Thelma Plum – Gold (Chet Faker cover)
It’s been a big couple of years for singer-songwriter Thelma Plum. She picked up national new talent of the year at the 2013 national Indigenous music awards, transplanted herself from Brisbane to Sydney and, in partnership with producer M-Phazes, began experimenting with bigger, lusher sounds – as evident in her two most recent songs How Much Does Your Love Cost and Young In Love. All before she’s had her 20th birthday. It should be said that Plum, who is touring nationally, can still hold her own live – with or without her new twist of Lorde-esque electronica. She was recently on the Triple J series Like a Version where she performed a stunning, stripped-back cover of Chet Faker’s Gold.
One Day – Love Me Less
One Day is a hip-hop collective comprising of Sydney favourites Horrorshow, Spit Syndicate, Joyride and Jackie Onassis. Throughout November they’re taking their regular monthly block party on the road, after a successful national tour in September. In honour of these travelling salesmen of soulful summertime jams, here’s the first single, Love Me Less from the new album Mainline. In contrast to a certain controversial rap song, Love Me Less approaches sex and partying with a far more pensive tone, expounding on the bittersweet difficulties of staying faithful to the one you love amid of all those female fans.
Ani DiFranco – Careless Words
There’s something incongruous about a happy Ani Difranco. But here she is on Allergic to Water, her 18th studio album, sounding genuinely upbeat. Dig a little deeper – beyond song titles like Happy All the Time and her current, suburban New Orleans, married-with-two-kids existence – and folk’s flag-waving feminist is still waging some serious inner and outer battles. The evidence lies in the fine print of songs like Careless Words, where barbs exchanged in an acrimonious relationship (“You really gave me hell, big talker/Polluted the well”) are almost whispered over an airy acoustic jazz arrangement.
Katy Perry – California Gurls
The mind boggles that this former churchie managed to fool the world into thinking she was more than a spotlight-hungry girl-who-kissed-another-girl. But Perry, now in Australia, has more bubblegum pop smashes under her belt than fake eyelashes and drag queen wigs combined. The singer has been known to teach her impressionable young Katycats how to get boozed, burn cash and have threesomes (see: Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) and This Is How We Do), but we can’t help but recall with fondness her cupcake-bra-cherry-on-top California Gurls. Despite its dubious spelling, there’s no denying the song is a catchy cracker. With a nursery rhyme chorus and Snoop Dogg ghetto poetry (“bikinis, zucchinis, martinis, no weenies”) this sugar rush is bound to put a smile on your dial and rot your teeth at the same time.
Jack Ladder and The Dreamlanders – Come on Back This Way featuring Sharon Van Etten
Tim Rogers – aka Jack Ladder, aka Nick Cave’s voice double – and The Dreamlanders released their fourth album last week, Playmates. Rogers’ sonorous baritone voice adds weight to the wash of 80s-inspired new wave beats. Her Hands, off the album, illustrates the group’s gothic sensibility, love of surreal imagery and reoccurring theme of strange, obsessive love, with lyrics like: “She’s building it with willow sticks, she’s building it with gold, she’s building it with bones, a gift from my soul.” Come on Back This Way does an even better job of conjuring up images of vampy ladies hanging on dark street corners and makes for a delicious, noirish piece of pulp fiction set to song.
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