The Single Life: Alison Wonderland, St Vincent & More

There’s a fine marketing tradition in the car industry that as a current model gets tired and the sales start to tail off, they raid the spare parts bin, bolt on a few extra bits and pieces, add some racing stripes to make it go faster, and call it ‘Special’. Even if often it isn’t.

Sections of the music industry seem to have taken this idea aboard, and thus we welcome ‘The Deluxe Edition’ - where the bonus accessories can include the fairly irrelevant dance mixes, a couple of new photos on the digipak, and even new songs. You may ask why such extra tunes didn’t get a run in the first place, but that’s because you’re a suspicious little ingrate cynical about the motives of corporate thinking.

Or is that just me? Extra features to St Vincent’s already much lauded album – making most of those ‘Best Of…’ lists of last year, including the definitive one of themusic.com.au’s – include new song Bad Believer (Loma Vista), which fizzes along with perhaps even more of her idiosyncratic nervous energy and even some glam rock glitter - and may well encourage a few more of the curious to kick the sales along.

And sometimes, even if you put on new mag wheels and a chrome exhaust pipe, it’s still a VW Kombi Van that smells of bong water and patchouli. Yes, it’s the Deluxe Angus & Julia Stone self-titled album offered with All This Love (EMI) – she does airy breathy conversation, he joins in on the harmonies. You know the drill. And, to make you feel a bit older, it’s actually now five years since they hopped on that Big Jet Plane.

Of course, there are other ways to make people notice your music. You could phone a (better-known) friend and get them to guest on your record. Our already rather wondrous producer/performer/dj Alison Wonderland is getting some overseas notice – signed to a US label, already with a spot booked on this year’s Coachella – and her floaty electronic melodic sense is well served on U Don’t Know (Astralwerks/EMI) with the familiar helium-tinged vocals of The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne.

It’s a fair argument that pop and dance music based on electronics probably wouldn’t exist at all if not for Giorgio Moroder – the veteran European producer with a hand in many things from Donna Summer’s disco standards onward. Without his influence there would have been no Berlin Bowie, no Yello, no New Order, no Daft Punk. Honest. But it has taken 30 years for him to get around to another album under his own name, and calling it 74 Is The New 24 also gives some idea that he does a nice line in self-deprecation as well. But he knows he needs to get one of the youngsters in to give himself some 21st century relevance. Yes, it’s our Kylie doing the featured warbling on Right Here, Right Now (RCA), and it is as modern as tomorrow, and as neon-soaked as a night at Studio 54 in 1975.

Offering the slogan of being ‘International In Flavour, Cosmopolitan In Style’ – which sounds a lot like a cigarette commercial from 35 years ago for that matter – the heroic haircuts of Client Liaison decide they don’t need guests, they just make a circa 1983 Hall & Oates song all on their own. Pretty Lovers (Dot Dash) is somewhere on a fine line from homage to pisstake via pastiche, right down to the plastic saxophone solo two-thirds through. Thing is, Harvey’s & Monte’s pop sense is as getting as good as Daryl’s & John’s ever was. The world should be leaving messages on their fax machine even now.

Well, there’s a hideous phrase: ‘post-punk revival’. And then a confusing one: ‘Platinum-selling English indie band’. Not sure The Vaccines could rightly be pigeonholed by any of that, despite how the normally infallible Wiki has chosen to describe them. There is a chunky guitar noise to them, certainly. And knowing what a hook is. But deciding to record with Dave Fridmann – he originally of Mercury Rev, maker of the aforementioned Flaming Lips, and lately somewhat surprising collaborator with Neil Finn – could be the making of them. Handsome (Columbia) actually has a touch of shouty Britpop about it, and a nice sense of its own absurdity. And how rock are matching kung-fu pyjamas or bomber jackets? Ok, not much - but good luck to them.

You want a local band to tread that line between The Rock and The Pop (with guitars), and be neither too twee, nor too blokey? Lime Cordiale might be it. Although it may well hang on which way they decide to lean on that spectrum as they almost inevitably make a bigger name for themselves through 2015. Hanging Upside Down (Chugg Music) is good, and accessible in that middle ground - where the only problem might be what kind of radio puts it on the playlist, potentially cruelling their chances with the community stations and/or national youf network and/or the commercial FMs, depending on who gets them first, thus putting the other one’s noses out of joint.

And another phrase I’d never read: ‘Mordialloc jazz-hop combo’. This is apparently what Slum Sociable are. There’s a mix of the synthetic and analogue to what they do, as you look for reference points that may include the likes of Portishead and Unknown Mortal Orchestra – comparisons you get the feeling they may vehemently object to if you get them on the wrong day. That said, Anyway (Liberation) is a confident piece of work, and interest in what comes next is well-piqued.

It’s sometimes not up to me to write the category pigeonholes, sometimes you put down what you’re given. Thus Lincoln Jesser, former guitarist with the widely unheard Technicolor Wolves (anything with ‘Wolves’ in the name being just so 2010…) decides he can have more fun with machines and keyboards, and apparently now makes “…electronic yet symphonic brand of feel-good, off-colour indie pop”. That’s what they say. Anyway, We’ll Be Fine (Indie Pop) is offered as an example of what Mr Jesser musically provides.