The Drones review – menaced, dirgy rock’n’roll at Melbourne comeback show

The Drones brought muscular guitars, crashing cymbals and menaced balladeering to Melbourne’s Thornbury Theatre.

Massive Attack review – an arena-sized version of doomscrolling

The songs really fucking slammed at Massive Attack’s Melbourne show – when the light show calmed down enough for one to listen properly.

Day Tripper review – performances by Kae Tempest and Chanel Beads make for an emotional winter’s afternoon

Featuring a mix of hyped indie acts, cult favourites and sprouting locals, Day Tripper showed a general disregard for genre pigeonholing.

Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 review – joy reigns supreme at Hamer Hall

Seun Kuti and Egypt 80’s gig at Hamer Hall was a raucous affair for its entire two-hour duration, featuring Fela classics and Seun originals.

Cate Le Bon review – skin shedding and renewal at Melbourne Town Hall

Cate Le Bon returned to Melbourne to perform songs from her latest album, Michelangelo Dying, her most vital body of work.

Sparks review – beloved songs from beloved strange brothers

Sparks’ performance at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre was like a Reader’s Digest of the Mael brothers’ long and discursive career.

Sparks review – more energised, more extraordinary than ever

Performing at the Sydney Opera House, Sparks proved that they have never stood still, and they’ve never allowed themselves to grow bored.

« Older Entries

The Drones review – menaced, dirgy rock’n’roll at Melbourne comeback show

The Drones brought muscular guitars, crashing cymbals and menaced balladeering to Melbourne’s Thornbury Theatre.

Massive Attack review – an arena-sized version of doomscrolling

The songs really fucking slammed at Massive Attack’s Melbourne show – when the light show calmed down enough for one to listen properly.

Day Tripper review – performances by Kae Tempest and Chanel Beads make for an emotional winter’s afternoon

Featuring a mix of hyped indie acts, cult favourites and sprouting locals, Day Tripper showed a general disregard for genre pigeonholing.

Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 review – joy reigns supreme at Hamer Hall

Seun Kuti and Egypt 80’s gig at Hamer Hall was a raucous affair for its entire two-hour duration, featuring Fela classics and Seun originals.

Cate Le Bon review – skin shedding and renewal at Melbourne Town Hall

Cate Le Bon returned to Melbourne to perform songs from her latest album, Michelangelo Dying, her most vital body of work.

Sparks review – beloved songs from beloved strange brothers

Sparks’ performance at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre was like a Reader’s Digest of the Mael brothers’ long and discursive career.

« Older Entries

Recent Posts

Lim Orion rebels against relational neglect by dancing on the furniture

Lim Orion channels Japanese folklore and 90s alt-rock on Futon, the third single released from forthcoming album Ilk. The hefty power chords in the chorus might resemble something off Silverchair’s Neon Ballroom, but Futon is no garden variety bit of grunge nostalgia....

The Drones review – menaced, dirgy rock’n’roll at Melbourne comeback show

The return of The Drones has caused a minor but genuine frenzy. What was originally intended as a "six show run for fun" has ballooned into an 18-stop tour plus festival appearances in Darwin and Wollongong. The Aus rock nostalgia circuit is a bloated field, but the...

Massive Attack review – an arena-sized version of doomscrolling

No one was moving or dancing really, and very few people even had their phones out to film – perhaps out of guilt as they watched so many images of the world ending. Massive Attack’s 2010 tour of Australia occupies a special place in the memory of anyone who attended...

Day Tripper review – performances by Kae Tempest and Chanel Beads make for an emotional winter’s afternoon

I’ve been going to Rising’s Day Tripper festival since its launch in 2024. The lineups have all featured a mix of hyped indie acts, cult favourites, genre veterans and a few sprouting locals. But what characterises the Day Tripper programming is a general disregard...

Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 review – joy reigns supreme at Hamer Hall

A few months ago, my friend Penny recommended me the Fela Kuti podcast, Fear No Man, a 12-episode series that looks at how the Nigerian Afrobeat icon backed up his claim that “music is the weapon of the future.” During the 1970s and 80s, Fela made music designed to...

Cate Le Bon review – skin shedding and renewal at Melbourne Town Hall

The morning after Cate Le Bon’s gig at Melbourne Town Hall, I was flicking through the digital version of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies card deck. There was one card that seemed to neatly sum up Le Bon’s latest album, Michelangelo Dying, songs from which accounted...

