The Single Life: AC/DC, Pharrell, Day Ravies & More

It’s reached the point where AC/DC is not so a much a music, it’s a formula. A formula which has survived 40 years, and even the loss of ingredients thought irreplaceable. But Play Ball (Alberts/Sony) may be the start of the last hurrah – which at the least will include cannons, bells, volume, and a man with a Seniors’ Card dressed in school uniform. I am reliably informed that, musically, this is actually tuned down a tone, which may allow Brian’s scream to stand up to delivering it. 

In these days of diminishing returns, you may even need to amalgamate individual formulas. Or ‘mash’, as the kids might have it. So, Pharrell gets Daft Punk to repay the favour of him giving them a face for elements of Random Access Memories by offering him a couple of helmets and those annoyingly insistent phased vocals on the chorus of Gust Of Wind (I Am Other). Allow me to be among the first to play you the tune that’ll likely be annoying crap out of you in under a fortnight.

Meanwhile, straight outta Marrickville, Day Ravies – among the best puns in bandname-dom, even if many of their audience probably wouldn’t have worked it out yet – haven’t had time to settle on a formula. Even if in the 100 seconds of this they manage to reference krautpop as made by machines, and Australian suburban pop as made by well-read university students in Brisbane and Perth for decades. This Side Of The Fence (Popfrenzy) will further make you love them, or at least offer to take them home for a cup of Earl Grey and a Scotch Finger biscuit.

More polite, but rather good, pop from boys with their guitars held high to obscure the shirts their mums have ironed comes from The Ocean Party, with Head Down (Spunk) even including the obligatory 80s synthetic sax solo to match their haircuts.

‘Here’s the man who’s done it all’. Bit of lyrical self-mythologising right up front from Thurston Moore – who at least may have some right to say such a thing. Local release upcoming for the former Sonic Youth leader’s The Best Day (Matador/Remote Control) album, of which this is the eponymous song. Surprisingly tuneful 12-string strumming gives way to the rampant guitar strangling you may well have expected from the start.

Also a title track of album to come, Caribou’s Our Love (City Slang/Merge) has Dan Snaith offering a first appraisal of various forms of that most weighty of all four-letter words. Renowned musical dilettante that he is, this confuses the issue slightly by not doesn’t stray far from his most recent work under this name – although there has been one of his Daphni offerings in the interim. Warm squelching electronica takes your hand for a work through the forest to a babbling brook, where the bears are catching salmon, so you run away.

Also mostly built on machines, but retaining a humanity owed in large party to the sheer questioning and longing in Jaye Kranz’s voice, Melbourne’s Brighter Later present Brace (Gaga Digi), which seeps and echoes while staying just out of reach. First offering since The Wolves album of last year, this is a thing of some intriguing beauty, which hopefully more will notice on this cycle.

Little May seem set for some degree of international note. Signing to record companies that still mean something overseas, and the same American booking agency as The National as references. Bones (Dew Process) has all the haunting grace of the genre they’re now giving the label of ‘ghost folk’, which will do them well as they shake hands with the world.

Proving there may still be some tailoring to markets going on in this global digital world, we here in #Straya get First (Create/Control) as first taste of the new Cold War Kids album, while some other territories get Hot Coals – which sounds pretty much like that Hang Me Out To Dry one, which has really been their only hit, despite ongoing high hopes for them from some. Compare and contrast: