Chew CD - The Mighty Underdogs: DROPPIN' SCIENCE FICTION It’s a late Summer afternoon and more sunnies-clad people turn up to your beach side house party. You panic knowing you haven’t got any fr... Read More

Chew CD - Rolo Tomassi: HYSTERICS It’s tough to get a handle on Hysterics. For a flittering of a fewseconds you’ll be listening to some electronic cigar-lounge jamming whic... Read More

Chew CD - Firekites: THE BOWERY This may just be the most beautiful Australian album of 2008. Sounds like I’m making wild, sweeping statements right? Probably read about this b... Read More

CD - Common: UNIVERSAL MIND CONTROL Universal Mind Control can be described as having a synthesised 80s electro-pop-techno-hip-hop Dizzie Rascel-esque OutKast party sound. Common’s 8th album has him teaming up with the make-that-money super producers The Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo). It sounds both strange and exciting to have Common’s introspective rhymes m... Read More

CD - Funkoars: THE HANGOVER The Hangover starts off with a brief intro skit: It’s the morning after, in a hotel somewhere in the States. The phone rings, and an Aussie bloke answers – on the other end, a wake-up call from some smarmy-voiced Yank. In just those few seconds of introduction there’s your metaphor for the rest of the album: an Aussie staying in a... Read More

CD - Heartbreak: LIES I really wanted to like this album.Heartbreak's modern take on Italo disco has garnered rave reviews. Though the style is not particular originally it still had the potential for great things.Unfortunately I was terribly disappointed.Perhaps it's the delicate nature of appreciating Italo, a warped utilitarian cousin of its American counterpart made... Read More

CD - Amaya Laucirica: SUGAR LIGHTS There’s something really lovely about Amaya Laucirica’s debut – a feeling of intimacy smooshed up against what I can only peg as a profound sense of sparseness. The sparseness part at least is no wonder – until she was 18, Amaya lived in Millicent (gateway to… Mt. Gambier). After moving to Melbourne, she began to writ... Read More

CD - Girl Talk: FEED THE ANIMALS Gregg Gillis is the musical Dr. Frankenstein. That metaphor works even better than you first think – because not only is Gillis (better known as Girl Talk) an expert at lacing together sample-based dance tracks, he was also (until recently) a biomedical engineer by day. Gillis’ talent is in mashing up pop tracks into frenzied, unrelenti... Read More

CD - Kanye West: 808s AND HEARTBREAK For the past seven years, The Kanye West Eatery has been packed out – serving up some of the finest and freshest hip hop thatmade all the customersdrool. As the hungry fans came to get their fill from the eccentric musical chef, Kanye’s head expanded from all the admiration he was getting. He thought he could serve the public anything h... Read More

CD - Q-Tip: THE RENAISSANCE The seminal New York rapper and former A Tribe Called Quest members new album is everything old school heads and new school players have been asking for, excellent production, excellent beats, lyrical poetry and the journey the way only Q-Tip delivers.Q-Tip is a Hip-Hop pioneer and in many ways his return is timely as Hip Hop has taken a downward s... Read More

CD - Tornts: Hells Burn Remember that kid you went to high school with who sat at the back of the class, drank ‘Woodies’ near the bus stop, smoked weed on the side oval, got into fights, told the teacher to fuck off, was beaten by his father, and hated the world – well a few years down the track we may well have found him. Tornts 3rd album Hells Burn is ... Read More

CD - The Rapture: TAPES Tapes is the underachieving cousin to !K7's seminalDJ Kicks series. For artists unwilling to put the time and effort into producing exclusive content, touring and promoting a DJ Kicks compilation. Fortunately this does not affect my enjoyment of its excellent first installment.With even Snow Patrol releasing a "DJ compilation", it seems h... Read More

CD - Tame Impala: ANTARES MIRA SUN Tame Impala’s debut release is much like the Christmas decorations currently haunting the disorganised in retail outlets around town: premature, much hyped, but yet still worthy of excitement. Despite somewhat unfairly being heralded as “the new Wolfmother” due to their nostalgic sound and signing to Modular, these three young lad... Read More

