STACK #137 Mar 2016

MUSIC NEWS

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he says. “Once you realise that you can just put ANZAC bullsh-t on the cover of your Harvey Norman catalogue, you can get away with it, so why not? I don’t think people realise that. People should not suffer fools and they should not suffer scams like that, so it’s everybody’s fault.”Liddiard sees the weird sounds and chugging rhythms of Feelin Kinda Free as something of a full circle return.The myriad effects which permeate the album are, for the most part, all created on guitar – even ThenThey Came For Me ’s high-pitched, airy whistle (which mimics the terrifying Jericho trumpet Liddiard mentions in the lyrics) and the singing saw sound on Tailwind , which suggests the creepy astral close of Radiohead’s Pyramid Song . “The whole thing was to not have blues guitars in it,” Liddiard explains. “I’d been listening to really old four-track tapes from the ‘90s that me and [formerThe Drones member] Rui [Periera] made, and they’re all totally bizarre. It was almost as though having two guitars playing American-ish, country-ish, blues-ish guitars music – that was a stretch for us. We had to learn how to do that. But just being completely f-cking weird is so natural. It was a relief. Everyone was on side, everyone was cool.”

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INTERVIEW

I f you're a Jeff Buckley fan you're likely to feel like a princess at prom with the news there's a collection of previously unreleased recordings about to come out.The project has come to fruition thanks to the legendary producer behind Buckley's stellar album Grace , Steve Berkowitz – look out for our interview with him in next month's issue. JEFF BUCKLEY "T he creative process is sh-t,” says Gareth Liddiard. “You’ve got to make it seem like it just flows out of you. But it doesn’t, it’s awful. It’s stunted and it’s painful and it’s just sh-t. But it’s do-able.” What the singer-guitarist and the rest of his five-piece have done on new album Feelin Kinda Free is innovative as a Rube Goldberg machine (although the consequences are anything but pedestrian), with guitar lines that snake and chomp at sudden, thick chords, and Liddiard’s spat lyrics lurching away from the babylike responses of bassist (and Liddiard’s wife), Fiona Kitschin. Incredible lead single Taman Shud – which Andrew Bolt has loudly scorned, much to Liddiard’s amusement – is about a little-known Australian murder mystery.The randomly scrawled letters on Feelin Kinda Free ’s cover are an unsolved code found written on GARETH LIDDIARD THE DRONES

a scrap of paper – which was ripped from a book found in a random man’s car footwell – which ended up in the pocket of an unidentified corpse on Somerton beach in Adelaide in 1948. “It’s well known,” Liddiard says of the tale. “Everyone in America knows about the whole f-cking thing, but no one in Australia is interested in anything Australia.” His idea is that much of our cultural cringe stems from the fact that if we look into our own history, pretty soon we’re going to get to the mistreatment of our indigenous race, and then we feel uncomfortable; this guilt fosters offensive behaviour towards both Aboriginal Australians and immigrants.The clip for Taman Shud features a whole lot of hilarious and powerful imagery including two Ned Kellys making out, Gina Reinhart as a toad spewing coal and Liddiard in ANZAC fatigues singing in front of various photoshopped ads which piggyback the ANZAC legacy. “I just think they’re shameless,”

Feelin Kinda Free by The Drones is out March 18 via Dew Process. Read the whole interview with Gareth online at stack.net.au.

MUSIC

MACKLEMORE & RYAN LEWIS T he Seattle duo have already released a few singles, including the Grandmaster Flash-esque Downtown and the sociopolitically-charged White

You And I by Jeff Buckley is out Mar 11 via Sony.

This Unruly Mess I've Made by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis is out now via Warner. Privilege II . Now their second LP is ready to be set loose, and it promises to be yuge.

Q1/ In your Red Bull behind-the-scenes video you talked about balancing your own writing with working with producers. Did you mind giving control to others? It’s actually really fun for me to collaborate production wise, and writing with other people as well. As much fun as it is doing it on my own also. I was really excited The fey vulnerability of singer-songwriter Elizabeth Rose belies the conviction behind her manner. She's just released Intra , her gorgeous debut album.We asked her five questions. ELIZABETH ROSE

to bring people on board. But with some other songs, I kind of thought they were quite personal, and I wanted to keep them just for myself to work on in my own time. Q2/ It was clear how much you loved doing the video for Shoulda Coulda Woulda . Did you come up with the brief, the costumes, the dancers? Myself and the company I created it with, PixelFrame, we both came up with the idea. Then they decided to go and build the actual mirrored cube room, which was awesome. So that was quite collaborative as well. I chose every outfit, and I knew I wanted dancers in it. PixelFrame are great; they also did my video clip for The Good Life . Q3/ How long have you been playing DJ sets? I started DJing probably three years ago.

I’ve been doing it for a while. I like to do that in between while I’m touring. I really like playing music that I am actually influenced by, which is a lot of dance music; a lot of house and techno. Q4/ What was New Years in Perth like? I DJ’d on the rooftop at Avery, it was a ticketed event. It was really fun. I brought in the New Year; there were confetti cannons at midnight. Q5/ Which song did you play when the clock struck 12? I played Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers. Yeah, it was good.

Intra by Elizabeth

Rose is out now through Inertia.

MARCH 2016

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