Coming soon

Straight from the means streets of Hope Street, Brunswick. Lower Plenty is a bunch of sweet dudes (M & F) from bands like Dick Diver, Deaf Wish, The Focus, UV Race and about a billion other great bands. Heavy on the downer country, imagine an outer suburban Go-Betweens or a Paul Kelly song where he doesn’t name-check Melbourne landmarks all the time. Sick.

Hammocks and Honey is an ever-evolving multi-disciplinary project for Prudence Rees-Lee and Alex Nosek, long-ago bandmates in Melbourne indie collective Scissors For Sparrow, now firm friends and partners in pop.  Influenced variously by Julee Cruise, Klaus Nomi, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Olivia Newton-John, the result is smoke-drenched space pop with a kind of noir-ish air. They are presently working on a film to accompany their forthcoming album.

Marc from The Enclosures has been making his way around Melbourne impressing people as Popolice for the last ten years or so, and this is his new(ish) band. With Nat and Kerrilee (and now Mia from New Estate on drums) they make a pretty awesome racket. Special Award released their debut cassette in 2010.

Formed in late 2007, Oblako Lodka combine lush bedroom pop with an ethereal goodness comparable to Colleen, Free Design, The Pastels and Gal Costa… let’s call it a kind of ambient tropicalia. Including members of The Motifs, Hammocks and Honey, ii, Milk Teddy and Cor’delle, their debut album on Special Award is a low key affair which feels like lying under a tree watching clouds. Yup, it’s that nice.

Around the time he was born, Lehmann B. Smith picked up a guitar and started recording. The ensuing years saw him join KES Band, move to North Melbourne and share stages with cool people like Rowland S. Howard, Boredoms, My Disco and heaps more too numerous to mention. Lehmann plans to release 6 albums in 2012, watch out for them…

Coming soon

A. Wallace is the barely-veiled moniker of Melbourne sad-folk troubadour Aaron Wallace. Starting out in sleepy Bendigo back in the early 2000s, Aaron has been slowly winding his way through roughly a billion live shows, CD-Rs, tapes and 7”s (many of which are available free of charge at his blog bigbusinessventures.blogspot.com). Aaron likes to record free of the confines of the studio, preferring to make his way to the wilderness and press record. It’s more intimate that way, y’see.

Evelyn Morris started out as a drummer in hardcore bands, but somewhere around 2006 her music took on a gentler tone. What started out as a guitar, accordion and loop-pedal (what we now call ‘live sampling’) affair is now a full fledged psychedelic band. Somewhere in the transition I was lucky enough to release an EP for her, ‘Not So Still’. It’s a bunch of pretty sweet bedroom-recordings-which-don’t-sound-like-it. Since then she has supported heaps of amazing international artists (Camera Obscura, Sufjan Stevens, Goldfrapp, the list goes on..) and released an awesome second album on Chapter (‘Stem’). Sweet.

Denim Owl played their first show in a Thornbury basement in 2007 and the only way was up. Fusing the considerable talents of Janita and Aleks (Aleks and the Ramps), a good dose of whimsy and some witty lyrics (not ‘funny’, we’ll leave that to Ween) they rustle up a sweet pop snowstorm of sounds for your ears, little or large.