Bobbysix.com's End of Year Review 2011 - Celeste Macdonald

Having split her year between the UK, The States, Europe and Australia, Celeste Macdonald is well-placed to give her opinion on what's been the best of 2011. Check back on New Year's Day for the overall winners of best album, song, film and gig, as voted for by you:

Top 10 albums

1. El Camino – THE BLACK KEYS
2. Making Mirrors – GOTYE
3. Prisoner – THE JEZABELS
4. To The Horses – LANIE LANE
5. Come On Board – JEFFREY LEWIS
6. Bad As Me – TOM WAITS
7. Let England Shake – PJ HARVEY
8. Bon Iver – BON IVER
9. Rain On A Humming Wire – THE PANICS
10. I Want That You Are Always Happy – THE MIDDLE EAST

Top 10 songs

1. Video Games – LANA DEL REY




2. Lay It Down – THE RUBENS
3. Run Right Back – THE BLACK KEYS
4. What Do I Do – LANIE LANE
5. Somebody That I Used To Know (featuring Kimbra) – GOTYE
6. Golden Revolver – SAN CISCO
7. I Follow Rivers – LYKKE LI
8. Brother – MATT CORBY
9. Second Chance – PETER, BJORN AND JOHN
10. Tongue Tied – GROUPLOVE

Top 5 Gigs

1. JEFFREY LEWIS - Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton
2. DARK HORSES - Concorde2, Brighton
3. THREE TRAPPED TIGERS - Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton
4. PURITY RING - The Green Door Store, Brighton
5. CARL BARAT - The Prince Albert, Brighton

Highlight of the year
Having the privilege of spending nearly nine months of 2011 traveling around Europe and the United States, I stumbled upon maybe the greatest place on earth, Budapest. Added to its greatness, I had the pleasure of being there with Bobbysix himself.

2011 in words
Fantastically amazing year for music, incredibly disappointing year for Hollywood.

Prediction for 2012
After 2011 came out with the highest number of Hollywood sequels ever, (yes, EVER) Hollywood decides to stop making sequels and instead take a chance on original, independent and thought-provoking cinema...fingers crossed.

Celeste Macdonald - Contributor

Celeste likes to travel to world. She knows her stuff about music, movies and TV. She is deadly with a pool cue.

Harry James Angus - Little Stories

You may know Harry James Angus as the beardy chap from The Cat Empire. Well, he has utilised his band’s current hiatus by releasing a solo album. Little Stories was written over the past three years, usually in his lounge room and, according to Angus, largely just on his own, “laughing at my own jokes, lip trembling at my own tragedies, watching the characters come alive.”

Indeed, the album is aptly named. The eleven songs here are tales in the tradition of Paul Kelly's storytelling style. Each narrative is clearly defined over finger-picked acoustic guitar which, for a trumpeter, Angus plays expertly. Sometimes he has a real way with words. Banker, for instance, is clever and subtle. “I know I was put on this earth to change pounds into dollars and yen and back again,” he sings in this rather touching tale of loneliness and chaste love. Elsewhere though, the songwriter is perhaps a little too concerned with making himself laugh. The Batsman – which tells of a disgraced cricketer – might offer the occasional chuckle (“The cops found him naked on the steps of the church trying to hit his balls for six with his dick in the rain,”) but mixing comedic one-liners with genuine sentiment a la Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits is a tough thing to achieve and Angus doesn't always hit the target.

Generally though, this is an interesting an enjoyable alternative to the standard contemporary folk on offer elsewhere and shows Harry James Angus to have the potential to be a very clever storyteller.

Review by Bobby Townsend. It first appeared in Sydney's Drum Media.

Tom Waits - Bad As Me

It's been seven years since Tom Waits unleashed on the world his brilliant, barmy work of "cubist funk", Real Gone. So there was obviously a huge amount of anticipation about his new offering, Bad As Me. What would he do next? Would he bang together blocks of wood in a wardrobe, or sit down at a piano like it's 1976?

Well, joyfully, the answer is that he is doing a bit of both. Bad As Me takes many aspects of Tom Waits' incredible career and squeezes them into one album. With a soft vocal over gentle Spanish guitars, Back in the Crowd is one of the prettiest and saddest songs Waits has ever written. "If you don't want these arms to hold you/If you don't want these lips to kiss you/If you found someone new/Put me back in the crowd/Put the sun behind the clouds," he sings like a man trying to hold together his breaking heart. Juxtaposing this is a shouty title track and the barked Hell Broke Luce, which sounds like it's taken directly from Real Gone. Meanwhile, Get Lost sees Waits go all rock n roll, Kiss Me is an optimistic Blue Valentines for 2011 and Last Leaf is pared back and acoustic.

Bad As Me gets better with every listen and is one of the albums of the year. Existing fans will love it, while newbies will find this the ideal place to begin their Tom Waits collection. Let's just hope we don't have to wait seven years for the next record.


