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  • The Monthly story: ‘Only The Lonely’, August 2013

    A story for the July 2013 issue of The Monthly. The full story appears below; illustration by Jeff Fisher.

    Only The Lonely

    After midnight with ‘Psychic TV’

    On a dark and stormy Thursday night, broadcasting live from a TV studio in northern Sydney, clairvoyant Francis Bevan “reads” one viewer after another, using their birthdate. Margaret, born on 24 June 1961, wants to know whether she’ll ever fall in love again. Laura (12 December 1986) wonders whether she’ll have more kids. Janelle (6 December 1964) asks whether her mother is happy “on the other side”.

    Bevan next turns his attention to Eileen, the night’s oldest caller by some margin. She’ll be 70 on 15 July. In a voicemail message broadcast on the studio’s speakers, Eileen asks what the future holds, “whether there’s any money coming, and will I move?”

    Staring straight into the camera, Bevan tells Eileen she will move, in six to 12 months’ time. She’ll sell her property and end up close to water. Meanwhile, two men, one a father figure, the other closer to her in age, will watch over her.

    “We’re going to get the lovely Mal to use her psychic fingers to pull you out two tarot cards,” says Bevan, as the producer rings a bell to indicate that 90 seconds have elapsed. Malvadee McIver, the smiling, sprightly host, selects two cards from the deck. Bevan glances at the cards.

    “Definitely the sale of the property is going to happen,” he continues. “We’ve got the High Priestess here, and the Knight of Swords. This tells us there’ll be sudden decisions, but positive ones. I hope you’ve enjoyed the reading. Have an absolutely fantastic 2013.”

    This is the format of Psychic TV, a two-year-old program filmed in Frenchs Forest and screened nationally Thursday to Sunday, between 11 pm and 2 am. Queries are raised by Australian viewers and answered by a rotating cast of psychics – tonight, two men and two women – who take turns sitting at a desk beside McIver.

    Bevan, a former police officer, was 2007 NSW Psychic of the Year. He wears a dark suit with a bright pink shirt, and rarely smiles on camera. Fellow psychic healer Christian Adams wears a suit jacket over an open-neck shirt, showing off his crystal pendant, and reads auras by closing his eyes, tilting his head and gesturing wildly.

    While the men could pass for car salesmen, the two women are dressed more suitably for astral travel. Tarot reader Amira Celon wears a striking white caftan with gold accessories. Psychic medium Kerrie Erwin wears a floor-length leopard-print dress and red lipstick. All four are middle-aged.

    The three psychics not directly addressing the viewers remain visible in booths, taking live phone calls. Names, birthdates and star signs are read in a background blur. Time is money, after all. Psychic TV charges $5.45 per minute, or $4.75 for those who have registered their credit card details and authorised $100 in credit. Text messages cost $5 apiece.

    But the night – the crew’s first on the newly constructed, purple-hued set – is not without technical difficulties. At one point the show’s graphical overlay, which displays three phone numbers as well as the command prompts to reach the three psychics in their booths, suddenly disappears. Production manager Danny Stocker runs frantically between the studio and the bank of broadcasting technology stacked in the next room. On the phone to tech support, the 38-year-old barks: “It’s very urgent because we’re not making money!”

    It’s 34 minutes before the graphics reappear on screen. In the interim, McIver enthusiastically repeats the phone numbers every few minutes, but the pace noticeably slows.

    Exactly who watches Psychic TV is not clear. Free-to-air viewers find it on the digital channel TV4ME; Austar subscribers via the Aurora channel. The show’s Facebook page has 12,000 fans, 9000 of whom are women. “A large percentage of the population hasn’t heard of us,” admits Michael Charlesworth, who owns Interactive Media, the company behind the show. He yawns – he’s not usually on set this late. “That’s what we want to change.”

    An hour into the show, at midnight, the production team – uniformly youthful, some still studying media at university – ask whether I’d like a live reading. My details are sent through as a text message. “Andrew was born on 10 February 1988 and requests a general reading. He loves the show!”

