SMH IT Pro story: “‘Larger technical issue’ in Facebook ad system”, December 2011
A short feature for the Sydney Morning Herald’s IT Pro section. It’s my first work published under the SMH masthead. Excerpt below.
‘Larger technical issue’ in Facebook ad system
Self-service ad platform gives advertiser grief.
A Facebook employee has suggested the dramatic shifts in advertising rates on the company’s self-serve ad platform may be due to a “larger technical issue”, in an email to an Australian customer.
The customer, Tim Levinson [pictured], manager of Sydney-based hip-hop music label Elefant Traks, claims to have experienced price hikes of up to 1000 per cent on the social network’s self-serve ad platform.
Levinson has spent around $10,000 on Facebook advertisements in the last two years; roughly $100 per week, using the site’s pay-per-click model.
In late July, he wrote a concerned email to Facebook’s ad sales team, noting that the pay-per-click rates had gone “inexplicably through the roof” – from $0.50 per click to as much as $5. The Elefant Traks manager – who performs under the MC name Urthboy, and is also a founding member of popular Sydney hip-hop group The Herd – noticed in July that the estimated cost-per-click suggested by Facebook’s self-serve ad system wouldn’t budge on its ‘suggested bid’ amount, regardless of whether he was bidding on popular – and therefore, more competitive and expensive – keywords such as ‘triple j’ and ‘bliss n eso’, or significantly less popular terms such as ‘sydney underground rap’.
“I run a music business where a click results in an actual ‘sale’ only a certain percentage of the time,” he wrote in the email. “This is consistent across the board. The art is increasing that percentage through clever targeting. There is no way that $2 per click is value for money, let alone $3 or $4. There is no way that I gain useful information about the best keywords for targeting people who actually buy our product when the fee per click is the same, regardless of the targeted groups.”
It took two weeks for a Facebook employee to respond. In the month of July, Levinson had been charged between $25 and $71 each day. On August 5, “Josie” from Facebook’s ‘Online Sales Operations’ team wrote back and explained how the pay-per-click system worked, despite Levinson having used the ad platform without problems for two years. His concerns remained, so the email conversation continued.
For the full story, visit SMH IT Pro.
The Australian album review: The Necks – ‘Mindset’, November 2011
An album review for The Australian, reproduced below in its entirety.
On their 16th album, this Sydney-based trio opt for two 21-minute long tracks rather than the singular instrumental piece that characterises most of their past releases.
The opener, Rum Jungle, is a claustrophobic jam laced with menacing bass notes, jarring piano chords and insistent cymbal-tapping.
It’s a consuming piece of work; from the initial five-minute mess of noise emerges some flighty piano progressions and, later, a fiercely strummed electric guitar – a rarity among the Necks’ overarching modus operandi, which is best captured in the title of their 1998 live album, Piano Bass Drums.
Rum Jungle is thematically similar to their previous release, 2009′s Silverwater, in that its sustained creepiness invokes a sense in the listener of being constantly on edge.
Track two, Daylights, marks a distinct shift in mood; its gentle, noir-like atmosphere is a breath of fresh air. Its gradual uncoiling has more in common with the soothing perpetual motion of their 2003 release Drive By, which won the trio an ARIA for best jazz album.
This contrast between light and shade works well, and the absence of a narrator invites listeners to fill in the gaps themselves. Mindset is a fine addition to one of the most consistent catalogues in contemporary Australian music.
LABEL: Fuse
RATING: 3 ½ stars
This review was originally published in The Weekend Australian Review on November 26. It’s my first album review for the paper. For more on The Necks, visit their website.
The Australian story: Hillsong Music Australia, October 2011
A short feature for The Australian’s arts section about Hillsong Music Australia, the record label arm of the Hillsong Church. Excerpt below.