TOUR - Cut off Your Hands Enthusiastic live bands are almost always good. Unfortunately Cut off Your Hands would be the exception to the rule. They brought a lot of enthusiasm to a sleepy Adelaide audience last Friday night but they just couldn’t get the crowd moving. Maybe that’s because in all their enthusiasm they forgot to bring their ‘in key’ vo... Read More

FILM - Planet B-Boy Before seeing Planet B-Boy, I admit it: I was a philistine. Like most of the world, my exposure to breakdancing was limited to the background dancers in Britney Spears’ videos and that one episode of 90210 when Steve visited the Bronx.I didn’t know that breakdancing (or B-Boy) culture is alive and quite literally kicking today, and that... Read More

CD - Outrun: FUTURENATURE The first time I heard Melbournian Josh Armistead was on his extremely stripped-back acoustic They Saw Him Dancing And Capering In The Woods (2005). That was a lovely, quiet album - so personal it was like sneaking a peek at someone’s diary. So to see him pop up again, this time as part of electrosynth rockers Outrun, was a bit of a surprise.... Read More

FILM - Man on Wire The story of how on earth a man managed to rig up a steel cable, that would support his weight enough to walk on, between tower 1 and tower 2 of The World Trade Centre is simply stupefying. Man On Wire delivers the experience of crazy French man, Philippe Petit’s walk at the very top of the world wrapped up in all the vertigo, fantasy and emo... Read More

CD - Amp Fiddler + Sly & Robbie: INSPIRATION INFORMATION Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare know what they’re doing. Pioneers and grand masters of reggae production, to date the pair have appeared on around 200,000 tracks – including producing for everyone from Bob Dylan to Michael Franti. This time around they’re shacked up with Detroit-based ‘soul maverick’ Amp Fiddler, who... Read More

CD - Murs: MURS FOR PRESIDENT Murs for President? Why do we need voting for him? Now is the time for Murs to break out and be heard after 10 years in the rap game. His seventh album (first with record label major Warner Bros) is Murs’ response to the new generation of disposable hip hop (e.g. Souljah Boy). He’s here to represent with help from DJ Quik and a cameo by... Read More

CD - Squarepusher: JUST A SOUVENIR One day, Tom ‘Squarepusher’ Jenkinson had a dream about watching a space/time twisting rock band playing an ‘ultra-gig’ while variously challenging Cro-Magnon men to Monopoly and dodging exploding neutron stars. There were glowing green coat hangers, imploding sonic pin cushions, Venus fly traps, and (wait for it) electromag... Read More

FILM - 21 For a movie about high-stakes gambling in Vegas, you’re ironically not gambling an awful lot sliding 21 into the DVD player. It’s a safe, by the book morality tale of a mathematics genius (the deeply, deeply uninspiring Jim Sturgess) joining a team of card counters run by his university statistics professor (Kevin Spacey). From the mome... Read More

CD - Josh Pyke: CHIMNEY'S AFIRE Continuing along just about an unbroken line from 2007’s Memories & Dust, Sydney’s Josh Pyke hasn’t exactly busted out a new bag of tricks with Chimney’s Afire – but we’re not complaining, because it all still sounds quite nice. The exuberance of ‘You Don’t Scare Me’, the quietly moody &lsqu... Read More

CD - Kool Keith: DR DOOOM 2 Dr Dooom 2 is one for rap purists. There’s nothing complex about the beats, the lyrics may as well be freestyles, and you get the feeling it may have actually been all slung together in a single session. But none of those qualities are bad things, and in the end it’s not a particularly bad album.A lot of this is thanks to its author, Ko... Read More

FILM - Street Kings The first fifteen or so minutes of Street Kings is absolutely tops. It’s high octane, twisty like a giant pretzel, and (probably most importantly) Keanu Reeves doesn’t speak much and gets shot a few times. It’s when this roller coaster opening ends that things start to go sour, and (probably not coincidentally) that Keanu begins t... Read More

FILM - Iron Man It's a refreshing prospect to see a movie about a superhero whose story hasn't already been told on the screen several million times before, and even more refreshing to see one starring Rober Downey Jr. who absolutely can't put a boozy foot wrong, god bless him. Here he plays Tony Stark, a hugely rich arms (not limbs) inventor / manufacturer, who t... Read More

CD - The Woods Themselves: (C'MON) DO THE BEACH THING (C’Mon) Do The Beach Thing is a surprisingly diverse album, surprising in that the first few tracks seem to set it up as strictly low-fi confessional, but then as things progress it gradually folds out and musically expands. And ‘Beach Thing’ is right; Sydneysiders The Woods Themselvescapture that aesthetic of time by the coast &n... Read More

CD - Ice Cube: RAW FOOTAGE It’s been a long time coming for Ice Cube. After hanging out in Tinseltown for a good number of years it’s good to have the Cube back on beat street. It’s not great but definitely good.Raw Footage follows on in the vein of modern gangsta rap like Chronic 2001 but lacks the flair and diversity of Dre’s production. There&rsquo... Read More

CD - Sia: SOME PEOPLE HAVE REAL PROBLEMS 13 tracks of straight-out pop bombardment, Some People Have Real Problems sees Adelaide's own(TM) Sia Furler the most assured she's ever been. Lavish bordering (and occasionally crossing over to) the over-produced, the album has a tangible I-just-broke-up-with-my-boyfriend-but-I-feel-fine exhuberance. The title, Some People Have Real Problems was a... Read More

CD - Fujiya & Miyagi: LIGHTBULBS Whether it’s in the precision-rolled r’s that pop up now and then or in the general lyrical cheekiness (any track that name drops Hans Christian Anderson is a-ok by me), there’s a real sense of fun that pervades Lightbulbs. It’s all helped along by the punchy, tight production and deadpan vocals of David Best, who somehow ma... Read More

CD - Roots Manuva: SLIME AND REASON If there’s a commercial sold-out sound, this album is about as far from that as you can get. You just know dickheads aren’t listening to it and probably never will, which is a shame for an artist who needs to sell records but a bonus for those of you who don’t like dickheads listening to good music. Slime And Reason doesn’t ... Read More

CD - Rodriguez: COLD FACT Without turning into a history lecture, the story behind 'Cold Fact' is pretty bloody interesting. When it was originally released by Detroit singer-songwriter Sixto Diaz Rodriguez in 1970, the album made about as much of an impact as a NO BLOOD 4 OIL text message at an Iraq War protest. When Rodriguez's follow-up did about as well, he decided to h... Read More

CD - Horrorshow: THE GREY SPACE HORRORSHOW's album debut, The Grey Space is scarily good. The band (ahem... two people) seems to capture a great snapshot of Australian Hip Hop at the moment and define the two sides, or schools, of the genre in this sunburnt land. Very different to the slightly gaudy, slightly gangstarish sound, groups such as the Hilltop Hoods and Terra Firma hav... Read More

BOOK - The Defection of A.J. Lewinter The billing for Robert Littell’s 1973 novel, The Defection of A.J. Lewinter is somewhat prejudiced by the praise of Tom Clancy whom regards the author as the quintessential American spy-novelist. Aside from the fact that the book is set in the early 70s between the grimacing giants of the USA and USSR, Lewinter does not file in suit with the ... Read More

CD - Terra Firma: MUSIC TO LIVE BY Did you like the Hilltop Hoods’ The Hard Road? If yes, then chances are you’re in for a treat with Terra Firma’s latest. Music To Live By follows along a lot of the same ground ploughed by the Hoods – well produced, sophisticated Aussie hip hop from a group who are both extremely intimate with the medium and talented at what... Read More

FILM - Robot Chicken: Star Wars It seems almost like the George Lucas empire just won’t ever die (someone should definitely be looking into euthanasia after Clone Wars). Robot Chicken, a sketch comedy series from Seth (Scott Evil) Green made entirely with stop-motion action figures, is the latest in a couple of comedy tributes to the space opera. Like the show behind anothe... Read More

