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 SINGLE OF THE WEEK
SAILORS & SWINE – The Boiling Sea
(Spooky Records)
Take into account the name of this new Melbourne band, the title of their debut single, and the nom de plume of their upcoming album All Hail The Drunken Liar, and it would be reasonable to expect a shanty-styled collection of maritime rum-jigs. What The Boiling Sea reveals, however, is less swash in the group’s buckle, and more Old in their Testament. Wait, that made literally no sense. Retribution themed and harsh sounding, vocalist Billy McCabe releases a majestically demented howl, baying about a world notsomuch black and white as it is different shades of blood and flame. The Boiling Sea builds from a Kim Salmon styled creeps into a frightening ‘80s-Bad-Seeds Nick Cave story, like The Mercy Seat but without its underlying nobility. B-side The Birds skips back over Cave’s work to the even more primal The Birthday Party, with the brutally told tale of a man falsely accused of murder and hanged, and the line “Birds / birds / birds rip out his eyes” straight up giving me the willies. Comprising members of other Melbourne groups like Bit By Bats, Moscow Schoolboy and The Process, Sailors & Swine arrive not just with some darkly morbid post-punk-country fables, but an addictively chilling mindset. At this rate, the album might leave you curled in a ball on the floor muttering about seeing the devil. Giggle. I can’t wait.
 WIND & BRACKETS – Fire In The Ocean
(MGM)
Here’s to self-improvement! At the time local five-piece Wind & Brackets released their debut promo-only single Nu Nu (Za Za) last year, I had caught the band live a few times, and while there was definitely a fuming ember of crossover indie-rock what I most memorably took away was that this was a band who wanted to be The Strokes, both musically and coolistically. It’s thrilling, therefore, that almost 12 months later Wind & Brackets drop their first release proper, the Fire In The Ocean EP, as a still recognisable but vastly more original entity. While self-confidence was certainly never missing from smooth frontman Tommy Ivo’s stage antics regime, through dance-punk tunes like Lucien and paranoid highlight The Truth Is Best Never Mentioned, the group now sounds more self-assured than cocky. Bringing a garage-band organ (NOT cheesy ‘80s synths…) to the occasional forefront also adds a melodic depth that, as a listener, is more inviting to submerge yourself in, rather than just staying on the shore and watching. It’s true that the band still sounds like a lot of other bands out there (although more from Northern England than New York this time) and of the two similarly titled releases this week I’ll take The Boiling Sea over Fire In The Ocean, but if Wind & Brackets keep improving at this length over each release, their first album should be a cracker.
 BIRDS OF TOKYO – Broken Bones
(MGM)
Powering chords. Soaring vocals. Lyrics conveying a desperately hopeless situation met head-on with a heartfelt commitment to earnest self-determination. Yep, it’s the good ole Power Ballad, tailor made for an inspirational montage of people sweating against the odds on Sports Tonight. It’s easy to be cynical about this sort of track. Natural even. To its credit, Broken Bones does avoid many of the genre’s clichés, as if it’s simply an anthemic, fist-clenching song espousing self-belief that happened to wander into the same area as the Power Ballad, instead of being formulaically constructed from a blue print by an assembly line of soulless major label droids like (I assume) approximately 98% of Power Ballads are. If you’re needing some propping up and think a dose of Perth guitars might do the trick, knock yourself out. Otherwise, just keep an ear out for the hook line You must be out of your heeeeeeaaaaaad in an inevitable Olympics promo soon.
 JAGUAR LOVE – Jaguar Love EP
(Matador / Remote Control)
It’s pretty great when questions or circumstances you’ve pondered hypothetically for ages actually come to realisation. It happened last year when John Howard lost not just government, but his own seat. Burn. It happened last week when Declan shouted to the whole General Store that he loves Didge. It happened just before when I finally remembered to order my BLT from the local cafe without BBQ sauce. All of these were things I had thought about for ages, wondering if they would ever happen, and if they’d be as amazingly life-affirming as I dared hope. They all were. This week there’s another longrunning hypothetical to retag as an actuality. Really, who amongst us hasn’t wondered what a group featuring members of the Blood Brothers and Pretty Girls Make Graves would sound like? See, nobody. It’s my pleasure (well, duty really, as a singles reviewer) to report that the resulting self-titled Jaguar Love EP is probably even better, and certainly poppier, than envisaged. Three tracks cut from the same pulsing guitar-heavy glittery indie-pop template, they’re unexpectedly not that far removed from the sounds of someone like Operator Please, although with a touch more Death From Above style production. Dancing to guitars has become the norm over the past five years or so, but rarely is it done with such a non-ironic smile. Jaguar Love isn’t building any new bridges to uncharted musical territory here, but for fans of their previous bands, the members aren’t burning any either. Enjoy.
GRAFTON PRIMARY – She Knows It
(Shiny)
While the final counting continues in the Mine’s On The 45 Tally Room, the trend seems pretty definitive. It’s been with the help of star recruits like Sydney synth-wielders Grafton Primary that this result has been made possible, made all the more startling by the fact that this electronica-inspired group are yet to release their debut album, though of course their prominence has been helped along by outings on remixes for other Triple J adored luminaries like Faker and Dukes Of Windsor. Nonetheless, this is a convincing win for a cause which only a few short years ago was written off by many simply as a fad, and an often cloying one at that. Yes, I’m being told that the numbers have been confirmed now, and we’ll cross live to the Mine’s On The 45 Auditor General for the announcement.
“Good evening. It is with certainty that we can now reveal that the amount of songs containing what are classed as ‘cheesy ‘80s synth hooks’ released in the current decade distinctly outnumber the amount of songs containing cheesy ‘80s synth hooks released in the 1980s themselves. It is therefore the decision of the Mine’s On The 45 committee to retitle these tired and clichéd sounds as ‘cheesy ‘00s synth hooks’, starting with Grafton Primary’s She Knows It. May God save the scene, because nothing will save those bereft of imagination.”
SIMON TOPPER
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