Tracks of the Year 2014

M+N Editor DOUG WALLEN counts down his top 30 local tracks of 2014.

30. The SMB
‘Who Do You Love?’

Is yet another version of Bo Didley’s much-covered rock classic really one of the year’s best songs? Hell yes. The SMB – a.k.a. The Steve Miller Band, named for its frontman and the proprietor of Handsome Steve’s House of Refreshment – specialise in blinding, bastardised versions of evergreen songs, hijacking everyone from The Everly Brothers to Wreckless Eric and Little Richard. But this is their calling card – especially taken in video form, where a stack of brides in full wedding regalia collide with some truly scalding singing and feedback. Remember when rock ‘n’ roll actually sounded dangerous? The SMB do.

29. Flat Fix
‘Cerulean Blue’
(From the cassette An Unkempt House)

You’d expect two guys with the combined credentials of Nick Senger (Castings, Cistern Corrupt) and Cooper Bowman (Altered States Tapes, Dry Mouth, Junk Sick) to excel at synth-fried vision quests, and they do. The dozen-minute ‘Cerulean Blue’ from their duo Flat Fix is serpentine in structure and positively humming with detail, chewing on more and more changing scenery as it unfurls.

28. Mere Women
‘Our Street’
(From Your Town)

“Will you still want me when I’m old and frail?” is just one of many pointed questions Amy Wilson poses about the cruel passage of time on Mere Women’s personal-history-fixated second LP. The Sydney trio already blur the line between atmospheric indie rock and mathy punk, but ‘Our Street’ adds a dubby rhythmic edge to its distorted smear of guitar. Three minutes later, as Wilson again repeats, “I’ve walked down this street so many times,” her refrain mirrors the life cycles that can be so hard to break – something this song is all about.

27. Kučka
‘Divinity’
(From a forthcoming EP)

Inertia started its new in-house label Midnight Feature to explore “the exhilarating edges of the Australian pop spectrum,” which makes Perth’s Laura Jane Lowther (a.k.a. Kučka) a natural choice to launch the imprint. Her immersive single ‘Divinity’ is a post-Grimes feat of future-pop sorcery that’s psychedelically layered while still hinging on a coquettish vocal turn and the head-spinning refrain “I can feel my cells divide/Gathering and multiply.”

26. Harmony
‘Big Ivan’
(From Carpetbombing)

‘Big Ivan’ wasn’t a single, but it should have been. (There’s still time.) It ropes in everything Harmony does so well, from dirge-y moodiness and a gallows choir to Tom Lyngcoln’s bristling howl and that frazzled monster of a guitar solo at the two-minute mark. It sounds like the entire band’s been buried alive, with the vocal section trying to soothe a raging Lyngcoln into some version of acceptance.

25. Pond
‘Elvis’ Flaming Star’
(From Man It Feels Like Space Again)

Seeing Pond live has always confirmed the feeling that they can do pretty much anything, and in this one song they do. Pinned to a rubbery disco snap, ‘Elvis’ Flaming Star’ ploughs through a suite-like structure than accommodates strong whiffs of Bowie, The Zombies and maybe even its namesake. It’s noisy and unwieldy yet super catchy, like King Gizzard holding court at a rollerskate party. In fact, might as well call this one a tie with Gizz’s ‘Cellophane’.

24. Emma Russack
‘You Shouldn’t’
(From You Changed Me)

You Changed Me was the year’s best Australian album about relationships, with Emma Russack noting every compromise like marking off a battered scorecard. It’s hard to take just one song from the record on its own – as they really do paint a cumulative picture – but of the singles released so far, ‘You Shouldn’t’ is perhaps the tidiest introduction to that smoke-draped voice and Alec Marshall’s spine-tingling guitar lines. And Cameron Potts continues to be one of the country’s most fascinating and unique drummers, even at a simmer.

23. Wireheads
‘Five Grand’
(From The Late Great Wireheads)

At the beginning of 2014, not many people outside Adelaide knew who Wireheads were. And while the ragtag ensemble haven’t exactly taken over the world since, a year later they’re recording with Calvin Johnson (Beat Happening, K Records) in US indie mecca Olympia, Washington as well as releasing a seven-song tape that furthers the warbling, cowpunk-damaged sprawl of their debut LP. Most importantly, though, they’ve made a case for Adelaide as a city you’d actually want to visit instead of escape. It all started here, with their heart-on-sleeve ode to the City of Churches.

