Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues or yet another inexact album review

Most songs on Helplessness Blues sway like trees bending before a gathering storm. There is an elegantly organic sense of momentum and meaning conveyed within the earnest and open harmonies and bare and urgent strumming of acoustic guitars.

All of the expected noises are present, you already know what Fleet Foxes sounds like, and it is comforting to hear the same sound grown into new and more reaching songs. Some are saying the arrangements are more ambitious, maybe they are, but it is safe to ignore those kinds of thoughts and just press play.

I adore the echoey drum sound that plonks through the whole album like an asthmatic child running after his friends. And of course the harmonies, and melodies that surge and retreat like waves. But what I’m really loving right about now is an unexpected existential strangled trumpet freak out. I like those but don’t worry there is only one on the whole album and it doesn’t interfere with the gentle posturing of the album as a whole.

You might need to put on your earnestness hat to properly listen to Helplessness Blues, it will help. It is also best to leave a respectable distance between you and your speakers when you are playing this album. If you sit too close you’ll be listening wrong. This album requires space, distance and a kind of pottering activity to be heard at its best. I suggest tidying the kitchen and then baking a cake, with love.

People keep mentioning the beautiful lyrics on this album but so far I have allowed the sound to wash around unsullied by literary critique. That is a rare and important gift. The only other album I listen to like that is Unhalfbricking by Fairport Convention, which led me to miss the point entirely on most of the songs but I don’t really mind. Sometimes an album is just for listening to and its best to bow down and be grateful for the invention of sound.

First published on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN: Mad Men Strike Back

Illo by Onnie Cleary

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away I was interviewed for a new job. I didn’t realise I was in a different time zone and galaxy until after the interview concluded and I was spat back out into a normal Wednesday afternoon in Sydney. It was then that it hit me, something really fucked had just happened.

After shaking my hand and sitting me down she launched into the first of many stupendous and terrifying rants. She told me she hated my resume, all of it, from the font to the layout. She ranted for ten full minutes while I sat and wondered just why in fuck was interviewing me if she hated my resume so much.

The interviewer interspersed her ranting with comments about how great I was, how smart I was, how many qualifications I had. I was entering an advanced state of confusion when she kicked it up another gear and started to really go for it. She hated my hair, said she’d never seen hair so unprofessional before. I was going to mention that we had almost identical haircuts it was just that my hair is wavy and hers is straight when she started on my shoes. 

I was wearing the wrong kind of shoes, apparently only an idiot goes to a job interview wearing flat shoes. She stood up to demonstrate how she was wearing high heels, pulled up the leg of her trousers so I could properly view her shoes. After the ‘one must always wear high heels’ rant she started on the rest of me. Fortunately she decided that my face would have to do because she didn’t suppose anything could be done about that, apart from more make up.  The horrifying conclusion of this job interview is that she thinks I would be fantastic for the job but I have to be interviewed again first, just to make sure. She said she’d give me a couple of days to ‘do something’ about my hair, my shoes and my wardrobe.

I have to confess I’ve been obsessed with watching Mad Men. I came a little late to this party, most people I know started and finished their own Mad Men obsessions some time ago. What everyone failed to mention about Mad Men is how horrifying it is. Everyone talked about the fashion, the cigarettes, the stupid men with their suits and slicked down hair but not the horrifying slow reveal of repression and oppression. How the women were judged more on their legs than their ability to do the job well.

In the first episode of Mad Men the new girl gets a proper going over, everything is commented on from her hair to her shoes. I remember thinking how glad I was that that kind of shit was over years ago, nothing like that could possibly happen to me, not now in 2011 when the most important thing is having the skill, aptitude and qualifications to perform well in a job. As usual it turns out I was wrong.

First published on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN: Hire Me, Bitches

Illo by Onnie Cleary

 I’ve been applying for jobs. I could say it makes me want to tear my hair out but that would be a lie. It makes me want to go to sleep in my oldest pajamas, on my softest pillows, under my biggest blanket, and never ever wake up ever again.

