Missy Higgins at Her Majesty's Theatre, Melbourne

Jess O'Callaghan went to see the rebirth of Missy Higgins in Melbourne:

Going to any sort of comeback tour, no matter who the artist is, can be a little bit terrifying. As someone who gets attached to songs pretty fervently, even going to a tour where the artist has more than one lovable album can cause mild anxiety. Clearly some of your favourite songs aren’t going to make it onto the set list. And which ones will get cut? Terrifying.

Considering she has two very well known albums chock full of sing-along-able songs and a fanbase made ravenous by five years without a new release, Missy Higgins navigated the evening remarkably well.

On the 16th of June she performed at Her Majesty's Theatre in Melbourne, which was a far stretch from the first time I saw her perform with a piano and an acoustic guitar at the Tamworth Country Music Festival. For one, no one in the audience was wearing cowboy hats.

Another big difference was the band behind her - the cello/trumpet/everything player, the American drummer’s accent jokes, and Butterfly Boucher. Boucher blew everyone away as the opening Special Guest and then stayed on to play guitar and sing. She co-produced the recently released The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle album in Nashville with Brad Jones.

While the production of a Missy Higgins’ gig has become slicker and prettier, you still had the sense that you could have been sitting around with a group of friends, yelling ‘play one more!’ as the night grew older. While she didn’t try to hit every heckler's request (“Play Sound of White!” “That would be a downer right now”) she didn’t pointedly avoid them like some jerk artists with popular old songs do. Listening to Scar performed live is still immensely satisfying, and she knows it.

Then there are the songs on The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle which were just so much better live. The sounds and rhythms in Watering Hole went way over my head listening to the track, but hearing the commotion performed live made a lot more sense. Animal sounds and stomping and calling her brother, Dave, back on stage to make noises. Dave also made an appearance when the pair performed Cooling of the Embers, a beautiful song about their grandmother growing old.

The coverage of Higgins’ return to making music has focused on her ‘writer's block’. The struggle with the idea that she might never make music again. She spoke about it briefly and unavoidably before performing the beautiful Everyone’s Waiting on the piano.

I guess the sold-out shows and the excitement of the audience prove that everyone was waiting. At one point she even managed to convince us all to applaude with animal noises. Judging by the sound of Her Majesty’s Theatre filled with snorts, moos and neighs, they’re very glad she’s back.

Review by Jess O'Callaghan. Photo courtesy of the official Missy Higgins website.

Sui Zhen - Two Seas

We’ve been besotted by Sui Zhen at Bobbysix for a while now, with her tinkling voice and her twisty, lovely lyrics. Jess O'Callaghan gives her debut LP a listen:

Upon listening to Sui Zhen's debut album, Two Seas, I felt as though I were falling in love and having my heart gently broken, over and over. Some songs are like secrets, whispered between sleepy heads on a pillow, and others are full of joy, suitable for singing loudly on bicycles.

Wandering Me, Cupboards and Sand and Little Frog fall into the latter category, with strange, pretty percussion and sweet harmonies sprinkled through the music. Then there are tunes like opening track My New Friend, Happy to See You and Tuesday Sometimes which are just so honest that it seems necessary to play them on repeat, savouring lines like "When I am with you/We are happy sometimes."

While the music feels spectacularly new - which I’m going to attribute to things like "and an accordion somewhere," snuck into the explanation of who plays what instrument - there is something wonderful about the everyday-ness of the lyrics.

When I heard "I can cook three meals/With not even a fight," and, in Blue Night, "I could watch three seasons with you/I could touch your skin under the blanket," it was like she was singing my own absent-minded thoughts and still surprising me by how important she made them sound. Track eight, Golden Cage is more of a story. The xylophone and harmonising reminding me of Lisa Mitchell’s album Wonder. The lyrics are both online and beautifully folded into a booklet for the hardcopy, which is nice for those of us who fall hard and fast for a song.

