The rest of the EP is no less striking. Take the aphorism-filled ‘Old Rope’, a track which juxtaposes bullish energy with chronic doubt and lands on something like defiance, the sound loaded with the kind of bitter confidence of those who have longed accepted this world of ours to be rigged against the little man. ‘Chew’ takes things even further, a song of two halves which barrels forward at a hundred miles an hour before stretching out into a weighty instrumental. Again, the presiding emotion is that of exasperation, Gilmore-Innis a man at the end of his rope, pushed too far once too often, and now letting every ounce of gathered frustration pour out in one cathartic breath.

But more than an exercise in self-examination or personal release, Committeemen also use (S)HITS to excoriate the forces responsible for much of our contemporary pain. Taking aim at those who use religious ideology as an excuse for cruelty, final single ‘Control’ is the perfect example. A no holds barred assault on a government who would not only deny healthcare to those most in need, but have the audacity to claim such actions are somehow Christian. “Anything it takes for control,” as the chorus puts it, though you feel such people might not have accounted for the rage they have brought upon their heads.

(S)HITS EP is out now via Rue Defense and available from Bandcamp.

Photo by Clare Kemp

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With the release of the album fast approaching, The Taxpayers have shared brand new single ‘I Am One Thousand’. A song which takes on a different dimension of our troubled present. Teaching English learners within the public school system a few years ago, it dawned on lead Rob Taxpayer how so much of the world exists under the trauma of violence. In a single class were students from Afghanistan, Burma, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Honduras and Ukraine, all of which are experiencing war to one degree or another.

“To suddenly have war thrust upon you. Unfathomable. But a reality for so many,” as Taxpayer says. “As part of a writing assignment, we were discussing the places we come from. A student from Burma was describing escaping the violence, and feeling guilt when thinking about family and friends who were not able to leave. At the end of the discussion, she said, ‘I left for my children. I live for the future’.” ‘I Am One Thousand’ is a song written for and dedicated to such people—those given no choice over the difficulties thrust upon them, yet reacting to the cruel, overwhelming present with hope and defiance.

Watch the video by Preston Spurlock below:

Circle Breaker will be released on the 21st March via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can pre-order it now.

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This duality between beauty and rage is central to Red Dirt. It simultaneously illuminates the contradictions inherent within any colonial country and lifts Last Quokka above the countless other punks and post-punks sneering at the contemporary situation. Because however understandable anger and frustration might be, such forces are dead ends without the clarity brought by reminders of the original motivations. It’s easy, that is, to get a taste for fighting. To fight as an end in itself. But those who remember what they are fighting for are the people fighting to win.

The mood is typified by ‘Broome’, a celebratory list of what makes Kimberley special, from the bustling caravan park and luminescent waves to the secret fishing spots and saltwater crocodiles. Though one which never loses sight of the place’s history and the colonial crimes which shaped it into its current form. “This is an ode to the mangroves / Baking in the Kimberley sun,” lead Trent Rojahn sings. “A salty paradise on stolen land.” Contrast this with the pessimism of ‘Disconnected’, a fatalistic view of the internet age in which each individual is stranded within an echo chamber and powerless to enact change, and the thesis of Red Dirt becomes apparent.  Without connection there is no hope, be it within communities or in the relationship between humanity and nature itself.

These braided threads of love and anger run right through the album. The former is captured as fondness for both the past and the present, the small joy of simple acts like kicking a footie in the dirt, or, as in ‘Piggy’, an encounter with a terrifying/cute pig out in the bush. Whereas the latter is delivered with in a cuttingly clear-eyed manner on tracks like ‘Eat the Rich’ and ‘Gina / Rupert’, or processed through a playful, wistful prism as with ‘My Girl’. A song which channels the Macaulay Culkin flick of the same name to create the funniest, most menacing tribute to a nineties movie you’re likely to find.

He can’t see without his glasses
He can’t see without his specs
Macaulay Culkin
Get the adrenalin
Those bees they sting

‘Gael Place’ ramps up the nostalgia, a song of playing cricket in street as the smell of your mother’s cooking mingles with that of the damp earth. But Last Quokka push beyond the surfaces to locate something deeper in the fabric of the land, respecting the cultures which far predate such memories. “The red dirt courses through my veins and prompts me to melt back into this land,” as Rojahn sings on ‘Cue’. “I want to dissolve into the particles that formed my body, the particles that formed my mind / oh sacred stardust, Daddy’s home / I want this country to soak me up.”

Within this context, ‘Gina / Rupert’ plays like a challenge to the titular ghouls (that’s mining magnate and climate change denier Gina Rinehart and enabler Rupert Murdoch) to come outside to see exactly what they are destroying.  “Have you ever seen the Western Woodlands at first light? / Or observed the sun rising from a great mountainous height?” Rojahn asks on ‘Bibbulman’, “Watched the morning mist over the Pingarup Plains?” The sense of a force which has preceded them, and will likewise outlast them so long as the capitalist death drive can be averted. And moreover a force from which we can learn in our efforts to avoid such a fate. “There is wisdom in this ancient land,” as Rojahn concludes. “Both discreet and obvious.”

