I'm In Miami Bitch

Last night I went to Dorothy, the Thursday night at Tramp Basement, to see Miami Horror, with Pop A Cap and Airwolf supporting. Miami Horror are about to drop an album in 2010, and they tore that basement apart. Kids tripping on the $25 gypsy jugs or 20 wet pussies (cough) trying not to look like they're trying too hard to look like they're not having a good time.

I like Dorothy. I like it a lot. The venue just looks fucking cool. The drinks are reasonable, and the people less pretentious than its indie rep would suggest. The silent disco was a kick, too. On channel one: One More Time by Daft Punk. On channel two: All Along The Watchtower. Yeah. Hendrix. But what's missing is just one or two strobes. I love strobe lights. Maybe it's just me, but I enjoy only being able to see when the bass drum hits. It adds to that all encompassing feeling of the music surrounding you, getting lost in the rhythm and totally forgetting yourself.

Gloriously 80's disco-house throwback.


Miami Horror are playing the Corner Hotel on November 20.

NOWWW.
LMFAO. Not even kidding, that's their name. Fucked if I know whether they're taking the piss, but it's catchy and electro and hip hop. In short, it's goooood.



Maybe you've been hearing this around the traps and didn't know who it was, I certainly didn't till I started looking these guys up.



Anyway, so there you have it. A fair bit of electric loving. I highly recommend these two artists.

Later,

some kind of crazy blinding bowling alley

I had a bit of an epiphany whilst listening to Jay Reatard's new track, It Ain't Gonna Save Me the other day. It happened so quickly, between a breath, and now it's completely gone. But it was an incredibly vivid flash of something, occurring underneath the jangling fuzz and frenetic drums, as I drove home from school. It had been raining but the sun was out and the road stretched out in front of me like some kind of crazy blinding bowling alley. And as Reatard repeated the phrase "all is lost, there is no hope for me", I had some kind of paradox of emotions, the same feeling I get when I listen to the chorus lick of It Ain't Funny How We Don't Talk Anymore by You Am I, or Always Love by Nada Surf. It's something about the perfect harmony between lead and rhythm, or vocals and melody that makes me feel every single dearly beloved memory and each painfully repressed yet wistfully recalled moment of despair condensed into 3 minutes of time.




Watch Me Fall is out now on Matador.

Later,

What it means to me.

Going back through my music library recently, I happened upon somewhat of a sonic time capsule. I’m not entirely sure how proud I should be that the first time I put Limewire to use was searching for (then) relatively unknown band, Kisschasy, to use as a talking point with an (ex) punk girl I dug, way back in Year 8. But that’s what I did, and I ended up with the entire United Paper People record, their debut effort from 2005.

Once my 15-year-old romantic sensibilities left the building and I realised that common interests ≠ sex, I was nursing a fairly decent rejection complex. But on the plus side, I had discovered the perfect genre of music to convalesce to.

What followed was a fairly stereotypical adolescent adventure into the  subtly emotional pop-punk which Kisschasy proffered, an adventure which - I’m slightly embarrassed to say as I listen back on some of these tracks as I write this - continues to this day. I can still listen to these songs, because they appeal to my sense of what sounds good musically, but also because when I do, something stirs, something deep within my chest, that place of reminiscence and old memories.

For me, there are times and places, people and events attached to this music. Morning has me sitting in the study at my mum’s house (in the days before wireless internet), with the sunlight streaming through the window, making the fatal mistake of coming on too strong. Face Without A Name’s distinctively playful lead guitar lick, and I am transported to the couch in the old holiday home rented down at Inverloch in the 2005/6 summer holidays, with the prospect of two long weeks at the beach and messing around after dark with the kids I saw at this time of the year only, and haven’t seen since. Ione Skye drags me back to Maroondah Festival in February 2006, running around creating innocent mischief, watching the bands, and stencilling anti-emo phraseology all over my genuine Rolling Stones Forty Licks tour t-shirt, a gift from my uncle in London, because it was the only white t-shirt I could find, a decision I regret terribly with the gift of hindsight.

Which brings me to something of a point. With hindsight, I look back on that 18-24 month period as part of the happiest of my life. It’s a constant summer in my mind, the sun always shines. I was in a band. We made music together, just played as loud as we could, and spent more time jumping around pretending to be rockstars than trying to become them. It was enough for us to play AC/DC and Nirvana covers, trash the little space set aside for rehearsal, and argue about how a riff should sound.

With hindsight, I think of sunny lunchtimes at school, before they cut down the trees and demolished the embankment we all used to hang out on.I remember talking on the phone till 3am about anarchism and the evil empire of capitalism, about running away and being free. I remember wondering what it was like to be drunk, what it was like to be in love, and finding out about both.

Hindsight allows us to look at the past through rose-coloured glasses, remembering the good times, preferring not to think about the bad ones. I don’t think about struggling with self-esteem. I don’t think about my parents arguing, and I don’t think about lying in bed unable to remove a female infatuation from my mind, because I’m constantly bombarded with wistful, memories at the edge of my consciousness of the first time I stood up on a wave, the first girl I kissed, and playing simple garage rock tunes with my best friends.

I’m glad I was able to experience such a purple patch of happiness and discovery during what is sometimes an incredibly hard time in adolescence.

That’s what Kisschasy mean to me, anyway.

Later,

Clever well adjusted psychopath.

I love house parties. There’s something about the idea of opening your house to a bunch of drunken loons, giving them free food and loud music, and allowing nature to take its course that immediately excites anybody to well beyond normal socially acceptable levels.

Year 12 so far has been pretty much chockers with just such events. And mostly they have been amazing. Oh, sure, there were a few misfires, some quieter than others, some less controversial, some very much more so, but on the whole I think I speak for us all when I say that the bar has been raised this year.

School has become, for a lot of us, what happens in between the other two nights a week when we’re totally out of our minds. And I’m not the least bit regretful of this. They’re an essential part of the downtime between the pretty much constant stress and anxiety caused by high school. A time to let hair down and get messy. Sometimes really messy. Sometimes so messy that you wake up in the morning with no idea how you became so clean-shaven or paint-free, until you see the video.

With the year drawing to a close, soon these magnificent social conglomerations will be a thing of the past. Well, at least until kids start turning 21. I say, it can’t come fast enough.

In the mean time, here's something to tide you over till the next jam.

For some reason, I can see this being MASSIVE at the Big Day Out, round about sunset. Hmmmmmm.

Later,