Someone Should Launch A Kickstarter To Keep Manson & Depp Out Of The Music & Film Studio

It must be tiring trying to provoke outrage all the damn time. Mostly because that’s pretty much all you’ve got left - as the musical element of your ‘art’ stalled long ago. So, the only way Marilyn Manson gets his name into the news cycle of late is having some oversize stage prop fall on him, or pulling out a pantomime firearm to aim at the audience the day after a mass shooting – admittedly, touring America that could be about a weekly timetable. But, in another shot at getting some airtime, Mazza adds some celebrity content to his latest video of uninteresting sex, fake blood, and insincere social comment by getting another in somewhat a career doldrums as ‘celebrity’ content. Yup, that’s Johnny Depp ogling the scantily clad as the increasing generic electro racket of KILL4ME (Loma Vista) drifts by – and please note the anarchic spelling style coz that’s just so rebellious, maaaaaan. Many generations ago Manson’s spiritual forebear, Alice Cooper, embraced the essential absurdity of what he was doing and took up golf. On evidence of this, maybe we should just start a Kickstarter fund to buy Marilyn and the Deppster a couple of badminton racquets, just to keep them out of music or film studios.

Of course, another reaction to a career’s diminishing returns is announcing you didn’t want to be working for the corporate man anyway, and getting off the major label was exactly what you wanted for ages as they were compromising your art. The Stockdale kiddie, still in charge of his Wolfmother brandname, makes that defence particularly obviously by calling his new thing Freedom Is Mine (Independent) just to further make the point. Sent down from his Byron eyrie studio – likely purchased from his days on those evil multi-nationals rather than from his recent selling of rare vinyl samples of his own work on eBay ($700! That’s a good profit margin there, Andy…) – the guitars still buffet and howl, as does he. Song chases the sun as is typical of his back catalogue, and shows it’s still musically somewhere between 1971 and 1974 somewhere.

Rarer are the bands who just keep doing it, regardless of fashion and true to no-one but themselves. Somehow, 26(!) albums in, The Church are still making music of vitality and freshness when others – often much younger than themselves – are on the nostalgia circuit, with nothing but nuggets from their back catalogue to carry them along. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. So, as I Don’t Know How I Don’t Know Why (Unorthodox) unfurls its sound suggests it couldn’t be anyone else as the waves of guitars shimmer a little like the old days, as Steve Kilbey lugubriously chats about everything and nothing as a genuinely terrific hook reels you in to their world.

The thing with the latest incarnation of Sarah Blasko’s art – and it really has always been art – is her ability to somehow be earthy and ethereal at once. Now so established in the Australian firmament that you can even get insights into her creative process via documentaries shown on the telly – probably now on ABC iView if you missed the old-school broadcast of it the other night – Phantom (EMI) is both comfortable and uneasy at once, as the almost electro-buzz of its beds carry that still so human, so honest, voice. The background noise drops away at one point, just leaving the emotions bared and felt.

Another Australian musical name your mother might know is Tommy Emmanuel. The Australian ‘guitar legend’ (surprisingly, that description is neither a cliché or hyperbole…) has been settled in Nashville for some years, with his upcoming album of covers and collaborations perhaps giving some idea of his respect and standing over there, judging by the company he’s keeping in those duetting with him. Ricky Skaggs, Rodney Crowell, Mark Knopfler among those handling standards and sometimes more unexpected recastings. Yes, this is Madonna’s Borderline (Favored Nations) turned into a longing lament, with the voice and fiddle of Amanda Shires – half of Americana’s power couple with the redoubtable Jason Isbell, if you didn’t know – entwining through Mr Emmanuel’s seemingly effortless picking and strumming. Utterly tasteful – which in this case, is a good thing.

There is also always a place for utterly timeless powerpop of the sort Danny McDonald’s P76 provided in the ‘90s, and is now doing so again. As the title suggests, Postcard From Bondi (Popboomerang) is perfectly of the Melbourne style - longing for that most iconic of Sydney locations, but probably remembering that time in the ‘80s when people could still afford to live there, as well being able to go and read the paper and drink longnecks in the park by the beach before the Council rangers came and hurried you along. Speaking of hurrying along: this gets the verses, choruses, and melodic hooks done and dusted in a flick under two minutes. Ideal.

Hopping the 352 bus back from Bondi Junction to the more warmly grey surrounds of Sydney’s inner-west at dusk, Tesse – band guise of Tom Stephens, who I seem to recognise from a couple of other local combos – decides that I’ll Tell You In The Morning (Rice Is Nice). It’s kinda folkie, kinda alt-something, as the guitars plunk and Tom ponders his place in the world in a thoughtful and not unappealing manner.