    Kerrie Erwin shuffles her cards. “Put your seatbelt on, because you’ve lots of changes ahead, Andrew,” she says, specifying a new career and a move interstate, both of which are news to me. Then she switches to a picture message from Gina, 25, who asks what Erwin “can see happening in the next three months, particularly in romance”.

    Three hours of psychic television pass surprisingly quickly. There are plans to add Wednesday nights to the schedule, which would take the total to 15 hours of live advertising each week. When Bevan ends the night’s final call, the automated telephone system reports that the four psychics, plus a few others listed on-screen as working from home, have clocked 1231 minutes – a gross taking of about $6000. (The call times are rounded up, as technically the four psychics have potentially 720 minutes between them.) A producer tells me that 1400 minutes makes for a “good night”.

    It’s just past 2 am. The crew are outside in the chilly air, smoking. Amira Celon kindly offers to drive me to my destination. Her silver Toyota Yaris is making a strange noise. We travel south, along State Route 29, for ten puzzling minutes before she determines the cause: it’s the bottom of her white caftan, trailing out the door.

  • The Vine story: ‘The benign threat of using mobile phones on planes’, August 2013

    A story for The Vine. Excerpt below; click the image to read the full story.

    The benign threat of using mobile phones on planes

    The Vine story: 'The benign threat of using mobile phones on planes' by Andrew McMillen, August 2013One Tuesday afternoon in April, the Attorney-General of Australia, Mark Dreyfus, was sitting on a Qantas flight bound for Brisbane. While the aircraft taxiied to the runway, Dreyfus used his smartphone to check and reply to emails. His posture was a familiar sight of the modern era: head down, hands low, eyes trained on a rectangular cluster of LEDs, while fingers and thumbs silently fondled a touchscreen.

    A nearby passenger took issue with the Attorney-General ignoring the instructions broadcast throughout the cabin to switch off personal electronic devices prior to take-off. A flight attendant reminded him of this obligation. Dreyfus eventually complied, pocketing the device, but the flight attendant informed the captain of the incident and as a result, Dreyfus was met on arrival in Brisbane by an airport security manager who again reminded the Attorney-General of the rules. These events were reported nationally; some commentators wondered whether a non-politician would have received the same treatment.

    “I am a very, very frequent flyer,” Dreyfus tells me over the phone – maybe the offending smartphone in question – in early June. “I probably know by name half of the Qantas attendants; that’s how often I fly. It was a courteous, very quick reminder in accordance with the protocol that they have, of the rules – which I know.”

    Dreyfus says he’s now a changed man. “I regret the incident,” he says. “For the avoidance of error, I now switch off my phone before boarding. But I do switch it on when the plane has landed. I can recite to you all the flight attendants’ instructions, and this one is: ‘If your mobile device is within reach, you may now switch it on.’ And I do!”

    In this incident, Dreyfus acts as a stand-in for those always-on wage slaves who view air travel as an impediment to productivity, rather than a break from the demands of an era where the ability to communicate with anyone, anytime is no longer an aspiration but an expectation. RIM’s flagship smartphone has long been referred to as a CrackBerry, and there might be no greater symbol of modern technological addiction than witnessing the speed at which those tiny screens are illuminated once humans inside an aircraft return to terra firma.

    Our national airlines have relaxed their policy on mobile phone use in recent years to the point where the devices can be used until the cabin doors are closed, and switched back on shortly after the wheels hit the tarmac. Yet according to some surveys, up to 30 per cent of passengers simply ignore those incessant warnings that electronic devices may cause navigational interference, surmising that if smartphones, laptops, tablets, and e-book readers were a true menace to aircraft, there’s no way in hell that any airline would allow them in the cabin.

    A well-known Australian musician tells me that he never turns his phone off on planes. “I don’t really believe that my smartphone is going to interfere with navigation equipment,” he says. “I think it’s just a power trip from the airlines to make you stand in line.” This personal ethos has never caused any in-flight drama, though my source is always unimpressed when asked to turn off his Kindle e-book reader – a device which lacks any wi-fi or transmission capabilities. “So I have to read your shitty in-flight mag?” he sniffs. “Or I have to buy a physical book? Give me a break, fuck!”

