[d/dn]

Category: Blogging

Day-to-day minutiae.

  • Theatre of Gnomes

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    2 min read

    Don’t get me started about Tumbleweed. Theatre of Gnomes, their first major release, was a five track EP. Enough said. Ask anyone who’s from Wollongong if they’ve heard of Tumbleweed. Then ask them if they’ve heard Theatre of Gnomes. If the answer’s yes, you’ve just discovered a true ‘Weed fan. And of course it was…

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  • Holy Bloody Hell, It’s David Bowie

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    2 min read

    Enough said. The man is an alien. I’m talking the Station To Station release which for the sake of a technical obsession with record lengths I’m going to call an EP. I ask you: does it get any better than this? One word: “Wild Is the Wind”. Two words: “Station To Station”. Three words: “TVC15”.…

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  • Glide

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    3 min read

    The sad story of Glide perfectly encapsulates the highs and lows of the early 1990s in Australian music. Glide, fronted by the extraordinary singer-songwriting talents of William Arthur, burst onto the Sydney scene in 1991, releasing two breathtaking EPs – Pretty Mouth in 1991 and the huge Shuffle Off To Buffalo in 1992 – to…

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  • Verve, not “The” Verve—get it right!

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    3 min read

    Back in the early 1990s ‘The’ Verve were still called Verve, the Charlatans didn’t have a UK tacked onto the end of them and Suede still sucked the big one. Pardon me for sounding monotonous but Verve were further proof that the old ‘the early EPs were great but the later work is like drinking…

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  • Swervedriver: the good guys of early-1990s UK indie

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    3 min read

    As Crowded House said, “Now we’re getting somewhere”. Swervedriver were one of the greatest bands of the early 1990s. Full stop. And you know what? Their early success, like that of Ride, hinged upon a series of phenomenal EPs: Son of Mustang Ford, Rave Down and the incendiary Sandblasted EP, all of whose title tracks…

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  • Ripe—Cherry Ripe

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    3 min read

    Last night when I was thinking about who I would profile next in my exhaustive catalogue of early 1990s bands that have, sadly, disappeared, I became aware that I was perhaps being a little too shoegazer-centric. Hence the inclusion of Ratcat whom, to be honest, I was never really that into at the time, except…

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  • Ratcat ain’t that bad (and that ain’t bad)

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    3 min read

    You may notice a pattern appearing: the last two posts have mentioned the seminal influence of a particular EP—namely, Ride’s Play and MBV’s Glider—on my musical tastes and palette. Well, here we go again. It’s time to talk about Ratcat. I cannot emphasise enough the impact of Ratcat’s Tingles EP on both myself and the…

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  • “That band is Ride”

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    4 min read

    Of all the sad remnants of the early 1990s, you’d be pretty hard pressed to find anything sadder than the lead singer of Ride undertaking a tour of Australia, ten years after the band fizzled out, like luke-warm piss floating down an alleyway behind the Punters Club. That’s because the Punters doesn’t exist anymore, and…

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  • Straitjacket Fits: nu-gazers from nzlnd

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    2 min read

    Straitjacket Fits supported My Bloody Valentine on their tour of Australia in – help me somebody – was it 1993? and, in the words of one reviewer, “wiped the floor” with the grandparents of shoegazing. You may think I’m coming out of left field with this one but having recently listened to Flying Nun’s excellent…

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  • My Bloody Valentine: Whatever

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    4 min read

    I don’t think My Bloody Valentine ever put out a song or album with the word ‘whatever’ in the title but I should be wrong. My Bloody Valentine are the ultimate Whatever Band. If you’re talking nano, they don’t even register. They’re so early 1990s the NME website doesn’t list any of their records for…

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  • What is an EP? Defining the ‘extended play’ record format

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    3 min read

    What is an EP? Well, to start with, EP stands for an ‘extended play’, 12″ vinyl record, thus distinguishing it from a 7″ ‘single’ or a 12″ LP (‘long play’) record. In this sense, the definition of an EP reflects a happier, simpler time (perhaps) when records were all issued on vinyl, and cassingles, CDs…

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  • ‘Allo …

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    2 min read

    My name is not Michael Caine but I may well be the next best thing. Namely, a person who has stayed in the same hostel in Hoi An as Michael Caine did during the filming of The Quiet American. Very Chinese, dark wood walls, floors and ceilings. Very nice, and how’s your father. ‘Allo. Thankfully…

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  • The power of muzac

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    2 min read

    For the first time in my life, i’m actually enjoying muzac. It hit me as soon as we got to Ho Chi Minh City – in our room, piped saxophone renditions of some of the greatest songs of all time (you fill in the blanks). The further we have got into this crazy trip, the…

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  • Uncle Ho ‘n all …

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    2 min read

    Ho Chi Minh City contains over 3 million motorbikes and boy, does that make crossing the road an adventure! Like a scene from futuristic movie Tron, bikes come at you from all angles, like packets of unsprawled information at breakneck speed. The trick, they say, is to simply step into this seething mass of metal…

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  • Good mor(o)ning Vietnam!

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    2 min read

    Ho Chi Minh City. Where the air is hot and sticky like freshly cut pineapples. As in the scene from LA Story where Steve Martin goes to the ATM only to hand over his withdrawal to a mugger, we couldn’t resist the chance to get ripped off by a ciclo driver at the earliest opportunity.…

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