The Brag

How you approach this record depends on your relationship to Rilo Kiley, and whether their indefinite hiatus was barely a blip on your musical radar or a massive tragedy. One of the most promising young bands signed to Saddle Creek (Bright Eyes, Iron & Wine) in the new millennium, Rilo Kiley’s bare-faced, self-deprecating yet highly likeable brand of indie rock won them many fans, this reviewer included

Posted: April 22nd, 2013 under Album Reviews, Brag 509, Music.
Tags: Jonno Seidler, Little Record Company, Rilo Kiley, Rkives

Here’s what a three-star review means. Three stars accorded to a fifth album of a band that you loved when you were 17 is basically the easiest way to say “Meh” without actually writing a one-word synopsis. Comedown Machine is good. It does all the right things, Julian hits all the right notes and the band still play tight and fast like they’ve only discovered two key signatures – ‘C’ for cool and ‘D’ for ‘debonair’. But in 2013, good isn’t good enough. Particularly when your last album was pretty much a write-off, and the one before that was your attempt at being a stadium rock band, The Strokes seem to be burning through their nine lives pretty damn fast.

Posted: April 1st, 2013 under Album Reviews, Brag 506, Music.
Tags: Comedown Machine, Jonno Seidler, RCA/Sony, The Strokes

Brooklyn-via-Washington D.C. rapper/producer Oddisee – who put out his first ‘official’ record last year after a swathe of mixtapes, instrumental records and guest features – likes to fly under the radar. But following the release of his acclaimed debut album People Hear What They See, it doesn’t look like Oddisee, the nom de tune of Amir Mohamed el Khalifa, is going to be enjoying anonymity for that much longer. An instant classic that takes sample-based culture and flips it on its head by reworking the hooks using live instrumentation, People… showcases a hip hop ‘slashie’ who seemed to emerge fully formed, if not for all the years of work he’d done on the sidelines. And that’s before you even get to the lyrics – beautiful, dense stories that seem to tumble out of Khalifa’s mind faster than Kerouac could scrawl them onto a page.

Posted: March 4th, 2013 under Brag 502, Music, Music - Interview.
Tags: Civic Underground, Huwston, Jones JNR, Jonno Seidler, Katalyst, Myele Manzanza, Oddisee, Olivier Daysoul, Suff Daddy

The first Songs record happened to come out at a time when every other band in Australia was trying too hard to be interesting and different, and it succeeded in being both of those things simply by existing. The stock-in-trade for Songs, aside from being basically un-Googleable, was repetition. They constructed shimmering, moody riffs and built them into slow-burning, sensual alternative rock songs that lingered long after, not unlike the images front man Max Doyle produced in his day job as a photographer for Vogue.

Posted: March 4th, 2013 under Album Reviews, Brag 502, Music.
Tags: Album Of The Week, Jonno Seidler, Malabar, Popfrenzy, Songs

Rivers Cuomo is such a boss. It’s something that you forget now that his band has literally been around for twenty years, but the guy is a proper rock star hidden under a cardigan and Buddy Holly glasses. Throughout Weezer’s two-plus-hour victory lap of the city they’ve neglected since their ‘90s heyday, it’s Cuomo who proves the most endearing, both as a supremely talented and on-note vocalist but also as a killer lead guitarist. His solos regularly outflank his bandmates’ and he puts in a massive amount of energy for someone who fucked up his leg in Melbourne the night before (he’s still visibly limping).

Posted: January 29th, 2013 under Brag 497, Live Reviews, Music.
Tags: Jonno Seidler, Sydney Entertainment Centre, Weezer