Episode 3 of Sound Doctrine’s post-modern theatre-art emotionscape Show & Tell saw us sitting in the living room of a friend of a friend of a friend watching Spirit Faces performing ‘Hurts Less Than Heartbreak’. It was strange hearing it performed stripped bare of the thundering electronics but in their place sits a dark, pondering series of chords punctuated only by the tap of fingers on smartphones and my own excited heavy breathing as exposed hammers hit strings. This one can speak for itself…

Filmed by Matt Davis at Silent Creative
Audio by Lewis Tems

I’ve sat on this one for a few minutes because I’ve had lots of stuff to do ie only bloody well starting my own record label / Ponzi scheme. A new Foreign/National track is worth returning to despite my tardiness because the five of them delightfully straddle that formless psych aesthetic and the rigid form of a highly structure track with ease. For that reason I’m going to keep the psych references to a minimum because, in fairness, 98% of what bloggers label as psych is pop-rock with reverb. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t pull out a lazy Tame Impala reference or suggest easy stonerisms for the next three minutes (one minute if you skim read- recommended.)

This is just one of the multiple [great] singles that F/N have popped online from their debut EP due out this month through Sam Gill’s DOWNTIME Records. Honestly, it feels like the 73rd single these dudes have released this month but that might just be due to the fact that everyone everywhere everytime keeps writing about them to the point where it’s literally the only feature of my feed. You can personally blame this band for the fact I don’t like any of your wonderful statuses or thinspirational images, I’m just not seeing them, sorry.

BONUS CONTENT: F/N covering fellow Melbdogs The Harpoons.

Tame Impala.

As soon as I received the email for this one I knew something good was coming. I just knew it right down into my bones. They started shaking a bit and that was when I knew it right up in there. That was the exact moment I knew about this song. I knew it was a song that was going to have not just some good bits in it but also some good ideas. It’s all about the protagonist Lux who happens to be out wandering the suburban rains when he has a great realization. I’m pretty sure it’s something to do with love or something but I can’t really tell because lo-fi etc but I think this song is actually pretending to be more dischordant than it actually is. You can hang your hat on that guitar section and the chords padding into the background actually resolve the melody real nice like. It’s one of those deceptive Bored Nothing affairs that parades as a black coffee but is actually pre-loaded with artificial sweetener. Man, that’s a lazy metaphor. In conclusion, this is so good that I’d be willing to award it Sound Doctrine’s album of the week for this week, despite the fact it’s just one song and I don’t do an album of the week.

You can have it as a free download via Airpunch if you wanna.
So Melbourne, so good.

I think we need to talk about this one because it’s working for me in a big way. Full disclosure, I know Hannah In Real Life and I’m Writing About The Music Of A Friend but I’m wholly impartial when I say she can sing and sing well. That’s no new info, but something seems to have clicked recently and she’s combining that whole ‘can sing really well’ thing with ‘can write good songs’ and the combination of the two, as history will attest, often bears fruit. Her new song was home-studio’d into existence with the help of Tim Fitz who is going to be known for his production credits as much as his own output if he doesn’t settle down. He’s also rumoured to have been recording with Birds With Thumbs and March Of The Real Fly lately. Whoa Tim Fitz! Take it easy fella! Anyway, back to this song- guitar resolves and unresolves, back and forth in the background as Hannah builds to a drum heavy crescendo. The last thirty seconds sees vocal untether itself from lyric and it’s sort of a little bit kind of really a beautiful sound.

The last two weeks have been something of a rage induced flurry in the sound doctor clinic. The three or four of us have been pacing up and down the corridors, muttering as our breath mists in front of us, occasionally even slamming our fists down on a desk. I guess we are just angry because it’s winter, and we don’t have a heater. That’s life on the frontier for you. When I was a kid we didn’t even have houses, we had to shack up under a mound of dead possums because that was all we could afford. Time passes but nothing seems to change right? Meanwhile, Jeff from accounts hasn’t sent a payment through to any of the writers in over nine months. There’s mutiny afoot.

Then, from nowhere, like the warm breath of summer that feels as though it will never come, Bored Nothing’s new track ‘Ice Cream Dream’ shimmered over the horizon and into our open but still fairly cold arms. Steadily chugging rhythm guitar underpins the downcast vocals, a sharp guitar line cuts through the squall. If Fergus Miller’s eponymous debut record as Bored Nothing set him up as the prince of shimmering-downcast-lo-shoe-fi-gaze-guitar pop, it looks like his second record Some Songs, due October 22nd on Spunk will make him the genre’s King. I suspect that this cut might be something of sweet intermission among a topically heavier collection of tracks. I spent a minute digging for the connecting thread of the songs underlying metaphor but I’m not so sure there is one. “Everything’s exactly how it seems”. Ice cream dreams.

And, look, if you’re not convinced yet, Ferg has followed it straight up with a tidy cover of Mac Demarco’s excellent ‘My Kind of Woman’ but before I got a chance to show you, that scumbag Miller pulled it down again. You’ll have to content yourself with this older, balder, fatter cover of FKA Twigs’ Water Me.

Read: Australian Artists Pick Their Favourite Australian Songs of 2013 feat Bored Nothing