    This particular musician – who wishes to remain anonymous, to avoid being hassled on future flights – is a self-described time management freak. “If I’m running late, I like to turn my phone on before I land to check who’s picking me up. When we’re in a holding pattern, I’ll try to get a signal to check emails and Twitter, to see what’s happened since I’ve been on the flight.” Not one of these planes has ever dropped out of the sky as a result of one phone seeking a connection to the nearest terrestrial tower; it’s unlikely that several hundred devices doing the same thing at the same time would make a difference, either.

    To read the full story, visit The Vine.

  • The Guardian story: ‘School’s out early for overworked and undersupported young teachers’, August 2013

    A story for The Guardian Australia; my first for the website. Excerpt below; click the image to read the full story.

    School’s out early for overworked and undersupported young teachers

    Nearly half of all teaching graduates leave the profession in the first five years, Monash University research has found

    The Guardian story: 'School's out early for overworked and undersupported young teachers' by Andrew McMillen, August 2013

    Close to 50% of Australians who graduate as teachers leave the profession within the first five years, many citing overwhelming workloads and unsupportive staffrooms as their main reason for leaving the job, according to new research.

    The apparent exodus of early career teachers is a significant drain on resources, says Dr Philip Riley, of Monash University’s faculty of education, who is leading Monash’s research into the reasons that lead to young educators resigning at an alarming rate.

    “It’s costing the nation a huge amount of money. It’s just a waste, particularly when we’ve got so many threats to the funding of education,” he says.

    Riley estimates that between 40% to 50% of “early career” teachers – defined as recent graduates with less than five years of practical experience – ultimately seek work in another profession, a nationwide figure that’s consistent with research published in the UK and US.

    The most frequently cited reasons for teachers leaving aren’t related to the traditional complaints of difficult student behaviour or mediocre salaries. Instead, Riley’s research – currently unpublished, with a view to publish later in 2013 – pinpoints unsupportive staffrooms, overwhelming workloads, and employers’ preference for short-term contracts as the main areas of tension.

    “Graduate teachers feel relatively well-prepared to deal with difficult kids, although that can be hard,” says Riley. “Young teachers tend to go into schools highly optimistic and full of energy, but if there’s no one to take them under their wing and help them through those first couple of years, they get very disillusioned. The smart ones start to imagine an easier future doing something else.”

    The estimates in Riley’s study are supported by the Australian Education Union and highlight a system in crisis. “It’s a very demanding profession,” says the AEU federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos. “Workloads and stress are both high. Teachers remain undervalued, underpaid and overworked.”

    This scenario rings true for Nick Doneman, a 28-year-old based in Brisbane. He graduated with a bachelor of education from Queensland University of Technology in 2007. “I really enjoyed my degree,” he says. “My practical experiences [before graduating] were really good. But all of that died quite quickly when I saw that the job wasn’t so much about teaching as it was about being a parent. That was a huge turn-off for me. I felt like classroom teaching was only 25% of the job – the rest was dealing with kids and all their issues, the things that go on between them and their parents, and behaviour management, as well as paperwork.”

    Doneman says he got “thrown from school to school” upon graduating; he took several short-term contract jobs, teaching English, Film and Television, and Social Science, but found it difficult to attain full-time employment. His contract stints involved travelling to schools in and around Brisbane, including Kenmore, Bray Park and Carbrook. He found that it wasn’t the kind of job where you could go home at the chime of the three o’clock school bell with a clear head, either.

    “It involved a lot of work in the afternoons and on the weekend, if you wanted to do the job properly,” he says. “It’s easy to be a bad teacher, and not plan ahead of time what you’re going to teach.”

    In each staffroom, Doneman looked around him and found that very few teachers could relate to the young graduate’s initial passion for making a difference to students’ lives.

    “The majority simply did it as a job,” he says. “They didn’t feel like they had the responsibility to do any planning outside of work. I couldn’t live like that, doing a crappy job. There was no teacher at any of those schools where I looked at them and thought, ‘I like what your life looks like’.” After three and a half years, Doneman threw in the towel, went back to university, and now works as a paramedic.