Red Dirt is out now and available from the Last Quokka Bandcamp page, and limited edition cassettes have been released by Noise Merchant Records.

Front cover artwork by Jacob Boylan

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With the album slated for release early in 2023, Last Quokka have returned with another taster to further whet our appetites. ‘Eat the Rich’ shows the continuation of the band’s evolution. The outfit have added new blood to further enhance their sound, with Justin Zanetic joining as a second guitar and Carlota Rivera now lining up on drums. The result is a palpable weight, as though having established a solid foundation with their previous work, Last Quokka are now ready to turn that dial up.

And the new ferocity is certainly warranted. Described as a “commentary on the elitist private school boy wankers of Perth’s ‘golden triangle'” (and by extension elitist private school boy wankers the world over), ‘Eat the Rich’ is another searing dispatch from a slimy corner of the twenty-first century. A world of status and surfaces, where the men compete with one another for yachts and Gucci shoes while ignoring their medicated housewives and sociopathic kids. Men that is, worthy of both barrels of Rojahn’s fury.

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Fresh are back with brand new single on Specialist Subject, though this time the inspiration comes from a far more contemporary source. Because ‘Morgan & Joanne’ is based on a viral story of a blind date gone right. “I wrote ‘Morgan & Joanne’ because I was so struck by the charm of Morgan and Joanne and how they turned what had the potential to be a really typical first date into an adventure,” explains lead Kathryn Woods. “The song is about the magic of meeting someone who you really fancy for the first time and kind of escaping into a different realm with them.”

With a rattling rhythm and Woods’s impassioned delivery, the song’s intensity is very much familiar, though the tone and subject matter shows a different side to Fresh. One concentrated more fully on the positive side of things. But this sense of fun carries its own weight too, subverting traditional narratives to develop a truer picture of the queer experience. “I think popular media and historical narratives tend to make queer relationships tragic instead of focusing on all the joy and possibilities that they hold,” Woods continues, “so I wanted to put a song out there that’s sweet and funny and empowering to counter that a little bit.”

Things didn’t go quite as planned
Morgan & Joanne
If I believed that love existed
I think I’d see it in your faces

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“It was a jaded time,” Kali explains. “L.A. was changing so much and it didn’t feel like the city I grew up in anymore. Pehrspace had shut down, and we didn’t have a spot to play regular shows. Most of these songs are about emotional exile and reclaiming a sense of power, contending with impossible truths.”

Lead single ‘Not a Citizen’ is almost a mission statement for Changing. Inspired by Claudia Rankin’s poetry collection Citizen, the track uses the riot grrrl blend of clear-eyed ferocity and sneering swagger to take on the themes of identity and injustice explored in the book, emerging with an alluring blend of frustration and catharsis that refuses to be pinned down. “I was thinking a lot about otherness and belonging and citizenship and exile,” Kali says, “and wanting to learn how to affect change, not having yet learned about transformative justice.”

‘Not a Citizen’ is out now on streaming services and available to buy from the Changing Bandcamp page.

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Opener ‘Burning the Body’ sets the tone, its instrumentation barely there beyond the ominous patter of drums and pervasive background drone. The near-silence stretches for an uncomfortable period, threatening to catch alight but never realising the potential, before a keyboard enters with an organ’s heft. This brings with it No Home’s vocals too, a committed outpouring of whispers and wails that blurs the line between empowered and inconsolable. The track is haunted by an electronic glitch too, a sporadic malfunction, like the appearance of an old and violent force sitting in some plane below ours that nevertheless manages to push through.

There’s an almost acapella feel to some of the songs, the instrumentation of tracks such as ‘A B- In This Economy’ more like a mood made manifest, needling and anxious, foreshadowing some future break. Others, such as ‘Catholic School Never Taught Me How To Talk To Men’, are far more spacious, but even the ethereal sound is interrupted by abrasive noise and then a demented pounding beat.

The track captures something of No Home’s music. The sense that something, some thing, is hammering upon the door, demanding to be let in. What it might be is unclear, but it is large and likely violent, and its never clear if the songs are attempting to keep this thing at bay or fighting the urge to submit to its potential for spectacle and change.

“I’m an exile in the city, I’m an exile in the country,” Valentine sings on ‘Exile’. “It’s all a lie.” The track grounds the No Home moniker, caught between here and there with no possibility of solving the conflict, instead owning the no man’s land in between. ‘4×4’ might be the most classically punk song on the record, occupying an itchy stasis between the threat of explosive motion and the eventual release, while ‘Secondary Actor’ leans into a poppier territory with its lushness and fever dream missteps.