CD - Michael Franti & Spearhead: ALL REBEL ROCKERS As soon as I hit play on All Rebel Rockers, I was worried – this didn’t sound anything like Michael Franti & Spearhead. A mild sheen of perspiration instantly appeared on my forehead. With their first release, 1994’s Home, Spearhead established themselves as a lively, deeply socially conscious rap group who knew their way arou... Read More

CD - Glen Campbell: MEET GLEN CAMPBELL Meet Glen Campbell. Haven’t already? Well that’s a mighty shame. One of the most popular country singers in the 60s and 70s, Campbell has been plugging away on his gee-tar for some time now – so it’s probably with conscious irony that his latest release is titled Meet Glen Campbell.Unfortunately it doesn’t work wonders... Read More

CD - The Black Angels: DIRECTIONS TO SEE A GHOST Directions to See a Ghost by Texan group The Black Angels is like the soundtrack to everything going wrong. It’s the sound of the whole world collapsing around you, of mountains crumbling, of the sky falling and shattering all over your head. All in a nice way, mind.In this follow-up to 2006 debut Passover, the self-proclaimed pundits of &lsq... Read More

FILM - Persepolis Persepolis is a graphic memoir in the vein of one of Merge’s favourite story-tellers, Joe Sacco. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, well you’re just going to have to see this film and then pick up Palestine. Persepolis (pronounced: per-sep-olis) is a graphic novel, turned animated feature which depicts the life of Marjane Satra... Read More

FILM - Son of Rambow There’s a scene at the beginning of Son of Rambow that sums up the rest of the film quite nicely. 11 year-old Lee Carter (Will Poulter) pelts down the footpath after pirating a movie (Rambo: First Blood, obviously) at the local cinema. Passing a garden where a man on a ladder trims a tree, Carter pauses, picks up a soccer ball, and pegs the g... Read More

CD - Nas: UNTITLED With a rambling piano thatinvokes the image ofsoft rain falling on parched earth, Nas' ninth album begins. And at about the same time you begin to doubt the father of Illmatic the weathered voice of one of Hip Hop's biggest influences, Nasir Jones, cuts in with a biting heat that has been missing since his Queens Bridge days. Many might say this is... Read More

CD - Pivot: O SOUNDTRACK MY HEART You’ll need a metal mixing bowl. A metal one, mind. Chuck in a big hunk of Kraftwerk and a dash of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Aphex Twin, before sprinkling in a couple of shakes of Do Say Make Think. Now get an electric mixer and combine that all until chunks form. Then turn out the lights. All done? That humming in the air you should be... Read More

CD - Esperanza Spalding: ESPERANZA A genius on the acoustic double bass as well as a composer and vocalist (in three languages, no less), 24 year-old Esperanza Spalding is already a lecturer at the Berklee College of Music and boasts a string of tours and an album (2006’s Junjo). The word ‘prodigy’ may have been coined for her.Esperanza sees Spalding proving that s... Read More

FILM - Be Kind Rewind In theory, Be Kind Rewind can’t fail. First of all, the story at its bare bones sounds fantastic: after inadvertently erasing all the video tapes in their VHS rental business, two friends set about remaking just about every big hit movie on a non-existent budget. Second, the actors are all people you’d walk ten miles through the snow ba... Read More

BOOK - Watchmen by Alan Moore With less than a year until Zack (300) Snyder’s film adaptation, if you haven’t yet read Alan Moore’s 1986-7 landmark graphic novel series then it’s time you drop everything and get on it. The first comic book to break the juvenile bonds of the genre, Watchmen consistently tops ‘best of’ lists both in and outside... Read More

FILM - Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs It was with polite smiles and ever-so-slightly-forced laughter that the first straight to DVD Futurama movie (2007’s Bender’s Big Score) was received. Not that it wasn’t fun, just that – well, after all that campaigning and carry-on to get the show un-cancelled, we all expected a little something more.Having first been given... Read More

CD - Ben Lee / Jessica Chapnik: THE SQUARE SOUNDTRACK The words “from and inspired by the movie” seem perfectly calculated to strike fear into even the most casual of music fans. And with good cause, because that phrase is usually code for “one track from a band you kinda-like plus 10 you’ll never listen to plus one Guns ‘n’ Roses B-side from 1986 that the director ... Read More