A beautiful album for those who like lyrics, awkward situations, a lilting voice and layering of sounds.

Review by Jess O'Callaghan. You can listen to and buy the album here: http://suizhen.bandcamp.com/

The Fearless Vampire Killers at The Toff in Town, Melbourne

Jess O'Callaghan checked out Melbourne's The Fearless Vampire Killers, as they played a gig in their home city. Fiona Wilde supplied the photos, taken at their recent Sydney show:

“We cleared back the tables. When we play this next song, you’ll understand why.” The Fearless Vampire Killers are not a band to see if you don’t want to dance. These Melbourne blues rockers are the epitome of boogie. They were actually making my shoes bounce with the beat, even to the songs I didn’t know.

Melbourne six-piece Major Tom & the Atoms' set was an energetic start to the night. They make the saxophone look as cool as it did when Rob Lowe played one in St Elmo’s Fire (very cool). Rhythm and blues, soul funk and sexy crooning warmed the crowd right up for The Fearless Vampire Killers, and set the tone for the rest of the evening. Wasteland was the aforementioned table-clearing number, and it had most of the packed-out dance floor swivelling their knees like 1960s rock and roll stars. Moving seamlessly between pop-rock, funk and soul, The Fearless Vampire Killers are like something out of another decade. With their bright orange shirts and gel-quiffed hair, the four Melbourne boys looked the part.

With sounds simular to Little Red and The Drums, The Fearless Vampire Killers have songs that will get stuck in your head for days. In a good way. They make me want to barbeque things by the beach and then go swimming in my clothes. They sound like summer, but not in a happy-go-lucky, too cheerful way. In a way that means great, rolling riffs can be mixed with lyrics like, "Most people I know, they think life’s for living/But you know what I say, life is for killing." And still make you want to boogie.

As always, the Toff in Town is a perfect place to see any band that makes a live gig feel a bit like you’ve discovered an ability to time travel. The candle-lit, velvet-curtained band room is perfect for a band like The Fearless Vampire Killers. Try and catch their upcoming gigs in Geelong, Ballarat and at the Apollo Bay Music Festival. They’re definitely best enjoyed dancing.

Review by Jess O'Callaghan. Photos by Fiona Wilde.

Chips Laffer and Single Twin at The Toff, Melbourne

Having interviewed Single Twin last week, Jess O'Callaghan took in his gig on Sunday and found a familiar-looking support act. Photos by Vinisha Mulani:

The entire evening was bewildering. Brilliant, but bewildering. Let’s begin with the support act, Chips Laffer. It became quite clear from the moment he sat at the keyboard and opened his mouth that this was Jae Laffer, lead singer of The Panics. A quick Google that day had told us Chips Laffer was definitely not a person, and if he was, he had never performed anywhere before.

‘Chips’ whittled out lovely tunes on the guitar and a dodgy keyboard whose keys kept sticking with heat (he held it up as proof. Apparently, real person or not, Chips Laffer has pride) before grinning at the slowly filling band room. “Here’s a song I play with my band. It’s called Cruel Guards.”

The whole act gave the illusion that you’d somehow found a time machine. For one, gigs at The Toff always make you feel like you’ve found a time machine. It’s all red velvet curtains, fancy wine and candlelight. Two, I was relaxed, and not battling a crowd of festival maniacs to see Jae Laffer play. I wasn’t being hoisted on shoulders and pushed through stubborn bodies to get closer to the music. I was sitting in a tiny band room listening to him play haunting solo versions of what are usually pretty overwhelming songs and chuckle at his own misleading moniker.

Halfway through the set he stopped again, and welcomed the newcomers.
Chips: I’m Chips Laffer...
Heckler: Chips?!
Chips: Chips. Shut up. I’m from a band called Chips Laffer and the Panics. This is our most famous song and I play it even when I don’t need to play it. I don’t know why.

