Latest Album Reviews

ALBUM OF THE WEEK

BEAUTIFUL YOU

THE WAIFS

[JARRAH/MGM]

* * * 1/2

Twenty three years and seven albums in, The Waifs work on Waifs time.

The West Australian band run their own record label, so each new album arrives when the trio are good and ready, not when some suit hassles them.

It’s been four years since the acclaimed Temptation. When not on tour, the trio are now spread out all over the globe, making recording an album a geographical ordeal.

An attempt to break with their own tradition and write communally for this album spectacularly backfired.

Once again the songs are divvied three ways through three very different personalities.

But that’s the charm of The Waifs, that creative push and pull.

That chemistry pushes them out of their respective comfort zones.

The brittle but beautiful title track (with a haunting Neil Finn feel) is Donna Simpson’s helping hand to someone battling addiction — “If looks could kill you would have killed me a thousand times over.” No stranger to the dark side, Simpson’s When a Man Gets Down is an emotional relationship post-mortem.

Vikki Thorn’s February is a storming blues-rocker ready to fire crowds up, and Josh Cunningham’s 6000 Miles is a country-tinged road trip about that awkward time he was stranded with a broken van and no friendly passer-by. “The good in a man is only as good as the bad is bad,” he notes.

Simpson’s Rowena and Wallace (about a skater boy and a good girl gone bad, not the TV icon Pat the Rat) fires up a swampy tale of misspent youth, stolen cash and DIY tattoos.

Come Away’s mellow tones showcase the beauty always at the heart of what they do, while the bouncy Blindly Believing could be a radio hit for those Waifs-friendly radio stations that genuinely like good music. / CAMERON ADAMS

SOUNDS LIKE: more songs for the Waifs faithful

IN A WORD: raw

THE AGE OF ENTITLEMENT

THE BASICS

[THE THREE BASICS/WATERFRONT]

* * *

Chopper-gate couldn’t have taken off at a better time for The Basics. The stoic Melbourne protest band (yes the one Gotye plays in) had already pulled the title from Joe Hockey’s speech for their first album since 2009 and now this highly charged LP brings the topical thunder, even if it’s ham-fisted at times. Wally de Backer’s eagle-like vocals wrap their talons around A Coward’s Prayer and offset Kris Schroeder’s earnestness. Roundabout may sound like Mona Part II (shout out to Craig McLachlan & Check 1–2) but de Backer’s persistence owns the space with his trademark angry-but-happy-to-be-angry “Heyyyyayy”. We need more political not politi-cool music, it’s a tricky balancing act though. / MIKEY CAHILL

SOUNDS LIKE: caught between Midnight Oil and TISM

IN A WORD: galvanising

AESTHESIS

DEAD LETTER CIRCUS

[UNFD]

* * *

There’s a lot of garbage faux-metal out there. Take a cursory glance at rage on a Saturday night and you’ll invariably enter a half-hour vortex of shirt-grabbing mock-rock we thought we got rid of when The Butterfly Effect’s Clint Boge was politely shown the door. DLC escape that category because of their songwriting chops. In Plain Sight is a bit Jeep ad, The Burning Number goes toe-to-toe with Deftones circa ‘97 then Show Me Up shoves everything out of the way so Kim Benzie’s mid-range vox can glide through, eventually letting Luke Williams’ luxurious drum fills in. X needs more of an X factor. A better title than Aesthesis would borrow from Daniel Clowes’ unsettling novel: Like a Velvet Glove Cast In Iron. / MIKEY CAHILL

SOUNDS LIKE: Shihad scaring little kids at a Karnivool

IN A WORD: thorough

KILL IT YOURSELF

JESS RIBEIRO

[BARELY DRESSED RECORDS/REMOTE CONTROL]

* * * *

Mick Harvey can crack a whip. Ribeiro quipped that working with him on this, her breakout record, was “like working with an old-school punk, German headmaster and spiritual adviser”. Ribeiro’s walked away from calm country and into the fire of big-smoke folk. Rivers On Fire’ s skronking, senile saxophone is wonderfully impatient, leading us to Bleach-era rusty guitars, then Slip the Leash and If You Were a Kelpie pick up Laura Jean’s thread, adding Cowboy Junkies menace with the rhetoric taunt: “Have you been cheatin’ on me?” Good Day celebrates the day the people of Muckaty Station, NT, went to the courts to stop nuclear waste being dumped on their homes … and won. / MIKEY CAHILL

SOUNDS LIKE:The Proposition soundtrack from a woman

IN A WORD: accomplished

COMPTON

DR DRE

[UNIVERSAL]

* * * *

Dr Dre, hip-hop’s omnipotent super-producer/rapper/headphone billionaire, has unexpectedly dropped his “grand finale”. He’s trashed the now-fabled Detox for a loosely conceptual tie-in with the new NWA bio-pic, mobilising generations of proteges – Kendrick Lamar is particularly impressive on Genocide. At 50, Dre is contemplative – and Compton is his most incisively political album as he protests against continuing police brutality against African-Americans. The G-funk godfather has also expanded musically — he has an in-house jazz trumpeter? Alas, Eminem’s misogynist missive to haters in Medicine Man detracts from salient themes about racial equality. / CYCLONE WEHNER

SOUNDS LIKE: the Next Dre Day

IN A WORD: compelling

Agree? Disagree? Think we’re off our rockers? Let’s talk about it. @joeylightbulb@keltz82 @cameron_adams

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