#Chapter Music

[bandcampsnoop]

1/3/25.

There was a time that Melbourne-based band Twerps were a mainstay hashtag/post on this blog. They were part of the great (at least in my mind) Australian indie renaissance of the late 2000s/early 2010s. I listened incessantly to their S/T release and later "Range Anxiety" and "Underlay EP". Then, of course, I got into their other bands - The Stevens, and Martin Frawley's solo work to name a few.

Pitchfork mentioned how they "chime and charm". Such a great three word description. This was released by both Underwater Peoples and the venerable Chapter Music.

I can't help but think of Scott and Charlene's Wedding, The Ocean Party, and The Bats (another great "chime and charm" band).

I found this on The Sound of Vinyl website. I've been sifting through their 50% off sale for the past couple of days. I've bought The Jam, David Bowie, The Divine Comedy, Josef K, R.E.M. and...Twerps.

[action-sounds]

Like That from Cool Sounds

Like That is an extraordinarily accomplished and very fun album from Melbournes Cool Sounds. It was released towards the end of 2022.

Musically it's a little bit of a left turn for the band. They were more known for being part of a jangly pop scene that was going on. This album has funk and disco influences. It has a very 80s sound in parts and inevitably brings to mind the Talking Heads.

These songs are so fun! They're joyful and danceable. They're the best kind of growth from a band hitting their stride for real. Or I reckon anyway.

[dougwallen]

The Particles review for The Big Issue

[mywifeleftme]

54: Kath Bloom & Loren Mazzacane (Connors) // Moonlight

Moonlight Kath Bloom & Loren Mazzacane (Connors) 1984, St. Joan (Bandcamp)

Despite Moonlight’s tones being quite hushed, and both Kath Bloom’s vocals and Loren Mazzacane Connors’ guitar being, we could say, adventurous with regard to pitch, any time I throw this album on as background music conversation tends to gradually trail off, and my guest will look at me perplexedly and say something like, “Why is this so fucking good?” Which, I think, is one of the main reasons to buy LPs, whether you’re DJing with wax or just the sort to get a bit pouty when a visitor wants to stream something instead of playing with your carefully alphabetized collection.

On that count, Moonlight is indispensable. Released on a private press label in 1984, Moonlight was the final collaboration between self-taught guitarist/songwriter Kath Bloom and Loren Connors (billed at the time as Loren Mazzacane), an avant-garde acoustic blues/folk guitarist. The recordings are so sparse you can occasionally hear a woody creak break through, like a rocking chair or someone stepping on an old floorboard. Bloom’s voice is an airy thing, seeming to billow and drift of its own accord, even up to high white notes that threaten to move out of hearing. Connors lets Bloom’s steady, dreamy fingerpicking carry the melody, using his own instrument to duet with her vocal. I suspect the appeal of Bloom as a partner was in the challenge of translating her instinctive vocalizations to his guitar. His lead lines share her wandering spirit, plucked sequences of panged off-notes that ring true.

There are moments that have the outsider joy of Daniel Johnston’s music, with its childlike directness and strange lyrical perceptiveness, like closer “Love Makes it All Worthwhile”:

“Every night it’s the same old thing He puts it in And then he takes it out again You might be closer Closer if you do Maybe he just wants some more of you It’s love Makes a difference It’s love Makes it all worthwhile”

“Breathe in my Ear” doesn’t develop much further than its chorus of “Breathe in my ear / I love you,” but Connors’ guitar and the sound of the players’ shifting in their chairs combine to create a warm impression of bodies moving on a well-worn mattress. Other songs are bolted together a little more firmly, but feel no less sublime for it, like “You Cleared Up the Sky,” where Connors takes a long, bluesy solo and you sense Bloom listening with soft wonder to what he plays. At time of writing there were only a handful of vinyl copies remaining of Chapter Music 2019’s reissue on their Bandcamp (well, there are exactly five, so let’s say you have large hands), so if you’re interested it might do you to pick one up sooner rather than later. Do it for your guests.

54/365

[polaroidblog]

"Noi che a Milano ci andiamo per la moda e la radio" (novembre 2022) - Chapter Music 30th anniversary special

Tracklist:

01. Mustang - Dough Eyed

02. O! - Outskirts

03. The Cannanes - A Bigger Splash

04. Pikelet - Pressure Cooker

05. The Violet Slide - Venus Love

06. Twerps - Who Are You

07. Hit The Jackpot - King Of the Pool

08. The Goon Sax - Target

09. yumbo - cake

10. Essendon Airport - Science Of Sound

11. Small World Experience - Side Projects

12. Crayon Fields - She's My Hero

13. Sulk - Kissability (Sonic Youth cover)

14. School Damage - Gasbagging

15. Dick Diver - Purgatory

16. The Stevens - Chancer

17. Molasses - Fingers In My Eyes

18. Gus - Maybe Love

[thejoyofviolentmovement]

New Video: Aussie Punk Outfit CLAMM Wrestle with Impatience and Yearning in "Something New"