[Photo above: Hillsong Live plays at the Sydney Entertainment Centre in December. Thousands of fans attend Hillsong's conferences and live album recordings each year. Picture: Trigger Happy Images Source: Supplied]
The crowd roars as the lights dim. All eyes are focused on the stage, where smoke obscures the silhouetted figures. Four guitarists, four singers, two keyboardists, a drummer and a dozen-strong choir break into song. The sound is loud and clear. A boom operator swings a camera across the front rows; its images are fed on to three screens, which also list the song’s lyrics in a huge white font.
The visual aids seem superfluous, though, as most know these songs by heart. Once the strobe lights disperse at song’s end, one of the singers asks: “Does anybody love Jesus here tonight?”
It’s Friday night at the Brisbane campus of the Hillsong Church, yet the production values wouldn’t be out of place at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, about 25km away. About 3500 worshippers surge through these doors each weekend for services on Friday nights and Sunday mornings. The first third of this 90-minute service is more rock show than sermon: there are about 600 people in attendance tonight, all grooving on the spot to the rhythm section, hands held aloft in praise, voices singing, “Our God is greater than all”.
All the musicians on stage are volunteers, as are the sound and lighting technicians. But unlike other live music venues across Brisbane, there’s no pursuit of a pay cheque. Instead, we’re witnessing musical expression in search of divine approval.
After the band leaves the stage, an advertisement for Hillsong’s annual live album recording appears. This year, the recording takes place at Allphones Arena in Sydney, where 15,000 people are expected to attend. Hillsong Music Australia manager Tim Whincop calls the recording — to be held this Sunday — “an extension of our church services”.
“With so many services across a weekend, we don’t often get chance for our whole church to worship together at the same time,” Whincop says. “Our gathering at Allphones Arena will allow us to achieve this, and we will take this opportunity to record our next worship album.”
Since its first album in 1988, Hillsong Music has become one of the most successful independent record labels in Australia. According to Whincop, the label has sold more than 12 million records worldwide, and more than one million records in Australia. It has 21 ARIA-certified gold records to its name, 11 certified gold DVDs and one platinum CD: the 1994 live album People Just Like Us, which sold more than 70,000 copies. Yet, apart from when it pops up in the charts a handful of times each year, the label exists outside the nation’s mainstream music industry.
Hillsong Music emerged in 1983 out of the congregation at the Hills Christian Life Centre in Baulkham Hills, Sydney. Whincop says its music interests have grown from “a small team of passionate people to a group of hundreds of singers, musicians, songwriters and production volunteers” based at three campuses in Sydney, one in Brisbane and 12 extension services held in venues including bowling clubs, universities and cinemas.
Hillsong Music Australia — a department of the church — employs 17 full-time staff.
Its artists and repertoire have little in common with other labels. Where a company such as Dew Process in Brisbane has a diverse roster of artists, such as Sarah Blasko, the Panics, Mumford & Sons and Bernard Fanning, Hillsong has just three bands on its roster: Hillsong Live, Hillsong Kids and United, the church’s best known “praise and worship band”, which was founded in 1998 and has 13 albums under its belt. Like the Hillsong Live series, United releases an album each year. The label’s next release has a Christmas theme.
For the full story, visit The Australian. [Note: you may have to register for an account to read the full article, as News Limited has imposed a paywall as of October 2011]
IGN Australia story: ‘Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years To Make?’, June 2011
A feature story for IGN Australia. Excerpt below.
Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make?
Examining the troubled development of Team Bondi’s opus.
by Andrew McMillen
Team Bondi’s film noir-inspired detective thriller L.A. Noire was released last month to critical and commercial success. Set in a lavish recreation of 1947 Los Angeles, the game eschewed a familiar open-world design for case-by-case detective gameplay that revolved around examining crime scenes and interrogating suspects. Featuring a vast city, cases that adjusted depending on the player’s actions and choices, and sophisticated motion capture technology that had never been used in a video game before, it was a mammoth project.
So mammoth, in fact, that it took over seven years to complete, with a publisher switch – from Sony to Rockstar – midway through. That’s not the whole story, however. The development of L.A. Noire was anything but smooth.