    To read the full story, visit The Guardian.

  • Shorthand story: ‘The Making of England v Australia’, July 2013

    A story for Shorthand, a Brisbane-based digital technology company. Excerpt below; click the image to read the full story.

    The Making of ‘England v Australia’

    The Making of 'England v Australia' by Andrew McMillen for Shorthand, July 2013

    The first project released by Australian digital publishing company Shorthand details one of sport’s ultimate rivalries, yet ironically, it only came to fruition after partnering with an iconic British media outlet which recently launched down under. In collaboration with the Guardian Australia, ‘England v Australia’ is a long-form interactive story that traces the history of the the two countries’ ongoing contest, which spans generations, oceans and sporting codes.

    “We wanted to develop a tool that would be used by the publishing industry,” says Shorthand executive manager Ben Fogarty. “And what better way to find out what it needs to become than working with someone like the Guardian, with their experience and their approach to storytelling, news and features? It was a great opportunity to get straight into the thick of it with a very well-known, professional organisation, and see how and where Shorthand fits into that scenario.”

    The Brisbane-based start-up was founded in March 2013 in recognition of a problem that had emerged in online journalism: how could publishers tell ‘epic’ stories without the requisite eye-popping budgets, labour-intensive web development, and months of lead time?

    In short: how to craft an interactive masterpiece like ‘Snow Fall’ without breaking the bank each and every time? The start-up saw a gap in the market to provide a high-quality, affordable platform for digital storytellers. Although Shorthand’s goal was clear, the team still had many unanswered questions.

    “‘England v Australia’ helped us define our scope very well,” says Fogarty. “We had a big question around where the content was going to come from, and how digital storytelling is crafted. Do you start with media and put text around it? Do you grab text and find the media to go with it? Being part of that process from an early stage with the Guardian Australia has helped shape in our minds how to create the product features that’d work best for telling these sorts of stories for the web.”

    To read the full story – and get a better idea of the tool that the company is developing – visit Shorthand’s website.

  • The Weekend Australian album review, July 2013: Karnivool – ‘Asymmetry’

    An album review for The Weekend Australian, published 20 July 2013.

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    Karnivool – Asymmetry

    Karnivool - 'Asymmetry' album cover, reviewed in The Weekend Australian by Andrew McMillen, July 2013Never before has an album like this been released by a popular Australian rock act. Dark, deep and challenging, Asymmetry is the third album by Karnivool in eight years, and it sees the Perth quintet moving further away from the accessible, pop-like approach to songwriting that characterised its early releases in favour of intricate, unwieldy prog-rock suites.

    For this, the group is to be admired, as it certainly is not taking the easy way out by pandering to the sensibilities of its significant national audience. Taken in whole, as a 66-minute song cycle, it’s an interesting listen. The problem here is that the songs simply aren’t strong or memorable in isolation. “Interesting” is probably not the adjective these five musicians were aiming for, either.

    Better known as frontman for Birds of Tokyo, Ian Kenny is Karnivool’s most potent weapon. While this was certainly true on 2005 debut Themata and 2009’s Sound Awake, here, Kenny’s vocal hooks are frustratingly few and far between. Dominating the mix is the incessant sturm und drang of his bandmates, who appear to have become scholars of Swedish technical death metal band Meshuggah.

    Shifting tempo changes are the order of the day; aggressive and contemplative moods crash into one another, with little rhyme or reason. The overall effect is as messy and disorienting as the album artwork. Complexity for the sake of complexity soon numbs the ears, and even after repeated listens Asymmetry simply doesn’t make much sense.

    LABEL: Sony
    RATING: 2 stars

  • The Weekend Australian album reviews, June 2013: QOTSA, Sigur Ros

    Two album reviews published in The Weekend Australian Review in June 2013.

    Queens Of The Stone Age – …Like Clockwork

    Queens of the Stone Age - '...Like Clockwork' album cover, reviewed in The Weekend Australian by Andrew McMillen, June 2013The sixth album from this Californian hard rock band solidifies its reputation for consistency. Though founding singer-guitarist Josh Homme is the only ongoing member, he has become known for attracting a rotating cast of accomplished players since the band’s self-titled debut in 1998.