Review by Bobby Townsend. Check the video for Satisfied below:

Getting To Know... Britany Nola

Read our exclusive, candid interview with model and actress Britany Nola, as well as checking out some more photos by visiting our new site: www.somethingyousaid.com

Getting To Know... Howl at the Moon

BobbySix.com was recently lucky enough to catch Melbourne's Howl at the Moon play an excellent show at MUM, the legendary Friday night indie shindig at Sydney's World Bar. Afterwards, singer Katie and drummer Mikey told us a bit about the band:
 
(Katie): I would describe Howl at the Moon's sound as a blues noise dark country carwreck. We're pretty moody and very honest but we all love and appreciate classic pop music, so there's a lot of melody involved.

(Mikey): I would describe it as Tom Waits and P J Harvey tag-team mud-wrestling against Thom Yorke and a zombie Roy Orbison. PJ and Tom Waits win... just.

(K): I take inspiration from books, bands and films of course! But from a songwriter's perspective I draw a lot on stories people relay to me. I'm empathetic by nature and can't help but feel the pain that others go through, so some songs are thinly-veiled true-life experiences of mine, people I know or people they know. Music comes from a weird dark place for me. Sometimes I'll write when I'm full of happiness but not that often. I don't know how others view/hear it but I sincerely hope that in amongst the shadows in the music we play, people will find something like hope. I'm not a pessimist at all. I believe and am inspired by the good I see in people, but life can be pretty shit sometimes. Mostly due to that old chestnut, heartbreak. There is a dark humour in the songs too, but sometimes I think people miss it. I think I'm dry-funny sometimes, but my comic nature is so under-developed that most people miss it.

(M): I take inspiration from Yacht Rock

(K): Melbourne is a wonderful place to have as a creative home. I have lived here nearly six years now. Mark (bass), Mikey (drums) and I are all originally from New Zealand and though I miss home, I don't think there's a better place to live in the world right now. A lot of people I know who have traveled a lot more than I feel the same way. I've never been in the right place at the right time before but at the moment it feels like I am. The music scene isn't divisive or cliquey. Real musicians are connecting and making awesome things happen together. The venues down here all seem to be run by people who really give a shit about music more than anything else and that, in my opinion, is a rarity.

(K): I wish Howl at the Moon had written Real Gone, Is This Desire?, Figure 8 and Sketches disc 2. That pretty much sums up my personal influences. Like most people, I also wish we'd written Abbey Road. It would've been sweet to have written a great, funny, dark book too - anything of Richard Brautigan's would be my dream.

(M): I wish Howl at the Moon had written Welcome to the Jungle.

(K) It might surprise people to learn that I'm pretty keen on Billie Holiday and 20's-40's tin pan alley songwriters. I'm very nostalgic for that era, though, obviously, I didn't live in that time. I'm a bit of a tragic romantic. Not in the flowers and candy sense, but in a classic swoony kinda way. I melt a little bit more each time I hear Billie's versions of Some Other Spring and I Cover The Waterfront - beautiful stuff. I also recently became addicted to Otis Redding's Cigarettes and Coffee. I don't know if I'll ever get sick of it. I keep putting on the record when people come over and I'm starting to wonder if my friends are growing tired of it.

(M): It might also surprise people to learn that bats always turn left when exiting a cave.

(M): In five years time we will still be talking about the first time we played at World Bar. What a night!

(K): We'll also still be playing music lots and we'll have made a full-length record. Tour New Zealand and some other places. Go on a writing/working holiday to Croatia, France and Mexico. Write, write, write, right? I think I'll be very pleased if we have an album under our belts and don't have to pay for it all ourselves!

Check out Howl at the Moon for yourself at their Myspace page. 

Interview by Rob Townsend

Ed Harcourt - Lustre

Ed Harcourt hasn’t always been the breeziest fellow, but his fifth studio album sees him in a slightly less world-weary frame of mind than in his previous offerings. Since his last record, four years ago, he has become a doting father, and while there is still the familiar desperate melancholy running through his lyrics, this time it is pierced by a renewed sense of hope. “Oh please don’t break me from this spell/I’ve found a little heaven in this world of hell,” he pleads on Haywired, before concluding with, “It’s not easy to be happy and get away with it.”

Harcourt has always been very skilled at combining bouncy melodies with darker wordplay, and his new long-player displays this. Co-produced by Ryan Hadlock (The Gossip), Lustre is lush, sweeping and beautifully structured, with three-part harmonies courtesy of The Langley Sisters (made up of Harcourt’s wife and her sisters) and handclaps accompanying his piano-led songs. Considering the lyrics deal with subjects such as life in a mental asylum and a stern view of religion, it is a fascinating juxtaposition, and brings to mind Costello and Cohen. Elsewhere, more of the British troubadour’s slightly optimistic demeanour is evident on Heart of a Wolf - a playful, Tom Waits-style knockabout - and on the jaunty A Secret Society.

Even in the album’s weaker moments - and there are a few - Harcourt’s words are always poetic and delivered with honesty and passion. Regardless of whether he is singing through a smile or a frown, Lustre signals a welcome return for this underrated songwriter.