Padua College Students - "Too Munch" EP

Title: "Too Munch"
Label: Sundown Records
Cat: SUN 331
Distributor: Independent
Release Date: October 1987
Producers: Giovanni Porta & Chris Dodemont

Tracks:

1) The Crustaceans - "Shake, Rattle & Roll" (Calhoun)
2) That's All - "Bitter Duel" (Joe Ragusa/David Atkinson)
3) Blue Brick - "She's The One" (Tony Field)
4) Staff & Students - "Little Fishermen" (Giovanni Porta & Chris Dodemont)

The Crustaceans:

Michael "Mojo" Webb: Guitar and Vocals
Damien Searle: Sax
Stephen Giacomantonio: Bass and Keyboards
Daniel Purdie: Drums

That's All:

Marco Ferro: Lead Vocals
David Atkinson: Guitar and vocals
Tom Cooper: Bass and vocals
Joseph Ragusa: Guitar and vocals
Simon DiMichele: Drums

Blue Brick:

Stephen Slade: Guitar and Vocals
Andrew Rootes: Bass
Bernard Maude: Keyboards
Giovanni Porta: Drums

Staff & Students:

Giovanni Porta: Drums and Vocals
Anne-Maree Moon: Vocals
Tom Cooper: Bass and Vocals
Joe Ragusa: Guitar and Vocals
Simon DiMichele: Drums and Vocals
Daniel Purdie: Percussion and Vocals

A bit of a trip down memory lane for me, because this EP was recorded by my school friends and teachers when I was in Year 11 at Padua College. I had originally reviewed this EP for my school yearbook "The Paduan" in 1987, and thought it'd be worth mentioning on here.
Padua College is generally famous in Australia for being the breeding ground for renowned footballer-turned-commentator Paul "Fatty" Vautin in 1974. By the 1980's the multi-talented and charismatic music maestro Chris Dodemont (formerly of Sydney jazz-rock band The Jumpers) had been enlisted to run the music department at the school. In 1986 the school invested a substantial amount of money into building a new state of the art recording studio. The following year one of the teachers Giovanni Porta decided to put it to good use to record an EP featuring the cream of the musical crop at the school together with a song he had written for one of the recently departed teachers Frank Gracias (in "Little Fishermen").
Out of the musicians on here, only Mojo Webb has sustained a serious career in music as a top blues guitarist.

SHAKE RATTLE & ROLL: Opens up with some fine sax playing from Damien Searle, but the track sounds rather lightweight with cheesy synth playing, plus the guitars could have been brought up a lot more in the mix. The mulit-tracked vocals in the instrumental break sound very effective though.

BITTER DUEL: An anti-drug song written about a fictitious teenage girl who beats addiction and lives to tell. Nice piece of radio friendly power pop which also had the band interviewed on 4ZZZ a few weeks later. I was friends with the guys in the band, but none of them continued it after leaving school although I did try to work with Joe on another musical project four years later with a particularly nasty control freak of a producer (whose name I will not reveal on here), but that's something for another story sometime later.

SHE'S THE ONE: This was a cover of a good rollicking number by good-time rock'n'roll revivalists The Cockroaches, and their biggest hit which reached the Top 5 in the charts. I remember Stephen having a bad cold at the time this was recorded and you can hear his voice going a little bit raspy here and there. In all, a good arrangement of the song though not quite as loud and aggressive as the original.

LITTLE FISHERMEN: Written about Frank Gracias who taught maths, religion and technical drawing at Padua up until his untimely death in 1985 when he was struck with a fatal cause of influenza. Frank's main passion outside of teaching was fishing which he used to teach as a sport for a few interested students. This is a pleasant reggae influenced track with great percussion, duet vocals with Giovanni and Anne-Maree Moon (who was then teaching music) and a student chorus. He was one of my favourite TD teachers, firm but soft spoken and always did his best to encourage students. It was the only time that I really enjoyed doing the subject at school as the one I had the following year was a misanthropic bully who was an ex-cop and got his rocks off from intimidating students.......just goes to show that school days aren't always all happy days, but at least I've survived it!