I’m lucky enough to have one or two friends happy to read over some applications before I send them in. Their unanimous opinion is that I need to ‘toot my own horn’ more. The problem is applying for jobs makes me feel altogether hornless.

My professional experience includes the usual list of jobs I did just to pay the rent, a good job I fucked up, a great job I left for heartfelt reasons I can no longer remember and an erratic career path that looks more like crazy paving than the path to success. The other problem is my finer skills are unable to be politely included in any job application. I’m not talking about bedroom skills here, but the vast list of attributes that have so fixedly attached themselves to me they have become an essential part of who I am.

I’m taking this opportunity to devise a list.

Skills and attributes possessed by the very excellent and unique Dale Slamma:

• I am very good at throwing things in the bin, first shot, no rim, all basket, from any corner of the room. This is my very mild superpower.
• Strangers tell me their innermost secrets all the time, everywhere, for no actual reason and I don’t mean just crazy people.
• I can drink five cups of tea in a row and suffer no ill effects.
• My skill at deducing other people’s emotional state borders on the telepathic.
• Last time I counted I had sixteen personal enemies.
• I dislike Easter eggs and will not use opaque toothpaste.
• My inability to appear intelligent when meeting someone for the first time has never before been exceeded by even the stupidest person on planet Earth.
• I can wear starched, ironed and personally styled corporate clothes handpicked for me by the world’s best corporate stylist and still appear to be in casual dress suitable only for wearing to buy milk at the corner shop.
• The fabric of my soul is constructed of rock and roll. No really, get a scalpel and take a peek.
• I can cook with the best of them but choose not to, not if I can ever help it, for no reason I have ever thought of.
• The power of my ability to crave chocolate is exceeded only by the power of my snoring.
• You will disappoint me. Guaranteed.

First published on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN - Slamma of Arabia

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

I don’t watch too many movies. For example yesterday I watched a mere ten minutes of Lawrence of Arabia. It was an action packed ten minutes in which thousands of horses jumped out of a train into a desert, a handsome be-robed man wandered around the desert looking commanding while an orange be-robed man with twinkly eyes shot someone who accidently exploded their underpants with something whilst waiting for a train, in the middle of the desert.

In addition to being interesting, Lawrence of Arabia raises an interesting point; the shooting of people who have exploded their underpants. It takes a brave and noble person to shoot the fatally injured person who cannot be taken to safety and rescue but must either be killed instantly by friends or left to die a slow and hideous death. This is the kind of important point movie-watching brings rightly to the forefront of modern café thinking.

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Nuns!

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

 Nuns! I've been banned from writing about my house so this week it’s nuns. I couldn't help but notice the large flock of nuns, in white habits and wimples, chanting on the corner outside my office. At first I thought they were chanting at Ding Dong Dang, the ancient and well-attended karaoke bar that has featured in car ads and one song by Sydney band Psychonanny and The Babyshakers. As I approached from downhill I imagined I heard the nuns singing said band’s Ding Dong Dang, the woeful tale of the disappearance of a girl named Ashley. It soon became clear they were chanting something along the lines of, "Hail Mary full of stuff, Hail Mary you're very tough", and the Ding Dong Dang was coming from my iPod. 

The nuns - and their posse of priests and worshippers - stayed on the corner outside my office for a very long time. They chanted about Mary, God and some other people without pause whilst holding cheap-looking candles. After eliminating the possibility of them being an en masse outdoor karaoke performance, I decided to investigate what it was they were really doing. Through a scientific investigation process involving three listens to the song Ding Dong Dang and a minor hair-on-fire incident, I reached a firm conclusion. The nuns were using the occasion of International Women's Day to protest the existence of a women's clinic. If this is the best idea they had for celebrating women then they suck. Nuns suck.

My friend Leif once told me, in astonishing detail, about a video he saw of nuns sucking - nuns sucking all kinds of things. I was not surprised to discover that he finds the idea of nuns erotic. It just so happens that Leif's housemate is one of the singers from Psychonanny and The Babyshakers, which leads me back to the song and the street corner. This might not be so much about nuns as it is about geography and sound.