Much has been written about the long development cycles on games such as Duke Nukem Forever, Too Human, or Prey, but the story behind L.A. Noire’s rocky road to release stands out within Australia’s small, tightly-knit development community. Team Bondi’s crime drama is not just the biggest game development project ever undertaken in Australia, it also served as the first-ever project for many of the creative forces behind L.A. Noire. It’s perhaps the combination of all these factors that has resulted in surprisingly open testimonials from former Team Bondi members about their experience working on the game.
Recently, a group of former Team Bondi employees launched a public website with an amended staff roll for L.A. Noire that includes 100 developers omitted from the official game credits. But the look behind the curtain started much earlier. On January 23 2010, an anonymous source on Twitter began leaking stories heard through the grapevine regarding the Sydney-based studio. The account wasn’t run by an ex-employee; it was anonymously dishing the dirt on Bondi as heard through unnamed sources, Wikileaks-style.
The tweets alleged that studio founder Brendan McNamara had mismanaged Team Bondi and development of L.A. Noire, and had spent “tens of millions” on proprietary technology in just a year. Despite then-publisher Sony Computer Entertainment America’s faith in McNamara based on his PS2 hit The Getaway, Sony dropped the project in 2005, when the studio “had far exceeded SCEA’s expected price tag for the game.”
According to the tweets, this situation “threw the studio into disarray. Strangely, McNamara quickly found hospice in his former rivals–the Houser brothers–and L.A. Noire was picked up by Rockstar [Games] in spring 2006… Since then, the game has been revamped, ported, and delayed four times. Rockstar spent more [than] Sony in their efforts to make it not suck.”
Locally, when the tweets were reported by the Australian gaming industry hub Tsumea, several anonymous commenters stepped in to back up the reports: “I can certainly attest to the appalling working conditions, the angry and abusive boss and the ineffective leads who were completely unwilling to do anything to protect their team members,” wrote one. “It’s abhorrent that these young kids are being thrown into a 24/7 corpse grinder with perpetual crunch and weekend overtime,” wrote another.
The comments on Tsumea recall events that took place in 2004, when an anonymous LiveJournal post by a user named ‘EA_spouse‘ expressed frustration at the fact that she rarely saw her fiancé, an employee of Electronic Arts, due to the long hours he was forced to work while attempting to meet deadlines for the title The Lord of the Rings: The Battle For Middle-Earth. The blog received wide press attention and eventually led to three class action lawsuits against EA for unpaid overtime.
After the initial tweets and short-lived online discussions that followed, the situation returned to all-quiet-on-the-Bondi-front. In the meantime, there was finally light at the end of the tunnel: L.A. Noire’s worldwide release date had been set for mid-May 2011. The game would finally see the light of day, but many questions remained. Are the allegations true? Why did it take seven years to bring L.A. Noire to market?
IGN Australia reached out to dozens of former Team Bondi employees to help get a deeper look and tell the story. Eleven agreed to speak on the record, under the condition of anonymity; many feared reprisal from current and future employers if they were to be tagged as whistleblowers. The combined experience of these former staff is extensive: between them, they represent 24 years of service. Their individual tenures range from a few months, to four years, and they include artists, programmers, animators, and software engineers. We also spoke extensively with Team Bondi studio head Brendan McNamara for his perspective.
For the full story, visit IGN Australia.
This story runs to 4,500 words. It’s the biggest story of my career thus far, in terms of length, readership, and impact. As is hopefully apparent, a lot of work went into this story.
I first pitched it to my editor at IGN on February 14, 2011. My initial email, entitled ‘Story pitch: What was it like to work on L.A. Noire?‘, is below.
Hi mate,
Just catching up on some industry news via Tsumea and elsewhere. Am loving the allegations by (seemingly) dozens of anonymous ex-Team Bondi employees about the horrible working conditions behind L.A. Noire.
Favourite comment? “It’s abhorrent that these young kids are being thrown into a 24/7 corpse grinder with their perpetual crunch and weekend overtime.”
