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!

Smokies · Barefoot Jerry

[1971]

Groovy baby! Chuck this on your i-pod immediately.

Pretty cool funky southern rock tune with a west coast psych tinge. Like that other great barely recognised group Cowboy these guys were totally unknown to me when they appeared on that great swampy southern rock compilation cd on Soul Jazz Records 15 years back. Since then this tune has turned up on some dumb show on the telly and now the normies have steamed it millions of times so it's pretty surprising that the debut Barefoot Jerry LP Southern Delight has not been reissued on vinyl since its initial release. Maybe the people who stream songs coz they were on the telly aren't your physical media/vinyl buying/artist supporting music fans. 

Orkiestra Ósmego Dnia / Jan A. P. Kaczmarek - Muzyka na koniec

[1982]

When psychedelic and ambient meet in an apocalyptic folk based extravaganza. It's unbelievable that this LP isn't a massive cult album in avant/psych folk or new age-y ambient circles because this pioneering work is a masterstroke of atmospheric ethno-psychedelia. 

An orchestra of two Polish men Grzegorz Banaszakon on guitars and Jan A P Kaczmarek playing a zither (Fidola Fishera), Synthesiser, piano, flute, recorder, vocals and percussion

Muzyka na koniec, I think, translates as Music For The End. A totally compelling cosmic-pagan jam that's mysterious, mystical and sometimes unsettling. One of the great unknown and unconventional records of its ilk, this has surprisingly never been issued on cd or had a reissue since the 80s. 

Helga Pogatschar - Mars: Requiem

[1995]

Spooky ye olde voices. 

Mars: Requiem is an impressive blend of oratario and 90s industrial flavours. Placing liturgical vocals amongst a dystopian post industrial landscape creates a creepy and ominous effect then at other times it feels pretty sacred and devotional. Some relate these ancient vocal stylings as demonic opera but that probably has more to do with pop culture's inclusion of such music in horror movies but then again who knows what the intentions were. Actually some of the more bombastic tunes from Mars: Requium would have been perfect for a game or movie soundtrack while the more solemn songs would be more suited to being heard in a cathedral. 

Luciano Cilio - Dialoghi del presente

[1977]

It would be pretty hard not to be touched by this minimal avant-folk LP. It's an improv chamber jam like no other. The opening eight minute track Primo Quadro della Conoscenza is the spectacular high point here: Gorgeous, delicate, mysterious, sparse and haunting. 

It all puts me in mind of a time when my younger self romantically thought there was a possibility of living a life like an art film where the aesthetics of the surrounding landscape were to feature in importance and prominence. It was going to be wintry secluded hills in the woods in a minimally furnished cabin-esque farmhouse where the evenings would feature wine, women and song and society and the state would be far from your mind. A life combining the voluptuous, epicurean and contemplative to an integrated cosmic level was the dream not the wretched unrelenting circumstances of reality.

Ksiezyc - S/T

[1996]

Ye olde and modern collide in this ambient medieval psych-folk jam from Poland. Haunting folk horror vibes. Apparently the subject matter is rather grim and macabre. The sorta thing you would have expected 4AD to release back in the day and as good as anything they did put out in this vein. I mean the closest thing to this record is early His Name Is Alive. Perfect music for tonight, the bleakest midwinter's night this year. Despite the fire crackling away me and the dog aren't sure who is coldest. 

With You Every Night · Ariel Pink

[2025]

"Can't lock me out when I'm the voice within"

Total dream-gaze-ment.

LO-fi hypnagogic goodness that goes from romantic to creepy to ecstatic and more. He's tapping into the lost subconscious for a peak deep sonic dreamscape where all sorts of forgotten and unthought things are bubbling away. A hazy and haunted trip-out of glorious proportions. 

The pint size psych pop maestro is in unexpected fine form in 2025.

DURUTTI COLUMN - Lips That Would Kiss/Madeleine

Durutti Column - Lips That Would Kiss/Madeline [1980]

You will be charmed and enchanted by the debut 7" of Vinni Reilly's sublime mesmerising guitar exploits put through the Martin Hannet ringer. Fragile, sweet and odd. 

