This is as good a chance as any to put my foot down about that son of a gun Tim Fitz. The dude won’t let me get my bearings before he takes off once more, chopping and changing between styles, navigating the waters between genre and genre with the sincere confidence of an old naval dog. The most recent single he’s provided is Mr Streetwise and it features the most straight down the line pop hook he’s yet written. Admittedly, I heard this track whilst it was still in its formative stages and my feedback was less than helpful. Now as a grown beast though, Mr Streetwise has thrown off his swaddling cloths and covered his fully-formed manhood with the pantaloons of post-production. And for all that, it sounds a million dollars.
This is as good a segway as any to make mention of a mixtape on which this track features. Sure, you could cop a download
of Mr Streetwise straight from the source (along with the other tracks that make up Fitz’s 3rd EP) or you could head over to the newly formed bandcamp of FBi Radio’s The Bridge. The Bridge is FBi’s Sydney-only music segment and they’ve just now put out their first mixtape, full licenced and completely free. You’ll find a couple of tracks on there you may already have heard via SD (such as Fawn Myers’ You Know Me So Well and the recent Mammals/Flash Forest collab) as well as a fair few that will hopefully be brand new for you. Get on it. Also, how good is this Day Ravies track?
Due to financial limitations I can’t actually write as much on each band as I used to so here’s the short of it. There appears to be a small collective forming in the Mountains that are throwing big tunes around like it ain’t no thang. The bros that make up said collective include Wheat Fields, Skinny Legion and Spoonty. Admittedly that’s the entirety of it but I think that still constitutes a collective. They’ve a mixtape up on bandcamp featuring tracks from the three and below you can hear a few highlights. For my money, the below track from Skinny Legion is the best of this bunch but it’s worth listening to the lot.
There’s a little Tame Impala going on with that new Wheat Fields track, am I right?
Just a little video to tide you over whilst I struggle to push through a period of near radio silence. I’m not sure why I’m feeling so jaded towards music blogging lately but fingers crossed I can push through it and come out the other end with my winning smile and receding hairline in tact. This is an Oscar Key Sung live take from FBi Radio. Light on the beat end but a good vocal showcase for the gentleman who has probably overtaken Sufjan as my most overblogged artist. No regrets though, the dude is a prodigious talent. Enjoy.
Guerre has never pushed my pulse past its impressive 40bpm resting rate and so I’ve never felt driven to give any real airtime (read blogspace) to his tunes. Potentially I’ve been coming at these from the wrong direction or maybe my current listening habits have better positioned me to take an interest in what he’s laying down. One way or another, I think this is the right time to be sharing these tracks. The last thing I want Sound Doctrine to be is a post-all-the-songs-as-soon-as-possible type affair. There are those out there whose sense of taste looks more like a shotgun blast than a well directed sniper round (I’ve been playing loads of Borderlands 2). There are a few blogs out there that are posting so much daily content that I’m forced to use the search function to find anything of value which basically means they’re of as help finding good music as google is.
Guerre is yet another feather in cap of Sydney imprint Yes Please whose roster grows more nourished with each passing week. Let’s start things off with ‘For Qwanisha’, the B-Side to recent single Rashad (Lose Pace) which you’ll also find below.
And -added bonus- here’s a thirty minute live cut pulled from a set he played a GoodGod about a month back. He’s pushing into the dark, dark territory of beatmakers like Shackleton. Big ol’ sinister bass.
I had ventricular love for Guy Brown before he did this here track with Flash Forest but this is the proverbial icing on the proverbial cake. It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, it’s the bird in the hand, it’s the tip of the iceberg and it’s the bees knees. It’s just so many things, so many great things. It appears to have some significance to more than just myself as Triple J have said “YES! YES MAMMALS!”, declaring him the artist of the week for at least (and indeed, at most) the next seven days. It’s a mantle worthy of his shoulders as the track in question demonstrates an artistry of sound that I was previously unaware he possessed. I was well aware of a recumbent falsetto but this coupling points at more. The underlying beat is the handywork of Flash Forest, a Melbourne based producer whose own musics are most pleasing. Get familiar if you’re not already as amongs his repertoire there’s more buoyant swagger than every other minimalist Sydney beatmaker combined (WITHDRAWN).