This EP has not been re-released in any format, but I will get round to transferring it to MP3 and put it up, so keep an eye out for it! :)

REGURGITATOR - UNIT

REGURGITATOR - UNIT

Label: East West Records

Distributor: Warner Music

Catalogue Number: 3984-25260-2

Release Year: 1997

Producers: Lachlan "Magoo" Gould at The Dirty Room

Personnel: Quan Yeomans (Guitar, Keyboards, Vocals)

Ben Ely (Bass, Keyboards, Vocals)

Martin Lee (Drums)

Tracklisting:

1) I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff

2) Everyday Formula

3) ! (The Song Formerly Known As)

4) Black Bugs

5) World Of Sleaze

6) I Piss Alone

7) Unit

8) I Will Lick Your Asshole

9) Modern Life

10) Polyester Girl

11) 1234

12) Mr. T

13) Just Another Beautiful Story

Regurgitator were always a band to surprise and shock people and never content to rest on their laurels or categorising themselves into one genre. Anybody who was expecting another "Tu-Plang" was in for a shock, for Regurgitator had followed similar footsteps to Savage Garden and gone for 80's inspired electronic pop but unlike them tackling more controversial and off-beat topics than love and romance.

1) I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff - good opening song with Ben Ely's vocals put through a vocoder similar to the old Georgio Moroder sound and bloopy bass keyboards. It is a slap in the face to listeners who refused to adapt to the changing cultures that Regurgitator were exploring and wanted them to stay a band similar to Primus and the Chili Peppers. The moral of this song: broaden your horizons cos we ain't gonna the sound the same forever! This track also appeared on the compilation Endangered Species featuring Brisbane bands protesting against the then Howard Government seeking to allow parallel imports of CDs because the local record companies were overpricing albums (still are today - I drink to the day we can buy singles for $2 and albums for $13 again).

2) Everyday Formula - The first single taken from the album, this is a cross between 80's power pop with dashings of synth pop in the chorus. The song is all about taking a dump in the toilet and where it ends up.

3) ! (The Song Formerly Known As) - The third single from the album, this is a great piece of sassy funk about the joys of living the life of a bedroom loner whose had enough of the party circuit and nightclubs. Great funky guitar riff, and a sample from Silver Convention's 1976 hit "Get Up And Boogie" thrown in for good measure.

4) Black Bugs - Owing a bit to Kim Wilde's "View From A Bridge" but a lot slower. This was the second single from the album featuring a very cute cartoon video with exotic animals playing the instruments like the Banana Splits.

5) The World Of Sleaze - Opens up with a half-hearted played riff of "Sweet Home Alabama" which is what the song is based around. Quan's tired and jaded vocals glorify a pornographic underworld with a great rousing singalong chorus with the charming line of "We've got dicks and cunts and slutz and butts and pimps and hos yeah plenty of those. There's no end to the things you can win, and i'll be your friend if you just spread your legs". Obviously not a song that would have gone down well with mainstream radio programme directors.

6) I Piss Alone - Decrying public urinals in men's toilet blocks due to inadequacy over penis size. Starts off with a big stringy organ chord section then suddenly explodes into a thrash punk number with fuzzed vocals mixed so far back it's impossible to decipher them unless you are reading the lyric sheet.

7) Unit - a filler track with a hypnotic beat and metronomic keyboards and ethereal New-Agey vocals.

8) I Will Lick Your Asshole - Taking the mickey out of 'name songs' that were popular in the early 90's like the Beloved's "Hello" and Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire". It name-drops the band's heroes like Sarah Jane Smith from Doctor Who, Cliff Richard, Peter, Paul & Mary, and David Attenborough put over a jiggly funk backing track and the chorus rapped out sounding like they had been ingesting helium.

9) Modern Life - Ben Ely is on vocals on this track whereby he decries the disposable society we live in today. A more pleasant pop number with an incessant guitar riff and big accentuated chords in the chorus.

