Breaking news today on Sound Doctrine’s one and only insistently (creepily?) regular column: What’s Happening With All Those Guys Who Were in The Middle East? All has been quiet on the North-Eastern front (get it, cause they started in Townsville?- Stay with me here fellas, classic sound doctrine one liners coming thick) for quite a while now. Who better to break that silence than Bree Tranter? (Answer: Nobody, this is perfect).

Bree has spent the last year building up to a record – Another Night on Earth – which is due on June 24th. The latest cut from said record is a loping slow jam called Tuesday Fresh Cuts. The song starts heavy on a late 90s vibe underpinned by a repetitive hip-hop drum beat and a vocal take that captures longing and loss as much in melody as in lyric. It opens out towards the middle as sax and guitars break out into waves of premature crescendo that Bree’s vocal melody scythes into as “I’ve got the blues” turns from an introspective lament into the call to arms “you’ve got the blues”.

The accompanying video is a warped insight into the songs headspace. Shot on a head-mounted Go-Pro, it feels closer to stream of consciousness than premeditated marketing tool. The near-perfect intersection is reached here, where raw is matched with beautiful, and nothing feels hidden. We may never get the album of R.L. Jones birthday songs we thought we wanted, but it looks we’ll be getting along just fine with the Bree Tranter record we didn’t know we needed.

The running theory on the internet at the moment is that all sounds are actually small worms that fly through the air and into your brain. It has something to with Albert E’s (that’s Einstein to you) as yet unproven theory that all of the light from the sun is actually a bird yelling ancient greek at you across a lake. Anyway, we won’t want to bore you with the specifics, we want to talk about the well documented side effects of this theory of sound transmission. The Sound Doctors at Sound Doctrine have labelled this an ‘Ear Worm’ (patent pending).

Confused? Excited? Want to buy into our new pyramid scheme? Well, friends and enemies, let us show you how it works – the new single from OM Collective, ‘Psilies Kite’ is a great example of the phenomenon at work: the nice and the familiar combine with something new and strange and together they just crawl right on into your big ol’ dome and lodge themselves in there real firm using their ‘Worm Hooks’ (we’re not as confident that this one will stick)

‘Psilies Kite’ pulls in a broad range of influences with layers of psych, lots of mid noughts indie feels and Beatles references buried with the lyrics. All these elements are brought together with the vocals of former Sydney wonderkid James Blackwood. Blackwood brings some of his most elevated moments since Valar was a post-rock band. His soaring, interlocking melody wraps around the instrumental textures like a warm and familiar embrace. With the vocal as it’s backbone, the psychedelic and the ethereal warp together and glide around like an earthworm that’s just enjoying itself so much in your worm farm. Like a big, disgusting hedonistic son of a bitch that’s just gobbling up earth like it’s discount day at the earth store.

If you leave your full name, bank account details and your mother’s maiden name in the comments section we’ll send you a starter pack containing records such as ‘You’ve Got A Friend In Me’ and Matt Corby’s most radio friendly singles. In the meantime, enjoy ‘Psilies Kite’ and get excited for OM Collectives’ debut record.

Today, the unthinkable happened. D.D Dumbo dropped new music. Many of you are going to try to level with me here, you’ll say “Tommy! It hasn’t been that long! 2014 was a while ago but he was getting the record RIGHT!”
You’ll be right about one thing, he’s used his time well, but you’ll be wrong about that date. The EP actually dropped on 2012 which is closer to a thousand years ago than three. It was rereleased two years later once D.D (real name Oliver Perry) signed a deal with 4AD but they then cut two tracks from the record, making it a four tracker instead (RIP ‘Dinghy’ and ‘King Franco Picasso’) so it wouldn’t be unfair to say that in the past 4 years, D.D Dumbo has actually released -2 tracks (certainly not a whole lot). Big news today friends, very big news indeed. Perry has reduced the deficit to a very manageable -1 with a song called ‘Satan’.