I’d like to investigate these allegations and find out how much truth there is to it. Like my Krome story, could be the case of ex-employees agreeing to speak anonymously. As long as we can verify that they were employed by the company and they know what they’re talking about, we should be good to go. Right?
Interested?
Andrew
It wasn’t until I got the nod from my editor and began reaching out to former Team Bondi employees that I realised the Tsumea story was published in 2010, not this year. Those allegations had existed for over a year, and no-one had checked them out. Curious.
As mentioned in the story, I contacted dozens of former Bondi employees. Some were silent; some told me to leave the story alone, as they didn’t want their former colleagues to suffer in the event of the allegations being found to be true. Over the months, I rounded up eleven ex-Bondi workers who were happy to speak to me, anonymously, about their experiences working for the studio.
Rockstar Games found out quite early on that I was investigating this story – via an overzealous source contacting an existing Rockstar employee, I think. They weren’t particularly happy. In an attempt to ensure balanced coverage, they eventually offered me access to Team Bondi CEO Brendan McNamara – though speaking with him was necessary if the story was ever going to be published, as it would be rather slanderous to publish the ex-employees’ comments without juxtaposing them against the responses of their former boss. Yet, as picked up by many of those who commented on IGN and the article’s resultant media coverage, McNamara did little to deny what I’d been told by his former staff.
With a gestation time of over four months, this is by far the longest amount of time I’ve spent pursuing a single story. It was worth it, though, because I feel that it’s a story that needed to be told. I hope you agree.
A final note: I’m interested in pursuing this story – and stories like it – on an ongoing basis. If you’d like to share your experience of working for Team Bondi and/or Rockstar Games, you can email me here.
Mess+Noise interview: George Nicholas of Seekae, 2011
An interview for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.
Seekae: ‘We’re Too Busy Forging Battle Plans’
While other bands are out partying, Sydney’s Seekae are too busy playing LAN games backstage. Ahead of the release of second album ‘+DOME‘, they talk to ANDREW MCMILLEN about poverty, illegal downloading and how they recently “annihilated” Cloud Control on ‘Starcraft’.
Since releasing their debut album The Sound Of Trees Falling On People in December 2008, Sydney trio Seekae have become one of the most interesting independent acts in the country. Both in the studio and on stage, their set-up consists of laptops, MPCs, live drums, keyboards and melodica; their sound, a distinctive and complex brew of electronica. Rarely do vocals work their way into the mix, yet the band have a reputation for delivering: they won a Sydney Music, Art and Culture (SMAC) award in 2009 for ‘Best Live Act’, and re-released Trees with a bonus disc of remixes (and a PVT cover) upon signing with indie label Rice Is Nice.
So how have the trio – John Hassell on synth/guitar, Alex Cameron on synth/drums and George Nicholas on synth/melodica – spent the couple of years between their debut album and its forthcoming follow-up, +DOME? Playing too much Starcraft, according to Nicholas, though he confirms they still attempt to record new ideas each day, even if most of it is “absolute garbage”. It’s fitting that a video game would distract these three from their artistic calling; they were originally named after the DOS game Commander Keen, before shortening to a stylised version of its initials after discovering that the name had already been taken.
Though Cameron was initially scheduled to do this interview, some unexpected laptop problems ahead of a show supporting Mount Kimbie in Perth on the next night – simply, a computer wouldn’t turn on – caused him to flee to the nearest repairs store, leaving Nicholas to fill his shoes.
There was an article published in triple j mag in March last year, where you wrote: “Musicians don’t have any money. They spend all the money they earned on new instruments and laptops.” Is this still the case?
George: Yeah. I think I’m the poorest I’ve ever been, actually. I don’t think we’re going to hit the jackpot for a while. I hope we do, but we’ve still been eating spaghetti for a couple of weeks now, waiting for our cheque to come in.You’re the poorest now that you’ve ever been?