10) Polyester Girl - The third single from the album ended up being the band's biggest hit, reaching No. 13 in the charts and it's not hard to see why. The bass riff is taken from the Jackson's "Blame It On The Boogie" and deals with unrequited love over a blow up doll. This is geeky karaoke pop at its best. Sadly commercial success for the band started to slowly diminish after this song was released. It also featured a very eye catching video, but is sadly not available on the Net.

11) 1234 - 51 seconds of pure silly thrashing mayhem and nonsensical lyrics. Sounds like the proto track for "I Want To Be A Nudist" from their subsequent album "...Art".

12) Mr. T - Sounding like a bad detective track, it's not so much a homage to everybody's favourite destructive punk Negro from "The 'A' Team" but about a guy who's learned from his mistakes from his past relationships and ready to take another chance at love.

13) Just Another Beautiful Story - Sounds like a scuffy remake of the Beatles "Strawberry Fields Forever" before going into an Oasis-ish chorus. Good closing track as it deals with the uncertainty of romance in the face of death and in the afterlife.

"UNEXPECT THE EXPECTED (EP)"

Artist: Hot Liquid Sex

Label: Mucho Bravado

Cat No: 63447-979690

Year Of Release: 2008

Produced by: Ben Stewart at Ultrasonique Studios and Massive Studios

Personnel: Ocean Wilson (Guitar, Glockenspeil and Vocals)

Ruth Nitkiewicz (Bass and Vocals)

Angela Kohler (Drums)

Ben Preece (cowbell and handclaps on "Trousersnake")

Ben Stewart (egg shaker on "Emergency")

Lucas Arundell (guitars on "Fortune Cookie", "Emergency!", and "Trousersnake",

Fender Rhodes piano on "Fortune Cookie" and "Trousersnake")

Hot Liquid Sex were a female power pop trio who were active from 2005 - 2008. The act was led by Ocean Wilson who wrote all the songs on this EP with the exception of "Trousersnake" which was co-written by James O'Brien (bassist from The Boat People), and originally had Natalie Rapoto on bass who left in 2007 to live in Japan and was eventually replaced by Ruth Nitkiewicz. Drummer Angela Kohler enjoyed some modest recognition by being the drummer in the video "Like Only A Woman Can" by Brian MacFadden.

Track listing:

1) Wherearewewherearewearewethereyeah?

2) Fortune Cookie

3) Emergency!

4) Trousersnake

5) My Vanity

6) You Ain't Mine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ELn88ytGBo

This is a bright and upbeat EP which fuses instantly catchy and snappy guitar pop with strident rock chick vocals from Ocean and focusing on off-the-wall subjects such as everybody's favourite Chinese biscuits (echoing Regurgitator's "Kong Foo Sing" - they used to put a box of fortune cookies at the front of their stage as a pre-rider snack which a few mischievous audience members would help themselves to!), metrosexuals in the song "Trousersnake" and unrequited love in "You Ain't Mine". The band split up after a Melbourne tour in late 2008 after artistic and aesthetic differences with Wilson started to make headway. Angela Kohler now works alongside manager and publicist Ben Preece with his company Mucho Bravado, whilst Wilson has taken up university studies. The only downside is that this EP does not contain my favourite song of theirs "Nude Twister", and their excellent cover of "Stray Cat Strut".

5/5

The Veronicas - "Hook Me Up" (album)

The Veronicas are twin sisters Lisa and Jessica Origliasso. Formerly from Albany Creek on Brisbane's northside, they now reside in L.A. The band first hit in 1995 with "4ever" a cross between bubblegum, power pop and punk which reached No.2 on the charts, and since then have been favourites with Top 40 audiences in Australia, America, Europe and more recently the UK. "Hook Me Up" is their second album for Sire Records, and explores a more darker and introspective side to the band as well as veering more to the combination of electro rock in a similar style to Gary Numan and Regurgitator.