CD - The Herd: SUMMERLAND Merge tried to like this album, it really did. On the first play-through however, we couldn’t get past track five. Listening to the subsequent nine tracks, at a more appropriate time (when no-one else was in the office), there were redeemable moments.The punchy altruistic lyrics are still there. In ‘Pearl’ when Batla reminds his a... Read More

CD - Stephanie McKay: TELL IT LIKE IT IS It’s a timeless theme in music – the struggle to get out of the ghetto and rise above the ills of the hood. Fair enough, too, because it’s easy to understand how living in unjust poverty can frustrate and inspire artists to meditate upon and write song after song about it. This time around it’s Stephanie McKay’s turn t... Read More

CD - Sigur Rós: MED SUD I EYRUM VID SPILUM ENDALAUST To instantly clear up a couple of nagging mysteries: Sigur Rós is Icelandic for ‘Victory Rose’, and the title of their fifth full-length album translates as ‘With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly’. Not that deciphering a little Icelandic will help you understand Sigur Rós. In fact, the best part about Sigur... Read More

CD - My Morning Jacket: EVIL URGES Evil Urges by Kentucky band My Morning Jacket kicks into gear right away with the titular track, with a barrage of guitars, beats and vocalist Jim James falsettoing all over the joint. It’s a sprawling opener, and manages to showcase within a few moments where exactly My Morning Jacket are at this time around. That has always been an importan... Read More

CD - Micah P. Hinson: MICAH P. HINSON AND THE RED EMPIRE ORCHESTRA Micah P. Hinson just has one of those voices. He sings like a cowboy who’s just found out his favourite bull’s been rustled – strong with just a faint (manly) tinge of sorrow. After hearing that voice it’s no huge revelation to read Micha’s bio: drug addiction, crime, jail, homelessness – all that action and he&r... Read More

CD - Time Machine: LIFE IS EXPENSIVE There’s always a niggling panic in the back of your mind when you slide in a CD by a group who have decided to go ‘in a new direction’. With their debut, 2004’s Slow Your Roll, Time Machine established themselves as a group who knew how to produce good old-fashioned hip-hop, along the lines of De La Soul or Digital Undergrou... Read More

CD - Frightened Rabbit: THE MIDNIGHT ORGAN FIGHT If you can put up with a Scotsman’s wavering voice signing about breaking up with his girlfriend for 17 tracks, then you might enjoy The Midnight Organ Fight. Although that’s admittedly dumbing things down slightly, it’s basically what you’re in for with Frightened Rabbit’s second release. Fronted by the aforementioned... Read More

CD - Coldplay: VIVA LA VIDA As far as I’m concerned, there are two basic types of people roaming the world: Those who like Coldplay, and those who haven’t yet admitted that they like Coldplay. You can struggle all you want, but there’s something just so charming and inoffensive about Chris Martins’ vocals, something so warm about their melodies.Viva La... Read More

CD - Various Artists: LIFE BEYOND MARS - BOWIE COVERED David Bowie is hard to avoid. Not in a Rolling Stones, tracks-on-Honda-Fiat-ads kind of way, mind you – more in that way that once you’ve heard Bowie, you begin to notice that he’s actually been with you all along. Bowie has infiltrated pop culture without making a nuisance of himself, and remains as distinctive and – let&rs... Read More

CD - Radiohead: THE BEST OF What can you say about a “best of”?For a band who are best enjoyed through their albums rather than their singles – like Radiohead – it’s like seeing a bunch of movie trailers without seeing any films. Sure it’s a nice showcase and you do get a feel for the band, but it all seems just not quite enough.To be fair,... Read More

FILM - The Darjeeling Limited The Darjeeling Limited is a Wes Anderson movie. That might seem like the most boring sentence ever to be committed to precious internet bytes, but it’s important because the director’s 5th film is inescapably his own - 100% pure, uncut Anderson. If you don’t dig his style, there’s no chance that you will have fun aboard the ... Read More

