“Co-caine! Bub-bly! WHEE!”
Pretty much ever since The Avalanches' first full-length was released, people across the world have been whining "when will the Avalanches release something new?" You can't say they don't have a point - in the three years before Since I Left You they lost their original Japanese MC, played a bunch of interstate shows, released a single and an EP from their demo recordings, added Dexter as DJ, toured solidly around the country, released a polished EP and toured some more, released a four-track 12" of dancier non-rap material... and then spent the second 18 months just clearing samples for the album (filling in a little bit of time with shows and putting out the Gimix cassette).
And in the five years since then - scattered, occasional shows, adding members, dropping members, a handful of remixes, and devolution into a two-person DJ team. They've emitted smoke signals to the effect that more recording has begun, but no point getting excited just yet.
And who knows if anything new will even engender excitement once it emerges - the karaoke show that was the Since I Left You tour only served to 
disappoint in comparison to the thrilling chaos of their early shows, with members running across the stage rapping, trading instruments every song, even throwing guitars to each other mid-song, jumping over each other's backs to reach the theremin... No argument that the album (well, the original pressing, before so many samples got fucked out the side, at least) isn't a fantastic piece of work, but it's a polite record, a living-room House album, a (whisper it) headphone record. I miss the hip-hop group that was fun to watch, you know?
So let's crank up the nostalgia machine and revisit their very first single (note to collectors: the red vinyl was the second pressing!), the ramshackle rap mess of "Rock City". In case you like it, here's four fucking versions for your ass.
The original 7" version (Horse001-7):
The Avalanches - Rock City (7" version)
This one's from a radio session in September 1997:
The Avalanches - Rock City (radio session)
The re-recorded version from 1998's El Producto EP (no juxmo):
The Avalanches - Rock City (El Producto version)
And finally, a live TV appearance following that EP's release - the version of "Run DNA" they played on the same show often gets programmed on Rage, but this doesn't seem to be in the options. It got released on a compilation, though:
The Avalanches - Rock City (live on Recovery)
Buy:
Well, the 7" is way out of print. The EP goes for big money these days (or did a few years ago. The Recovery CD of TV performances has gone OOP too, as did a sequel. And the radio session is from my own tapes. That's all well and good, we're not about posting commercially-available stuff here.
But would you believe that even Since I Left You is unavailable on CD right now? At least you can still pick it up on vinyl (along with ludicrously expensive 12"s of the title track and Since I Left You). Though then it's still the sample-censored version. Ah fuck it, let's hope they do put something new out after all, eh?
More old Avalanche excavation tomorrow? Anyone want it?
kinda shoulda sorta
One-time Lemonheads bass player Bill Gibson pointed us in the direction of this fansite download of a pick-up band rendition of the classic It's A Shame About Ray album, for the Don't Look Back series of gigs in London this month. Of course, given the record was only 29 minutes (before dead-eyed commerce tacked their "Mrs Robinson" cover onto the end of CD copies), there's a mini-greatest hits set filling out the rest of the hour, too.
In slightly less spurious tribute to that period (the musicians in the above aren't even the players with whom Dando is currently recording a new album under the L'heads name), here's a couple of radio-session tracks from the period: Dando playing an acoustic solo version of "Confetti" from the album, and Sydney's Glide proving their cred by covering "Ride With Me" from the less-famous-but-still-major-label previous record, Lovey
Evan Dando - Confetti (acoustic)
Glide - Ride With Me (acoustic)
Buy:
These are both taken from a compilation titled Tota11y Wire1ess, which is totally out of print. Remarkably, so is pretty much the whole Lemonheads catalogue in Australia, with the exception of this Atlantic best-of jobbie. There's a load of acoustic versions on the end, so it's kinda appropriate. Most of Glide's output is similarly unavailable, but this tribute site to their late singer has a bunch to sell you, including an exclusive final album.
we’re not using titular punctuation
More live bootleggy* stuff with girls singing; we'll get back to out-of-print records and such in a day or two.
