Eight Miles High Tuesday, 13 December 2011

The Zoo - Sat Dec 10

Howling Rabbits start this evening’s showcase of all things psychedelic with their own brand of incense-scented rock & roll. Throwing in Doors-y keyboard licks with a wealth of catchy garage riffs, the band’s heady mix of psych and hard rock provides an early highlight.

Power trio Dead Shades follow with a more meat-and-potatoes style of R&B-based rock & roll. Resembling a blend of the pub rock tradition with the rough-and-ready approach of early Who, the band may look thrown together, but mercifully there’s a greater unity to their sound.

With their excellent Constellations album behind them, Grand Atlantic reveal the psychedelic elements that have inched their way onto the new record. The performance showcases the band more eager to jam out the instrumental passages of their solid power pop. The title track boasts a particularly brain-melting coda, while elsewhere their songs have the ringing anthemic quality of Oasis or current Britpop stars Kasabian.

Black Cab are up next and reveal a rather different musical approach to the last time the Melbourne shoegazers visited our end of the coast. Replacing guitars with laptops and synths (and drums for a couple of numbers), the group retain the swirling soundscapes of the past, but throw in some Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk synth pulses for good measure. Most recent single Sexy Polizei vividly illustrates this transformation, while a version of Joy Division’s Heart & Soul finds an almost drum&bass rhythmic pattern.

Also from Melbourne, Sand Pebbles take us back to the world of guitar reverb and drone, but also throw in some fine vocal harmonies for good measure. While the churning guitar clang brings classic noisemakers like The Velvet Underground and 13th Floor Elevators to mind, their melodies are more classicist and gentle.

With one of the best Australian releases of the year in the excellent Crystal Theatre album, Belles Will Ring take the harmony side of psychedelia even further. Their near Simon & Garfunkel-esque melodicism goes superbly with their guitar swirl, multi-instrumentalist Lauren Crew filling out the sound nicely with keyboard and that most psychedelic of instruments, the flute. Frontman/guitarist Liam Judson leads the band through solid renditions of album highlights including The River and the hypnotic bass skip of Come To The Village.

More than anyone tonight, Richard In Your Mind illustrate the genre-hopping properties that frequent psychedelia. Theirs is an almost Zappa-like playfulness, which extends to crowd interaction – large balloons are thrown into the audience to bounce along with the group’s fevered and buoyant art rock. With his whimsical yet surprisingly powerful voice, Richard Cartwright fronts with aplomb and the group as a whole makes a likeable shimmering racket.

The evening is rounded off nicely with our own bandidos of instrumental surf rock Los Huevos. Complete with go-go dancer and horn section, the band’s blend of Morricone spaghetti western soundtracks and surf tunes would sound ideal in a Robert Rodriguez movie, while Jamie Trevaskis’s saw brings to mind pre-psychedelia soundworlds circa The Ventures In Space LP. It’s a rousing finale to a truly quality night out.

MATT THROWER

Sand Pebbles Monday, 05 December 2011

CHRIS HOLLOW, bass player for Melbourne’s enigmatic psych-rockers SAND PEBBLES, won’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. He chats with KRISSI WEISS.

Sand Pebbles began their musical journey when three scriptwriters from Neighbours – Chris Hollow (bass), Ben Michael (guitar) and Piet Collins (drums) – decided to join psychedelic forces. The line-up has changed a lot over the past 10 years with the band’s diversity augmented by the fact they have members born in every decade between the ’50s and ’90s. But despite Sand Pebbles’ latest release, Dark Magic, receiving rave reviews, the band are probably more known for the mythology that surrounds them. Normally musicians plead with the media to focus on the music but Hollow embraces the stories that have created this mythology. There’s their unique beginning, the infamous Meredith Music Festival ban (they allegedly stormed the stage during Rose Tattoo’s set in 2006, something that Hollow describes as “the greatest story that never happened”) and now revelations that Hollow went to school with the US government’s most wanted man, Julian Assange.

“There hasn’t been many people who have asked me about Julian Assange,” Hollow says. “I went to an alternative school down here, I had a fair bit of communication with him but it wasn’t as though we were close or anything… We were working as scriptwriters and storytellers so if the story is more intriguing than the music or it provides a way into it, then go with it.”

Sand Pebbles have managed to make quite a name for themselves over the past 10 years despite the fact they barely, if ever, play outside of Victoria. “It’s hard to talk about this without sounding egotistical,” he says. “But Melbourne is a big scene and there are so many places to play so we don’t feel like we have to push it very hard. I don’t want to sound like Melbourne is the best or anything but we are able to play here and still have people turning up that have never seen us. Also, heading to Sydney and Brisbane, well, we may as well be going to New York with the amount of organisation that is involved.”

Each time we move onto Sand Pebbles’ latest album, Hollow cuts things short, stating “I don’t want to bore your readers.” As we begin to wrap he tells me that he is much more interesting via email if I had any more questions and he once again reiterates that he doesn’t want to sound boring. We have a laugh about the notion of controversy and how people perceive that as being somehow more interesting. He decides to take a crack at controversy by discussing the latest album of 2011’s golden boy, Gotye. “Well, I lived through the ’80s and listened to Peter Gabriel and Sting so I don’t really need to hear all of that again,” he says laughing. “I am wrapped that he is doing so well though and is jammed up against Rihanna and any of those types of artists.” It seems that Hollow can’t help but be a nice guy, which some people still find interesting.

SAND PEBBLES with be at the Eight Miles High Festival at The Zoo, Saturday Dec 10, with Richard In Your Mind, Black Cab, Grand Atlantic and many more. Tickets are available through Oztix. Head to www.sandpebbles.com.au or www.thezoo.com.au for more information. DARK MAGIC is out now through Dot Dash.

(Dot Dash/Remote Control)

Melbourne psych-rockers’ fifth album has decent tunes and name collaborations

Don’t let the shocking-pink, skull-emblazoned cover scare you off – Dark Magic is actually a rather sunny listen aside from some choice minor chord progressions. A unique generation-spanning combo (youngest member Wes Holland is 20 while the group’s patriarch Andrew Tanner is in his 50s), Sand Pebbles perfect the craft of an unassuming psych-pop song on their LP number five. Featuring contributions from such indie/shoegaze/psych godheads as Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips (yep, the ones from Dean & Britta/Luna), Dark Magic aims for not so much for the decibels as textural perfection – and often comes pretty close to nailing the latter. Opening on a folky, yet unmistakably hazy note with Blue Eyes In Black And White, the album quickly shapes up as a solid modern psych-rock outing. The somewhat unexpected highlight, Occupied Europe (Take Me Across The Water) boasts a throbbing bass line and dolorous post-punk arpeggios that give off a very Chameleons/For Against feel, while the title track marries a jaunty verse hook with needling ‘psych’ guitars and Long, Long Ago is an exquisite shoegaze-ballad. Further along, ex-Spacemen 3 bassist Will Carruthers figures on the moody Entrance To The Stream and Death In Vegas’s Tim Holmes lends his distinctive touch to Because I Could – which blends vintage VU groove with honeyed vocal harmonies and fuzz-guitar fills. The five-piece may have a number of great yarns to their respective names, but on DM they let their music do all the talking.

****

DENIS SEMCHENKO

http://www.ravemagazine.com.au/content/view/30119/180/