This Week's Releases

This week's latest and greatest…

Ball Park Music — GOOD MOOD (Stop Start)

Brisbane favourites Ball Park Music's latest album is their most playful and ambitious record yet. After the introspection of their previous effort, Every Night The Same Dream, the five-piece's ecstatically titled fifth album seems to share more in common with the indie band's earlier work, reasserting the idea that it really is nice to be alive.

The album sets expectations high from the first moments, as the words, "Experience incredible music, yes!" reverberate through the speakers, right before lead singer Sam Cromack starts singing about nuclear apocalypse and the end of the world. Continue reading… 

Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy (Matador/Remote Control)

Indie rock wunderkind Will Toledo was still in the tail-end of his teens when he first released his bedroom masterpiece Twin Fantasy on Bandcamp under his Car Seat Headrest moniker back in 2011, and his first move following the breakthrough of his smash 2016 opus Teens Of Denial is to revisit Twin Fantasy again but this time armed with newfound studio mastery and a full band at his disposal.

A song cycle about the confusion of adolescence and the sexual awakening concurrent with one's first fully-fledged relationship, the raw power and emotion of the original lo-fi document remains intact but is now delivered in a far more realised fashion favouring pristinely clean (but not cloying) production, presumably far more in line with Toledo's original vision. Continue reading…

Marlon Williams — Make Way For Love (Caroline)

Itinerant Kiwi-bred troubadour Marlon Williams has crisscrossed the globe for the past two years on the back of his acclaimed 2015 eponymous debut album, creating a huge and devoted global following for himself in the process. Yet instead of being daunted by the prospect of mass scrutiny for his inevitable follow-up, he retreated to his native Lyttelton on the South Island of New Zealand and penned the calculatedly ambitious cache of songs that comprise his stunning new album Make Way For Love. 

The most major shift between the two collections is the completely recalibrated musical focus: where on his debut Williams favoured the alt-country realms with flourishes of bluegrass, blues and folk, he's now gone completely and unreservedly into '60s crooner mode, as if he filed away his Gram Parsons and The Byrds records and pulled out a slew of Roy Orbison and Jim Reeves platters in their place. Continue reading…