Australian twee-core band Frente managed to blow their career by being associated with a novelty song twice, in different countries and with different songs. Their big hit at home, a bouncy piece of fluff with a Play-School video, brought them broad commercial success for a time, but also had them unfairly tagged as bright and cartoony kiddie music in the mind of the general public. After this, they managed to break overseas in a minor way with a cover of New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle" (or of Even As We Speak's cover of New Order's etc, but never mind that), only to - of course - then be thought of as "that band that did that acoustic version of Bizarre Love Triangle..."
They regrouped, shifted line-up and recorded a more "mature" follow-up album with Booga Bear and Cure producer Dave Allen, but it was too late to redeem their reputation, and sank like a stone under the weight of a massive, advance-gobbling array of limited-edition multi-formats (no shit: 7"s with individual polaroids by each member of the band, shaped CD singles which form a foot when you buy all three versions, all kinds of nonsense). And then seven years later they reformed! and did a new EP! and a sold-out tour! And then started hibernating again.
But lead singer Angie Hart is actively playing solo and with other bands in LA and Australia, and is doing the Annandale TONIGHT in Sydney. So here's some stuff from Frente's own turn at the same venue nine months ago.
This is from their "naive period", when Hart and co-writer Simon Austin were cranking out songs that strained to break one minute and eschewed any faffing about with choruses or repeated motifs or anything like that. See the EP Whirled for more:
Frente - Risk (live at the Annandale 2005)
"Labour Of Love" was the medium-sized hit off that EP, and a re-recording later headlined an OS compilation that took the New Order cover to the world. Probably sums up their aesthetic better than anything else:
Frente - Labour Of Love (live at the Annandale 2005)
"Sweet" is a new song, that gave 2005's Try To Think Less EP its title. A return to core values!
Frente - Sweet (live at the Annandale 2005)
In its original form (as a between-albums single), "Lonely" swirled into a sample/singalong of Barry White's "Can't Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe" in its latter minutes. Here they extend the appropriation, spinning off into a few other tags, starting with Ol' Dirty Bastard's classic "Got Your Money":
Frente - Lonely (live at the Annandale 2005)
(Said interpolation induced bouncing and shouting delight in FBI's Levins, incidentally)
I was actually thinking they might shun this like they shunned (and mocked calls for: "What? No, we don't know any Kenny G") "Accidentally Kelly Street", but then it was hardly a surprise for it to turn up as the final song of the night:
Frente - Bizarre Love Triangle (live at the Annandale 2005)
Buy:
There's not a lot of choice, really - the band (or Angie or her website bloke or something) had arranged to buy up the stock of their two albums from the Australian record company, so said company promptly remaindered the lot through two chains of $10 shops. The comeback EP is available by mailorder from label Popboomerang, though. And while you're there,they've also got an EP by Angie Hart's band Splendid, featuring a song by Simon Austin.
ALSO! or for furriners: get these plus others from Angie-Hart.com
Bonus:
These two sound a good bit rougher than the tracks above, due to enhanced instrumentation and audience enthusiasm overwhelming the recording equipment, but if you're still hungry: biggish hit "Ordinary Angels" (from first album Marvin The Album - really, you can see how people got put off), and "Sit On My Hands," from the second album Shape
Frente - Ordinary Angels (live at the Annandale 2005)
Frente - Sit On My Hands (live at the Annandale 2005)
*not that this is dodge or anything, all legitimate and above-board, just recorded by a mini-disc perched atop the soundboard stack
“…FEIST!”
Producing and arranging Feist's Let it Die seems to have set off a new phase in Gonzales' creativity (though, interestingly, he hasn't changed his name this time around), going on to perform similar behind-the-scenes roles on records by Jane Birkin, Jamie Lidell and Buck 65 (not to mention his solo piano album). But putting these tracks together for you lovely people, while listening to "Salieri Serenade", I found myself wishing that he'll go back to rapping one day. There's such glee in his wordplay and rhythms that it would be a shame to only have one real album of his own beats and rhymes...