New Video: Aussie Punk Outfit CLAMM Wrestle with Impatience and Yearning in "Something New" @CLAMMband @ChapterMusic @meatmachinerecs @nathanisariot @riotactmedia

With the release of 2020’s full-length debut Beseech Me, the Melbourne-based punk outfit CLAMM — Jack Summers (vocals, guitar), Maisie Everett (bass, backing vocals) and Miles Harding (drums, backing vocals) — quickly exploded into national and international punk scenes. Originally released by the band on cassette, the album received airplay and praise from Aussie radio stations 3RRR and FBi.…

[dustedmagazine]

CLAMM — Care (Chapter Music)

Photo by Gen Kay

Care by CLAMM

CLAMM, out of Melbourne, gets maximum force out of the punk trio formation. The band lands brutalist punch after punch in battering songs that are anthemic without being especially devoted to melody. These are shouty, rally-the-masses adrenaline hits, stripped to pounding one-two simplicity, and sheathed with echo.

Care is CLAMM’s second album, following 2021’s Beseech Me, an album of comparable violence and intensity and snare-shot agitation; you can get the gist of it from this live performance of “Liar.” The band formed around friends since grade school, Jack Summers and Miles Harding, and now includes the bass player and singer Masie Everett. Everett played on Beseech Me, but she didn’t do much singing there. One of the main differences between the first album and the second, then, comes her participation in the massed, shouted refrains. She augments the chorus in “Done It Myself,” “Monday” and “Bit Much,” making them a group effort, rather than an individual one, and consequently giving the songs a bit more communal, enveloping urgency.

The fire, though, comes from the pummeling interplay between Summers’ militant chants, his wild, flailing guitar and Harding’s primal, kit pounding cadences. Every sound is thrown like a punch, rocking you back with sheer bludgeoning impact. The sound is instantly familiar, though surprisingly hard to pin down with punk antecedents. The closest I can get is Ex-Cult with fewer moving guitar parts, Stiff Little Fingers without the propensity for tunefulness, or Perth’s Zerodent but a bit more metal. The band itself likes to invoke California garage punks like the Osees and Ty Segall, and I wasn’t hearing it until “Make Me,” whose mammoth guitar riff sounds like Fuzz.  

All 15 songs are shots to the gut, with highlights in “Monday”’s hopped up denunciation (“I don’t want drugs, I don’t want fame, I don’t want money, I don’t want love”), “Scheme”’s feedback screaming dissonance and “Buy”’ sublimely heavy riffs jacked up on amphetamines to warp speed. If you were to ask for anything, it might be a bit more variation. But then again, if you’re getting this much oomph out of basic ingredients, why add a lot of extras?

Jennifer Kelly

[robmoro]

RobMoro TV | Laura Jean –  ‘Teenager Again'

RobMoro TV | Laura Jean – ‘Teenager Again’

Australian singer/songwrite LAURA JEAN is back with her first album in four years and a new single. Taken from the new album, “Amateurs”  Jean has released the video for, ’Teenager Again’, which features backing vocals by Aldous Harding and Marlon William, who also feature on two other tracks on the album. “These songs arise from my acceptance that I will always be an ‘amateur’. At the same…

[bandcampsnoop]

4/21/24.

When I saw that Chapter Music (Melbourne, Australia) was splitting a vinyl reissue of Guy Blackman (co-founder of Chapter Music and member of Minimum Chips), I was anticipating a good album.

I wasn't really expecting a great one. "Adult Baby" was originally released in 2007 and now is being reiussued by both Chapter Music and Pop Superette (Pierre, the label owner, is just amazing), a French label responsible for one of my favorite Bandcamp releases, Irmão Victor.

As usual, the Bandcamp write-up contains some gems I need to pass on. First, Guy Blackman is a "nerdy fan of Syd Barrett". His voice reminds me of the melancholy voices associated with Nick Drake, Belle and Sebastian, and Jens Lekman (who appears on the 3rd song!) And finally, the Bandcamp page hypothesizes how the Guy Blackman CD made it to France in the first place. The blame is laid at the feet of Maxwell Farrington - an Aussie living in France who says of Guy Blackman:

“Guy Blackman is one of Australia’s finest singer/songwriters. There are very, very few artists who can make me cry like he does. Normally I don’t give a damn about the lyrics, but with him it’s genius. After his moving (unpretentious) words come his graceful and sticky melodies and arrangements. ‘Adult Baby’ - this is a very important album for me, it’s the Mount Everest of Australian pop.”

[dougwallen]

CLAMM review for NME Australia

[underachievers-please-try-harder]

Track of the day // Thibault - See The World

From the album Or Not Thibault, out now on Chapter Music.

[joanofarc]

astra, the cannanes and steward (2000).

turn off the light and shut the door that bit of history we won’t repeat i see your face in the mirror of my car i know before you even speak what your answer is the life we had, it’s over, and now i’m looking straight ahead, you know, i’m scared

[riotactmedia]

The FADER premieres Sweet Whirl’s new LP ‘How Much Works’ - out this Friday May 29th via Chapter Music!

