CD - Teen God – Seventeen – Self released
Contact: teengodaustralia@hotmail.com
Luke, working behind a Sticky Stall at a zine fair, gave me this two song CD recently to listen to, and I’ve played it a few times now and am getting more and more into it. Teen God make nicely crafted indie pop; melodic backing vocals, pretty jangling guitars – a not uncommon formula these days, and one I admit I’m very partial to. If you need a reference point, it sounds a bit like a rawer version of Yo La Tengo, minus the country bit.
But what makes Teen God sound different, and what people most react to about this band, is Luke Sinclair’s loud semi-shouted, semi-sung vocals, again, not unusual in and of itself. But his voice always sounds like its straining and on the verge of breaking – which you might find either abrasive and challenging, or punk rock as fuck and full of genuine emotion and depth.
On the title track, ‘Seventeen’, Leigh Caffyn’s spiralling guitar work make his backing lyrics hard to distinguish, but a sense of melancholy prevails, and is expressed in Luke’s angsty sentiments in the refrain at the end, ‘I wish I was seventeen a-gain!’ There are points in this song, a crescendo in the guitar, lyrics about words being just noise, that are so full of longing that one cannot help but be filled with a similar yearning for those vanished days of youth. And that’s when Luke’s vocals begin to make perfect sense.
The second track, ‘I don’t want to sleep anymore’, features Leigh’s sweet singing more predominately, and starts gently before building in that buzzing melodic guitar way that is such a feature of these sort of bands, and continues that pace throughout the song. This song too has overtones of the ache of lost youth – the sense of time passing, and the inadequacy of words and our failure to be able to say what we really want. When Luke yells, ‘I never said what I wanted to say! / Couldn’t say what I wanted to say!’ there seems to be a real urgency and pain in his breaking voice. Or at least that’s what I took from it.
Zine – This Wicked Tongue #4 – Kelly Elizabeth – Cunt-Struck Press
PO Box 469, Croydon, Vic, 3136 AUSTRALIA
www.cunt-struck.com
contact@cuntstruck.com
The latest issue of Kelly’s perzine extensively covers what the last issue had gone into briefly, namely, her experiences after being diagnosed with Premenstrual Dsyphorphic Disorder (PMDD), which is an extreme form of PMS, and how she copes with and lives through the depression, rage and grief associated with the disorder. She writes about the 10-16 days of hormonal hell she experiences every cycle, and her decision to take medication for it, despite her reservations – and how she gets through on as little as possible in order to not pass through life as a zombie and be devoid of all feeling. Because she was studying for a PhD in Sociology before her illness became too much, she manages to critique her own experiences from a broader perspective as well, as she writes in one entry in ‘Diary of a menstruous woman’: ‘Between clinicians who treat my symptoms as nothing more than mental illness and my feminist scholar peers who tell me my emotional extremes are nothing more than mood changes…I feel like I have no authority with which to describe and define my own experience. I feel patronized by those at both ends of this debate. I presume none of them have had PMDD.’
Kelly’s great strength is that her writing is not only well articulated and well informed, but is also minus pretension. She writes honestly, but not in an explicitly embarrassing personal way, and her revelations are an eloquent expansion of her personality; she above all is a strong, independent, feminist woman with a strong sense of justice and a good heart and a lot to say.
She also writes in this zine about her love for Midnight Oil, and about how the quintessential politics and activism of this seminal Australian band and their campaigning for Indigenous and environmental justice, has become overlooked in their popularity as a pub rock band. She also writes about the controversy when Peter Garrett decided to join the Labor Party, when most presume he would have joined the Greens. Peter Garrett, it turns out, is also ‘a committed Catholic and not comfortable with the practice of abortion’. It’s interesting reading a zine wherein someone still expresses a belief in parliamentary politics (in the Greens at least), as most zines I read stem from an anarchist/autonomous perspective. But Kelly’s views are insightful and well worth reading, and the coloured covers and pictures scattered throughout also make this visually appealing.
