Category: Edge Radio Recommended

EDGE RADIO RECOMMENDED: Cable Ties - 'Far Enough'

30/3/2020

Powerful Melbourne rock trio Cable Ties have released their widely anticipated second LP, Far Enough.

Capturing the attention of a slew of acclaimed press, Far Enough features all the critical elements of Cable Ties’ sound - colossal walls of ‘70s hard rock and pithy proto-punk are coupled with a pulsing rhythm section, anxious guitar, defiant songwriting, earth-trembling vocals and unwavering intensity.

According to guitarist and singer Jenny McKechnie, Far Enough revolves around the philosophy of hope, with album tracks drawing from the central theme of finding hope in dark moments.

“Hope is a really important theme on the album,” says Jenny. “In the past, I thought I could change things. I thought if I pointed out how messed up everything is, then people would see a clear path to fixing these problems. By the time I started writing this album, I had lost this hope. But it’s about the importance of getting hope back, even when you can see no logical reason to have it."

Release: Poison City Records/Merge Records, March 27th, 2020
Words: Slow Clap

EDGE RADIO RECOMMENDED: The Dead Maggies - 'More Than Just Ghosts'

23/3/2020

More Than Just Ghosts is the new album from The Dead Maggies. Tasmania’s wildest folk-punk, cow-punk, colonial cos-playing, gang vocalist story tellers are back with a powerful new release demonstrating their unique sound. More Than Just Ghosts brings 200 year old stories of rebellion, resistance and death back to life, remembers the Port Arthur massacre, and looks to the future, Australia’s closest neighbours Indonesia, and the past.

The album was recorded, mixed and mastered across 5,566 km of land and sea. It’s 2020 and a DIY folk-punk band from Tasmania can now access the tools of a global industry. The recording was a bi-national effort - first demoed in Bass Studios, Bandung, West Java (Indonesia) before being sent to Hobart, Tasmania and then back to Bandung again. Fitting then that the first songs from The Dead Maggies to step away from Tasmania, step to Indonesia and their friends lives there. And for the first time the Maggies have included traditional songs, weaving ancient folk stories in amongst their modern folk punk, exposing the links between the past and present of their music and lyrics. Fans of their early work won’t be disappointed though, the core of the album is still the swashbuckling adventures of bush pirates and convict rebels, in some cases following directly on from stories included in their widely acclaimed 2015 album Well Hanged.

Release: April 3rd, 2020, Folk 'Til Ya Punk Records
Words: Folk 'Til Ya Punk

EDGE RADIO RECOMMENDED: Porridge Radio - 'Every Bad'

16/3/2020

While Porridge Radio have self-released numerous demos and a garden-shed-recorded album (2016’s Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers) on Memorials of Distinction, Every Bad is a culmination of what has been in the band’s head for some time; the record they have been waiting for the means to record.

2019 saw the band propelled from a word-of-mouth gem of Brighton’s DIY scene to one of the country’s most exciting upcoming bands. Birthed from open mic nights around the seaside town, lead singer Dana Margolin initially performed bedroom-recorded songs to rooms of polite, unassuming audiences who stared at her quietly while she screamed in their faces. She soon decided to form a band through which to channel her new love of performing and songwriting – and be noisier while she was at it – so Porridge Radio was born.

Every Bad arrives full of grand, sweeping ambition – with vocals so urgent that it often feels like it is moved by compulsion rather than choice, with all the rawness of early Karen O, and influences as disparate as Charli XCX and The Cranberries.

Speaking of the emotional drive behind the record, Margolin explains “A lot of it was figuring out how I want to exist in relation to others, and how to process my own feelings, how to be vulnerable, how to show people how I feel. I struggle with being vulnerable and being open, so that’s something I do through songs.”

And thank goodness she does. Though these songs are deeply personal explorations, expressed via a weird, beautiful musical language all Porridge Radio’s own, they extend a hand to every listener who has felt conflicted, held two feelings in their hearts at once, or flailed around the depths of their own choices and relationships. For those of us who know how that feels, Every Bad is a funny, profound little comfort.

Release: March 13th, 2020, Secretly Canadian/Inertia
Words: Secretly Canadian

EDGE RADIO RECOMMENDED: Shady Nasty - 'Bad Posture'

9/3/2020

Sydney trio Shady Nasty take an unconventional approach to the ever-transforming landscape of their city. “We feel disconnected within our music scene. We sound different to every band here, but at the same time, we write about our life and our experiences, so in a way it is Sydney-based,” muses Kevin Stathis, vocalist and guitarist. "We live in a globalized world, we can see what's going on in the United States and the UK, but we view it through a different lens," continues drummer Luca Watson. "We want to reinvent it. There’s a legacy of Australian rock bands who thrive on the local, idiosyncratic reference stuff, but I am not interested in extending that legacy. I want to do something different."