Feist & Gonzales - Salieri Serenade (live at the Big Day Out)
The next two both feature Feist in the torch singer role taken by Sticky on the Gonzales Uber Alles album, and the rearranged versions both cropped up after this tour on Z. Sadly, that collection of re-recordings didn't feature the fantastic rawked-up version of major-label lament "Candy" which tour-partner Taylor Savvy jizzed guitar all over at both the shows. If the radio version wasn't so thin I'd post it, and if it hadn't blown out the levels on my recording, I'd post that... maybe I'll pull some more tracks for a Gonzales feature anyway.
Not a lot to say about Feist this time. She sings on all these songs, you know. Will that do?
Feist & Gonzales - Why Don't We Disappear (live at the Big Day Out)
Feist & Gonzales - You Are (live at the Big Day Out)
“No! NOT Fist!…”
Last time Leslie Feist performed in Sydney, it was as sidewoman to Chilly Gonzales in January 2003. After an hour and a half of coming on and off to sing, banter and play occasional children's instruments, Gonzo stepped down from the stage of the Annandale, she climbed aboard his shoulders and the towering combination made its way through the sweaty, clamouring crowd while "Made It Through" played unassisted from the soundboard CD deck. As they passed by our spot, Feist stared at me and reached down from her perch to poke my nose with one extended, golden-gloved finger. I swooned gleefully as the pair moved on.
In two weeks, she's coming back to play one solo show on my birthday. What a nice present.
The show had opened with them both on stage in matched safari outfits, performing a duet on melodicas. The song is probably yet another variation on the "Chilly in Bb Minor" theme that recurs through most of his records, but I'm musically crippled and can't identify notes by ear, let alone keys. Retag it yourself if you know better:
Feist & Gonzales - Melodica Duet (live at the Annandale)
Next for you is her subsequent return to the stage, after a couple of show-off turns on the piano and rapping for Gonzales, and a costume change for her. Wonder if the story she tells to introduce "Shameless Eyes" here will recur at the Hopetoun gig?
Feist & Gonzales - Shameless Eyes (live at the Annandale)
Gonzo's apparent non-sequitur in the aftermath here (referenced in the post title) was actually addressed to a young lady down the front wearing a Bloody Fist t-shirt.
When I was creating the files for this Feist-fest, I found it frustrating how so many of the French phrases in the next song seem to turn up in a lot of different songs in Google. Then yesterday I saw Let It Die in a record shop here for the first time (it's just been released - US cover and tracklist, not the original) and too late saw that there's a song called "Tout Doucement" on it. This one I reckon you can retag with confidence, given the 'tout doux, tout doux, tout doucement, toujours...' refrain.
Feist & Gonzales - Tout Doucement (live at the Annandale)
Buy:
You can get Let It Die quite cheaply, or a redundant Mushaboom single quite expensively, from Sanity. The same chain also has an odd array of Gonzales records - you can hear Feist on Presidential Suite and Z. Get tickets for the show in advance from the Hoey.
Today's tracks are all from my own recording of the gig - come back on Monday for another selection from their Big Day Out festival appearance the same week, taped off the radio: trade boomy for tinny!
at @
Saw Martha Wainwright on Saturday night, her third show in Sydney: presumably on the strength of a Leonard Cohen tribute at the Opera House (and one show supporting her family) in January, as I didn't even know the album was out here until Friday. Her voice is obviously the major feature of her recordings, but it's even more remarkable live. It's allowed to be at the front of the sound there, too - she was accompanied only by herself on acoustic guitar, and sometimes her producer Brad Albetta on double bass, baby grand or bass guitar - but her singing is noteworthy in and of itself, plus she shows off a little, jerking away from or panning across the microphone to get interruption or tail-off effects.
For someone on their first album, she's got plenty of material to perform, too. we missed support Josh Ritter (the Herald said good things) just because she went on early enough to accomodate a 2½ hour set. Loads of low-key banter, joking with the sound guy (who'd convinced Albetta to wear a fishing hat strung with corks at one point), covers of her dad, her mum, Laughing Len... like you'd expect. I haven't listened yet myself, but check out this session for Radio National, recorded during the week.
Martha Wainwright - live on The Deep End
Buy:
The album's actually cheaper in shops than it is at the gigs (though there was a sign promising she'd come out and sign it). You can't get the EPs out here at all.