Some corners have a smell, like the corner of Pitt and Redfern streets in Redfern, some corners have a revolving temporal relationship with colour, light or shade. The corner outside my office seems to be developing a sense of something else altogether. Let's start with Ding Dong Dang. It was voted Sydney's fourth best karaoke bar by Time Out Sydney. My friend P Street writes for Time Out so it’s not too much of a leap to imagine that it was he who rated the bar, which is important for the following imaginary scenario.

Picture this. P Street is inside Ding Dong Dang singing his heart out to his open notebook, in the very same room Ashley last sang in before disappearing forever. Outside, a large posse of nuns chants over their cheap candles in the direction of the women's clinic while the producers of a car advertisement arrange three models in front of the green and white checkerboard tiles of Ding Dong Dang. Inside the women's clinic the medical staff are hard at work doing medical things and have no idea they’re about to be overrun by nuns. Across the street, I'm working in my office wishing I was at a party at Hibernian House, visible in the near distance over the heads of the nuns. On the opposite corner, the staff of The Australia Council for The Arts are ignoring everything that goes on and taking turns to have bathroom breaks so they can adjust the artful draping of their red plastic bead necklaces. Back in Newtown, Leif farewells his housemate who is off to a soundcheck for a gig at The Excelsior Hotel. The first song on their set list is Ding Dong Dang. Leif finds himself satisfyingly alone, wanders around the flat for a while and then decides that seeing as he is alone, just this once, he might put on the video featuring sucking nuns.


First published on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN - Hey Roomy

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

I hate sharing my house. I don’t mind sharing with Grizelda, she’s like family, but the idea of a stranger moving into my daily routine is freaking me the fuck out. Sydney’s real estate prices are threatening to rob me of my privacy and dignity. If you saw me first thing in the morning you’d understand about the dignity. 

I’m not very good in the mornings. I tend to walk around in a daze, bumping into walls and trying to remember how to switch the kettle on. For the first hour of the day, for no discernible reason at all, I am largely disabled. Grizelda waits until I have half-drunk my first coffee before attempting to talk to me and I appreciate her tact and understanding because I know it is rare.

When I bought a new desk I spent six months researching desks; going into shops and sitting down behind them, imagining how it would feel to sit there every day, what it would look like brought into my home, where everything from my jar of pens and stack of notebooks to my external hard drive would sit. Now that I am showing people aroundThe Peach to see if they want to move in I get to spend about half an hour with a person before deciding whether or not they get to share my life. This is not ideal.

In a world where people did not go insane over property Grizelda and I would be able to afford The Peach all by ourselves, just the two of us. And the cat. Last week I was reading a budgeting guide for the modern man, printed in 1960. It suggested that spending more than ten percent of your income on a mortgage was stupid. If I lived in The Peach by myself, rent would account for one hundred and ten percent of my income. I used a calculator and that’s what it said, don’t doubt my maths. Real estate junkies have now officially inflated prices past the point of stupid. Well done.

Five times I have given someone a tour of The Peach, answering their questions about my temperament and living style politely. On the inside of me head I’m screaming, "It is none of your fucking business, stupid stranger bastard!". I’m losing myself in translation from inside to out. They all say I seem very calm and easygoing but I am not calm. And I am not easygoing. I am going to hate you if you fuck with my shit. And I don’t even know what constitutes fucking with my shit. It could be as simple as using my pink teapot without asking, misaligning my shampoo bottles on their rack or leaving your dirty cup on the coffee table. It might not be anything like that at all. It might be interrupting a sentence forming silently in my head, or talking to my friends, or not talking to my friends... These things are harder than expected to predict.