There’s even a pivot toward folk, with ‘The Perfect Candidate’ offering a haunted seven minutes of sparse finger plucking and Valentine’s enveloping vocal range, the soulful croon falling into anxious jumbles and flattening out again. Against this, closer ‘YY’ is positively cinematic, the cool electronic flow underpinning the track’s progression. A fitting end to a remarkable record.

Fucking Hell is out now and available from the No Home Bandcamp page.

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Lead single ‘Willa’ suggests that the the band have honed their style even further, the carefree rhythm of the instrumentation belying the emotional vulnerability of the lyrics. “I wanted Willa, as a loud song with fuzzy riffs, to capture that kind of ecstatic, post-show high feeling you get when you’ve truly had a good time performing, when you feel really invincible,” explains vocalist and guitarist Kathryn Woods. “It’s also got a lot of frustration in the lyrics because I can’t change how the rest of the world sees me as a woman and I often feel like women can’t make the art they want to make without it being fetishised or tokenised. I want to be acknowledged as a musician and that’s it!”

The title is a nod to US author Willa Cather, whose works such as My Antonia explored both the beauty and horror of the working class existence in the American West. Such an embrace of the good and the bad of life is intrinsic to Fresh’s sound, as is the feminist underpinning of such a position. “[Cather’s] got quite a fatalistic style,” Woods continues, “and I wanted that ‘whatever happens, happens’ vibe to go into the song.” Fresh aren’t here to tell you that everything will be okay, but they are willing to walk through it with you, fighting for every inch.

Withdraw will be released on the 7th June via Specialist Subject Records and you can pre-order it now.

Photo by Francesca Tirpark

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After being part of Luau Records’ Quab Dub release, joining Car Seat Headrest, Brunch and Hyperturf on a four-way split album, and releasing a self-titled EP via Reefers Records, Wicketkeeper spent some time recording with Lindsay Corstorphine (Sauna Youth, Primitive Parts) at The Gun Factory in London to crank out some new material.

The resulting single ‘Night Night (whatever)’ is a perfect encapsulation of the Wicketkeeper style. “It’s super fun to play because we’re holding on for dear life, Simon Morley explains. “I play drums and sing on this track and I’d never played drums before we started Wicketkeeper, so it’s a challenge for sure!” And holding on for dear life is an apt image for a song packing all the momentum of a runaway train, possessing the distinctive feel of a live performance in its gloriously energy. This upbeat tempo belies the lyrics and vocal delivery, a bummed out dissatisfaction that seems determined to loose itself within the flow.

“Spilt milk on fractured bones
Carve up the subtle tones
Handshakes on weakened palms
Done deals on false alarms

The blindness of the everyday routine
Served up in monotony’s canteen
Disregard whatever could have been
Oh night night whatever so serene”

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Opener ‘Trouble’ drops you headfirst into the Shrimpwitch rockpool of crustacean jams. Scrappy garage pop, shadowy post-punk and swaying surf pop all come together to create something novel, helped by the fact that Georgi and Kim are natural performers, nowhere more at home than wailing their weird pop songs on stage.

Perhaps unusually for a genre that’s often all about a simple good time, Shrimpwitch also give their lyrics importance. Take ‘Leerers’, for example, which as the title suggests is about the unwanted attention the band can receive from certain (male) parts of their audience. It’s a song “about trying to say no to creeps and leerers when you feel backed up against the wall,” Georgi explains. “It is specifically inspired from two experiences I’ve had while performing in Shrimpwitch. So it’s self-referential, in that when I’m performing live, I’m literally screaming at people that ‘I’m not here for you to leer.’” The result is not just thrillingly direct and raw, but also completes a neat shimmy that takes the power away from oppressive gazes and back where it belongs, with Georgi and Kim, with Shrimpwitch.

‘Green Potatoes’ is another one where the lyrics stand out, a track that the band discuss in an auto-interview over at Pilerats. As with most things the band say, it’s hard to know just how serious they’re being when they describe the song as “basically a comment on the food wastage from capitalist, ruthless, major supermarket corporations who are replacing Gen Z’s first job opportunity with machines and completely and utterly—single-handedly—destroying our economy!”, but either way, hear, hear!

There’s an easy rhythm on ‘Bung Eyed Baby’, a song which shows that Shrimpwitch can do pop as well as punk, while ‘Repetition’ kicks and flails it’s way into tight little curls of a post punk chorus. ‘Digestion’ is full of rollicking swampy guitars and shrill vocals, delivering lines like
“skillfully able to repress / the horror I had to address / the power I possessed to finally find my happiness” with a sardonic fervour.

The full-throttle yelpy punk of ‘Mystique’ is followed by finale ‘Shrimping’, which feels like one last detoxifying purge, a shore-side exorcism that leaves the band twitching and frothing as the last of the shrimp-spirit energy leaves their bodies. It’s a fittingly crazed and energetic end to an album the likes of which you won’t hear again this year.

Gave Me the Itch is out now, and you can get it on cassette via Psychic Hysteria and the Shrimpwitch Bandcamp page.

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