Bonus:
Here, for no particular reason, is a song by a band that don't exist anymore. The song was on their first album, but this is a different recording from the Cop It Sweet compilation. Indie pop with girlie vocals, we're keeping it female this week. Big update tomorrow.
Half Miler - Another Relationship Fatality
the bible would be a lot whinier
In the '90s, Greta Gertler 
kicked about Sydney, playing the odd gig, doing the occasional collaboration, forming a band to complement her piano-led songwriting here, self-financing an album there. At the end of the decade, she lifted roots for New York, just in time to miss being beatjacked for the most-played Australian song on national radio. Since settling in NYC, she's played the odd gig, done the occasional collaboration, self-financed an album or two... but it's taken her until recently to form a regular band to back her up.
Greta Gertler & The Extroverts have been playing over the last year, and did a radio session on WVUV a couple of months ago. You can go here to download the entire program with chit-chat and intros and other peoples' records, but we've got a few otherwise unrecorded songs from the session, plucked out for you.
Greta Gertler & The Extroverts live on WFUV:
Veselka
Uniform
If Bob Was God
And just because those are more or less on the gentle singer-songwritery side, 
something a bit more upbeat and silly: a version of AC/DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll)" - followed promptly by another one, as the program's host Vin Scelsa is roped in to jam on glockenspiel.
There's another live version of this on Greta's Myspace page right now, and I'll dig up some older soundboard stuff with her old band Peccadillo before she comes back to Sydney to play in December.
It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll)
It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Glock 'N' Roll)
Buy:
CDs in America, CDs in Australia, and .AACs in America.
the incompleat… #4
Melbourne's This Is Serious Mum took a highly cavalier attitude to their 1995 box set Complete Recordings 86-94. For one thing, the earliest recording on it was from 1981, and for another they left off about a third of the Hot Dogma album simply on the grounds that it isn't very good (the vinyl edition had also been truncated on release in 1990, but with different tracks omitted). Not much of a surprise, since TISM's entire existence has been played as an extended cock-snooking at the music industry.
For the collector nerd, though, their attitude can sometimes prove frustrating: a 2002 singles compilation, Best Off, used the original 7" version of debut "Defecate On My Face" (a martial love-ballad from a bunker-bound Adolf to Eva Braun, released in a 12" sleeve with all sides glued shut), but replaced some songs with versions from a 1996 live album, and skipped all other opportunities for actual single versions.
Such as this 7" issue of "Saturday Night Palsy", from the Great Truckin' Songs Of The Renaissance LP. One disc of the record was proper songs recorded in a studio; the other was interview snippets, demos, live readings of poems and the occasional actual song for light relief, and bore the legend THIS RECORD IS NOT AS GOOD AS THE OTHER ONE around the label. Similarly, the single was subtitled This version is better than the one on the album - though not good enough to ever warrant re-release, apparently. It probably is a whole new recording (anyone want to side-by-side and check?), but the most significant difference is that the opening couplet was changed from "Well I don't want to live and I don't want to die/I want to shoot heroin through the eye" to the slightly more radio-friendly "...want to stick a red-hot poker through the eye."
TISM - Saturday Night Palsy (7" version)
Buy:
It's a bit of a fucking mystery actually. Shock don't seem to be carrying the Complete Recordings since TISM bailed for FMR. FMR don't seem to be carrying the Best Off, or indeed anything, since their acquisition and reissue of the back catalogue was a flop. You can at least get their latest, The White Albun from Madman Video, who released it as a package with a retrospective DVD and another DVD of a fake benefit concert (Save Our TISM). Come to think, this version of Palsy is probably in the video clip on that.
fleet follow-up
Quickie for the curious - here's a live version of Battleflag from after The Wrekked Train quit, from one of who-knows-how-many US tours.
And just because I couldn't crowbar them in yesterday: by the second album, the band had sadly also stopped using their recockulous pseudonyms. So, gratuitously: Sheriff Jon Stone played keyboards, The Slammer played drums (no relation to Zodiac Mindwarp's kit-hitter Slam Thunderhide), A One Man Crowd Called Gentilee was the bassist, and guitar was added by The Disco Bison. God love 'em.