Edquist writes about the internal conflict that drove the making of the album. "In the writing and recording of How Much Works I was having a discussion with myself about the conflict between trying to uncover and predict the natural order to my own life, how I should be, reading my future in my history — my fate in a word — versus that very human drive to overcome what we think of as our nature, to throw it all off, face the void, feel the angst, and push towards the unknown." Listen HERE

[dustedmagazine]

David Chesworth & Bill McDonald — Drive Time (Chapter Music)

Photo by Ponch Hawkes

Drive Time by David Chesworth & Bill McDonald

As a budding experimental composer, Australia’s David Chesworth (Essendon Airport, Whadya Want?) aimed to move “beyond the constraints of modernism,” as he put it in one interview, by performing in a range of venues and exploring new audience relationships. Some of the recordings of these events have followed a similarly elusive path, long remaining out of print or altogether unreleased. Chesworth’s sought-after synthwave masterpiece Industry & Leisure (1983), for example — recorded live in an art gallery, inviting crowd feedback — only saw its first proper reissue this past February on B.T.E. Records (Spain). But, thankfully, Melbourne’s Chapter Music has followed suit by unearthing another even rarer early performance piece from Chesworth: the genre-eluding and never-before-released gem, Drive Time.

On a cold winter’s night in 1984, Chesworth and bassist Bill McDonald (Paul Kelly, Frente!) played the exclusive eleven-song set in the Trinity Chapel at Melbourne University, where it was broadcast live over the unsuspecting airwaves of local classical channel ABC Radio 3AR. The station brought along a live announcer who gave traffic and weather updates from the choir stalls between songs, context which has sadly been omitted from this release. However, their engineer is to thank for preserving the set, having slipped a soundboard tape of it to the duo as they were packing up their gear. The most bizarre aspect of all, though, is the presence of an unknown organist practicing Bach from somewhere in the church's depths, which only adds to the mysterious, reverb-heavy aura of the recording and helps to underscore its uniqueness. 

Was anyone else making music like this — let’s call it minimalist post-punk lounge-groove — at the time? Is anyone making it now? The Native Cats, a fellow bass and synth duo from down under, feel like the most obvious current comparison, but Chesworth’s vocals play a more supporting role than Chloe Escott’s. His lyrics are built on simple rhymes that work to complement the occasionally absurd sense of mystery of the proceedings: “He’s over there/The one with the face/Sold out of his place,” Chesworth sings on “Influence,” as the music plucks suspiciously along. Perhaps he’s referring to the organist whose venue they’d overtaken. 

With its general air of whimsy, Drive Time might be more closely aligned soundwise to what England’s Woo had begun tapping into around this same time. Especially when the pair fully embrace their playful side on the Muzak-like tracks that play in between the record’s more locked-in and swaggering workouts. On “Slide,” for instance, things get downright hokey as Chesworth mimics dueling banjos on his Yamaha DX7 and McDonald moseys assuredly beside him in a punk throb. Meanwhile, “Telling” lands somewhere between the closing theme of an 80’s game show and the score of a nature documentary. 

Elsewhere, Chesworth riffs on the setting itself by letting church bells ring via his keyboard on the Hitchcockian “Walls,” which wavers and whistles as it progresses while remaining surprisingly groovy. The album’s standout track, though, is “Delay,” where percussion pops off like popcorn, accompanied by the chiming of a xylophone that intensifies and ascends when Chesworth declares: “I would if I could/Be in love.” Fortunately, thanks to this release, a whole new audience is finally getting the opportunity to do just that with Drive Time. And it’s hard to imagine why they wouldn’t…love it, that is. 

Chris Liberato

[burlveneer-music]

Chapter Music Bushfire Benefit - 28-track comp

100% of proceeds to be split between Wildlife Victoria, Fire Relief Fund for First Nations Communities and Gippsland Emergency Relief Fund. If you'd prefer to donate directly: www.wildlifevictoria.org.au/donate/donate-to-wildlife-victoria au.gofundme.com/f/fire-relief-fund-for-first-nations-communities www.gerf.org.au

[bandcampsnoop]

5/3/23.

As I was getting ready for bed last night, I saw an email from Chapter Music announcing the upcoming release of The Particles "1980s Bubblegum" (Sydney, Australia, late 1970s/early 1980s). The cover made me think of another Chapter release - Tangled Shoelaces. Regardless, I always am interested in anything Chapter (and Guy Blackman) have to offer.

I bought this sight unheard because the description used some magic words - Orange Juice, Television Personalities, and The Cannanes. Now that I'm listening to the two songs offered here (and a third - "Driving Me" - here on the compilation "I Won't Have to Think About You", released by A Colourful Storm), I would say this tends more to The Cannanes comparison. The trumpet and melodies remind me a bit of The June Brides.

Sweet vocals and upfront bass can recall any number of bands from Marine Girls to The Bats.