Close to home #12: Wipedoubt Interview

Local Brisbane band Wipedoubt have been on the scene for over a year now. Frontman and lead singer, Joel Smith, answers a few of my questions on fame, fortune and surf music.

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Close to Home #11: Taken By the Silence interview

Brisbane band Taken by the Silence will not be classified, or in their words, marginalised, into a specific genre. They are rock, progressive, punk and metal, wanting not a pigeon hole but the opportunity to make music which is real and new. One quarter and frontman of the band, Michael Hardgrave, talks about the band building a reputation around Brisbane for delivering raw and intense live shows.

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Your Trend Offends #10: Bloody Anarchists

Apparently punk rock used to be dangerous. The Sex Pistols were the cause of many sleepless nights for over-excited community groups and kept the censorship boards as busy as a pedophile at a Wiggle’s concert. Nowadays Frank Carter occasionally lays some tough love on rambunctious audience members and Tom Gabel glasses people at bars. Whatever happened to men like GG Allin?

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Crime Watch #8: Scary Music

I have always been intrigued by music that I find scary and of ambiguous or unfamiliar intentions. Like most humans, I enjoy a quick peek behind the black curtain from time to time, a glimpse of the other side available in documentaries about serial killers or books about acclaimed Satanists.

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Close To Home #10: DZ

Brisbane duo DZ have been doing the internet rounds for a while now. Their first single, ‘The Mess-Up’ has got to be one of the best film clips I have ever seen. Simplistic and funny, it just shows band members drinking an entire bottle of Jagermeister in three minutes. As you would expect, the ending is quite messy…

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Close to Home #9 – New Gents

For the first half of this interview I had trouble deciphering anything Mike Nugent of  lo-fi gurus New Gents had to say. Skype can be a bitch at the best of times, even more so when the subject is eating a family bucket of Hot & Spicy KFC and is distributing their enthusiasm accordingly.

Chicken aside, New Gents have something to say. Whether it makes much sense or not probably depends on your experience with stoned musicians, but nevertheless, people are listening…

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Breaking the News #23: new Weezer album

Weezer’s seventh album, Raditude, is set to be released at the end of the month.

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Culture Vulture #9: Hockey

Is it a bad thing that channel nine’s shiny, new digital GO! channel brought this band to my attention? I watch alot of Seinfeld. Hockey is a band with four boys in it. They are quite pretty, with nice clothes. They have boppy poppy tunes (including Too Fake, which I am sure is on a commercial somewhere…again TV, sad). They have sparkly video clips. They also have a colourful myspace. What’s not to love? Quite a lot, actually.

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Breaking the News #22: Rap Rivalries are Finished

First we had the dramatic cross-coastal cappings of  Tupac & Biggie Smalls. Harlem luminary Big L was the next to go, taking a mind-blowing seven rounds to the head in one of Hip Hop’s darkest hours. More recently, Detroit MC and Eminem crony Proof was gunned down in a blaze of glory after a nightclub altercation.

Yesterday, 50 cent called Kanye West gay.

Fiddy was on the Angie Martinez show in the States, and when she spoke about the “Fame Kills: Starring Kanye West and Lady Gaga”  world tour, he caustically spat:

“ah, the gay tour.”

But the wit of the bullet-riddled-one did not stop there.

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Crime Watch #7: Lyrics As Status Updates

There comes a time in everyone’s life when they are physically and mentally incapable of coming up with a clever activity, thought or observation to insert into their Facebook status box. Instead of simply remaining silent and letting everyone get on with their lives it seems to be an approaprite response to an uninspired current state of existence to utilize snippets of song lyrics, chosen or tailored to provoke the most response from the eagerly waiting lurkers inhabiting any good friend list.

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