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*Tweeet tweeeet!* Yes, just over there thanks! Wow, there’s more singles than ever rolling in to Mine’s On The 45. You might be able to hear the posties dumping sack after sack on our doorstep. *Tweeeet tweeeeet!* Thankyou! I didn’t even know posties still blew whistles, how quaint. Due to an increase in singles demanding our attention, once a month we’re going to try to suppress the rant, and squeeze in twice the usual number of reviews. Wish me luck.
 SINGLE OF THE WEEK
FIRE! SANTA ROSA, FIRE! – Little Cowboys, Bad Hombres
(Dot Dash Recordings)
In the space of a couple of singles, Adelaide’s Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire! have become one of the most excitingly placed guitar bands in the country to yet deliver their debut album. Little Cowboys, Bad Hombres keeps on marking the five-piece as innovators in making three-minute guitar songs work. Co-vocalists David Williams (high pitched and slightly muffled) and Caitlin Duff (another entry in the currently popular Washington/Blasko vocal style) trade lines almost unaware the other is singing in this multi-multi-layered boppy indie jaunt, at times overlapping to the point it sounds like two different songs have been mashed up. That’s a positive though, especially with the guitars delivering enough riffs and flourishes that a lesser band could have spread the ideas in this one song over an entire EP.
 THE THERMALS – We Were Sick
(Stomp)
From Portland, Oregon, The Thermals have gone unnoticed by the larger population for a few albums, despite their list of producers including members of Death Cab and Fugazi. We Were Sick is a sub-three-minute guitar pop shout-along that’s much cheerier and reminiscent of early Weezer than those collaborators might suggest. Further proof that in pop music, the most depressing topics can make for the most fun songs (and vice versa), it’s hard not to smile as a nasal Hutch Harris blasts “We were sick / Sick in the brain / Too young to kill / Too old to contain”, and makes you consider that maybe moshing could be fun again.
THE FUMES – Rogue River Woman
(MGM)
We always welcome new singles from The Fumes here at Mine’s On The 45, as the Sydney blues-rock duo tend to wring a freshness out of a genre that’s too often bogged down by mediocrity. Here they’re combining commanding lead guitar solos with more fuzzed up guitar than it would do you any good to shake a stick at, plus drums … thereby simultaneously playing more instruments then a duo has any biological capacity to. Unfortunately, while the fuzzy background gives the impression that Rogue River Woman holds some of the gruffness and grit that we love about the blues, the uncharacteristic staid vocals actually make this sound closer to the middle-American Dave Matthews Band steak roadhouse than the Deep South blues bar. Given Jim Diamond of The Dirtbombs is producing, the wash-over blandness is even more disappointing.
OK GO – When The Morning Comes
(EMI)
Horns, a massive chunky bass, choir-like vocals and a constant staccato piano clink underneath the hugeness of it all. This is grand, sun-drenched, spirit-soaring big band music that Americans tend to do best, in the style of The Polyphonic Spree, The Flaming Lips or, when E’s in the mood, Eels. It’s a little shallow in comparison to those masters of the sound, unable to quite match the inherently happy arrangement with a lyric that burrows into the heart, but it takes a decent shot without sounding like a cynical bandwagon-jump attempt. And while they’re probably resigned to the fact that they’ll forever be The Treadmill Band, that hasn’t stopped OK Go from making a pretty awesome one-shot mass marching band clip.
RU C.L – Rearrange
(Remote Control)
Ru C.L’s background in Australian hip hop apparently dates all the way back to collectives in the scene’s inception in the mid-‘90s (that date of origin would of course ignore the spoken word breakdown in the middle of Melissa’s Read My Lips, 1991). With a jarring but interesting psychedelic musical touch, including the Primus-like squeak of heavy bass-strings, Rearrange, a song about persevering in life, shows that he can deliver a phrase or hundred with conviction. But as is often the case with hip hop songs about an abstract concept, there’s too much phrasing that rhymes but adds nothing to a narrative, leaving the whole song running in unrewarding circles. “I work hard / Never give up my guard / Under the stars / But I never believe you rap stars” he spits, before heading into a cliché of how the bouncer’s only letting ladeez in. With some grabbing lyrical substance, this could be more worth your time.
 THE QUADRATIC CONTINGENCY – The Quadratic Contingency EP
(Independent)
When it comes to jazz I’m no real expert, and when you add the phonetically-based prefix ‘nu’ to the genre, I’m a Class A moron. Let’s face it, this column has reviewed more Dannii Minogue singles than it has nu-jazz, so don’t get cranky with me when I say that while the three-track EP by local quartet The Quadratic Contingency shows off a great degree of variety with instrumentation (traditional jazz elements like piano, drums, clarinet, joined by mournful strings and a bunch more) especially considering how sparse the recording can get … the Noonan-esque vocals can border on shrill. Still, if your world of music extends past old jazz to the nu-er variety, you may want to check this experimental lot out.
 DAN PARSONS – Run With Me
(Independent)
I have an analogy. It equates songs with water. It’s such an obvious one I’ve more than likely subconsciously stolen it, but it’s so apt in the case of Dan Parsons’ latest single that I’d ask you to please bear with my probable plagiarism. Run With Me, a gently-sung guitar/piano/tambourine tune, isn’t a great flood of novelty or hooks. It doesn’t burst out of the speakers and wash you over with its force like some songs, before leaving you either floundering in its inescapability or sitting soggy in its wake. Instead, the chiming Panics-like low key delivery is a steady trickle of melody that seeps into your ears and trickles into your brain, and with repeated exposure, soil and sunlight, vegetables will grow in your head. That didn’t work at all. Run With Me is a refreshing take on adultish melodic rock though, adding to the local Parsons’ continued breadth of impressive material.
 JÓNSI – Go Do
(EMI)
What happens when the man behind Iceland’s most acclaimed and bizarre act, Sigur Rós, (and yep, I’m counting Björk in that) steps out into the spotlight himself? Well, for those whose tastes have found Sigur Rós a bit on the twee side, you’re not going to find anything to persuade you otherwise here. Vocally, Jónsi could be Lisa Mitchell’s little sister, and even though he’s singing in English (at least in places), the combination of his accent and high warbling style make much of Go Do indecipherable. But to limit your assessment of the song to these points is to miss what makes his band so beloved by their disciples. Electronic beeping vocal samples, an almost dog-pitched pipe and Jónsi’s stunning voice inject the song with an emotional optimism, and a stomping beat makes it incessantly catchy, similar to Doves’ Pounding. Fans who have previously fainted or sobbed when seeing Sigur Rós live are unlikely to find the same revelations, but there could at least be a few goosebumps in waiting.
SIMON TOPPER
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