First published on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN - Slamtopia

Sydney has divided itself into four big, terracotta-roofed slabs we call North, South, East and West. So far as I can tell, all these suburban areas of Sydney are terrible. Everyone knows the north side is filled wall-to-wall with moneyed arses caring more about which ‘display’ books they range on their coffee table than about any real human issues. The east is something similar to north. I spent a large portion of my younger years rolling around the north-western rim of the Sydney basin - swimming in rivers, staring right up at the mountains no more than five kilometres from my front door and occasionally looking down at they city from the top of one, fervently wishing I could teleport myself there.

 

South I knew almost nothing about until last weekend, when I was lucky enough to spend three whole days in a beach house with friends. They all grew up south of Sydney in a place known as The Shire. And I have to tell you it sounds almost entirely fucked. There are the usual suburban consolations of wide spaces, easy access to bushland and riding around on your bmx with friends but that sums up the good points.

The Shire, like every other cardinal point spinning out from the city, is fucked. A large proportion of the residents sound narrow-minded, racist and aggressively ‘normal’. So aggressively normal that it is almost impossible to live happily as anything other than a nuclear family with a neutral-toned lounge room without being subjected to a truckload of shit. If the same can be said for all points from North swinging round to West then we have a problem here. 

How is it possible that out of the whole huge sprawled guts of Sydney the only place I can live without fear of clashing with locals simply by making art and having ideas is the Inner West? I propose we make a new area, a new suburban area east of Sydney. By east I mean properly east, out past the headlands of the harbour on the bean-green ocean.

We have all kinds of technology now - like ships, bulldozers and helicopters. We could solidify some human waste, build a large floating land mass, map out wide house blocks and gently winding streets, plant trees, vegetables, herbs and flowers. We could build houses that are proper habitats for humans, encourage the birds and bats to fly and visit. We could have picnic lunches at each other's houses and talk rationally and interestingly about our differences and how we each widen the scope of the others’ understanding of the world. Or I suppose I could just get jets and blow some of the existing suburbs up. Raze them to the ground, grow a moustache, throw all racist, bigoted and narrow-minded people out into the desert to die in the sun. 

I’d be happy with one or both of the above plans. Either way I’m going to need helicopters. Big ones.

First published on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN - Slamma Swap

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

I’ve been watching a television show called Wife Swap, not as a guilty pleasure but as a kind of science. Thinking about my own home, The Peach, and the role I play within it’s starting to become clear that I have become Un Slamma Terrible.

At The Peach my housemate Grizelda is a good lantern, she puts up with just about anything I can think of doing though she does tell me, quite often, that can’t possibly be another person on the planet as uniquely annoying as me. 

On Wife Swap the first thing the wives do is write a manual for their home outlining the general vibe of the home, the rules, schedules and a detailed setting out of who does what and when. I’ve been imagining writing a manual for The Peach and I have to tell you that on paper I’m not sounding so good.

I prefer to wake up at a different time every day. I hate doing things the same two days in a row. I hate washing dishes so every time I do it I do it with hate. I have been known to run up and down the hallway drinking rum from a bottle just for the hell of it. I listen to loud music as often as possible. I set my drum kit up in the middle of the library. I hate cooking and will yell about being hungry rather than go shopping. I hate boring people and people with bad hair cuts. I won’t talk to people I don’t like. I will invite people over for dinner and then not cook anything. I go out to see bands and come home plastered at five in the morning. I shoot the television with a water pistol when I don’t like the show I’m watching. I won’t let anyone else use my teapots, toothpaste or milk but if I find a hidden stash of chocolate I’m going to eat it. If I was a man I’m quite sure I’d leave the toilet seat up on purpose.

My next door neighbour is more settled and domestic than I am which is saying something because he just happens to be the former tour manager for The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead. He is about a thousand years old, has hands weighed down with skull rings and has lived just about as wild and hard as a man can live. But even he manages to get up at the same time early each morning, make a cup of tea, ponder a little and then get on his day in an orderly fashion.

I’m beginning to think Grizelda deserves some kind of medal for living with me. Speaking of which, we’ve got a vacancy at The Peach. Anyone want to move in?