Yeah. I mean, we put some money into recording the album, and stuff like that. What people don’t understand is that, in order to write an album, you have to take a lot of time off work. You have to dedicate a lot of your time to doing it. I think that’s the main reason why we’re so poor, I guess. But it’s not that bad. We’re not entirely starving. [Laughs]Does the lack of money bother you?
No, it’s alright. I mean, it does bother me, because it’s always hard juggling a shitty day job and a band. A lot of my friends are going and getting real jobs and careers, but I look at this and just see – although I’m not being paid that much for it – it’s good to be able to do this stuff, and have people listen to it. It’s all fine. It’s all gravy! [Laughs]You also wrote that you have to “try and convince security that an MPC drum machine is pretty much the same thing as a laptop, and that it was designed to destroy dancefloors, not jets”. I take it this conversation happens every time you’re in an airport.
[Laughs] Yeah. We always get a few snickers and laughs every time we go through the x-ray machine. I carry all my stuff in my backpack. I carry my laptop, my soundcard, my hard drive, my MPC, my Kaos pad, all in one bag. There’s like 10 different things. It’s really absurd when you see someone taking out all these suspicious-looking things out of their bag. We get a lot of strange looks. But we always make it through, although every single we time go through, we get the explosives check.
For the full interview, visit Mess+Noise. For more Seekae, visit their Myspace. The audio for their track ‘Blood Bank‘ is embedded below.
The Vine album review: Collarbones – ‘Iconography’, 2011
An album review for The Vine. Excerpt below.
Collarbones – Iconography
(Two Bright Lakes)Despite being written and arranged by two dudes living in different cities, Collarbones’ debut record is surprisingly cohesive. The product of the interstate collaborations (or should that be collarborations? *cymbal crash*) between Sydney-based Marcus Whale and Adelaide native Travis Cook, Iconography is the disorienting soundtrack to a ride through multiple sounds and scenes: electronica, pop, R&B and hip-hop all seem to inform the duo’s sound in equal measures. This has been Collarbones’ best asset since Whale and Cook began fooling around together in 2007: they can’t be confused with anyone else, they’re on their own wavelength. Iconography is worthy of your attention if only for its unique individuality.
Describing Collarbones’ music robs the experience of much of its pleasure, so here’s a couple of cliff notes. Most every song is built around an eclectic selection of sampled beats, synths and instrumentation, all of which are chopped and shunted into a shifting mass of sound. The results feel organic and effortless, the effects beguiling. In spite of the disjointed nature of their compositions, the production smooths over most jagged edges to ensure Iconography stays on a fairly even keel. Whale sings on the majority of the album’s 11 tracks; more often than not, his voice is discombobulated just as much as the surrounding instrumentation. Some of the album’s best moments are lyricless; the hook of ‘Id’ – if it can even be called a hook – is essentially a symphony of swelling vocal samples, intercut with staccato beats. Previous singles ‘Beaman Park’ and ‘Kill Off The Vowels’ feature Whale’s voice prominently, though the songs’ moods are vastly disparate. The latter is bent around a dark, almost industrial vibe and lower-register singing; ‘Beaman Park’ pitch-shifts Whale’s voice to improbably lofty heights. Both work incredibly well.
For the full review, visit The Vine. For more Collarbones, visit their Tumblr. Music video their song ‘Don Juan‘ embedded below.
Elsewhere: an interview with Marcus Whale of Collarbones for The Vine
IGN Australia story: ‘Australian Games Education: A 2010 Report Card’
My second feature story for IGN Australia. Excerpt below.
Australian Games Education: A 2010 Report Card
Do you want to work in the games industry? The good news is that over two dozen education institutions across Australia offer games-related degrees. But how valuable is having a degree? Are they keeping up with the changing face of development in Australia? And with so many studio closures how many jobs are there anyway? IGN AU finds out…
In the wake of Krome Studios’ significant downsizing in mid-October, one fact became very clear: finding employment in the local game development industry was going to be harder than ever before. Though Australia’s largest gaming company surpassed over 400 employees across three studios at one point, their gradual decline eventually returned the vast majority of that talent back into the national job pool.
