Author: Sophie Best
Miked - Live Reviews from Issue #55 Jan-Feb 2005
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – Palais (Hepburn Springs, Australia)
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are renowned for close harmony singing, and rightly so. But on this southern-hemisphere spring night, as they started singing their first encore at an old theater in the mineral spa mountain region of Victoria, they were in unison — and the already hushed crowd fell so still that nobody seemed [...]
Waxed - Record Review from Issue #50 March-April 2004
Paul Kelly – Ways & Means
At a cultural moment when it seems toyboys are everywhere — atop the charts, on the arm of every fashionable woman — along comes Paul Kelly, revered Australian singer-songwriter, to make a case for the Older Man. Kelly’s new album concerns itself with love and lust — the yearnings for connectedness, intimacy and meaning that [...]
Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #50 March-April 2004
Anne McCue – Up from Australia
Anne McCue calls it a “strange journey,” as she retraces her path from arts school graduate in Sydney, Australia, to singer-songwriter, guitarist and recording artist in Los Angeles. “But if you put yourself on a path,” she says, “things are bound to come to you, and send you in different directions.” The first in the [...]
Waxed - Record Review from Issue #49 Jan-Feb 2004
Kelley Stoltz – Antique Glow
What is it, exactly, that makes music “psychedelic”? The answer is in the mind of the beholder, but there’s no other word for the sounds pouring out from Kelley Stoltz’s head. His debut proper, Antique Glow, is psychedelia in the truest sense — boundlessly exploratory, opening up myriad inward paths and spiral stairways for the [...]
Waxed - Record Review from Issue #47 Sept-Oct 2003
Sleepy Jackson – Lovers
From Australia’s most westernward shores comes wunderkind visionary Luke Steele and his band the Sleepy Jackson with one of the year’s most startlingly beautiful debuts. Lovers has a magical immediacy in its assuredly-crafted songwriting and flawless production by Jonathan Burnside (Nirvana, Melvins, Faith No More); it also has a revelatory quality in its semi-mystic layers [...]
Miked - Live Reviews from Issue #47 Sept-Oct 2003
Various Artists – Woody Guthrie Folk Festival (Okemah, OK)
The boomtown days of Woody Guthrie’s birthplace are long gone. Okemah is a sleepy — one might say depressed — little town in the Oklahoma hills, situated on an industrial park in Okfuskee County. It’s hard to imagine that Broadway, the main drag with its run-down storefronts and humble churches, has changed all that much [...]
Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #46 July-Aug 2003
Audrey Auld – An outsider’s perspective
Audrey Auld was floored when her second solo LP, Losing Faith, was listed recently among the Americana radio chart’s top 5 most added records, debuting at #66. “Lucinda’s number one, y’know,” says Auld, laughing heartily. “This is the chart to be on!” Making inroads into the U.S. market, Auld knows, is no easy feat for [...]
Waxed - Record Review from Issue #46 July-Aug 2003
Go-Betweens – Bright Yellow Bright Orange
Classic Australian band the Go-Betweens have never sounded so classic, so Australian and so, well, Go-Betweens as they do now. By the time Robert Forster and Grant McLennan regrouped in 1999, sans longtime drummer Lindy Morrison, the Go-Betweens had become a byword for a certain indie-pop romanticism. The band was canonized during their eleven-year hiatus [...]
Town and Country - Shorter Artist Feature from Issue #44 March-April 2003
Bill Chambers – Grandpa steps out
Music has always been a family matter for Bill Chambers. When he formed the Dead Ringer Band in the late 1980s, it was a musical expression of the close-knit love, shared faith and fierce independence that typifies the Chambers family. Those family traits have been evident since Bill and Diane took newborn Kasey and toddler [...]
Miked - Live Reviews from Issue #41 Sept-Oct 2002
Paul Kelly / Be Good Tanyas- Forum Theatre (Melbourne, Australia)
Winter is a relative concept for Australians. Call us wimps, compared to northern hemisphere music fans, but don’t say it to the 2000-odd Paul Kelly fans who waited in the cold and rain to see our unofficial national hero of song. It would take more than bad weather to sabotage a show by Kelly and [...]
Shop Amazon by clicking through this logo to support NoDepression.com. We get a percentage of every purchase you make!