Sparks review – beloved songs from beloved strange brothers

Sparks' performance at Melbourne's Palais Theatre was like a Reader's Digest of the Mael brothers' long and discursive career, with a few unexpected picks. I recently spoke to Sparks keyboardist and songwriter, Ron Mael, who is now 80 years old. I asked him whether he...

Sparks review – more energised, more extraordinary than ever

For all their constant reinventions and subversions, the secret weapon of art pop duo Sparks has always been their sly but deep sincerity. Yes, brothers Russell and Ron Mael have songs with titles like “Dicking Around” and “Running up a Tab at the Hotel for the Fab,”...

A dance on a farm for Butter Sessions’ 15th birthday

Choose love. Sang wrote this on my left hand on Thursday afternoon. It washed off in the shower on Friday morning, but I retraced it before going to Butter Sessions' 15th birthday party later that day. It was Good Friday and Butter Sessions had curated an afternoon...

Gallery: Pitch Music & Arts, March 6-10 2026

The ninth iteration of Pitch Music & Arts took place from 6-10 March on the stolen lands of the Djab Wurrung and Eastern Maar people. The lineup included Bitter Babe, Yu Su, Sleep D b2b Jennifer Loveless, OK Williams, Eris Drew & Octo Octa, Estella Boersma,...

Redemption, revenge and trashy club bangers: everything that influenced INAUGURAL’s Stone Tapes Vol. 1

Sydney duo INAUGURAL want to tell stories about real people. The band’s new EP, Stone Tapes Vol. 1, includes stories of redemption, revenge, trauma and suicide, as well as a love song to disgruntled black sheep, and an 80s ballad about armed security guards. “The...

The return of Perth slowburners Bluetile Lounge: ‘We just wanted to be like the bands we loved’

Bluetile Lounge appeared fully formed to me in a vision at the UWA Refectory sometime around mid 1993. I was a 19 year old stripling in Perth, occasionally waking up in time to attend uni lectures, when this friendly guy from my English Lit class told me he was...

Golden Plains review – finding joy in the interstices

Recently, I have been interrogating my reflex cognitions, trying to slow down my conclusions. If, for example, someone makes a sound that annoys me, rather than deeming the sound inherently, objectively annoying, I take a breath and consider what else might be going...

The Streets review – Mike Skinner’s laddish melancholy rendered as musical theatre

“What percentage of the crowd do you think will be men?” I asked my brother a couple of hours before going to see The Streets at Palace Foreshore. I got us the tickets, thinking it’d be the perfect activity for a sibling date. The Streets’ music pulls in many of our...

Pulp review – Sheffield band’s music feels more relevant now than it ever did

If there’s one band from the Britpop era that has been pretty much guaranteed artistic immortality, it’s Pulp. That might sound like heresy to those who picked the Gallagher brothers as their avenging angels in the much-discussed Britpop wars. But listening to a song...

‘I fucken loved it’ – all the highlights at Pulp’s first Melbourne gig in 15 years

The last time Pulp played in Melbourne, in 2011, a feeling of temporariness surrounded the whole affair. The Sheffield band, led by Jarvis Cocker, were back together for a one-off reunion tour. They hadn't made music together in a decade, and they didn't have any...

Grace Jones review – come for the funk stay for the hula hooping

Iconic, energetic and anarchic, such was the atmosphere at Grace Jones' gig on a beautiful moonlit night in the Harbour City. Opening with “Nightclubbing,” the 77-year-old singer hasn’t lost any of her moxie, teasing the crowd with her ever-more revealing costume...

Australian music media is horny for Spotify

Spotify, famously, sucks. But Spotify is also, famously, very popular. Despite a year of bad press and calls for a mass boycott, Spotify still claims close to a third of the streaming market, which is roughly the equivalent of Apple Music, YouTube Music and Amazon...

Peter van Hoesen and MESS ride out the apocalypse with a new live score to Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Belgian electronic musician Peter van Hoesen and the MESS Synthesiser Ensemble performed a new live score to Terminator 2: Judgement Day at Hamer Hall. Given our present-day geopolitical and technological reality, James Cameron's 1991 sci-fi was a fitting choice for...

Getting close to POiSON GiRL FRiEND

It's the Year of the Fire Horse. Writing in Dazed about what to expect out of the first fire horse in 60 years, astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat underlines that while horses are big and strong, they are also gentle creatures. “They always watch out for one another,” they...

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