STACK #133 Nov 2016

MUSIC

REVIEWS

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Caligula's Horse Bloom

Drug Church Hit Your Head The best thing about New Yorkers Drug Church is their staunch swagger. Their music has tough guy guts that could amp your ego on your lowest days. Not unlike your standard, sh-tty hardcore band, this new album is swathed in attitude, big riffs and all of the feels, but has none of the generic breakdowns and monotonous vocals that hardcore seems to have thoroughly exhausted over the past decade. Patrick Kindlon’s vocals are everything. Hit Your Head is incredible. Late contender

Laurie Anderson Heart Of A Dog It's a long, long time since anyone took enough acid to believe that an album might even attempt to unlock the secrets to life, death and the hereafter. Laurie Anderson takes that very aim in her unpretentious stride here, quoting Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, her dog's Buddhist teacher and other seemingly random sources in a collage of

Prog rock really tends to hit its stride when it harnesses its inherent technical arrogance and is overly ambitious. The genre has been consistently propelled by game-changing albums over the past decade and Australia’s own Caligula’s Horse have just nudged that bar a little higher. Album highlight Dragonfly is almost dizzying in its wild, theatrical composition. “You never see me coming," vocalist Jim Grey cries, but on the contrary, many have tipped Caligula’s Horse to burst through to the big time soon – and this album will have you inclined to believe them. ( Inside Out) Emily Kelly

interconnected thoughts to make a compelling statement – no, seriously – about the very purpose of death. It was the passing of her beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle, that set the parameters of the project. But clearly, between meditations on her unspeakably bizarre childhood and a closing selection by her late husband Lou Reed, you can tell she's been working up to this dazzling philosophical masterwork for some time. Spoken in her distinctive, hushed tone of poetic wonder to an ambient minimal backdrop, it ranges over dreams and memories, the surreal post-9/11 militarisation of America and deep into the mysteries of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. "What are days for? To wake us up; to put between the endless nights," she whispers. "What's the name of those things you see when you close your eyes? Phosphenes. " Questions find answers in tangential connections and parallel stories that are hilarious, profound and sometimes shocking. When Reed's familiar voice croaks into Turning Time Around , we're right there beside her. And there's a whole feature film goes with this? Hard to imagine it could make the pleasure any more complete. (Nonesuch) Michael Dwyer

for best of the year. ( Shock) Emily Kelly

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SOPHIE Product Who is SOPHIE? For a while there nobody really knew. If someone asked you could say “I don’t know, but either an individual or group of producers, or maybe a conceptual project combining synthetic sounds, online aesthetics and consumerist dialogue into a hyper-polished product.” You wouldn’t have been wrong, but now we can add that SOPHIE is the work of UK producer Samuel Long. So far there have been collaborations with Madonna, Le1f, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, a number of chart topping and genre-defying singles, and a total blurring of underground electronic club music and mainstream pop culture. Now there's Product : an album and manifesto, featuring some of those revolutionary singles with unreleased material, packed with sugar, energy, and ideas. ( Inertia) SimonWinkler

Kurt Cobain Montage Of Heck: The Home Recordings Somewhere between rubber- necking a fatal car accident and genuinely grasping for the answer to ‘why?’ lies this 31-track ‘soundtrack’ to the recent doco on grunge’s enigmatic Godfather. Certainly no party starter, we’re instead meditating on the creative aspects to the mischievous noodler. Between demos and mere ideas are snippets of Cobain’s fascination with editing sound on his four-track; it's an exhaustive, sad, funny and ultimately fascinating insight into his creative process and a flittering peek into a rarely celebrated sense of humour ( Beans ). Wow, an album where Cobain tracks can make you laugh? Who’d have thunk it! ( Universal) Chris Murray

Dallas Crane Scoundrels Gentlemen, where on Earth have you been – we’ve been dying here! We’d lost memory of what that authentic ‘live sound’ Oz rock does to the brain, feet and mood. Hear Dissolution , a veil is lifted; So It Goes offers that rare, 1976 smooth and edgy rock ballad ‘45 we’d lost behind the couch – now finally returned to our broken hearts. The neighbours called the cops upon hearing my indoor concert to Billy’s Gonna Die Young . Folks, if classic AC/DC and Chisel had got drunk and made out one night, it would sound like this. Welcome back DC, you’ve been missed. ( Alberts) Chris Murray

5 Seconds Of Summer Sounds Good Feels Good

The Aussie quartet that refuse to be pigeonholed as a boy band keep getting better with every album. How do they do it, you may ask? Some would argue by riding off the success of other artists, with Hey Everybody! regarded as a 'blatant' rip-off of Duran Duran's Hungry Like The Wolf . Even if it was (I think not), there are 13 other uniquely 5SOS tracks here that highlight just how far the Sydney boys have come since 2011. Worth a spin are Vapor (for the line “I want to feel your love like the weather/ All over me"), and Catch Fire if only just to see how much of an influence those five British lads had. ( Sony) Alesha Kolbe

NOVEMBER 2015

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