He played Don’t Fight It. He played originals. He played Bob Dylan covers. It was fantastic.

Single Twin was no less perplexing, but not because of his name. I’d long since untangled that web of pseudonyms. Single Twin is Marcus Teague. Marcus Teague was once the front man for Deloris. Marcus Teague is the name of Single Twin’s first album. Single Twin is not the name of the album. Got it. Not perplexing.

The intro to every song was deadpan, with Marcus staring unblinkingly at the audience. They began almost convincing, "This song is about catching a centipede bus through the backwaters of Santa Monica..." and escalated into the absurd: "This one’s about ordering pizza in World War II. And bombs are dropping all around you, and you’ve realised that you’re going to die... but you just want your last meal to be pizza." Ok, so they were all absurd.

He played a song that went for all of forty seconds which was about being called in for dinner and running back to the house. When it stopped abruptly he grinned at the audience. “A song can be as long as you want it to be.” Then the band came on stage; four beautiful moustachioed hipster men with an eclectic collection of instruments. I was sold. Marcus is obviously clever as well as a talented musician. He knows what live music is meant to do and what an album is meant to do, and he makes it happen. Marcus Teague the album was very different to a Single Twin show, although most of the songs were the same. The album feels almost as though the music is whispering to you, telling you a secret. The live show was crisp, and the sound was big, quite precise in its execution but never to the point of being polished, or trite.

There was a song dedicated to how sexy banjos are (complete with a banjo being all sexy), back-up whistling and men harmonising. This means I can’t be held accountable for anything written in this review. Men harmonising turn me to jelly.

Regardless of how great the band were (and they were great), Teague’s lyrics stand up all by themselves. Each one tells a story, and, contrary to what his intros suggest, none of them seem to be about energy drink. They remind me of trying to explain a dream you’ve had first thing in the morning. Every time you listen to one of these songs you hear something in there that hasn’t hit you before. Like the familiarity of the "packet mix of corn and cream," in Fish in New Leaves, or the ache of "in my mind you are beside me and singing," in My Silken Tooth.

So, on the whole, it was a bewildering but spectacular evening. I’d like to thank whoever had the thought to arrange the tables close to the stage like a 1920s nightclub so there was no pressure to stand and do the awkward quiet-music-shuffle on a Sunday night. The whole gig was like a giant, satisfying exhale at the end of a very long week. An exhale that involved white wine, secret identities and male harmonising. The best kind.

Review by Jess O'Callaghan. Photos by Vinisha Mulani.

Single Twin interview

Ex-Deloris frontman Marcus Teague, aka Single Twin, talks to Jess O'Callaghan about his album and his show at Melbourne's The Toff on Sunday night: 

Six years is a long time to spend recording an album alone on GarageBand. Was it always going to emerge as an album, or was it something that happened once you had a few of the songs?
I had it in my head that it was always going to be an album. I mean, I knew then that I was always going to keep writing and recording songs whether or not anyone was going to hear them. So you pull a bunch together and see which ones best fit into 30-40 minutes. Either you have to keep revisiting ideas or versions or recording new songs to get it right. At some point it sounds balanced over repeated listenings and that's when you decide it's an album.

You write on Mess+Noise about the ‘happy accidents’ that make their way into the music when you record on GarageBand. What were they? What do you think these add to the album? 
Stuff like field recordings I recorded on a mini-disc for a few years. Wind in the staircase of an apartment block; recordings from the Frankston library; birds in a park in Sydney; an opera singer practicing up the street from my house. Crickets. The other ones are mistakes or moments in the recording that aren't intended—a bum note; a finger-picking mistake; something falling over in the room maybe. None of it is overt but it helps bring some of the musical sentiments to life when weaved amongst the recordings. It also brings a life to it that is separate from yourself maybe, so you get to be an observer of your own music for a moment, perhaps.