    This time he has re-enlisted master sticksman Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) to keep time, after first trialling this experiment for 2002’s Songs for the Deaf, widely regarded as QOTSA’s finest album. (It helped that the pair hooked up with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones in 2009, too, as Them Crooked Vultures.)

    As expected, it’s an inspired decision, one that sets the tone for yet another compelling collection. Songs such as ‘If I Had a Tail’ and ‘Smooth Sailing’ swagger with a momentum that only Homme and his comrades can muster. First single ‘My God is the Sun’ is the weakest of these 10 tracks; the real gold is buried towards the back.

    ‘I Appear Missing’ and the closing, title track exceed five minutes and hark back to the expansive suites that featured on the band’s excellent second album, 2000’s Rated R. Homme has long since learned that rock music is all about contrasts: atmosphere is just as important as breakneck chord changes.

    “One thing that is clear / It’s all downhill from here,” he sings in the album’s final lyric; he must be taking the piss because six hits and no misses is as remarkable a scorecard as you’ll find among bands of any genre.

    LABEL: Matador/Remote Control
    RATING: 4 stars

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    Sigur Ros – Kveikur

    Sigur Ros - 'Kveikur' album cover, reviewed in The Weekend Australian by Andrew McMillen, June 2013There are bands with distinctive sounds, and then there’s Sigur Ros. These Icelandic gentlemen have produced seven albums, including Kveikur (pronounced ‘quaker’, meaning candlewick in the mother tongue); and with each successive release they further distance themselves from any other act, past or present.

    Formed in 1994, Sigur Ros has long been associated with the post-rock genre that favours sprawling, intricate compositions eschewing traditional verse-chorus structures. Kveikur is the group’s strongest album yet. It’s certainly Sigur Ros’s most accessible collection. Nine tracks, 48 minutes in total; only the closer, ‘Var’ (Shelter), is forgettable: a wordless, aimless dead-end of sunken, delayed piano notes and sighing strings.

    The other eight tracks are thrilling, powerful and inspiring. The nature of the cinematic sound, coupled with the band members’ Icelandic heritage, inevitably conjures mental images of snow-capped mountains and glaciers. Its winter release is ideal. Here, the former quintet is reduced to a three-piece for the first time. Jon Por Birgisson’s incomparable falsetto and bowed guitar playing practically defines this band; even his solo album, 2010’s Go, was virtually indistinguishable from the Sigur Ros catalogue.

    Only Georg Holm (bass) and Orri Pall Dyrason (drums) accompany him here, yet you’d never guess that based on the complexity of the production. Layered strings, clattering percussion and soaring sampled effects run through these songs, as best exemplified on second single ‘Isjaki’ (Iceberg). This is excellent music, unlike anything else on earth. For the uninitiated, Kveikur is the ideal starting point.

    LABEL: XL Recordings
    RATING: 4.5 stars

  • The Monthly story: ‘Chalking The Walk’, May 2013

    A story for The Monthly in the May 2013 issue – my first contribution to the magazine, in ‘The Nation Reviewed’ section. The full story appears below; the illustration is credited to Jeff Fisher.

    Chalking The Walk

    The Monthly story: 'Chalking The Walk' by Andrew McMillen, May 2013On a Tuesday morning in March, 80-odd young people wearing red T-shirts hopped off two buses in Lismore, in northern New South Wales, and began canvassing shoppers and retailers in the central business district. Their quest, as declared on their chests, was to help end extreme poverty. Not in Lismore per se, but globally, by petitioning the federal government to bump up its foreign aid spending.

    The team was one of many converging on Canberra from around the country, as part of “The Roadtrip”, a week-long campaign organised by the Oaktree Foundation, the youth-run group that also arranged the MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY concert in 2006. About eight hundred “ambassadors” were taking part all over the country. Their aim was to gather 100,000 signatures, or around 125 each, over the course of the trip via a smartphone app.