Durutti Column often get lost in the history of post-punk, the development of 80s guitar music, all things ethereal and being a key influence on future genres like dream pop, shoegaze, UK post-rock, hypnagogia etc. Durutti Column are not just some footnote though, they are the big bang... well more like the gentle rippling waves of the oscillating universe... 

Vinni Reilly captures the beauty and melancholy of our lives, everything in between and more. Capturing the ineffable is what art is for and Reilly excels in this pursuit. There is so much unnecessary bullshit put out into the world it's hard not to be touched when somebody is generous enough to create such poignant and exquisite music for you to enjoy. 

Warning - Warning

[1982]

If Gary Numan turned into Cookie Monster and started playing doom metal maybe it would sound like this. One of the stranger anomalies in the history of 20th century pop. Disco-Doom or as somebody said aesthetically it's Disco Grover meets Cookie Monster. It's got vague hints of French cosmic, 80s action/sc-fi/horror soundtracks, zuehl, Goblin, Archaïa, Heldon, Chrome, F/i, new wave, synth-pop, space-rock, heavy metal etc. but really this German duo's debut LP defies categorisation and is in a genre all of its own. 

Swans - I Am The Sun

I Am The Sun - Swans [1995]

Keeping up the theme of all things sunshine. Beach Boys and Swans are pretty much the same really, sun and fun.

You know what's funny, when this came out Swans were perceived as so passé hardly anybody even noticed. I recall a small article in The Wire and one dude on the radio in Melbourne played tunes from The Great Annihilator so I would be curious what the sales figures were. A year later after releasing the follow up LP Soundtracks For The Blind they broke up because the lack of financial stability had become so stressful they couldn't even sustain running the band.  

In a turn of events that is still surprising to me Swans returned in the 2010s after a thirteen year hiatus to immense critical acclaim and an unforeseen surge in popularity. Somehow in their absence a huge cult following featuring a younger generation of devoted fans had formed. Soundtracks For The Blind had become a cult phenomenon online to rival other cult records of the 90s like Spiderland, When The Kite String Pops, Stratosphere and In An Aeroplane Over The Sea. I'm guessing their influence on Godspeed You Black Emperor was also a key factor to their meteoric post-millennial rise.

Song For The Sun - Swans [1991]

Another Beach Boys-esque tune to get you in your Little Deuce Coup headed to the coast for some surfing fun in the sun and beach babe action. Michael Gira the most fun man in rock with the sunniest disposition!

Palisades Park - The Beach Boys

[1976]

Where the Beach Boys pay tribute to the music that inspired them in the early days. This is a cover of Freddy Cannon's #3 hit from 1962. Carl absolutely kills this vocal performance. Also featuring great fairground organ lead break for peak Americana nostalgia. The good ole days when everything was way more innocent, even the creepy stuff. The Beach Boys are America's band but also they're Australia's.

Let Us Go On This Way · The Beach Boys

[1977]

There's refined radio friendly Beach Boys then there's deranged scuzzy Beach Boys and much in-between but hey its all Beach Boys. Many can't hack the rough unhinged and lo-fi version but for those that can handle it there's a load of wild stuff. I mean they sometimes get so goofy its like outsider music at times... And they are retarded aren't they... like they've got arrested development, grown blokes stuck with 15 year old boy brains. In a way they're keepin' it pure with these adolescent rock'n'roll concerns and startling strange music that's so abrupt you can't ignore it.

The Beach Boys - Little Saint Nick

[1963]

A young Mike Love at a vocal peak here on this tune penned by Brian Wilson. Many moons later It was credited to Wilson/Love after legal action, there was no love lost between these two cousins. Creating a Christmas classic is no mean feat and here The Beach Boys entered the Christmas pop culture lexicon forever.

Merry Christmas everybody!

It's OK · The Beach Boys

[1976]

By this stage, the Brian's Back era, The Beach Boys were post-modern whether they knew it or not.  Everything about this is fan-fucking-tastic: The melody, the words, the sentiments, the impeccable Brian production, the expansive harmonies, the hand claps, Brian on the fucking Moog!