Contact: teengodaustralia@hotmail.com
Luke, working behind a Sticky Stall at a zine fair, gave me this two song CD recently to listen to, and I’ve played it a few times now and am getting more and more into it. Teen God make nicely crafted indie pop; melodic backing vocals, pretty jangling guitars – a not uncommon formula these days, and one I admit I’m very partial to. If you need a reference point, it sounds a bit like a rawer version of Yo La Tengo, minus the country bit.
But what makes Teen God sound different, and what people most react to about this band, is Luke Sinclair’s loud semi-shouted, semi-sung vocals, again, not unusual in and of itself. But his voice always sounds like its straining and on the verge of breaking – which you might find either abrasive and challenging, or punk rock as fuck and full of genuine emotion and depth.
On the title track, ‘Seventeen’, Leigh Caffyn’s spiralling guitar work make his backing lyrics hard to distinguish, but a sense of melancholy prevails, and is expressed in Luke’s angsty sentiments in the refrain at the end, ‘I wish I was seventeen a-gain!’ There are points in this song, a crescendo in the guitar, lyrics about words being just noise, that are so full of longing that one cannot help but be filled with a similar yearning for those vanished days of youth. And that’s when Luke’s vocals begin to make perfect sense.
The second track, ‘I don’t want to sleep anymore’, features Leigh’s sweet singing more predominately, and starts gently before building in that buzzing melodic guitar way that is such a feature of these sort of bands, and continues that pace throughout the song. This song too has overtones of the ache of lost youth – the sense of time passing, and the inadequacy of words and our failure to be able to say what we really want. When Luke yells, ‘I never said what I wanted to say! / Couldn’t say what I wanted to say!’ there seems to be a real urgency and pain in his breaking voice. Or at least that’s what I took from it.
Zine – This Wicked Tongue #4 – Kelly Elizabeth – Cunt-Struck Press
PO Box 469, Croydon, Vic, 3136 AUSTRALIA
www.cunt-struck.com
contact@cuntstruck.com
The latest issue of Kelly’s perzine extensively covers what the last issue had gone into briefly, namely, her experiences after being diagnosed with Premenstrual Dsyphorphic Disorder (PMDD), which is an extreme form of PMS, and how she copes with and lives through the depression, rage and grief associated with the disorder. She writes about the 10-16 days of hormonal hell she experiences every cycle, and her decision to take medication for it, despite her reservations – and how she gets through on as little as possible in order to not pass through life as a zombie and be devoid of all feeling. Because she was studying for a PhD in Sociology before her illness became too much, she manages to critique her own experiences from a broader perspective as well, as she writes in one entry in ‘Diary of a menstruous woman’: ‘Between clinicians who treat my symptoms as nothing more than mental illness and my feminist scholar peers who tell me my emotional extremes are nothing more than mood changes…I feel like I have no authority with which to describe and define my own experience. I feel patronized by those at both ends of this debate. I presume none of them have had PMDD.’
Kelly’s great strength is that her writing is not only well articulated and well informed, but is also minus pretension. She writes honestly, but not in an explicitly embarrassing personal way, and her revelations are an eloquent expansion of her personality; she above all is a strong, independent, feminist woman with a strong sense of justice and a good heart and a lot to say.
She also writes in this zine about her love for Midnight Oil, and about how the quintessential politics and activism of this seminal Australian band and their campaigning for Indigenous and environmental justice, has become overlooked in their popularity as a pub rock band. She also writes about the controversy when Peter Garrett decided to join the Labor Party, when most presume he would have joined the Greens. Peter Garrett, it turns out, is also ‘a committed Catholic and not comfortable with the practice of abortion’. It’s interesting reading a zine wherein someone still expresses a belief in parliamentary politics (in the Greens at least), as most zines I read stem from an anarchist/autonomous perspective. But Kelly’s views are insightful and well worth reading, and the coloured covers and pictures scattered throughout also make this visually appealing.
posted by Jo Tender-heart at 6:25 AM
3 comments
