EUROPEANS - Europeans

[1978]

Top obscure British new wave single. Some insane twisted keyboard action amongst the high energy power pop riffage and awesomely daft catchy chorus. Euro-peans! Out of Bristol on Heartbeat Records. 

Victrola – A Game Of Despair

[1983]

A glorious array of intertwining icy synth-waves, gloomy guitar-waves and a bleak crispy drum machine. It's cold yet kinda comforting and cozy. A haunting hypnotic trip to the coldest depths of loneliness so infectious you don't want it to end. Dejection has never sounded so alluring and majestic.

A triumph of evocative 80s synth production that remains outstanding to this day.

The Embarrassment

Elizabeth Montgomery's Face [1981]

One of those "lost bands", "unknown legends" or "best band you never heard" bands. I mean when that comp cd came out in the 90s they really were unknown and I guess are still to some extent. Can you be forgotten if you weren't known in the first place... 

This tune is new wave of the quirky, dark and jangly kind. 

60s American telly is iconic and emblazoned on my mind. Get Smart, I Dream Of Jeanie, Gilligan's Island, Bewitched etc. Get your knobs out boys. 

Elizabeth Montgomery's Fa-a-ace!

Shoulda gone to number one in Canadia at least!

Patio Set [1980]

Punky post-punk, punky new wave, new wave-y post-punk etc etc etc. This was the debut single from Wichita Kansas' finest The Embarrassment. Dark, sorta menacing, weird and a whole lotta fun!

I'm A Don Juan [1981]

Double your guitar pleasure with supreme, tight, high octane riff-age and supreme surreal riff-age on this one. Frantic rhythm section plus another dual vocal with hooks galore. Surprisingly unique. Totally cookin' manic pop thrills! 

Celebrity Art Party [1981]

This one might be their best pop moment. They jangled, they angular-ed, they menaced, they dual vocal-ed, they toe-tapped, they rocked, they popped! Infectious tight blistering pop.

Drive Me To The Park [1983]

A crackin' tune from their second ep Death Travels West. Nails the whole dark indie jangly thing while simultaneously still sounding punk. Still sounds incredibly fresh to this day. If this had been on a major label or big indie imprint it would have surely been a smash but it was released on Fresh Sounds who were based in Lawrence Kansas.

Two Cars [198?]

Alright one more... A brief angular song. Very cool dual vocal with talk-singing, the sorta stylistic choice taken on ten years later by (early) Pavement. These guys really nailed a distinct indie sound all of their own in the nascent days of college rock. That this tune was never released at the time, only ever coming out in 1995 on the archival cd Heyday 1979-1983, is crazy to me.  

НИИ Косметики — Счастлив как никогда

[1986]

Brilliant and absolutely astonishing that this is not Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti circa 1999/2000.

 

When this turned up on that Fact Mix by Ariel Pink in 2010 there was no info to be found about this tune on the world wide web information superhighway. I'm sure we all speculated that it was actually just Ariel pretending to be a faux 80s Soviet new wave pop star but look it turned up 4 years later on the youtubes. Cool.

Spider Vomit

[2007]

Here's a rough and ready video of Spider Vomit I've never seen until today. Scuzzy tripped out raunch'n'roll baby!

You know what's funny I saw Spider Vomit live once and had their cd. Back in the late 00s I had the first cds by St Helens, Beaches and Scott & Charlene's Wedding but I did not realise the dude from Spider Vomit was the same dude in S&CW and the chick in St Helens was the singer in Spider Vomit and the main dude in St Helens played bass on the first Scott & Charlene's Wedding album. That's all news to me today. All I knew was that the bird who played guitar in Spider Vomit was also in Beaches and that she was awesome.

I was once accused of being a hipster for owning the Widows Walk cd.

[2006]

Here's an even rougher videeo. Spider Vomit doing Widows Walk live in someone's lounge room a year earlier. Tribal psychedelic grunge Royal Trux stylee. So the singers here are Hannah Brooks who went on to sing in St Helens and Craig Darmody who went on to form Scott & Charlene's Wedding. 

St Helens - Pharaohs Tomb [2009]

At the time I thought St Helens leaned way too much into their Royal Trux and Television influences but I gotta say there are some pretty cool tunes on their one and only cd Heavy Profession. It's all dual guitar interplay and intertwining girl/boy vocals. 

St Helens - One In Seventeen [2009]

Now that we're in this constant state of decline culturally and otherwise, I really appreciate these guys giving it a good crack. The Rolling Stones heavily influenced Television and The Rolling Sones heavily influenced Royal Trux and The Rolling Stones, Television and Royal Trux heavily influenced St Helens. That's a triple layer of Stones which is just the right amount. There's a bit Neil and bit of J to add into the pastiche mix on this tune too. I'm starting to think that this tune is so good it might just be undeniable... or has my naff-detector broken now that I'm old... 

Scott & Charlene's Wedding - Footscray Station [2010]

So the singer here is Craig Darmody who had been in Spider Vomit. Here though he's in more of an 80s indie jangle mode à la The Clean, The Bats and The Go-Betweens so I never put 2 and 2 together. Who cares anyway. Para Vista Social Club was an instant hit in my mind which now I see is kinda funny because it is just as much indebted to its influences as the St Helens album. These cds while having charismatic creators were record collection rock following well worn paths with nary innovation. Why do we allow certain things and not others? Taste: It's a mystery. 

Scott & Charlene's Wedding - Every Detail [2010]

Every Detail's got all the intense strums, jangles and noisy repetition swirling into a maelstrom echoing legendary pioneers The Velvets, The Feelies, The Clean et al. Nobody really expected a popular revival of this kind of music, we thought it had been done to death by the end of the 80s although it had continued in its own little alcove during the 90s & 00s where the diehards were keeping the faith. These Melbourne kids weren't even around when REM, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Bats and The Chills were getting originally aired on community radio and played on all night music video show Rage so I guess it was a trendy fresh and retro thing to them.