22. Sui Zhen
‘Infinity Street’
(From the forthcoming LP Secretly Susan)

If Infinity Street were an actual road, it wouldn’t be merely infinite but suspended high up in the clouds, just like this song seems to be. ‘Infinity Street’ is the latest evidence for Sui Zhen’s evolution from quirky singer-songwriter and tasteful collaborator to a bona fide pop visionary. Like so many great pop singles before it, this downplays its genre-crossed sophistication with a breezy, summery nonchalance – but look closer and you’ll see just how well-crafted it is.

21. Low Life
‘Friends’
(From Dogging)

Low Life were the talk of Sydney this year, and not just because of how unreliable they are. Their long-time-coming LP Dogging is a bizarre artefact, as is ‘Friends’: laced with jarring vocal quirks and droll commentary while fumbling through murky punk. And yes, it’s about the TV show of the same name – not that you’d immediately guess, recast as it is in Low Life’s own fucked universe. It’s not necessarily their best song, but it nails the band’s unlikely successes, built as much on comic misanthropy as on barbed hooks that are weirdly poppy.

20. Black Cab
‘Supermädchen’
(From Games of the XXI Olympiad)

Black Cab’s concept album about the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics is – to keep with the theme – a marathon of an listen. So is the 10-minute ‘Supermädchen’, a Kraftwerkian instrumental (not counting the unintelligible vocoder) that definitely evokes forward-moving feats of pure physicality. This may be instant heady gratification for synth fans, but you can dance to it too. It’s a room-filling colossus that feels ever so light on its feet.

19. Totally Mild
‘Take Today’
(From Five Years of Bedroom Suck Records)

It was another great year for smart Australian guitar-pop, from Twerps and The Ocean Party down to Babaganouj and The Zebras. But some of the most interesting pop emanated from Totally Mild’s Elizabeth Mitchell, who pens short songs that change direction several times within a single tune. Ahead of a debut album, ‘Take Today’ amply displays the band’s gifts: from a head-in-the-clouds vocal dreaminess to a ringing chorus and abrupt little turns. Still, this is actually straightforward compared to much of the album material they’ve been previewing live, which should see Totally Mild become one of 2015’s best pop bands from any country.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.]

17. Yes I’m Leaving
‘Care Less’
(From Slow Release)

It’s easy to underestimate Yes I’m Leaving: the Sydney trio take a few basic elements and simply bash them into the ground for the next couple minutes. But repeat listens brings out both the sheer resilience of those would-be basic punk anthems – and the universal bent of frontman Billy Burke’s vented frustrations. ‘Care Less’ is a standout partly because of its bass-rattling, guitar-jangling looseness, but what seals the deal is Burke’s end-of-his-rope refrain “And I just don’t care any more/I don’t know if I ever did” over perfectly snappy drums.

16. The Harpoons
‘Can We Work This Out’
(From Falling For You)

A lonesome duet hinging around “your speed dial” and “cell phone” – communication devices that have just as much capacity for distancing us – ‘Can We Work This Out’ downplays The Harpoons’ breakout soul singer, Bec Rigby, and reminds us how easily they can also pull off disembodied R’n’B ballads. Swapping familiar sentiments with Martin King (Oscar & Martin), Rigby gets the most poignant line with the recurring six-word lament “It can’t go on like this.”

15. You Beauty
‘Healin’ Spirit’
(From Jersey Flegg)

As with Black Cab, it’s risky to wrench a single song out from the context of a concept album. But you don’t even need to know about the intricate rugby-league narrative behind Jersey Flegg to appreciate ‘Healin’ Spirit’ as a rhythmically grooving, lyrically haunted three-minute single. It doesn’t take some wider backstory, after all, to sell the universal opening line “Of course I still think of her.” And seriously, that rhythm section is to die for.

14. NUN
‘Evoke the Sleep’
(From NUN)

Is it synth-pop or synth-punk? Who the hell cares when it’s this well-oiled? The percolation-happy ‘Evoke the Sleep’ falls on the more accessible side of Melbourne quartet NUN, but it doesn’t neglect their industrial and goth vibes or Jenny Branagan’s scene-stealing vocals. Rather, it’s the perfect gateway into a band – and album – that feel like their own thumping, whirring microcosm.