Shady Nasty play an energetic and weirdo breed of punk that skirts the boundaries of the genre. With backgrounds in jazz and classical music, Shady Nasty subvert expectations. As Watson explains, “We have all had musical training. Haydn, Kev and I have been playing our instruments for a long time and played in jazz bands and shit like that. The problem with all of that music for me, though, is that it has no cultural resonance. As much as I like jazz, it doesn’t describe my life." What, then, might describe Shady Nasty's lives?

Modding cars. Chinese heritage. Making ends meet. Bad Posture explores these themes with a snarling, swaggering confidence, tackling the expectations placed on them by immigrant parents, revelling in the liberation of rebellion, all while facing mental health and addiction head on whilst railing against a city slowly being crushed by big business.

Release: Inertia Music, February 21, 2020
Words: Inertia Music

EDGE RADIO RECOMMENDED: Chitra - 'Chitra'

2/3/2020

Chitra's self titled EP squeezes the juice out of country, indie-rock and pop and turns it into a zesty new taste of woozy intimacy. Covering deeply complex narratives of unspoken thoughts, self preservation and figuring-it-all-out, Chitra catches the listener off guard. Though things sound breezy, the deeper observations on the EP are astute and rich proving that the more specific you make something the more universal it becomes.

The EP was recorded over a week in enchanting Mount Macedon with producer James Cecil, founding member of beloved Australian band Architecture In Helsinki, who has previously worked with The Goon Sax, Elizabeth, The Orbweavers, Time For Dreams & many others

Chitra's effortlessly cool energy and endearing magnetism emerges from her definiteness to remain wholly herself in her writing and music, making work that is deeply grounded in the honesty of her day to day. She represents a strong and free thinking creative emerging within Australian culture that strives for creative authenticity rather than conventional milestones of the past.

Release: February 28th, 2020, Our Golden Friend
Words: Our Golden Friend

EDGE RADIO RECOMMENDS: King Krule - 'Man Alive!'

24/2/2020

Archy Ivan Marshall has the world at his feet. After two feverishly received albums as King Krule, plus another low-key outing under his own name, this extraordinarily gifted 25-year-old from Peckham in South London adds further depth and substance to his oeuvre with another wondrous long-player called Man Alive!. It arrives packed full of his trademark sonic ambition and compositional skill, as well as the now-familiar corrosive lyricism and lurid social observation. Marshall has emerged as a pack leader amongst his peers, leading the charge in a fearless blurring of genre divisions, one minute seeming to drag the listener through the trashiest punk experience, the next ushering in a soundworld that’s apparently hi-tech and forward-looking.

Like any great artist on the rise, Archy's life is moving fast. There’s a lot to catch up on, after 2017’s sprawling masterpiece, The Ooz, broke through amid Mercury Prize nominations and minds-blown media plaudits. Unlike that record, Man Alive! doesn’t aim to present any kind of narrative thread, or Brexit-era state-of-the-nation address, just a collection of snapshots and stories, artfully sequenced into a dazzlingly coherent whole.

This third King Krule album was written as a direct reaction to the non-stop energy of touring The Ooz, and then partly recorded at Shrunken Heads in Marshall’s native stamping ground of Nunhead, with ‘Ooz’ co-producer Dilip Harris. Midway through those sessions, however, Archy found out he was going to become a dad for the first time, and he decided to move up to the North West to be near his partner's family, ready for the baby’s arrival.

“I should’ve had it all wrapped up before my daughter was born,” says Marshall with a sheepish grin. Impending parenthood came at a felicitous moment for him, as he was beginning to feel trapped in South London’s suburban lifestyle of all-eclipsing drunkenness and depression, which existing fans will know was a recurring theme in his earlier music.

“It was just the easiness of it,” he reflects today. “There really is nothing else to do here, especially when it turns to winter. Everyone I know has jobs, whereas I’d sit on my arse all day sometimes not doing anything, then I’d go to the pub with them when they finished work. It became a bit habitual. Then, right in the middle of the record, this big change came in my life that I didn't really comprehend initially. It was like, ‘Oh, I’d better get my shit together!’ To be honest, I was really glad to get away from all that so I could focus on more pressing matters – like keeping a child alive and stuff.”

The new album’s title, he explains, “is an exclamation, about the times we live in. Like, ‘Fucking hell, man!’” He stole the title from a CD that his uncle gave him back in 2013 with some of his uncle’s own music on it, and originally planned to use it for his last album.

“More and more,” he explains, “I've been put off by the intention of speaking about what's going on in society as a black-and-white thing, or trying to get to the bottom of why we’re in this position. So the album is mostly made up of snapshots and observations. There are a lot of real-time-and-place moments, songs talking about walking through the park just over there and getting a head injury, then there are other tracks which are just simplicity, looking at one particular situation and reflecting on it as somehow being super-profound.”

Release: February 21st, 2020, XL Recordings/Remote Control
Words: Remote Control

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