Ernest Ellis returns with his first release in over five years, Be The Pariah; an ode to, well, being a pariah, an outsider, a loner, a freak. There are no negative connotations in this title, rather it encapsulates everything Ellis feels is real and good: "All the best stuff happens on the fringes, in the weird zones of life and the mind. The rest is not real, it's coercion. I've tried to tap into that sense here, believing in it wholeheartedly as I do."

New York based, Australian artist Ernest Ellis has been busy over the past five years. Since the release of his first three albums, Hunting (2010), Kings Canyon (2012), and Cold Desire (2014), all of which received widespread critical acclaim in Australia on release, Ellis moved to NYC, earned a PhD and delved deeper into his creative work as a songwriter and director. 

Spending over four years writing Be The Pariah, Ellis demonstrates that above and beyond all else, he is a storyteller. Whether that be his own or those of others, with some tracks told from the perspective of an eclectic group of outsiders and others from a deeply personal perspective, Ellis has a way of crafting words that are truly meaningful.

Release: August 7, 2020, Heroism/Prospect
​Words: Brain Drain PR

​Tom Lyngcoln proudly presents to you Raging Head, out through his long running Solar/Sonar label.
 
Raging Head is the musical equivalent of an extreme skiing movie shown in a RSL or town hall by a sun fucked guy named Warren or Albie.
 
Tom Lyngcoln is a Tasmanian musician living in Melbourne since the year 2000, and has released 20 records in that time with various bands including Harmony, The Nation Blue, Lee Memorial, Magic Dirt, Pale Heads, and of course his compelling solo material. Raging Head follows debt solo album Doming Home.
  
Lyngcoln has a self proclaimed face like a steamed dim sim that has been self harmed so relentlessly that when it came time to replicate his notorious on-stage blood letting, armed with a pair of scissors on a Sunday afternoon in lock down, nothing came out. A raging head devoid of blood. A head so dry it never cracks a smile. A big white, male, middle class head trying to bleed a little and find some oppressive force to ruminate on. Oh the woe.
  
After 40 years the head still rages. It cuts hazier corners and the jowls swing at high velocity. The surgeries ring the nerve endings trying to hit the high notes. The chances of losing control, screaming through another lunch break, could end in not enough air to the brain or mass evacuation.
 
Aren’t you meant to mellow with age? Let’s overcompensate for years of balladry with Harmony through a deep fried punk record more fringe than The Nation Blue, kinetically charged by the drumming of Jay Allen, who has played in One Inch Punch, Mid Youth Crisis, The Kill and the empirically named Fuck...I’m Dead. 

The Raging Head project started when Lyngcoln invited Allen to play drums for half an hour. Lyngcoln then took those shards and cooked them into 11 two minute ragers by cut and pasting the fragments into a fabricated pastiche. Then came all the guitars. Squiggly and ridiculous, fast beyond able.
 
The project was then handed over to Cal Foley to drop some bass into. After Lyngcoln watched Foley play along to the majority of Houdini by the Melvins during a soundcheck for his then band The Stevens, he ear-marked Cal as a future Number One Draft Pick.
 
And now with all instrumentation complete the inevitable task of writing the wretched words could no longer be avoided. So he stands in a shed before a radial arm saw and listens to each song on repeat until, concussed by the repetition, a sliver of a thought leaks out from his battered dome.
 
Staring into the spinning blade a line slowly forms and then another, until there’s eleven chapters of big words. And then you sing until it hurts and play it to someone. They look at you and who is this for? Just me I guess.

Release: 14 August, 2020, Solar/Sonar
Words: Solar/Sonar + Brain Drain PR

New Zealand-born, Melbourne-bred and now Los Angeles-based Jess Cornelius has release her debut album, Distance, via Part Time Records / Remote Control. The album follows singles 'Kitchen Floor' and 'Body Memory,' which “documents the aftermath of a miscarriage, yet has the sound of a hard-earned, springtime bloom” (NYLON). Distance celebrates newness - new beginnings and new perspectives on endings, from the chaos of a vagabond lifestyle to having a child just weeks before the album’s release (Cornelius had her baby the day after the last song, 'Body Memory,' was shared).

A lot has changed since Jess Cornelius began writing the songs that would comprise Distance.

For starters, she moved halfway around the world from Melbourne, Australia to Los Angeles. At the time, Cornelius had a few new songs and the idea of finally making a record of her own, excited to start fresh after several years as the primary songwriter in the Melbourne-based outfit Teeth and Tongue.

But the distance that Cornelius addresses over the course of these 10 songs is hardly a geographical one. Instead, the album — her solo debut on Part Time Records — finds a deft songwriter analysing the space between society’s expectations for her and her own dreams; between the illusion of love and the reality of disappointment; between a past she is ready to let go of and a future she could have hardly imagined.

As Cornelius puts it, “A lot of the record was about me deciding to continue this nomadic lifestyle of being a musician. I wrote about coming to terms with that reality. People would ask me if I was going to have a family and a lot of the songs are about me being okay with not pursuing that path. It was about coming to terms with the choices I had made.”

She adds with a laugh, “And then two years later, I’m knocked up and married. I couldn’t have imagined that.”

The album’s sounds and tones were selected with great care. Cornelius says it was important for the album to reflect the local music scene of her new home. With the help of producer Tony Buchen — another Australian transplant who approached Cornelius after a show at Los Angeles’ Bootleg Theater — Distance became a roving affair, recorded in a string of Los Angeles studios with a changing cast of friends and local musicians.

The album features contributions by Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint), harpist Mary Lattimore, Emily Elhaj (Angel Olsen), Stephanie Drootin (Bright Eyes), Jesse Quebbeman-Turley (Hand Habits), whistler Molly Lewis and special appearances by Justin Sullivan (Night Shop, Kevin Morby) and Laura Jean Anderson.

Release: July 24, 2020, Part Time Records/Remote Control
Words: Remote Control

Marcus Whale (Collarbones, BV) has released his second studio album Lucifer.

In development for four years and teased by a series of performance artworks in collaboration with artist Athena Thebus, the album mines the grand drama of good and evil from Catholicism to make a case for Lucifer, the brightest and most beautiful angel, as a light for those forsaken by God.

In the rich tradition of queer performance, Lucifer appropriates and displaces the theatrical moralism learned from a Catholic upbringing in service of imagining a world beyond its present bounds.

Extending on the orchestral scope of debut album Inland Sea (co-produced by HTRK’s Nigel Lee-Yang),
the self-produced Lucifer places the fallen angel in a strange and uncanny intersection of soundworlds, as linked to the sci-fi elasticity of contemporary club music as to 90s industrial metal or the ecclesiastical tones of an organ-accompanied church choir. At the centre of each song lies Whale’s voice, whose melodies serve as a guide through this spooky milieu.

Lucifer follows Collarbones’ 2019 album Futurity and 2016 solo album Inland Sea, both longlisted for
the Australian Music Prize and nominated for SMAC Awards. Like Inland Sea, Lucifer is paired with a written work as its physical product, a zine containing lyrics, further texts, visual works and a dialogue with collaborator Athena Thebus.

Release: July 24th, 2020, Independent
Words: Marcus Whale