All industries move in cycles, and though the Australian game development sector is at a low ebb right now, it’s myopic to believe that things will stay this way forever. Though Krome’s wave broke upon the shore and left a great many stranded – as the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall – other sectors of the local industry are experiencing periods of unprecedented growth. Krome’s downfall served as a two-prong reminder: that large-scale game development is a high-risk business, and that relying upon overseas publishers’ work-for-hire cheques in a volatile world economy is among the riskiest business in the games industry.
Disheartening though the events of October 2010 were, as I sifted through the detritus of vindictive former Krome employees and their shattered CEO Robert Walsh, one question kept flitting through my mind: what did this all mean for students graduating with games degrees in 2010? Here they were, about to enter the job market – many of them bleary-eyed, owing to marathon all-nighter sessions spent completing their final projects – only to be shuttled to the very end of the queue. They’d stand behind former staff from Krome, and the handful of other development companies who’ve shuttered in recent years; behind anyone who ever took on a temp QA (quality assurance; game testing) role; behind existing games graduates, many of whose only industry experience is submitting their portfolio to every studio with an email address, and – if they were lucky – participating in a brief internship, arranged on behalf of their educational institution in their final trimester.
What else but passion could drive these people? To give up several years of their (often young) lives, to willingly put themselves tens of thousands of dollars in debt, just for the slight chance that they’ll be able to make a living making video games in Australia? The answer must be passion, if not madness. Yet here they are: hundreds of them, each year, graduating with degrees in games design, art, animation and programming. On the other side of mortarboards, robes and well-deserved handshakes awaits uncertainty, self-doubt, and a high likelihood of unemployment – within the game development industry, at least.
Put simply, making games for a living sounds like fun. Given that gaming is the world’s fastest-growing entertainment medium – last year, for instance, Australian consumers spent over $2 billion on video games – it’s unsurprising that tertiary education providers were keen to institutionalise game development, just as they’ve done for practically every other form of creativity. As I discovered, though, investing in a games-specific education in the hopes of obtaining employment within the local industry is a decision of similarly high risk as building your company’s business model around ever-shifting economies and the mood swings of international publishers.
For the full story, visit IGN Australia. At 6,000 words, it’s the longest article I’ve written. A huge thanks to everyone I spoke with for this story.
The Vine interview: Big Boi
An interview for The Vine: face-to-face with Big Boi in Sydney. Excerpt below.
In Australia for one night only to promote the new Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit video game, American hip-hop artist Antwan “Big Boi” Patton had been booked wall-to-wall with media commitments from the moment he arrived at the Hordern Pavilion. From 1pm onwards, he was being filmed, questioned, and photographed by an extensive media contingent, all eager for a moment in the presence of one half of the multi-million selling duo OutKast. In the hall adjacent, a few million dollars’ worth of cars are having their tires kicked – though not literally, as they’d probably be escorted from the building – by a couple of thousand gig attendees, all of whom were offered free tickets through a variety of web outlets. Initially access was only guaranteed to those who pre-ordered the new game, but in the weeks leading up to the event, it seems that EA and their partners couldn’t get rid of the tickets fast enough. Indeed, at the height of Big Boi’s kickarse, hour-plus-long set, the Hordern was only about half full.
Before the show, The Vine was initially scheduled for 10 minutes with Big Boi in a space upstairs at the Hordern that’d been designated as the venue’s green room. In actuality, it was a room flanked with thick black curtains, long tables, and a couple of dozen people milling around. A curious combination of anticipation, expectation, and desperation hung in the air. Only two chairs were set up, atop one of which sat Big Boi in front of a television, an Xbox 360, and the new Need For Speed game. The other seat was warmed by a revolving door of interviewers, most of whom were committing their conversation to video. This wouldn’t be a problem if each team filming used the same chair, game banner and lighting set-up, but of course, it’s never that easy. The Vine watched as a half-dozen video teams – mostly Australian, but a couple of New Zealanders, too – generally spent more time re-arranging the set than they did actually speaking to Big Boi.