Label: Sire Records
Distributor: Warner Music Group
Release Year: 2007
Catalogue Number: 9362-499154-2 (CD)
Producers: Toby Gad, Greg Wells, John Feldmann, Josh Alexander and Billy Steinberg
Purchase album here: http://www.amazon.com/Hook-Me-Up-Veronicas/dp/B001E1DJ7U/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1246541300&sr=8-3

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3zdkh_the-veronicas-untouched_music

1) UNTOUCHED - Opening up with some gorgeous strings, it quickly goes into an electro thrash track. It tears along at breakneck speed like a Japanese express train. Jess and Lisa half-talk their way through this song and it has a great rousing chorus. A good choice for their second single, and the video is just as excellent. The song is also their debut hit in the UK, having peaked at No.6 in the charts with a different video.http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6cwsf_the-veronicas-hook-me-up-clip_shortfilms

2) HOOK ME UP - The title track is The Veronicas first official No.1 Australian single, and I hope that it will not be their last. It's a pleasant dance pop track about wanting to just get away from the pressures of mainstream society. Relies a lot on electronic effects, but it has some fine piano playing.

3) THIS IS HOW IT FEELS - The intro for this song reminds me of Kim Wilde's 80's classic "Kids In America". The song is basically their frustration over fair weather friends who only call them when it suits them, but when needed the most they are nowhere to be seen. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there like that.

4) THIS LOVE - It's an album track, but for some reason the lyrics for this song (and quite a few others) aren't included on the album's cover.

5) I CAN'T STAY AWAY - Written by Josh Alexander and well known pop songwriter Billy Steinberg, it isn't a bad song but it just didn't make any impact on me.http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8gjki_the-veronicas-take-me-on-the-floor_music

6) TAKE ME ON THE FLOOR - The bloopy keyboards on this track remind a lot of ex-pat Brisbane band Regurgitator, and I think that's a good thing because they are one of my fave Australian bands of all time. I like that croaky scream towards the end of the track!

7) I DON'T WANNA WAIT - This is a more softer track with some dramatic strings and nice percussion and acoustic guitar, but it has a tough side to it. The girls attack this song really well, and if you listen closely to the end, Lisa messes the lyrics up a bit and you can hear her giggle at her mistake.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9oehs_popular_videogames

8) POPULAR - Basically a rant over hangers-on and groupies who freeload off celebrities because of their financial situation. I like this song a lot, and they sing it well. This was released as the fourth single in Australia, but it did not chart.

9) REVENGE IS SWEETER (THAN YOU EVER WERE) - Wow! This is quite possibly the most angriest and abrasive track on the album. The backing track is pleasant, and is quite listenable. It should contend with "In Another Life" to be released as the third single from the album. This is the Veronicas dark side at its best in my honest opinion.

10) SOMEONE WAKE ME UP - Again, the lyrics for this song are not included on the album (maybe they should put out a sheet music compilation of their songs for those who want to learn them). Not a bad song, but it's not my personal fave.

11) ALL I HAVE - It's all about struggling with a partner who will stick by you no matter what. Good track, and I like the piano playing at the end.

12) IN ANOTHER LIFE - Regardless of what some other fans think, I think that this should definitely be released as the next single, especially for people who think that the Veronicas songs are just throwaway pop. It drives home the sad truth that childhood relationships aren't always built to last forever and there comes a time in your life when you have to give up and let go of them. It's a very organic, honest and heartfelt track that you just feel like wanting to give them a big hug.

EMMA DEAN: "Real Life Computer Game"

EMMA DEAN: REAL LIFE COMPUTER GAME
Label: Doily Records
Distribution: MGM
Year Of Release: 2008
Producers: Emma Dean & Ben Stewart

Personnel: Emma Dean (Keyboards and Vocals), John Turnbull (Bass), Dane Pollock (Guitar), Anthony Dean (Drums and Backing Vocals), Ben Stewart (Backing Vocals),

Tracklisting:

1. Waiting Room
2. Real Life Computer Game
3. Most of the Time
4. Sorry
5. Get What You Paid For
6. Orange Red
7. Addicted To ...
8. Cocaine
9. Henry
10. End Of The Table
11. Dry Land
12. Could this mean if everyone is alone we're together? In the way that we're all together alone?