You don't hear this ever on golden oldies radio here but it's an undeniable feel good hit of the summer. 

The fuckin' best! 

Find a ride 

In the sum-sum-summertime
It's OK

it's alright

Dennis on the outro...  two Dennis' in fact!

Dennis

Dennis

*Roy Wood guests on drums

**The sound and vibe here are a precursor to Brian's great 00s solo LP That Lucky Old Sun.

***Also surely this is the inspiration for several sunny tunes on Ariel Pink's Before Today.

Here Comes The Night · The Beach Boys

[1979]

Beach Boys fans know this as a tune originally from Wild Honey but some insane people prefer this rerecorded disco version. The legendary Curt Boettcher (The Millennium/Sagittarius) along with Bruce Johnson were behind the production on this one. The ten minute version took up most of side two of L.A. (Light Album) however this is the 7 inch single edit of the tune. Many fans hated it as did guitarist Al Jardine.

[1967]

The Wild Honey LP is an underrated masterpiece. Its got a harder stripped back r&b vibe compared to the sophisticated psych pop of the previous two records. Like the rest of the album Here Comes The Night is heavy on the piano, bass and organ: A very nifty proto lo-fi sound. I do love it when Brian has a sing on Beach Boys songs.

The Beach Boys - Adult/CHiLD (Medley)

The Beach Boys - Adult/CHiLD (Medley) [1977]

This is a neat medley of the record that the Beach Boys scheduled to put out to follow up the strange synth pop odyssey Beach Boys Love You (1977) but Mike Love and Al Jardine ixnayed Brian's plans for that and made a different album instead called M.I.U. Album (1978). 

The Beach Boys - Hey Little Tomboy [1978]

The one tune they salvaged from the abandoned Adult/Child project for the M.I.U. Album was this peak weird Brian tune. A lost classic. Many don't realise that Brian is a fucking hilarious dude because he's often so deadpan. He was one funny fellow!

Breathless – The Glass Bead Game

Touchstone - Breathless (1986)

Anthem.

A dark psychedelic dream pop classic. Mournful tones give way to a mesmerising kaleidoscope of ecstatic sound that gets so fervent it spirals off into the stratosphere leaving the gloom behind for the heavens.

Every Road Leads Home - Breathless (1986)

Another soaring hypnotic tune that detours into hair raising menacing sonic excursions before returning to the waves of celestial atmosphere and empyrean euphoria. Then the swirling gets so frenzied it's confusing and hard to distinguish if it's ominous or uplifting. An incredible dreamscape depiction where puzzling emotions are conjured: Foreboding joy. 

Breathless – The Glass Bead Game (Full Album) [1986]

Breathless? Who were they again? You may ask. Well for a start singer Dominic Appleton sang The Jeweller, The Strength Of Strings and I Am The Cosmos on the second and third This Mortal Coil albums. Surprisingly however they weren't signed to 4AD despite being the archetypal 4AD band. Breathless bridged the gap between goth-y post punk and dream pop. At once a throwback and a glimpse into the future, the tried and true gloomy atmosphere and the future ecstatic sonic spirit that groups like Slowdive, The Church, Panda Bear etc. would later incorporate into their sound. 

It's surprising a group like Breathless weren't more famous back in the day or even now while Chameleons, The Sound, And Also The Trees, Sad Lovers And Giants etc. who also weren't all that renowned either have fanatical cult followings amongst the younger generations online today. Breathless don't seem to be as highly regarded for some reason yet they might be more innovative with their sonic explorations expanding beyond the limitations of genre. Perhaps it's because those aforementioned groups were more about successfully nailing the tone of the style in that specific moment rather than experimenting by pushing the boundaries and creating new possibilities. Transcending the gloom of the era by injecting surreal trip-outs and euphoria into the mix was their masterstroke. 

On The Glass Bead Game gloomy post-punk, eerie tribal ominousness, ecclesiastical tones and dreamy neo-psych gloriously collide in a splendid atmospheric vision....