    The target didn’t sound overly ambitious. But, by noon, many of the locals out and about in central Lismore had been approached several times. Some were starting to get ticked off. “We’re actually irritating people now,” noted a group leader, Tammy, and the entire team retreated to a McDonald’s restaurant, where the buses were parked. One overweight team member was in tears. A local woman had accosted her, shouting: “If you stopped eating at fuckin’ McDonald’s, there wouldn’t be any poverty!” The canvasser’s peers moved in to soothe her. “That’s really rude,” someone countered.

    Three days earlier, the volunteers, aged from 16 to 26, had met for the first time at the University of Queensland in Brisbane to undertake an intensive course in political campaigning. Most were university students; a handful were still in high school. Ebony from Townsville was a champion skateboarder pining for her board. James, 21, was a soccer-mad Scot. Emily Rose, a petite redhead, showed off an unnerving party trick: the ability to dislocate her limbs at will. Each had stumped up $400 to cover food, travel and accommodation costs.

    The ambassadors had been taught some handy lines: “The door to ending poverty is opened by thousands”; “Two-thirds of the 1.3 billion worldwide living in poverty are our neighbours”; and “Australia’s fair share is just 70 cents in every $100 to fight global poverty”. This last line was central to the campaign. In 2000, Australia agreed to adopt the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, aimed at reducing extreme poverty. This meant setting aside 0.5% of Australia’s gross national income for foreign aid by 2015 (recently put off till 2016) and 0.7% by 2020. Currently, the nation contributes 0.37%.

    “The government has made a commitment,” the Roadtrip ambassadors pitched to shoppers. “We’re here to keep them true to that.” At night, the team slept rough in local church and sports club halls. By day, when not canvassing or on the buses, the team courted the local media, debriefed, attended further campaigning lessons and enjoyed “personal energising time”, as spare hours were denoted on the itinerary. Some members worried that they were falling behind on their petition targets. “Relax, it’s not about the signatures,” said a group leader. “It’s about the movement.”

    The day before they were in Lismore, the team had detoured briefly to the retirees’ paradise of Bribie Island, where half the group “chalked the boardwalk” with messages – “Help keep the promise of a fair share!” – while the other half were assigned the task of “painting the town red”, by asking local businesses to display campaign posters in their shop windows.

    Many shop owners were charmed enough to comply. “I don’t think they’ll achieve anything, but good luck to them,” a 74-year-old manager said. A girl serving ice-cream next door could barely remember the pitch – “something about foreign aid?” – but said she assented to their request because “they were young, and looked like they were important”.

    Wyatt Roy, the 22-year-old local MP, joined the ambassadors for a barbecue lunch. Wearing sunglasses and a crisp white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, he stood on a picnic table and said, “In this job, very often do people come to me with problems, and very rarely do they come with solutions. Thanks so much for doing what you’re doing.” As the team left Bribie, a sudden downpour washed away the chalked messages. The ambassadors coasted into Canberra two days later, via Kempsey and Port Macquarie, late on Wednesday afternoon, with 47,000 digital signatures.

    The next morning, at seven o’clock, the various busloads from around the country assembled at Parliament House. A giant map of Australia had been painted on the lawn, and the eight hundred ambassadors stood within their respective state boundaries. Chanting slogans, they made a lot of noise. Greens MPs hung around. A cherry picker was on hand so that TV crews and Oaktree’s media team could take shots from above. Bob Carr, the foreign minister, addressed them. “We are on target for 0.5%,” he said, before turning and gesturing behind him. “It’s up to you to persuade everyone in that building that they’ve got to act!”

    Scores of meetings had been scheduled between ambassadors and their local MPs, but many representatives either cancelled or sent staff in their place. Julie Bishop, the shadow foreign minister, slated to speak at the morning assembly, sent her apologies, too.

    The bus trip home, via Sydney, was a long one. A question kept coming up: had they actually made a difference? Was Wayne Swan, the treasurer, any more inclined to heed their call to increase spending on foreign aid by a third, to 0.5% of gross national income? His sixth federal budget will answer that, on 14 May. No one is holding their breath.