Intelligent female pop music in Australia is not exactly a crowded field, but for that matter Emma Dean is a very crowded and multi-coloured renaissance woman. Being a theatre performer, music teacher, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist she is every much in a class of her own despite the many hats she proudly wears.
Starting out fresh from the Brisbane Conservatorium as a jazz student having excelled in piano and violin, she formed her own act Bittersuite which she worked in from 2002 - 2005 and collaborated with Kate Miller-Heidke and the physical theatre troupe Zen Zen Zo before she finally decided to proclaim herself as a performer in her own right.
The last few years have been summed up in the intriguingly titled debut album "Real Life Computer Game". Her vocals are sensual and sultry, but at the same time with an authoritative 'don't fuck with me cos I've been there and done it before' rock attitude.
Every song on the album is a wonderfully crafted gem with the soft and lilting opener 'Waiting Room' that starts peacefully then explodes into a theatrical rocker towards the end, the pizzacato-ish waltz and triangle filled 'Sorry', the Lisa Loeb-ish 'Orange Red' (which came No.2 in the Courier Mail's People's Choice songs this year), the tearjerking and despondent 'Henry', the frantic piano led thrash of the harrowing 'Cocaine' about muck-raking internet journalists who spread rumours about her alleged drug use, and the boppy pomp rock stomp of the title track with quirky harmonies and biting guitar licks (which I personally think should have been saved for the last track). Speaking of which, the final track is the unsuccint "Could This Mean If Everyone Is Alone We're Together? in The Way That We're All Together Alone" in which she demonstrates her vocal acrobatics in a homage to her best friend Angie Miles.
If you like the quirky dark sophistication of acts like 10cc, Sparks and Dresden Dolls together with the cool and collected rock princesses like Kate Bush, Bjork, Danielle Dax, Fiona Apple, and Kate Nash then Emma Dean is definitely worth checking out not only as a recording artist but as one of Brisbane's most exciting and captivating performers of this decade.
This is a dangerously catchy and dramatic album that demands your attention with so much more than meets the ear every time you hear it, it's one of those rare albums that repays repeated listening.

5/5

Lavish - "Polaroid"

POLAROID

Artist: Lavish
Label: Festival Records
Cat No: D 32107
Year Of Release: 1999
Produced by: Jeff Lovejoy & Clint Mansell
Personnel: Nathan Thomas (Vocals), Luke Thomas (Bass), Gary Beavis (Guitar and Vocals), Nigel Lacey (Guitar), Jeff Lovejoy (Guitar), Justin Nelson (Drums), Glen Gibson (Drums)

Running Order:

1) Careless
2) She Said
3) Trashed
4) A Big Surprise
5) Parasite
6) Automatic
7) Wear Me Down
8) Get It Together
9) Tokyo
10) The Beats
11) Homosapien
12) Gone
13) Good For Me
14) Jimi (I Wish I Could Be You)

Genre: Electronic, Rock, Alternative, Dance

Lavish were a Brisbane band active from 1994 - 2000. Formed on the Gold Coast by guitarists Gary Beavis & Nigel Lacey, vocalist Richard, drummer Michelle Wilson and bassist Matt Boulton. Eventually moved to Brisbane in 1996 where brothers Nathan and Luke Thomas took over on vocals and bass. The album was preceded by three singles "Trashed", "Good For Me" and "Homosapien", none of which made the top 40 despite the positive media reviews they got including the striking videos for "Trashed" and "Homosapien" and eventually "She Said" which was the last single taken from the album. They were dropped by Festival in 2000 due to poor marketing and mainstream interest in the band flagging. This is a great album which draws from a range of heavy rock, British rock and pop, electronica, and even some Adult orientated rock numbers like "Wear Me Down" and "Automatic". "Trashed" and "Homosapien" are both frantic rockers, the latter a more aggressive guitar orientated cover of the Pete Shelley 1981 song which made the Australian top 10, even though the Buzzcocks never had any Australian commercial success. Album was produced by Jeff Lovejoy and Pop Will Eat Itself frontman Clint Mansell.