Single Twin emerged while you were still the front man of Deloris, and all but one song on your album Marcus Teague was recorded alone. Do you prefer working alone after collaborating with other musicians for so many years? 
Yep. Even in Deloris I wrote most things alone. And actually, that one song (Splinters and Seeds) I made up and recorded alone, leaving my friend Matt Blackman to make up his part alone also. It's just how I work best. I've always done it like that and I don't really know to do it any other way. I used to play drums and can play a bit of keys, so when I think of a part of a song I immediately start thinking about what could be a counterpoint to it, or where the arrangement could go.

The songs on Marcus Teague reference place a lot and listening to them you get a real sense of story. Is there a method to your song-writing that makes this happen? Do you have a place or story in mind when you set out to write a song? 
I don't specifically, but I guess there's always a world or mood of sorts that I have running through my head when writing songs. Like a blurry film-strip or something. And particular sorts of characters. I don't know why but I suppose that's how I know when a song's working or not, when it sustains that world running through my head. If there's a line or character that seems incorrect in that mental landscape, then I know it's a bum line or isn't working the way it's supposed to.

I’ll be reviewing your performance at The Toff Sunday night- what can we expect from a live Single Twin show?
Well, at the moment I'm playing with a band of four other guys, who use a bunch of different instruments to add a lot of the details that are present on the album. So it's them and then me making things up in between songs.

And will it be another six years of recording before we get to hear more from Single Twin? 
God I hope not. I have about four or five songs approaching being ready to record, a couple of which we'll do at The Toff, so I'm thinking of recording those soon. And I have some other music coming out before too long that's different and separate from Single Twin, so I will probably actively return to Single Twin World in the second half of this year. I'll release some more Single Twin stuff this year I'd say, but realistically, probably not another album until late 2012 or early 2013. I do have fantasies of setting mics up in my kitchen, pressing record and playing a whole new album from start to finish, without stopping, and releasing that...but... we'll see. I'm not sure if that's a good idea yet.

Single Twin plays at The Toff in Melbourne on Sunday night. You can listen to his stuff here and get tickets here.

Interview by Jess O'Callaghan. 

Justice at Festival Hall, Melbourne

French electro duo Justice filled the Melbourne Festival Hall with lights and sound last Friday night, at a sold-out, all ages show. Jess O'Callaghan was there for Bobbysix.com:

The evening got off to a good start thanks to a solid set by Sydney five-piece Canyons (they play indie-club-pop with a saxophone!). Next, special guest Busy P somehow took us from Black Sabbath through Owner of a Lonely Heart to Goodbye Stranger by Supertramp, a feat probably made possible by his awesome French accent and lovely hair.

Melbourne Festival Hall was full by eight-thirty. To fill such a space with bouncing, singing-along bodies is no easy feat, but there were obviously a number of Justice die-hards present, with homemade fan-shirts and squeals of "this is actually happening," a constant throughout the night. Their songs may be sparse on lyrics, but the crowd knew them all (and belted them back) to the French electro duo (Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Auge), when they played to what has to be one of the most enthusiastic audiences I have ever been a part of.

Justice somehow combine a rock vibe with electro dance music, and do it all in a French, deadpan way, as if that’s how everyone parties. The mixes were different enough from their albums to keep the set interesting, but familiar enough to please the fans. While they didn't seem to care too much about working the crowd and were set back in the stage (unlike the warm-up benevolence of Busy P and his crowd-charming hair flicks), the focus was instead on the lights and making the audience jump about.

The lighting was almost as spectacular as the music and pretty theatrical at times, opening with an ambitious amount of fog and their trademark luminous cross in the middle of the stage. D.A.N.C.E saw beams of what seemed like sunlight coming through the bars of the backdrop and a faux organ, made of incandescent tubing, accompanied the second half of the set, sliding across the stage. By the encore - a spectacular version of Never Be Alone, I was well and truly a convert to the world of French electro.

Review by Jess O'Callaghan.

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.