What better title for a track on the back of yesterday’s annual vote competition to see which band has made the most comfortable song to listen to in the year of our Lord 2016. ‘Contest’! Winning! Losing! Ranking! That’s the thrust of the day’s discussion and though I enjoy the spectacle of it and the opportunity to inject some nonsensical banter into an otherwise uneventful day (except for when Lewis played number #97 BEFORE #98 – MAYHEM!) I’m filled with a constant desire to hear a song that punches me in the stomach. And look, this song from FOREVR doesn’t strike you in the face with such intrusiveness that you’d deny the bands potential to be a Band That People Like but it also doesn’t scream Winner Of A Radio Competition. The guitars build impossibly on top of each other (something I’d almost NEVER get to say about a song on SD) but you’d expect that sort of wieldy guitar action given Donnie’s background in Roku Music. Sam, who sings the bits with her voice as a singer in the vocal sections, was last seen in Mega Ogre so maybe we should judge them more harshly knowing that they’ve had a little practice before delivering their recent EP. Won’t though, I wont at all. I’m just going to praise them real good and revel in the optimism and warmth that I feel when I go in on this record. Make sure you dive in on ‘Heart Of Ice’ too, it has a sonic crunch akin to that first Sleigh Bells recorded, similarly tempered with some electronic production.

They’re playing Black Wire Records this Friday which means the ultimate Blackwire weekend is now ahead of you if you live in Sydney. FOREVR on Friday, Snakeface Saturday and Dave Le’aupepe on Sunday. Yum.

The below track from Melbourne’s Abelard dropped in late November 2015 which means that, if you use maths, it’s an entire year old. Wow. That’s really old. How can I even listen to something so old? Incredible question, thanks for asking it. The immediate answer is that this song is a good song to listen to today, just as it has been every day since its release, except for that one day in Melbourne mid-December when the temperature was so high that the heat actually distorted soundwaves citywide and all music was off pitch for a full 24 hours. PBS listeners were calling in to talk trash on Courtney Barnett, that’s the sort of day it was, nothing was sacred.

More great temporal news folks, me sitting on a track for a while is a throw back to the golden era of Sound Doc! Remember the glory days when it didn’t matter if a song was new or old, so long as it had the South Dock tick of approval then it received its due three million plays? Well, there’s a new me in town and the new me is the old me that likes old* music not just new music. Enough about new and old Tommy, just tell us about the SONG. Ok, sure, it’s a sparkling high energy affair with a buncha samples in the vein of 80s R&B. You can feel the touch of fingertip on MPC pads as individual notes and samples slip in and out, the dominant of them from Change’s 1984 jam ‘Change of Heart’, buried a lot more deeply than in the song from which its lifted, its pitch dramatically altered. Anyway, the short of it this is a real good one that holds even more promise than the Seinfeld theme remix he did at some point last year that I refuse to hyperlink because I want you to learn what it means to have a work ethic before you finish school.

*In 2016, anything that was release more than 45 minutes ago is legally classified as adult-conteporary

If I’m being honest with you reader, I don’t listen to a whole lot of this sort of business. I go in on the odd, foolishly bumpy Woolymammoth number or ocassional Herzeloyd banger but as a general rule, anything with trap influence or a future bass tag is usually just a soundcloud skip away. Half of the reasoning is that it’s the sort of music which inspires this sort of inane, highly irrelevant comment.

Noone cares what you wanted mate, the song is the song. The bloody soundcloud generation and their inevitable, valueless two cents. What So Not For This Guy, you kno what I mean? There were however, a couple of mitigating factors that bid me hit play on this record. The first was that Time Pilot delivered a wonky, unexpected remix of Spirit Faces’ Cloudplay around a year ago (out via Sydney label TEEF, Stereogum’s Record Label Of The Year 2015). The second was that this came with trusted peer recommendation and a Pilerats Records co-sign which is usually enough for me to, absolutely bare minimum, press play. The third is that they are famously lovely humans, so that’s the foot upon which we’ve launched off.

I don’t know if they’re the best technical producers* in the country but I don’t think that’s their charm. It’s not a record for the audiophiles among you (Pilerats signed Lower Spectrum to fill that particular niche) but it’ll appease anyone hoping to hear some strange rythmic manipulations. Individual samples gain and lose pace unexpectedly and strange sonic references permeate the track throughout. There’re string sections that feel lifted straight from Ben-Hur and the afro-beat inspired vocal cuts that evidently approve the track’s title. This one might not be for the Sound Doc loyalists but there’s certainly something to it.

*They also might be, I don’t have an ear for this sort of bizness.

Everyone knows that I have two great loves. Last week those two great loves collided and this time I’m not referring to the combination of haloumi and EPL football that is absolutely the best combination concept I’ve come up with (patent pending). Well it was, up until this Sampa The Great x Hiatus Kaiyote [re]mixtape dropped. I’ve sat with it for enough time to know that this thing is neither this nor that but a brand entity that sums both artists. Nai Palm’s vocals have taken a backseat and Sampa doesn’t crush these song beneath her usual pulsing flow, instead dancing lightly across them to give fresh life to a new beast. Godriguez, the producer recently voted by Sound Doctrine experts as 2015s Artist Most Likely To Rend The Fabric Of Time And Space, does his thing again on this record with immaculate adaptions to the Hiatus songs that underlay these new edits. He is miles sharper here than on the earlier The Great Mixtape but it’s no surprise since he’s becoming an in demand producer for vocalists in Sydney. His production on Wallace’s Negroni Eyes has seen the track garner a bunch of attention this week (alongside her, you know, excellent vocals and all that) and his own Godriguez 4.0 mixtape arrived via Vice a fortnight ago turning heads an immediately making those heads nod and then the mouths on those head open to say words like ‘wow this is a great mixtape, I am enjoying listening to this mixtape.’

‘Prince Miniqueen’ is weirdly my favourite on the release despite clocking in at only marginally over one minute. It’s a lowkey banger replete with Australian bird sounds, breathy gasps and pitchshifted backing vocals and a testament to the burgeoning skills of Godriguez who manages to make so much out of so little. Sampa demonstrates a whole style of vocal delivery on this record, demonstrated on tracks like ‘Prince Miniqueen’ where her lyrical cadence is as special as ever but the tone of her vocals is cleaner and smoother than we’ve heard before. ‘Owl Chant’ is a spiritual forest meditation that lives up to its moniker and is likely to leave you contemplative and little lost. It feels like this new mixtape is over all too soon but sometimes it’s nice to finish a record and feel like you want more. Download the whole mixtape free via bandcamp.

I’m not sure how this one slipped through the cracks but it hit me pretty immediately when I heard it in JayWays’ V Movement Mix last week. This might be the most fully realised song HMTLflowers has ever released. He’s found his rythm on this Polographia production, riding it without a hint of hesitation. The first chorus hits so nicely because he eschews any snare sound up until then and suddenly you’re toe tapping because you didn’t quite realise that the beat had never really resolved itself. Sure this track was actually released three months ago and HTMLflowers has even released another single in that time but here’s something you need to consider: time is a human construct and I’m hear to breakdown the wordly constraints by which we’ve been living our lives. Next week I’ll be working to deconstruct the idea of ‘place’ which I should be able to do in a 200 word post about an Anatole remix so stay tuned for some new Australian music wrapped in groundbreaking ideologies. That’s my new brand by the way. New Harpoons track? Will probably pair that with a treatise on the dissolution of gender. It’s new. It’s me. It’s the future of music gernalism.

Take the time to click through to the fella’s soundcloud and read the lyrics on this track, they’re altogether affecting.