  • The Weekend Australian album review, March 2013: Songs – ‘Malabar’

    An album review for The Weekend Australian, published 16 March 2013.

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    Songs – Malabar

    Songs - 'Malabar' album cover, reviewed in The Weekend Australian by Andrew McMillen, March 2013The second album by one of the least Google-friendly bands is short in duration – 39 minutes all up – but long on quality ideas.

    A quartet based in Sydney, Songs were impressive on their self-titled 2009 debut: an eclectic set that centred on taut, jangle-pop numbers, but also found room for a couple of sprawling noise-rock epics. Malabar is a more focused collection than the first that favours the former style over the latter.

    The duelling male-female vocals of songwriters Max Doyle and Ela Stiles are just as complementary as before. If anything, this is their defining trait, and the band uses it to stunning effect on this album’s sixth track, ‘Ringing Bells’. Late in the piece,

    Stiles’s wordless melody weaves between sparkling guitar notes and the driving rhythm section: the result is one of the finest songs in their young career. Fans of veteran American indie trio Yo La Tengo will enjoy Songs’ approach, as the two bands have a few stylistic tropes in common.

    Never is the mix any more complicated than a handful of instruments working together; all in all, Malabar represents a remarkable command of songwriting dynamics and sonics. ‘Looking Without Seeing’ is another highlight, built on a hypnotic bassline, featuring Stiles’s soaring vocals and the unexpected appearance of a flute.

    The core duo clearly made the right decision in introducing Cameron Emerson-Elliot (guitar, formerly Youth Group) and Ben James (drums, Talons) into the fold, as the eight ideas here, plus the abbreviated ninth track, ‘Reprise’, a return to the haunting melody of ‘Ringing Bells’, are all winners.

    LABEL: Popfrenzy
    RATING: 4 stars

  • The Weekend Australian book review: ‘High Sobriety’ by Jill Stark, March 2013

    A book review for The Weekend Australian, republished below in its entirety.

    Frank memoir explores the cost of our drinking culture

    'High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze' book cover by Jill Stark, reviewed by Andrew McMillen in The Weekend Australian, March 2013Scottish-born journalist Jill Stark was a health reporter with a blind spot: despite writing about Australia’s binge-drinking culture for The Age newspaper, she would regularly drink to excess, as she’d done since her teens.

    One too many hangovers, however – the last on New Year’s Day, 2011 – set her, at age 35, on the path of alcohol abstinence for the first time in her adult life. The result is High Sobriety, her first book.

    As the subtitle indicates, this is an account of Stark’s sober 2011, one month per chapter. It’s part memoir, part sociological examination of our national drinking habits, and both aspects work well.

    “Just like Scotland, Australia’s default bonding-ritual is drinking,” she writes near the beginning, noting that her homeland is “a place where whisky outsells milk, and teetotalism is a crime punishable by death”. Stark is being melodramatic, of course, but the narrative makes it clear: to cut booze out of her life is almost as serious as excising a limb.

    On announcing her first period of sobriety – three months, as part of a youth-led health program called Hello Sunday Morning – Stark captures her social isolation vividly. When confronted by her peers about her decision not to drink or smoke, she notes that “my identity was suddenly reduced to the sum of the substances I’d chosen not to ingest”. Her transformation from centre-of-party to self-conscious fringe-dweller makes for a compelling contrast.

    Every aspect of Stark’s life is laid bare: her suspicions that she drinks to dampen the fear of being alone; her troubled love life (she realises in March that she hasn’t been sober during sex in years); her depression and anxiety, perhaps exacerbated by booze; her family’s history of alcoholism, including a grandfather who drank heavily until the day he died. “At the heart of that tragedy: alcohol,” she writes after her mother tells this story for the first time. “A drug I have enjoyed with cavalier abandon simply because it’s legal.”

    Her initial three-month commitment soon turns into 12, thanks in part to a popular feature article about her experience in The Age (and resultant book offers).

    Stark is at pains to point out how difficult not drinking is: she wonders if she’ll be able to navigate various events without booze: her birthday, a return to Scotland, the AFL finals series, a friend’s wedding, Christmas parties and so on. These too-regular instances of self-doubt are the only aspect of her writing that grates a little.