Those who know me well will know I’m a man of religious convictions so I’ve a good radar for when an artist is intentionally pushing my buttons with a track title like ‘Satan’, and Perry, I don’t much appreciate it you son of a gun. Undoubtedly it’s a response to the shots fired yesterday through the Sound Doctrine Facebook (read only if you’re prepared for heavy shade, the likes of which only an Evergreen Alder can typically boast, though year round). He fired back, with a song he must have written, tracked, mixed and mastered over night and a video clip that must have been shot and processed this morning before I woke (no mean feat, I woke at 620). Now I’m calling for armistice because I’m no sufficiently armed to deal with something of this magnitude. Heck of a thing to pull off in thirteen hours though, heck of a thing.

The track itself is what I’ve come to expect from one of Castlemaine’s finest sons (alongside Lower Spectrum, cop an age old remix here). Wildly imaginative both sonically and lyrically, Perry’s words often seem to have an astral otherworldliness to them and a deep grounding in philosophy and religion.

Strange days movin on
AI and the Higgs Boson
And the looming deadline
Murder suicide
I pray for everyone
As a godless sapien

The magic of D.D Dumbo’s artistry is that the rawest elements of his personality and emotional quirks are all present in the records. And when that sort of character merges with this sort of raw talent the resulting record tends to be well… Something like this. Large, unique and fiercely creative, harnessing sounds which don’t subscribe to any particular scene or movement.

There’s no word on the album date yet but what I have heard is that it WILL contain this brain/heart wrenching record that he’s teased live for years. He’s touring East Coast in late July and early August and if you’re not there then may the Lord have mercy on your wretched soul.

Some cold grey mornings are broken only by a little bit of an electronic pulse. Some people call it your heartbeat, others prefer to take a more scientific view on the breaking of REM sleep and point to the obvious glass of cold water that your best friend just poured down your neck. All depends on who your mates are I guess. Just like that our very own Alex Cameron put out a new video for his new [again] song taken from his really new now (for real) solo album that’s going to pop on out like a the guts of a zit (but the good kind) on Canadian Secrets, America’s favourite record label three years running.

If you imagined a more melody focused Seekae, this might be it. I mean, maybe, I guess there a lot of variables in there like instrumentation and tempo. She’s Mine is built around AC’s burning vocal melody, slowly building into a raging fire like when you light a box of matches with one match and they all flare up which is very pleasing to watch but an inefficient use of matches. In your heart and mind the track will conjure images of a man standing next to a car with a city skyline behind him, the sky overcast. The man you’re imagining dances a little, he stands on the car a little, you focus on his shoes momentarily, his signet ring too. Amazingly that’s actually what the accompanying video clip looks like almost to a tee. It’s an austere dystopia, but it’s the future and it’s beautiful because it’s a future where Alex is on a car with a skyline behind him and he has a signet ring.

This one, is a good one, a classic all around package that gets the Sound Doctrine rating of a room temperature meat pie with a nice big dollop of tomato sauce.

The many individual constituents in this song that are of such extreme merit that it’s hard for me to know where to begin. Do I praise the vocal or elevate the production? Could it be the songwriting that marks this song a determinate monument? Perhaps it’s that each of the three members Middle Kids is a prolific musician in their own right, surely a song steeped in triune musicianship is superior to that of the lone singer-songwriter. We’ve all seen those memes (such as this one) suggesting that a greater number of songwriters guarantee a better song but is it always true? The answer is yes. It absolutely is. To that, it makes sense that Tim Fitz (famous from acts such as March Of The Real Fly and @TimFitzMusic and venerated for inventing the loop pedal), Hannah Joy (famous from acts such as Hannah Joy) and Harry Day (the one I don’t know much about but is surely wonderful if cosigned by the other two) would combine to make something greater than each of their individual powers would allow, in much the same way that five very talented robotic-lion pilots came together to make Voltron. Think on it.

Edge Of Town is the first thing they’ve released under this moniker and it immediately marks itself as something different from the current momentary musical flavours. Hannah’s vocals are as expansive and elastic as Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries so it should come as no surprise that the first has historically looked to the second for creative inspiration. There’s a bridge[like] section toward the end of the song that pans out not into another chorus but into such ballistic vocals from Hannah that they’ve been dialed back in the mix lest they overwhelm the rest of the song and I’m more than a little excited to see how they’re punched out live. It’s a song that speaks of uncertainty and confusion in its lyrics but is entirely assured in its sonic elements. Just as Hannah sings ‘standing face to face with the king of the underground’, I think we now find ourselves in a similar position with Middle Kids. All hail.