The downbeat sounds of both St Helens and Scott & Charlene's Wedding were retroactively chucked into the fake genre dubbed dolewave. This was a joke invented as a pejorative term for pissweak jangly indie bands in Melbourne in 2012 like Dick Diver and Twerps. A scene is not a genre but somehow a few years later midwit writers took it seriously and now its got a wikipedia page all of its own. I really don't get that St Helens get included as they don't have a "wannabe Dunedin 2.0" bone in their body, Scott & Charlene's Wedding however...

Beaches - Hoedown [2008]

I guess this was the first Beaches tune we all heard. So Gillian Tucker plays bass here and made the video. Beaches were a strange sorta Melbourne underground supergroup with the most guitarists. Hoedown is an upbeat driving surf guitar jam. Pretty cool.

Beaches - Halve [2010]

More guitars is better! A swarm of sparkling, driving and spaced out guitars go into swirling overdrive for your dreamy listening pleasure. The cosmic-psych-gaze is real.

I Have A Boyfriend - Chiffons

[1963]

An underrated Chiffons tune compared to their other Tokens production the previous more well known One Fine Day.

Everything's in the right place - the legendary girl-group drumbeat, the lead vocal, the harmonies, the bells, the key change, the surreal proto-psych guitar break etc. Perfection.

This tune and The Ronettes Be My Baby were both written by Barry/Greenwich. The drum beat is practically the same, they were recorded around the same time in mid 1963 with totally different producers, vocal groups and ensembles. I'm not sure who got there first but in the end Phil Spector and The Wrecking Crew overloaded the Be My Baby beat with more reverb and made it iconic.

I Have A Boyfriend might (I'm not 100% sure on this, I guess Bob Stanley would know) also have the first usage of that lighter than air "helium marshmallow" guitar sound which means this track probably has two innovative landmark features. 

One of the top two minute teenage symphonies. 

Melt Not My Igloo - Larry Jon Wilson

[1975]

A country-funk jam that gets pretty cosmic.

"Old cold gravy ain't gonna harm ya
If the meat is warm"

Wise words from Mr Larry.

Don Blackman - Deaf Hook Up Connection

[1982]

For a dude who played with Earth Wind & Fire, Parliament/Funkadelic, Lenny White and Roy Ayers you know whats coming yet he's surprisingly fresh and idiosyncratic. Blackman's jazzy piano starts up this jam that gets immediately funky with awesome bass and mucho hand clap action, goes into an awful scatting bit before going metal with triumphant horns then take it down to the celebratory party sounds then some daft funk verse. Next the heavy but buoyant riff is back with some chanting skipping rope kids and on to the final minute of funky metal mayhem. One infectious funky number it is! You would have to think N.E.R.D. were big fans of this because they ripped it off.

Ariel Pink - Everyone's Wrong

2025 Anthem.

The summer jam for August with the most correct sentiment in a pop song ever. The new look tubby sized Ariel un-cancels himself again.

Seriously who fucking drops an anthem this good 25 years into their career. 

Chuck The Beach Boys, Grandmaster Flash, Goth Rock and more into the Ariel blender and voilà you've got yourself... (insert some words to indicate the goodness of what you've got).

SOME OF THE WRONG (THE HATE IS REAL).

The government who are criminalising our dissent over their retarded mass immigration scam sending Australian born citizens to live in their cars in car parks while new arrivals get housing priority are wrong.

The Indian immigrant getting paid 400 thousand Aussie dollars a year to call us raycisss: Wrong.

The E-Karen American hag pretending to make our internet safe for kids. Really though she's just getting paid to tell us Aussies we can only say things that conform to her worldview. Her mass surveillance is for censorship of free speech and mining our personal data for future thought crime blackmail/social credit/criminal prosecution which is all so fucking wrong it's very very fucking wrong. 

Becoming Soviet Australia: Wrong, wrong, wrong!

The globalists: Most Wrong. 

The current state of anarcho-tyranny we've all been placed under in the anglosphere: WRONG AND FUCKING INSANE... and wrong.

The Netflix comedians who are so fucking not fucking funny: Wrong. 

These not fucking funny comic podcasters who need to quit comedy immediately because they're not funny: Wrong.

The fucking fake Christian influencers who got baptised this morning: So Wrong.

My entire fucking family: WRONG, WRONG, MORE WRONG.

Steve Albini apologising for being a fucking free speech legend, to the cult, before he died: Wrong.

The adderall addicted libtard youtubers: Wrong.

The containment centrists: Wrong.

The shitlib Islam apologists: Wrong.

The fucking fake outraged conservative youtubers outraging over their outrage: Wrong.

The fucking fake partisan legacy media commentators doing their divisive ra-ra-ing for money: Wrong.

You fucking rappers who haven't moved beyond the freaky psych-trap flows of 2013: So fucking wrong.

You boring pop stars who are so vacuous and boring and vacuous and boring are so fucking boring and vacuous AND... Wrong.

Youtube music critics why do you exist - you are all fucking twerps and so fucking dumb and got no taste and wrong.

All you haters throwing green dildos onto WNBA courts...  are they wrong... or just fucking funny... 

Keep On Funkin' · Barefoot Jerry

[1977]

Even more groovy baby. This one's from their sixth LP. A choice country funk hoedown it is. Some excellent banjo and cosmic guitar workouts. It makes you wonder if maybe The Meat Puppets were fans.

Turn it up and let the good times flow!