Carla Geneve is Perth’s next great hope, just nineteen years old and full of wild promise. I recently came across a state municipal report which stated that Western Australia had abandoned mining income in favour of capital investment in Carla Geneve stocks. And I’m no financial advisor but let me give you this piece of (financial) advise- you’d best do the same. The profit & loss graph looks like the sort of gradient that would be horrific to walk up and she knows her way around pharmaceuticals so we’re looking at some real short term dividends. First hand witnesses tell me that her performance at the WAMI’s was packed to the brim and talked about through the entire conference but that’s not the evidence you need. Listen to this absolutely song here. Greg’s Discount Chemist, is Carla’s… fourth maybe (?) song so far. She dropped three in batch a year ago but this feels like her moment with a quickened influx of fans following in the track’s wake. It’s wonderfully local in its lyrics and tone, and clever in the way it delivers turn of phrase (I’ve heard she doesn’t like her own line in “wish I could kill time but times killing me” but it is, of course, excellent). When the track breaks down to that lax baseline at the 1:45 I’ll tell ya, I damn near wept out the Yakult I’d just drunk and wouldn’t that just have been a damn waste of some good probiotics? It’s so beautifully earnest and she could read me my pacemaker manual and I’d still be riveted. Viva Geneve.

B-B-BONUS BEAT! That’s right, your favourite segment is back and with it comes a remix built around that bridge bassline from the Carla Rae Jepsen track above. You don’t get this on musicfeeds, I’ll tell you that for free.

I am not coping with this Marcus Whale cover of Troye Sivan’s ‘My My My!’. Not at all. All the coins have fallen out of my pockets, my umbrella has blown inside out, my headphones have become incredibly tangled and my laces are an undone spaghetti mess. I’m a total shambles. Marcus has taken what is unarguably a monstrous pop song and amped up the monstrous to make it both melodic and crushing in the one moment. I’m almost disappointed when it ends in that I want it to billow into even thicker chunks of noise. He’s playing some shows soon and word on the street is that he might even be working on some new music or whatever I don’t know. I don’t need new music, I just need this. What a titan.

When I first heard this thing it hit me harder than the Taronga zoo branded slap bands that my daughter keeps inexplicably losing, forcing me to purchase yet more slapbands. Harder than slapbands and harder even than the recurring cost of slapband repurchase. These are zoo gift shop slapbands too, objectively the best and most expensive slapbands. Harder than that.

Not because the beat was particularly chunky, though immaculately produced by Sydney hip-hop monster (and Godriguez collaborator) Stackhat and not because that voice is weighty and beautiful both. It hit me because right from the outset, this damn song kept reminding me of my own mortality. I mean the thing opens with a ticking clock, interposed into the production throughout the track so that you might never forget your impending doom. It’s all part of the semi-nihilist tides moving beneath the song, declaring that we’re all just matter. But there’s an optimism too, signalled halfway through the song with Nardean’s laughter and the ‘that’s a good thing’ tempo change. That’s the point at which Nardean starts to paint scenes of mortal beauty, things that are lovely even if fleeting. And please do not sir even begin me about the bit where she flows upward in pitch like a reverse vocal waterfall (low gradient obvs).

It’s wonderful structure and songwriting and lyricism and vocals and production and I just don’t know if I’ve heard another Australian song of the same finished quality in 2k18. There have been some wonderful and unique artists thus far but this is a holistic monster, the real deal, every box ticked. You could submit this for a US visa and they wouldn’t even request further justification, you’d be sorted.

Don’t ask me who she is or where she’s come from, you can scope Nardean’s socials for that side o things. I’ll tell you though, her future is where I’ve cast my eyes. There’s a full LP in the works (completed even?) made possible through an Australia Council grant and I’m quietly optimistic of more as good as this.

Yesterday I found a new artist the same way I find every other new artists on this gross website- an email from my cousin who saw another local artist repost a video of the first artist covering them at a brisbane market. That’s my format right there and I refuse to discover music otherwise. They’re a duo called Elder and they’ve got just this one song called Vagabond and boy howdy, it’s a good’n.

I haven’t received a press release about it but I bet if I did it would say that it was recorded using several singular pieces of rigatoni attached by a series of well cooked linguine strands. You can hear the starch, the reduced clarity and particularly an increase in the amount of audible pasta. You’ll be thinking to yourself “well now, I haven’t before heard of a song recorded on various pastas” but I beg of you, have you ever heard a song that sounded like this? Surely not monsieur. What a strange concoction. Unpredictable vocal melodies whipping like flags in the wind of those awful (or amazing?) new wave guitar sounds. Truly friend, I must insist you explain to me from whencst a song like this comes because i need to find its parents and mall security are offering little to no assistance. Was it left here by accident? Did it grow here? From what parallel realm have you conjured those strange pipes.

There’s only one thing to do here, in a mystery such as this. Band, you will need to deliver me several of your finest mp3s for further investigation. I am officially soliciting your audio and I will report back to you, my reader friends, once I’ve collated more evidence. Meantimes, cop a download over here and have a lovely week why don’t you.

I started writing the draft of this post by accusing you of having not read the last time I wrote about Tram Cops. I’ll need to put my hand up here though, apparently I’ve never written about Tram Cops. I’ve written about Michael’s earlier project, the simply titled Lawrence but Tram Cops? Well that’s my hidden shame.

Trying to apply a genre to tram cops is about as viable as trying to apply a leash to a pet cicada and let me tell you here and now, Cedric does not much like it when I try to tether him. So let’s leave that fools errand for other music “writers” and do what we do best here: spruik artisanal, bio-ethical mp3s. This one’s a bloody good one, refrained around the mantra of “I stand on stolen land”, with more than a handful of production ideas coming in and out like tides. It comes from Even In My Dreams, the freshly released full LP, and it’s indicative of the noodling, wing-nut orchestra that’s involved in this record, a menagerie of instrumentalists enlisted to birth the sprawling beast. It’s hard to pick just a few tracks that’ll express the diverse strangeness of this record but here’s a brace for you.

I don’t say this lightly but Tram Cops give me the same feeling that D.D Dumbo did very early on. The feeling that I’m listening to an outsider, an artist entirely in his own lane who might explode into cult fandom or who could just as easy reach no one. Explode. Please explode.