13. Laura Jean
‘Don’t Marry the One You Love’
(From Laura Jean)

Laura Jean does brutally personal storytelling so well that it’s a shock to hit the ninth track on her John Parish-produced fourth album and get what initially sounds like a radio-friendly folk-pop singalong. But listen to the words and you’ll see she’s lost none of that brutality. She does, however, crank up the bone-dry wit: “Don’t marry the one you love, it’ll make you a bad person,” she quips halfway through. Tackling monumental life decisions with a wry touch, Laura Jean dispenses hard truths about grown-up regret while we’re busy humming along. Let’s hope this song brings more fans to an album that never compromises when it comes to frankness – much like the artist herself.

12. Seekae
‘Monster’
(From The Worry)

For anyone concerned that Seekae’s transition to vocals would make them somehow straighter or less interesting, ‘Monster’ is a quietly powerful rebuttal. Set to skulking guitar, a pingponging loop and muffled horn motifs, it’s a stark ballad that does indeed sound straighter than Alex Cameron’s happily grotesque solo work – at least until Cameron gets to the part about being “in the corner of your room” and promising “There’s something comin’, something soon.” Then it slips into shadowy threats as the music fills out more and more, ending with you more likely to replay it than comfortably move on.

11. Martyr Privates
‘Something to Sell’
(From the forthcoming album Martyr Privates)

Yes, we don’t cover enough Brisbane music. And this year there was more good stuff coming out of the city than ever, from Roku Music and Tape/Off to Cobwebbs and Hits. (Oh yeah, and these guys.) But our favourite Brisbane song of 2014 was this simple, droning-voiced roughie from Martyr Privates, whose always-dependable dirges sound at once hopeful and forsaken. As the song says: “Don’t hang around for my love.”

10. Lowtide
‘Wedding Ring’
(From Lowtide)

Pop-leaning singles are always more prevalent on these kinds of lists, if only because they stand so well on their own. ‘Wedding Ring’ is the poppiest moment on Lowtide’s deeply lush, long-waited debut LP, and it could easily win the heart of someone who knows nothing about the shoegazing Melbourne quartet. It’s a honeyed duet about romantic devotion (“Be my wedding ring”) that deserves to be played at every union between two souls until the end of time. It’s also incredibly well layered, offering sparkling activity in every direction. In fact, it’s built more like a stacked-up wedding cake than a ring, melting forever in our mouths.

9. Peter Escott
‘My Heaven, My Rules’
(From The Long O)

One of the best sets I witnessed this year was Peter Escott playing on the house piano downstairs at Melbourne’s Curtin Hotel, wearing a dress (as he often does live) with his back to the audience. Those idiosyncrasies will be familiar to anyone who knows his perpetually underrated Hobart duo The Native Cats, and Escott’s beguiling solo album took them even further, despite swapping homemade samplers and prickly post-punk for piano ballads and crooned vocals. ‘My Heaven, My Rules’ is a smoothened oddity, dispensing the line “You never had to live by my rules” with the jauntiness of Bing Crosby. As always with Escott, it’s hard to parse the exact meaning of the lyrics, but he’s arguably never been more accessible than this, holding court over those keys while singing with what could just be a twinkle in his eye.

8. Tkay Maidza
‘Switch Lanes’
(From the EP Switch Tape)

Adelaide’s music boom isn’t just about indie-rock-friendly bands like Wireheads and Fair Maiden: Tkay Maidza and Strict Face each made big international waves in the realm of club music. Maidza’s ‘Switch Lanes’ is a giddy post-M.I.A. masterpiece, showing off the acuteness of both her dizzying rapping and heartfelt singing while producer Paces stokes an infectious jumble of thumb piano and other bouncy samples. (Its colourful animated video is nearly as mesmerising.) This song proves that last year’s ‘Brontosaurus’ and August’s ‘U-huh’ were no flukes. Now where’s the album?

7. Twerps
‘Back to You’
(From Range Anxiety)

‘Back to You’ doesn’t sound like a band that’s just signed to Merge and keeps getting bigger every day. Nah, it sounds like some friends from around the corner who stumbled onto a homespun pop gem, complete with a modest keyboard hook. Fizzy and propulsive, this is Twerps settling into stardom with a crooked grin. Just below the surface lurks the anxiety foretold by the above album title (“Somebody out there is doin’ better than me”), but it’s made better by love: “And it all keeps comin’ … back to you.”

