Big Budgets & A Dancing Channing Tatum - How To Make A P!nk Music Video

Sometimes you just have to battle on. What So Not started as a production/remix duo around the turn of the decade, but a couple of years on there was the ever-popular ‘creative differences’ and one half bailed. But with a silly stage name like Flume, you probably couldn’t expect him to kick on much. Best of luck to the kiddie. Back at home base, Emoh Instead – which I reckon might just be a pseudonym as well – has carried on, part of the success of artists like George Maple and the recently ARIA-dubbed Peking Duk. But eventually getting back around to work under his own brandname, Be OK Again (Counter) is atmospheric modern electronic of the current model, giving itself the handy selling point of having the voice of another who knows the rollercoaster of success – and Daniel Johns intones in that breathy sleepy way that’s still identifiably him. This may work to everybody’s benefit, or maybe not.

Some might even try a career change. Soaking semi-naked in an oversize champagne glass may well get less challenging the more you do it, and so the most identifiable name and face in burlesque cabaret decides she might have a sing. You wouldn’t really think of Dita Von Teese in musical terms – even given her glorious tabloid trainwreck of a relationship with Marilyn Manson some time back – but a tune is what we get. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rendez-vous (Record Maker) is breathily continental, but if you’re expecting Serge & Brigid – yeah, no. Whether she turns out to be Lana Del Rey or Paris Hilton probably depends if this ‘music career’ is sustained as you ask if its ‘so Frenchy, so chic’ attitude is sincere, or a pisstake not quite aware yet that it is one.

Some of the more experienced in the form who can rightly call this music thing ‘a career’ can often enjoy a little sidetrack or detour to keep the spark, or just have a bit of a distraction during some downtime. Thus, while the lead singer of the finest guitar band in Christendom is off poncing about being a best-selling author and part-time theatrical, another half of the Australian You Am I Show indulges and shows off their encyclopaedic and sometimes esoteric knowledge of the rock and/or roll. Russell Hopkinson and Davey Lane are the designated musical trainspotters of the combo – they’re the ones most likely to be arguing over which is the superior pressing of some Yugoslavian reggae 45 from 1971 – but here as The Fame-Bats they repair to the young fella’s garage and emerge with Don’t Tell No Lies (Wick), an utterly fab bit of Hamburg-era Merseybeatish Beatles harmonies and twang. Nifty, and offered on coloured vinyl, naturally.

If you’ve been going long enough, you can even plunder your own past. Before migrating east, getting idiosyncratic haircuts, and forming The Hoodoo Gurus, Dave Faulkner and James Baker were Perth’s only punks in the village. Or close enough to such. The Victims was also an ideal name for a combo in the first spits of 1977’s musical revolution. Forty years on, there’s still a time and place to get loud and snotty about the world around, and Dave still likes a yell, even if he can so gloriously croon Death Defying Or 1000 Miles Away. The recent much-unlamented passing of notable homicidal nutjob Charles Manson gives them an excuse to finally release a tune originally written those decades ago and Charlie (Television Addict) is just over a minute’s worth of noting ritual murder is never really a good idea. Contains added Hard-On Ray Ahn on bass, adding another generation’s amphetamine buzz to it.

There’s an odd collision of eras in what P!nk does as well. The big-budget high-concept music video is very much a lost art to all but the Taylors and Beyonces of the world, but Ms Moore embraces the old-school and subverts the form in her own way. Beautiful Trauma (RCA) is a glorious technicolour advertisement for the album of the same name, further stretching the budget by getting yer genuine Hollywood movie star in as the other half of this two-hander - and Channing Tatum is helpfully a helluva dancer and not afraid to make a bit of a dick of himself for the sake of the narrative as things take a distinctly John Waters-like bent turn among the Pleasantville vinyl furniture and crocheted eiderdowns. Some female empowerment and a nice line in latex BDSM-wear adds to the attractions.

The decidedly young players of Elliott Road probably not need concern themselves which such gender politics and such just yet. Oh, who am I kidding, they have the internet. But even if they’re glued to their screens and won’t get off the damn lawn, it seems the kids might be alright. Together since age 12, and now all of 16 or 17, they might be still working out just what their own musical taste is. Ordinary Sally (Studio 57 Recordings) is tightly wound and chunkily guitared rock, as part of an EP where they go a few other musical ways in other places, driven on some frighteningly energetic drumming to show that while youth is sometimes wasted on the young, that’s not the case here.

Meantime, Alice Ivy is somewhere between the four continents she’s toured recently, and offers a song that’s maybe somewhere between the radio and the club floor. This is a different take on her Be Friends (Dew Process), with Canadian producer and remixer Memorecks giving it the laid-back summery vibes of it layers of an almost soul-like overlay to give it flow and have it bobbing on the waves at once. Will likely be part of your soundtrack as the sun goes down over various festivals over the season.