Lo-Fidelity Allstars - Battleflag (live)
Buy:
This was taken from Naked 2000, a fundraiser CD for Boston radio station WBCN. The compilation's apparently out of print, but their website might sell you something else instead.
fucked by lawyers
Lo-Fidelity Allstars got lumped in with two different scenes on their emergence in 1997 - the then-peaking "big beat", and the never-got-off-the-sofa "skunk rock". More than anything, though, they were the first group of kids who'd grown up on acid house and the Happy Mondays, and formed a band informed by... or not informed by seeing any difference between rock music and dance music. In all their early recordings, there's no sense of the novelty excitement at "we're rapping, but over a metal band!" or "I painstakingly recreate my programmed arpeggios on a 12-string through a MIDI interface" wank that tends to infect even the most worthy efforts to blend genres - the Lo-Fis are just a "real band" playing "dance music".
They also had a fairly awesome stretch of bad luck - building on the buzz from their debut single 
and a Bond cover on Fierce Panda, the follow-up "Disco Machine Gun" was in the shops for about a week before lawyers stepped on an obvious Breeders sample (that didn't even get a solo in the 7" version! [or radio edit, whatever it was called]). The song got re-recorded for the album later as "Blisters On My Brain", but the way the sample struggles out of the murk of the long build and then collapses into the verse after a couple of seconds really works as a signifier - now we're getting into the meat of the song! Insult was presumably added to injury when, a year or two later, Moguai (was it?) put out a single that basically consisted of the same sample on a loop for four minutes while an unattended 303 farted along with it...
Lo-Fidelity Allstars - Disco Machine Gun
The second major blow came when, building on the buzz for their rework of a 
Pigeonhed track for that group's Emergency Overflow Cavalcade Of Remixes project, the band decided to revamp their remix and include it on the debut album, How To Operate With A Blown Mind. Fair dos - they'd rewritten enough music and recorded new vocals to mix with the original's, it was certainly enough of a Lo-Fi track by now for them to be proud of it. Unfortunately, while P-hed's label Sub Pop was manufactured and distributed by Warner Bros, the Lo-Fi's patron Skint was now in a M&D/licensing marriage with Sony - and all of a sudden, Warner publishers took objection to a slab of Prince-derived lyrics that Shawn Smith had used without controversy in the original song - having had their previous single withdrawn, the band now saw their album yanked from the shops and had to quickly re-record the track with that bit of Smith excised.
Lo-Fidelity Allstars (feat. Pigeonhed) - Battle Flag
Making the best of a bad situation, they released the retitled "Battleflag" as a single, and saw it become a hit in the US after being used in a bunch of TV shows - then just before heading over to tour on the back of this, lead singer/sleeve designer The Wrekked Train decided he didn't like the idea of becoming famous and chucked it to go back to working on the railways, or something. By now used to bouncing back, they simply reasoned that no-one over there knew what they looked like or how any of their other songs sounded, so carried on with DJ The Albino Priest standing in on Battleflag vocals. (Unfortunately, the loss saw them mutate into a smoother house outfit for the second album, but it has some nice collabs with Greg Dulli, Jamie Lidell and Bootsy.)
Buy:
The webstore of Skint Records still has most of their stuff for sale on 12" and CD. The LP version of How To Operate might even be the un-revised edition, who knows? Either way, it's a great record with one of the best opening tracks ever. Their DJ mix album, On The Floor At The Boutique, is pretty tops too.
You can still freely purchase the original remix version from Sub Pop, along with the non-remixed version on Pigeonhed's The Full Sentence album.
Bonus:
Just because I've been absent so long, here's an extra track for you: one of the B-sides from the single, "Disco Machine Gun Part II (Many Tentacles Pimping On The Keys)". It's not a James Brown-style part 2, or even much of a sequel, more an excuse for keyboardist The Many Tentacles to jam out like a mullet institute student, but this full-length version got sacrificed when the record was axed, so here it is for history's sake.
Lo-Fidelity Allstars - Disco Machine Gun pt II