6. Ben Frost
‘Venter’
(From A U R O R A)

Ben Frost’s self-described “ecstatic loss of control” became a surprise crossover this year, with even Rolling Stone loudly trumpeting A U R O R A at mid-year. ‘Venter’ was the album’s gateway for many of us, and it’s still so powerful: gradually cranking up the intensity until it’s almost unbearable. HTRK and others got to dismantle the song on an instructive remix EP that reminded us just how mystical the original is. In a year where Swans gained newfound currency and Sunn O))) teamed up with Scott Walker – not to mention to a whole school of world-swallowing noise-making typified by Aussies like Lawrence English – ‘Venter’ stands out as some sort of grotesque version of a club-friendly chart hit, right down to its gleaming pulse at the end.

5. Fair Maiden
‘Lady of Fortune’
(From Fair Maiden)

Fair Maiden’s long-gestating debut album is haunting for several reasons, among them Ellen Carey’s eerie vocals and the stark stylistic shifts from song to song. Indeed arriving at “this weird genre that doesn’t exist”, the Adelaide ensemble have their way with everything from gospel and folk to girl groups and country. ‘Lady of Fortune’ is the best and most unnerving of all. It’s an otherworldly ballad complete with ghost-like harmonies, as Carey stokes images from some distant time and place over loping acoustic guitar and smouldering drums. “Bring them to me/Bring their clothes and jewellery/Bring their firstborn baby,” she commands, straight out of the darkest fairy tale.

4. Total Control
‘Flesh War’
(From Typical System)

It would have been hard to imagine the Total Control of Henge Beat making Richard Kingsmill’s favourite album of the year, but that was before ‘Flesh War’. This one song toppled expectations for the post-punk outfit’s second album, and also reached a far wider audience than anyone predicted. After years firmly entrenched in punk as frontman of Straightjacket Nation, drummer for The UV Race and the man behind Distort, Dan Stewart stepped out here as the brooding star to the band’s sudden flirtations with hollowed-out New Wave. The mantra-like lyrics are awfully grim on their own, but the synth-glossed music transforms them into something out of The Breakfast Club (both the movie and the soundtrack): festering angst that anyone can relate to.

3. Strict Face
‘Fountains’

The best songs transport us entirely, and few do that better than ‘Fountains’. Adelaide producer Jon Santos may have cut his teeth with grime, but his output this year has been something else altogether. Before unveiling the fruits of his fast-growing maturity with September’s Marble Isles EP, he enveloped us with this mercurial single in March. Its disparate tones and bubbling melodies don’t sound grounded in any genre (or planet), and even when it gains rhythmic traction it’s not what you’d call a club banger. Instead, it’s a pure-of-heart meditation. Four and a half minutes later, our surroundings feel altered, down to a molecular level.

2. The Peep Tempel
‘Carol’
(From Tales)

Say it with me: “I don’t think Trevor is good for you.” The year’s best local rock song is all nervous tension, both musically (man, that bass line) and down to Blake Scott’s hard-spat advice to the title character, who doesn’t seem swayed by his argument that “You’re my spade/I’m your bucket.” It’s not just a bitter song about divorce and disappointment; it’s an explosion of frustrated momentum. As Scott himself tells it: “High anxiety. Unattainable and unfulfilled desire … It’s a suburban pub setting, with a real sense of community: Carol starts bringing in the new squeeze; he’s a contractor with a brand new HiLux and a house. You’re pissed and losing on the dogs. Bummer.”

1. Augie March
‘Definitive History’
(From Havens Dumb)

Even instrumentally it would be eerie enough, but those lyrics are the most unflinching in recent Australian history. This is our country in 2014, including our poisoned state of politics (“Bold in their beers, straw between their ears”). Couched nine songs into Augie March’s quietly sprawling comeback album, ‘Definitive History’ tackles everything from overpopulation (“One for the mother, one for the dad/One for the treasurer, one for the plasma screen/And don’t forget the developer’s dream”) to outright murder. Taken from a drift-prone, hour-long album that dispenses this gem – “O I know justice, it’s a birthright if you’re born right” – within the first few lines, ‘Definitive History’ reacquaints us with Glenn Richards’s damning moral compass. It may have been five years between albums, and five years with him holed up in Hobart, but Augie March have by no means run out of things to say. This is arguably the band’s best song, topping even ‘One Crowded Hour’, and it’s certainly their most fearless.

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