Mark Lanegan Band - Blues Funeral

Bobbysix photographer Sophie Metcalfe makes her reviewing debut, and does it really rather brilliantly:

It’s strange to feel nostalgia from an album that you’re only greeting for the first time, but it struck head-on from the moment I introduced myself to Blues Funeral. Crawling out of bed (rusty from the night before), I played track one and found myself thrown right back there. I taste the dark spirits, smell the poorly rolled cigarettes and can hear the garbled banter. Despite my hazy brain, I am quite content sitting with Lanegan at the kitchen table, as his familiar blues riffs take me through fractured memories from last night.

Not only does Lanegan earn himself a place in my Tom Waits book of ‘well-whiskeyed voices’ but he also has the power to thread this somewhat eclectic album together. You're greeted with a rolling bass-line and lusty layered guitar in Gravediggers Song – which is reminiscent of his dabbling with QOTSA – only to be then soothed back into familiar and faultless blues songs such as Bleeding Muddy Water and St Louis Elegy. They transpose me to my teenage years when my uncle would chew my ear off about New Orleans and hand me a pile of dusty albums for homework.

I settled all too comfortably with this sound only to be then hit with instances of a 90’s drum machine in Ode to Sad Disco, pop-rock choruses in Quiver Syndrome and did I hear a flute in those last few tracks? I’m left wondering what game is Lanegan playing (reaching for my plate of greased-up hangover breakfast).

An interesting exercise would be to gut the vocals from these tracks and see if they still held together as brothers from the one gene pool. But that’s ok. If you can view this album as a montage of his musical career, it is a fascinating insight into the breadth of influences and musical capabilities of Lanegan. He dips into the pot of many genres in Blues Funeral, but does it humbly and does it well. With no need to include any 20-minute power licks to prove this past, the songs aren’t huge feats but rather unassuming and skilfully executed. It is in some ways an old rocker’s ‘screw you’ to a society drowned with fad indie riffs and bird-like-synth-girls breathing down a microphone. After all, Lanegan has been there and back again and has the voice to prove it.

Review by Sophie Metcalfe

Fox + Sui interview

The wonderfully talented writer Jess O'Callaghan has recently joined Team Bobbysix. Here's her first interview:

Becky Freeman, half of Melbourne-based duo Fox + Sui, speaks just like she sings. Everything is wonderfully dreamy, and she doesn’t seem to find the intercontinental evolution of their debut EP nearly as astounding as I do. "Andy would make the music and send it to me wherever I was in the world and I would use Garage Band and sing over it." Where was she, when she was putting lyrics to Andras Fox’s already mesmerising music? "All over. San Francisco, London...Bahrain."

Becky (or Sui Zhen, as she is known when she is creating amazing songs like this one) and Melbourne beat-maker Andras Fox met at the Red Bull Music Academy in London. She calls the experience a "life-changing kind of thing. All expenses paid, access to all the equipment... They take every care out of you apart from making music." With every other care relegated to the real world, the only two Australians in the RBMA semester began to make brilliant music together.

Drawn together by speaking the same language and a love of psychedelic garage style music by James Pants, Becky and Andras began to produce demos and become friends. Fox + Sui combines Becky’s tinkling voice and dream-like lyrics with Andras’s talent for mixing garage house, and what comes out is somewhere between lounge, exotica and dreamy pop. "For the next six or seven months I was travelling around and Andy would send me instrumental tracks... He would be using obscure sampling, and making them in a really analogue way and I would just use the microphone on my laptop."

Does the influence of where she was show in the music they made? Becky thinks it’s inevitable, although don’t expect lyrics about Bahrain to be leaping out of the ether. The mystical quality of the music they make means that they could get away with their unique recording techniques, and create something incredible. And when they’re not travelling the world, playing psychedelic festivals and collecting records? Becky creates some beautifully homemade music videos. I ask about my favourite - the addictive stop-motion clip for her solo work as Sui Zhen Little Frog. "I’m glad that I did it," she says with a laugh, although admits it took a long time. "Actually, not a long time, a couple of weeks, but I didn’t edit it until a long time later."

With their EP to be released in early 2012, Fox + Sui are busy playing around Melbourne, including the Buffalo Club and Worker’s Club. They will play at the Sugar Mountain Festival on the 14th of January at The Forum Theatre, Melbourne. Apparently we can expect psychedelic muumuus. As if we need convincing.

Interview by Jess O'Callaghan. Find out more about Fox and Sui at their facebook page.