeed demands — full immersion.
Tim McNamara