    Wedged between her own confessions are historical passages charting Australia’s history with alcohol, with a focus on the relatively recent, media-defined trend of youth binge drinking; a discussion about journalism’s long, slow dance with alcohol on the job, including war stories from older Fairfax scribes; the role of advertising in the liquor industry; and interviews with public health professionals regarding the effects this drug can have on human brains if consumption is not kept in check. Pertinent observations are plentiful and the author’s tone is never condescending.

    Stark makes it through the year, of course, with more than a few self-discoveries along the way. There is a devastating, unexpected personal tragedy near the end, which pulls the book’s premise into sharp focus. As she puts it: “Life’s too short to be wasted.” This is a conclusion reached without moralising, without judging others. It’s a refreshing approach to the oft-loaded discussion surrounding drug use of all kinds. Near the end, Stark writes:

    As rewarding as my year without booze has been, swimming against the tide has been bloody hard, and at times exhausting. It could be even harder for the next generation of drinkers. As long as laying off the booze leads to claims that you’re a boring, un-Australian loser in an environment set up to convince you alcohol makes you cool and socially functional, young people will continue to get pissed for confidence, comfort, and belonging.

    This isn’t a guide to abstinence, nor is it intended to induce fear in those who drink, to excess or otherwise – though some of the statistics quoted are certainly enough to make any reader consider their consumption. Ultimately, it’s hard not to recommend this book: from teenagers experimenting with their first taste, to those who’ve been imbibing for decades, many will find Stark’s story illuminating, touching, and memorable.

    High Sobriety: My Year Without Booze 
    By Jill Stark
    Scribe, 320pp, $29.95

    Elsewhere: I wrote about the founder of Hello Sunday Morning, Chris Raine, for Qweekend in June 2011

  • Rolling Stone album review: The Drones – ‘I See Seaweed’, March 2013

    An album review for the April 2013 issue of Rolling Stone Australia. Click the below image for a closer look, or read the review text underneath.

    The Drones
    I See Seaweed

    The Drones explore cracks of beauty and humour amid the darkness on sixth LP

    The Drones - 'I See Seaweed' album reviewed in March 2013 issue of Rolling Stone by Andrew McMillenThis album’s greatest surprise is saved for the penultimate track, ‘Laika’: an orchestral upswing suddenly blooms from nowhere, and it’s later paired with a harmonising female choir. Neither stylistic decision sits well with The Drones’ reputation for misanthropic, noisy rock ‘n’ roll, but the result is beautiful.

    This Melbourne band’s sixth studio album sees keyboardist Steve Hesketh expanding the quartet to a five-piece. His contributions here work well, often providing another layer of rhythmic bedrock to keep these eight tracks grounded; on ‘How To See Through Fog’, though, Hesketh’s tinkering accounts for a memorable lead melody.

    Singer Gareth Liddiard is well-known for penning some of the most original rhyming couplets in Australian music; I See Seaweed is no exception. The eight-minute title track alludes to rising seas and overpopulation: “We’re locksteppin’ in our billions,” he sings, “Locksteppin’ in our swarms / Locksteppin’ in the certainty that more need to be born”. It’s the heaviest song – lyrically and musically – that The Drones have released since ‘Jezebel’, the devastating opener to 2006’s Gala Mill.

    But it’s not all dark. ‘Nine Eyes’ sees Liddiard using Google Street View to visit his childhood home – accompanied by a sinister groove – and wondering “what kind of asshole drives this lime green Commodore” parked out front; ‘A Moat You Can Stand In’ matches a hilarious skewering of modern religious practices to a taut, thrash-rock tempo that nods at their early material.

    I See Seaweed captures a singular band in scintillating form, delivering yet another astounding collection of songs.

    Label: MGM
    Rating: 4.5 stars

    Key tracks: ‘I See Seaweed’, ‘Laika’, ‘Nine Eyes’

    Elsewhere: I interviewed Gareth Liddiard for The Vine a fortnight before the album’s release