Interview: EWAH & The Vision of Paradise plus track ‘Play Hard’
Hobart, the city at the edge of the world, is a unique and fascinating place. I have written about the weird and wonderful Dark Mofo Festival over the last few years, where I had the good luck to catch EWAH & the Vision of Paradise (EVoP) live at the iconic Brisbane Hotel back in 2017. …
Video: Scratch – Soak
A while back we wrote about a terrific cross ocean collaboration between Perth musician Ruz Irani and New Yorker Avinash Lalwani under the name Scratch. Scratch are back with a video of the song ‘Soak’ – a song we described as sounding like Radiohead meeting Feeder – delicate guitars, synth, and vocals in between thunderous walls of guitar and …
Premiere: Cloud Tangle – Romance Me
It is with great pleasure that Backseat Mafia premiere’s the latest single from Brisbane’s highly talented musician/producer Amber Ramsay, working under the name Cloud Tangle. ‘Romance Me’ is a dreamy, floaty masterpiece with Ramsay’s gorgeous, distant, disconnected voice sweeping through the synth layers – sensual, enveloping and yet antithetically cold. There is a beautiful fragility …
Premiere: Alyrah – Twin Flame Portal EP plus single The Empress
Backseat Mafia is very proud to premiere the single ‘The Empress’ from Australian artist Alyrah, as well as her forthcoming EP ‘Twin Flame Portal’, due out on 28 February 2020. Hailing from Sydney, Alyrah is an indie-electronic artist and producer with, based on this release, an enormous amount of talent and a very distinct and …
Album Review: Steve Kilbey and Gareth Koch – Chryse Planitia
Living legend Steve Kilbey, the powerhouse behind one of Australia’s greatest exports – The Church – has just released an intriguing and delightful collaboration with Viennese-trained classical musician Gareth Koch called ‘Chryse Planitia’. The result is a beautiful set of 10 tracks that mix Kilbey’s deep sonorous vocals and his mystical lyrics with delicate and …
Track: The Proper Ornaments – Purple Hearts plus album news
The Proper Ornaments are an unashamedly guitar-driven band and the low-fi single ‘Purple Hearts’ is an absolute delight: a melancholic ramble infused with a sleepy bohemian rhythmic quality: There’s a sparseness and a majesty in this song – simple yet loaded with feeling. The song is off The Proper Ornament’s forthcoming album ‘Mission Bells’ due …
Album Review: Courtney Barnett – MTV Unplugged Live in Melbourne plus tour news
Australia’s iconic balladeer Courtney Barnett has just released an MTV Unplugged Live in Melbourne on the eve of an announcement that she will be supporting fellow Melburnian Nick Cave with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds UK and Ireland tour. Bringing together a host of music luminaries, with some covers, some golden oldies and a …
Track: A.Swayze and the Ghosts – Mess of Me plus tour news
A. Swayze and the Ghosts are undeniably one of Tasmanian’s finest exports (along with southern gothicism, unfiltered Gin and the Dark Mofo Festival). Building up quite a reputation across Australia, they have just released a fantastic new single and announced a tour of the US – treading the well worn path of Australian bands to …
Track: Luna Li – Trying
Toronto’s talented singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Luna Li has just released a magical new single ‘Trying’ which showcases her creative instrumentation, floating vocals and whimsical lyrics. ‘Trying’ is infused with a psychedelic melancholia and an almost fairground sound washed through with delicate strings. Li says of the song: Writing this song was an exercise in vulnerability. …
Album Review: Bambara – Stray plus tour news
‘Stray’ by New York band Bambara is one of those albums that provides a delicious, vicarious thrill on first listen: it has all the brilliance of a coterie of bands stretching from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to Alabama 3, Wall of Voodoo, Sisters of Mercy to Tindersticks: swaggering, poised story-telling that is visceral …