BOOK - Palestine by Joe Sacco No matter how heavy a rock you’ve been hunkering under, chances are you’ve at least heard the words ‘Gaza Strip’, ‘West Bank’, and ‘Israeli settlements’ thrown around at some point during the last forty-odd years. But chances also are that you’ve been rendered pretty blasé about the Pales... Read More

FILM - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford There are a couple of things you can gather from a title that reads The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The first is that it’s a longer title than a lot of other movie titles. The second is that – whoever this Robert Ford guy is – he’s sure getting stitched up in that title. Both of these things you c... Read More

CD - The Accidental: THERE WERE WOLVES Don’t panic: If there were any wolves lurking in There Were Wolves, chances are they’d be the cuddly, slightly misunderstood type. And they’d probably have a penchant for knitted sweaters. Although it’s difficult to whittle UK four-piece The Accidental down to a one-word genre, let’s do it quick and get it over with: p... Read More

CD - Viva Voce: LOVES YOU Viva Voce are happening. That's very basic present tense for anyone who's interested in hard rocking lo-fi music, interpreted as"perfectly skewed pop". Viva Voce Loves You isn't exactly breaking new ground for the band but is more of an introduction for the uninitiated. Loves You is a collection of the band's celebrated songs from their f... Read More

CD - DJ Bets: DROPPING SCIENCE This little mixtape gem comes from DJ Bets in Adelaide. Although not in wide release, this album is worth hunting down. True to its name, Droppin Science boasts a 40-track education in “all-time classic” Hip Hop. And just like the genre, Bets takes to hippin’ and a hoppin’ between the East and West coast varietals of America... Read More

FILM - Gunnin' For That #1 Spot Beastie Boy MCA, aka Adam Yauch, is preparing to launch his film production company, Oscilloscope Laboratories, into the cut-throat movie business this June with his release GUNNIN’ FOR THAT #1 SPOT. The film takes a look at eight of the US' top high school basketball players as they are groomed for the limelight. The film promises to excite ... Read More

BOOK - Sticky Lala by Robin Tatlow-Lord Robin Tatlow-Lord is a talented illustrator and regular contributor for Merge. A passionate Do-It-Yourselfer, Robin has melded her illustrations with a DIY bent in her most recent creation: “Sticky Lala”. The result is a chuckling little lesson in patience and perseverance as our heroine tumbles through her day “collecting” ... Read More

Home Star Runner I’m sure there are plenty of successful animators on the net, but none spring to mind that have done as well as the creators of homestarrunner.com. Birthed around eight years ago by two brothers Matt and Mike Chapman, the site was just an outlet for practising theirflash animation skills. Since then it has become somethingof a giant amongst m... Read More

CD - Nujabes: MODAL SOUL Straight outta the far-East side, Nujabes should be the name that everyone thinks of when it’s time to get the mood set. But for whatever reason, this Japanese DJ/ producer remains a “who?” Well, here’s who: Nujabes is a master in creating of cool-jazz-infused hip hop tracks, a style developed from his debut compilation Hyde... Read More

BOOK - YOU: Some Letters From the First Five Years If the idea of finding a letter personally addressed to You doesn’t pique your interest, then you’re probably not a properly functioning human being (sorry). That’s the general concept behind YOU, selected letters from the first five years collected here in this sprawling volume. Some Letters From the First Five Years is probably ... Read More

CD - Time Machine: SLOW YOUR ROLL It almost seems too soon to be seriously asking: remember the golden days of hip-hop? While rock-and-rollers look back 50 years to reminisce the glory days, you needn’t cast your mind back further than 20 to relive hip-hop’s heyday. It was an era of socially-conscious and good-natured raps, and an era when Fiddy was still a couple of sh... Read More

CD - Cut Copy: IN GHOST COLOURS Picture yourself inside a high-ceilinged, slightly dilapidated warehouse somewhere. All of a sudden, the lights hanging above you flick off with an echoing snap, and you’re plunged into darkness. There’s a brief pause before there’s another snap, and abruptly you’re surrounded by flickering, humming neon lights. Now picture ... Read More