It’s past 8pm when my interview opportunity arrives, and by that time, I could tell that the rapper was well and truly over posing for photos and answering the same five questions. I’m informed that since they’re running behind schedule, my time with Big Boi has been cut in half. Great! “Try and keep it close to that five minute mark,” his tour manager tells (warns?) me; “We wanna get him to relax a little bit before the show.” And fair enough. I’d moved the chairs a few metres away from the television because I wanted his full attention, but his tour manager insists that they be moved back, directly in front of the screen. Big Boi mishears my name (“Anthony?”), shakes my hand, picks up a controller and turns his sunglass-clad eyes to the game, where he’s driving a yellow Lamborghini at high speed through a beautiful, snowy mountaintop setting. This will take some skill.
–
“So I hear you’re a bit of a gamer,” I begin.
“Yeah, man,” he replies. “I do a little somethin’ here and there, you know.” Eyes on the screen. Mind more interested in the game than in speaking with yet another journalist he’ll never meet again.
Full interview on The Vine. More Big Boi on MySpace. The music video for his song ‘You Ain’t No DJ‘ is embedded below.
Elsewhere: a review of Big Boi’s debut album, Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son Of Chico Dusty for The Vine.
Mess+Noise EP review: The Jezabels
An EP review for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.
The Jezabels – Dark Storm
The press release seems to want me to mention something about their age, so here goes: Sydney quartet The Jezabels are aged between 23 (singer) Hayley Mary) and 25 (drummer Nik Kaloper). Together, they write soaring, dramatic pop, so here’s where I’m meant to make some kind of comment on their maturity, and how incredible it is these young musicians are performing deep, complex, Important Music. This EP is apparently the “third and final release in a trilogy that began with 2009’s The Man Is Dead…” Alright then, moving on.
The strangest thing about this band is that the instrumentation is essentially a blank canvas for Mary, whose voice is so urgent and alluring that you’re half-tempted to take a cold shower immediately after the disc ends. Her every yelp and note sticks in the mind, and endures; as for the instrumentation, there’s little to write home about. The band’s musical point of difference is the absence of a bass; keyboardist Heather Shannon fills out the bottom end by playing slow, deliberate chord progressions. Guitarist Sam Lockwood favours clean, feeble tones for the most part. In ‘A Little Piece’, his use of an ebow strives for that mournful, desolate soundscape feel, amid bursts of Foals-like noodling. Lockwood’s best asset as a player is knowing when to dial it back. Indeed, much of Dark Storm is characterised by a sense of space, which swells to crescendo during each chorus.
Full review at Mess+Noise. More of The Jezabels on MySpace. The music video their song ‘Mace Spray‘ is embedded below.
Mess+Noise album review: The Holidays
An album review for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.
The Holidays – Post Paradise
Somewhere between Cut Copy’s electro wonderland, Gypsy And The Cat’s soft rock, and Empire Of The Sun’s delusions of pop grandeur sits Post Paradise, the debut from Sydney’s The Holidays. Despite such reference points, the album somehow remains interesting. Put it down to the strength of the songs, which unerringly achieve that rare pop trifecta: accessibility, originality and memorability. Tony Espie, who’s worked with The Avalanches, Midnight Juggernauts and Cut Copy, has mixed the album, which may account for its overall slickness and sheen.
Favourite moments? The way the guitars intercut the vocal melody in ‘Broken Bones’; the ethereal introduction to ‘6AM’, which dissipates upon meeting the sound of an alarm clock and takes a right turn into tropical pop-land; the double-tracked phaser effect applied to the guitars in ‘2 Days’, and the joyous, nonsensical vocal hook in its chorus; and the seemingly effortless chillwave upon which ‘Conga’ rides (accompanied by bongos, widdly-widdly guitars and an incessant, sensual bass throb).
Full review at Mess+Noise. More of The Holidays on MySpace. The music video for ‘Golden Sky‘ is embedded below.
