Pepper Rabbit

No, this has not transformed into a food blog. Pepper Rabbit are a super quaint (I’m too manly to write cute, especially in reference to other men) duo from the states that make excellent music. Avant-garde folk is how one critic describes it, but I prefer to call it folk music with balls and substance. Forget your tame Mumford & Sons and the over-rated and underwhelming Angus & Julia Stone for their piss poor tunes (the latter duo being just a whiny gypsy wannabe and Australia’s national Piss Guy champion).

Pepper Rabbit are the goods. Two lads that are talented multi-instrumentalists, their sound has strong tones of Grizzly Bear in there and hints of Radiohead’s more subdued tunes. A fine combo. They impressed at SXSW earlier this year so maybe you should see what the hype is about below.

Pepper Rabbit – “Harvest Moon” Video from stereogum on Vimeo.

You can pick up their album Beauregard from Kanine Records here for only $10!

Older Brother – Pepper Rabbit

Red Wine – Pepper Rabbit

Tin Sparrow

Tin Sparrow are a quaint four-piece folk-pop outfit from Sydney’s northern beaches. Not to be confused with Tim Sparrow, or indeed Jack Sparrow, Tin Sparrow make music that exceeds their youth and relative inexperience.

I hear shades of Crowded House, Neil Young, and The Beatles, what do you think? Strong melodies and effective, intelligent lyrics create simple sounding yet genuinely sophisticated little pop gems. Throw in the odd guitar solo and it makes a pretty neat package. I quite like it.

They recently played the Peats Ridge music festival over New Year’s in front of several hundred people, not bad for such a fledgling group. They even handed out free demos, which I have sampled for you below. They play The Roxbury Hotel in Glebe this Friday the 21st as part of a charity fundraising night, how generous.

Fool’s Gold – Tin Sparrow

The Boat – Tin Sparrow

Beach House Anyone?

I’ve posted Beach House before. They’re good. I have been listening to them a lot lately and have realised that they are really very good. At first I thought they were a bit too laid-back/lo-fi/la-zy and their music might have an adverse affect on low-resistance insomniacs, but I have changed my mind. They really are excellent.

Their third LP Teen Dream came out about an e-lifetime ago (1 year, that’s how fresh I am) and they are wrapping up touring for it early next year with the Sydney Festival. If you were disorganised like I was, typically, then you might have bought tickets to Sufjan Stevens on the same night Beach House are playing and by being  incapable of being in two places at once or some form of osmosis then you have missed out. Others might still be able to get tickets.

Lover Of Mine is my pick of the tracks, hence it featured in the first post, but Silver Soul and especially Walk In The Park are really just as good. Still, I do wish they would rock out with their cocks out every once in a while. It is only the two of them I suppose.

PS How rad and serious do they look in this photo! A duo you wouldn’t want to meet in some dark back alley. No sir.

PPS I bet you want to go on holiday to the beach now, don’t you!

Walk In The Park – Beach House

Silver Soul – Beach House

Kate Miller-Heidke

I came home a little drunk on Friday night. I had been out drinking with a pair of Welsh guys from my football team and was simply not prepared for the beer-infused liver-assault ahead of me. After stumbling home a little after 1 I had the brilliant (at the time) idea to turn on my computer and kill time in a feeble attempt to sober up. My search for sobriety proved fruitless however in the process I managed to stumble across this gem from Australian songstress Kate Miller-Heidke.

The song is appropriately titled “Are You Fucking Kidding Me” and is a brilliant criticism of the most trivial aspect of everyone’s favorite online social networking tool, Facebook. The comical lyrics include references to various pointless features of the application such as Pirates, Stipper-names, “Poking”, and undesirable people from your past using the tool to “reconnect” with you. Combining a beautiful melody that demonstrates Miller-Heidke’s impressive vocal capability that verges on operatic at times and rampant piano chords, the perfect musical summary of all that is tedious about the excesses of online social media and those who overuse it has been created.

This charming little ditty and others were recorded “Live at the Hi-Fi” in Melbourne a year ago and are available for purchase from Kate’s website here.

Are You Fucking Kidding Me – Kate Miller-Heidke

The Middle East (Band, not region)

The Middle East is a cute little band from Townsville. They make excellent folk music and despite their fragmented beginning they have generated some steam over the past year with positive reviews across the blogosphere and radio alike. And rightfully so. TME produce the kind of folk music that is the complete antithesis of the underwhelming folk-pop I was lamenting here a few weeks back. I could have included The Middle East in that post as my primary example of quality folk music but that would have been insufficient acknowledgement of their substance. I felt an individual post was necessary, so here it is.

The Middle East produce music for the whole family. I mean this in the sense that everyone in the music family and anyone who knows quality music will appreciate TME’s music. Not in the way that Disney suggested that Pocahontas was “fun for the whole family” when in fact it just bored the pants off everyone, especially the little kiddies it was intended for (that sounds inappropriate…). These tracks have something that everyone can appreciate. Even if folk isn’t your thing and Ibiza dancehall anthems are. It is just good, simple, beautiful music.

They recently played the SXSW festival in the states, the stomping ground for all good “up and coming acts”, and are set for an expansive series of dates across the States supporting Pavement and Mumford and Sons. Hopefully they will be back in Oz soon for some shows as I have not yet had the pleasure. In the meantime you can purchase The Middle East EP directly from the band’s website. For a poultry sum of $5 you will rarely find better value online.

Help yourself to a free sample below.

The Darkest Side – The Middle East

Blood – The Middle East

Blair and Beach House – Soft Folk Indie?

Blair with cool neon fingers

Indie music divides me. I sit painfully on the fence and my love-hate relationship with the genre makes it very difficult to fully embrace this popular movement.

Let me first be clear in what I mean exactly by Indie music, in this particular instance. I refer to cutesy little guitar based bands that have a tendency to embellish their songs with glockenspiels and squeaky clean vocals. I suppose this is a sub-genre of Indie of which I am too ignorant to know the precise reference or classification, but I think you know what I mean. I distinguish between these artists and other Indie artists that still play their guitars and synths way loud and do occasionally shout into the microphone (in a good way). Now that I think about it, I might be talking about Modern Folk music, but Folk-Indie. Soft Folk-Indie, perhaps?

This brand of Indie music often leaves me feeling disenchanted and frustrated. The repetitive twang of the banjo and the isolated wail of a male vocal melody abandoned by the already minimalistic strum of an acoustic guitar, of course, and a sporadically struck high-hat leaves a wide, gaping hole in the sonic experience that listening to a song should be, in my opinion anyway. Not to say that acoustic or even just “soft” music isn’t great, indeed it often is, just that these modern manifestations I find often lack heart or genuine substance. I guess that is just my opinion. Many folk (see what I did there) whom are good friends of mine are really into this scene at the moment and it certainly has some cred behind it with the extreme success of accomplished artists like Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes, I just really dislike the diluted imitation bands that weakly attempt to mimic these artists. Often the music is hollow and underwhelming.

Anyways, enough whining.  Two artists in this genre who I believe do a good job are the titular Blair and Beach House. The lesser known, Blair, has recently moved to NYC, the epicenter of all things cool, it seems. I like her brand of soft Indie folk tinged rock. It is authentic and moving, as it should be, plus it still rocks out. See Hearts below, off the Die Young LP. Beach House have been getting a decent amount of coverage lately with the release of their most recent record Teen Dream. The simple, repetitious melody at the intro had me hooked instantly. The song is full of charm and soothes endlessly. Lovely listening.

Samples of both tracks are available below. Enjoy gooooood quality soft folk Indie.

Hearts – Blair

Lover of Mine – Beach House