First published on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN: Talking 'bout last night

Illustration by Onnie Cleary

He ran across the square yelling, ‘I fucked her face! I fucked her face!’*. Try watching a man do that then tell me how you feel.

Earlier in the night, before the face-fuck yelling, I was at a show reviewing three bands I had no interest in, none at all. I went outside for a little sit down when my left foot became mildly itchy. A small itch can be happily ignored but I scratched anyway. A stranger sitting beside me leant over, pushed my hand away and started scratching my foot with his own fingernails. My foot, his hand, you get the picture.

Over the course of the next twenty minutes, Foot Scratching Man photographed me against my will, made inappropriately familiar conversation, offered me terrible student-style cheap cigarettes he was too old to be smoking, declared he would pine when I decided to walk away and was generally quite strange. He was sitting with a woman who seemed like his girlfriend.

He wasn’t flirting, not by any normal definition of the word, but there was something odd going on there. I wouldn’t have minded too much if this was the only thing that happened last night but shit just went down a weird hill after that. One man pulled at my shirt to peer at my breasts and another poured his drink over my feet to help by anointing me with spirits.

The sense of relief after leaving a venue packed full of stupid men was profound. Later on I was sitting peacefully on the ground drinking longnecks with Spencer and friends when Fuck Face Yelling Man walked right up to us and asked to join us. I said he could if he told me a good story.**

He swayed drunkenly but steadied himself into a low crouch by hanging on to my shoulders. His story was this; he shagged a woman, took photographs of her, sent them to all his friends and then denied it to her face. All the while he was pushing his face right up into mine, wrapping his arms around me, crawling on his knees to get closer to me. If Spencer hadn’t jumped to his feet and demanded that this horrible man unhand me at once I don’t know what I would have done.***

Spencer looked serious as a heart attack standing there all tall and commanding telling him to take his hands off me and leave. Fuck Face Yelling Man leapt to his feet and started to run away yelling this: “I photographed her and I lied! I fucked her face! I grabbed her ears and fucked her face! I fucked her face!”

Might be there’s something in the water, or the power of my fuckwit magnet spontaneously tripled. Either way things are not coming up roses. There is something wrong the men of the Inner West. Please send me some new and better men, so I don’t end up murdering somebody.

* He was not talking about my face. He did not fuck my face.

** Spencer told him no, as I was saying yes. For the record Spencer was right and I was terribly, horribly wrong.

*** I was planning unmitigated violence, not helpless surrender.

First published on RHUM


Also on RHUM today my review of The Antlers and Bear in Heaven with Sherlock's Daughter but  I wouldn't bother reading that if I was you.

SLAMMATOWN - On the case

I haven’t been a detective very long. Long enough to receive an email from the editor of City News asking if I’d found the man in question and if so could he run a story on it, but not long enough to solve my first case.

I’ve always wanted to be a detective. When I was ten years old I started a detective agency with my dog and my little brother. We never had a case to solve but I made excellent headquarters in the wardrobe in the spare room. My dad wrote us a theme song but the dog never wanted to stay at HQ very long; as soon as the small dish of dog biscuits ran out she was out of there.  

Continue reading on RHUM...

SLAMMATOWN - The Final Solution

Some people say drummers can hide behind their kits, that it’s the safest place to be on stage but I don’t think a person can get much more exposed than when they’re drumming because all of them is engaged in the business. You can’t drum sitting still.

Drumming is a whole-body symphony of movement. When a good drummer is on form there is nothing left of them but beat-by-beat motion. Rhythm is the spine of music and like all good art requires at least a momentary sacrifice of self.  

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SLAMMATOWN - The World's Biggest Bastard

Nothing happened in Slammatown last night, nothing really at all. You could say less than zero happened. I was feeling kind of seasick from marching in the sun, for the sake of Julian Assange. I was feeling kind of seasick and The Lansdowne was disgusting with flesh, heat, noise and humidity. Everyone was there, just everybody anybody has ever met. I suspect it was more to do with the buzz building up to the night rather than the bands themselves, though they were rather good. 

