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While most of the world is currently obsessed with all things Olympic (Come on Australia!), a few items of music news have recently caught my attention.
I’m really pumped to hear that Brand New have announced that they’ll soon be working on a new album after they finish touring in September. Their last sublime release The Devil & The God Rage Inside Me is probably my favorite album of all time so I can’t wait to see what they bring to the table for their latest release.
I must admit that I hadn’t actually heard of Trial Kennedy until I read a great review for their upcoming album on Bombshellzine back in June. Despite a couple of EP releases (Present For a Day & Picture Frame), and frequent support tours with the likes of Gyroscope, Kisschasy & Fall Out Boy, its taken them about four years to finally release their first album. After receiving a record deal with Sony BMG, these four Melbournites headed over to Atlanta and worked with producer Nick DiDia (Stone Temple Pilots, Powderfinger, Incubus & Audioslave) to develop their debut album New Manic Art.
When Less Than Jakes last release In With The Out Crowd was critically panned for sounding too pop & commercial they mutually split from their previous partner Warner Bros. to start up their own label Sleep It Off. After listened to the fans they then decided to go back to basics for there follow up album GNV FLA. Chris Demakes (guitarist/vocalist) and JR (saxophonist) stated that “We should do what we’ve always done, and do what we do best” which resulted in “a quintessential Less Than Jake record”.
On Monday I saw my second MIFF movie called Not Quite Hollywood. This time my trick of arriving a little earlier was to no avail as one of the ‘organisers’ -a loose term as they didn’t know what the fuck was going on- told us that the movie was delayed by about 15 min and just to rub it in she then condescendingly added that we should enjoy our time in the line. Thankfully this film was well worth the final 30min delay as it turned out to be one of the most funny & entertaining documentaries I’ve seen. As an added bonus there was even a Q&A session from it’s director and two others that had films featured in the doco.
On Saturday night I was lucky enough to attend the Australian premier of the Diary Of The Dead at the Melbourne international film festival. On the night, all horror fans were in for a real treat as the legendary director of horror, George A. Romero was there in person to give a short introduction & 15 min Q&A at the end of the film.
Agony & Irony is Alkaline Trio’s 6th studio album & sees the Chicago threesome split from their previous independent label to join with Epic records. While this has resulted in the usual backlash of sellout remarks (The band recently endorsed a limited edition set of Nike Alkaline Trio shoes), this is still a solid release that will should appeal to those that like their punk rock laced with a good dose of pop.
Today I was originally going to try write a review for the new alkaline Trio album, but instead I got distracted after listening to the latest effort from Me First And The Gimme Gimmes titled Have Another Ball.
Unfortunately it caught my attention in a bad way as this album is actually pretty substandard. Even though every Gimme Gimme release has had its fair share of hits & misses, their 7th studio album is by far their worst to date (technically it could be classified as their 1st album since it was originally going to be released as a b-side to their 1997 release Have A Ball).
Yes it’s that time of the year again, where Melbourne is host to it’s very own International Film Festival (MIFF). This 17 day event will be kicking off next Friday (25th July) and up run until July the 17th.
Since I’ve got a short attention span it took me a while to sort through the usual tedious arthouse listings, but the following is a list of the movies that I’ll be hoping to check out at the Festival. For a detailed list of film times & locations scroll to the bottom of the post.
Despite the general opinion that Weezer haven’t released a great album since their early days I still stuck by the band up to their last effort, Make Believe. After traded in their catchy rock riffs for cheesy synthesiser laden ballad’s this release was pretty forgettable & left me wanting more old school Weezer tunes. When I heard the fun upbeat single Pork & Beans (more on that later) from their latest release I was actually pretty excited about the rest of the songs as it sounded like it would be a return to form for the band.
Some really great music tours have been recently announced for Melbourne so I thought I would write a post to keep track of them all (the calender on this site seems to have disappeared).
Coming up this Friday is the Strung Out & No Use For A Name show at Billboards. Tickets are still on sale ($39) from Oztix and considering they’re over here for a whole month & playing plenty of shows there’s no excuse not to check out this sweet double header act. Check my previous post for further details
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