So I’ll tell you what my mum has been telling me for at least two decades: You need to pay more attention to HAIRCARE. I’m gonna edge out on a limb here and suggest that you probably haven’t listened to this band before today and if you have, well colour me impressed and proud. Today they received the Sound Doc seal of approval which industry estimates have valued at anywhere between 6-11 Spotify streams. This is only single two for HAIRCARE so we’re not kilometers deep into a storied career.

I was put across this Perth four piece yesterday morning having been told that they’d made fans out of some of Perth’s musical top tier and I’ve not stopped listening to their newest single since. ‘Blinding Cordoned States’ is full of lo-fi synths, tender guitar parts and a vocal from old mate that hits you with all the urgency of The Walkmen. The chorus pops like an overinflated balloon and I quite simply haven’t been able to sit down since the first time I heard it. This is actually really bad and I urgently need someone to send help, my legs are be fixed in a literal state of living rigor mortis. You’re not hearing me, please stop reading this and send a doctor I’m in an incredible amount of pain.

 
Harrison Rae lives in Sydney having moved here from Boambee (up near Coffs way) and as a special dowry gift to the city of Sydney he bears this moody dee n bee signalling ambiater. It pans across your dome in its quiter moments, slices with percussive scissors and then merges the two together artfully. From how I understand it, the move to Sydney has guided his music into more frenetic realms just as he’ll do for your good self if you’d kindly hit play below.

It’s released through his own label Club Moss, launched just this very year but if you’d like more, he has a slightly less angular seven tracker in the form of Vitamin B.

When I’m told that I have to listen to a certain track through headphones I pointed avoid listening to that thing on any sort of phones, head or otherwise. In fact the last time someone demanded my earphone experience I actually forced the band to immediately dissolve so if you were into At The Drive In, I’m really sorry. And so, I’m not going to say it here because I don’t presume to direct my mostly-masters-and-doctorate-holding-readership about their listening medium but you know I’m thinking it now. Surely you have to know that.

Sometimes it’s easy to grow accustomed to some of the talents in your own backyard and I think Anatole suffers for that. In this buffet-style music market you can never stop discovering some sometimes the desire for the new can push you away from appreciating what you already know. And what I know is this- Anatole is remarkably gifted. If you can imagine a tallboy filled with about 85 different levels of drawers? In terms of electronic music, you’ll find Anatole right up in that top one. He’s a masterful, meticulous producer lacing organic bones with electronic sounds… or maybe it’s electronic bones with organic sounds? Listen closely.

Can’t make Too bold a statement about an at with only one song to their name but this feels like a band who have chosen their cognomen wisely. Whether it’s the optimistic warmth of a love interest or the overwhelming press of bodies in a crowd, im hearing all sorts of titular Ultracrush sounds whenever I hit go on this track of theirs ‘Swimming’. It is yes, the first track they’ve ever released. They’re a Sydney five piece out of Camperdown only one song in and I’m wholly in their corner. The song itself signposts some Newcastle lineage and reportedly they’re from Lake Mac and Central Coast, but that’s all besides the point. Hit play here and then Let’s Talk.

As someone with a pair of kids who just holidayed outside daylights savings time, I’ll tell you here and now, I’m no fan of a time change. Getting up pre-dawn each day? That blows and I recommend it to no one. The multiple time changes in this song though, well they’re just fine by me. This is a band who channel the heady nostalgia of Bored Nothing, the airy whimsy of Beach House, the groove of Radio Dept and fill them with small town specifics to make something genuinely moving. I even found myself looking up the Council Street fig trees because the lyrical energy drew me in real close and I couldn’t not know after that.

Bonus: here’s the vaporwave remix of the track you neither knew you needed nor had.

They’ve got an EP on the way but given I can’t find a date for it I reckon we’re looking at 2019. Well here’s this- Ultracrush are my favourite new Sydney band.

One of my favourite records of this year dropped way back in January. That was the debut Tram Cops full length even in my dreams, a record that moved Michael Vince Moin from ‘Melbourne musician making weirdo acoustica-jazz’ to ‘one of the most creative nodes in Australian music rn’. It was the realization of the ideas from several records that Moin had dropped under the name Laurence, like William, Andromeda (2013), It’s Real (2014) and Happy Town (2015). Dropping these hyperlinks in, I’m actually starting to think that maybe Moin is the artist I’ve written about more than any other on Sound Doctrine over its eight years of life? He’d be neck and neck with Oscar Key Sung and Tim Fitz [music] but interestingly by contrast to both, he’s never tasted any big name-making success, including in the wake of ‘even in my dreams’.

He entered a new phase in the second half of this year, releasing singles from his next album Not Forever. This second single follows on from October’s ‘this is it’ and let me tell ya, you can almost blow past that first in excitement for this second because it’s the one you’ve held out for. Gentle guitar parts baking in a Summer haze and horns that fade in as if from the distance, both lounging atop percussion that’s drier than Coober Pedy (look it up, you’ll find that’s quite dry indeed). Mikey’s a heck of a guitarist but he also has the capacity to produce guitar sounds so that they sound damn gorgeous. That’s the first and final third of the track but in those middle bars it’s spry, trotting guitars. As ever, you’ll find old mate messing with the format and gluing pieces of songs together but, as ever, somehow it doesn’t feel disjointed.

There’s something extremely moving in the way that Moin grabs simple refrains and drives sentimentality into them like a tent peg into dry festival earth. The lyricism is often sparse and simple but it nails me more often than not. Album’s out November 9 (his first through a label, on ripper tiny Melbourne indie Neat Lawn) and you can secure yourself a copy here.