The Lansdowne has gone and had itself a mini makeover, neon strip lights along the edge of the awning, huge speaker stacks, an actual stage and a removal of that horrific overhead bar thing. Now it is one big room, huge sound, better bands, extra heat and more patrons. Sounds good so far doesn’t it? 

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SLAMMATOWN - I'll take a cup of kindness yet

Resolutions are terrible things - they come hanging with ready guilt and daily obligation. I have been trying to be more kind but am discovering that where I am most unkind is silently, in my head, where there are no actions or observers. I do not like the daily obligation of trying to be more kind, it is like trying to quit smoking but without any health benefits or encouragement from friends.

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SLAMMATOWN - Travel, Fight, Write

I’ve never been in a fight, not a proper punch-throwing-urge-to-kill fight, but I want to be. How much can I really know about myself if I’ve never been in a fight? I have made several attempts over the last few months to get in a fight. I tried yelling rude things at people in a pub but they just laughed at me. I tried yelling rude things at Spencer but he just laughed and yelled rude things back. I tried poking people in the back and saying, "I challenge you to a fist fight!". But they never believe me.  This is starting to become problematic. Just what does a girl have to do to get in a fist fight?


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SLAMMATOWN - Up your charts

There’s a new man soaring up my Tex Perkins chart. His name isBen Corbett from Gentle Ben and His Sensitive Side and the infamous Six Ft Hick. Watch out Tex Perkins Gentle Ben is coming up fast but just to be clear I’m not sure there’s anything gentle about this man at all. 


Continue reading on RHUM... 

SLAMMATOWN - So you want to be a temporary contemporary bohemian?

SLAMMATOWN REGULATORY DEPT.

This week’s SLAMMATOWN features the style of document formatting favoured by the Baltimore Police Dept. 

Ever wanted to become a temporary contemporary bohemian? Well now you can. Follow these six easy steps and just like that you're in.

1. DOUBLE BAG IT 

You know what I’m talking about. Those hideously drunk yet intriguingly beautiful boys are riddled with diseases, all kinds. If they don’t ever wash their jeans then how much attention do you think they’re paying to what’s running around in their bloodstream? Double bag it ladies, double bag it. 

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Fall

The Fall in 2010 are a curious beast. Mark E. Smith looks like a foreshortened peacock but the rhythm section is made up of two meatheads, all forearms and shaved heads. The drummer played elbows up like he was trying to murder a set of metal garbage cans but the guitarist wouldn’t have looked out of place in Oasis, the visible sweat on him giving away just how much stress he was under in this band.

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Sings pretty good for a dead man

Just in case you don’t already know, Damo Suzuki is a living legend. 
The Holy Soul have recorded a live album with him thanks to Repressed Records. 


You should read my review on RHUM.

All in a golden afternoon

I’ve been going to see Caitlin play gigs for years. I go for one reason, her music. I am never disappointed. I remember seeing her for the first time. I was just walking through the room to get to the bar. She was about fourteen years old, standing on stage with a huge guitar slung high and her right shoulder raised towards her ear. She was playing a Paul McCartney cover, it stopped me dead in my tracks. Ever since that first minute I’ve been listening to Caitlin Harnett every chance I get.

Her sound is earnest and wonderfully simple, like a straight answer in a sea of bullshit. It is post-dreamy and threaded through with the good elements of country. If I had to choose one reason to listen to her it would be this, when she lifts you follow.

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EP available now through itunes and on Caitlin's Big Cartel.

SLAMMATOWN - I'm a spy

After staking out the back entrance to the caterer’s kitchen for ten minutes I discovered a regularity of flow in extremely large trolleys going in and out of the doors. All those hours of double jump with the skipping ropes in primary school finally paid off when I launched a perfectly timed jump from behind a door to the hidden side of a fast moving trolley. Crouching like a commando I ran undetected alongside the trolley until I reached the entrance to the VIP area.

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