Series: 33 1/3 Oceania

An in-depth look at the rise of enigmatic Australian rock band TISM, the unexpected success of their 1995 album, Machiavelli and the Four Seasons, and the continued trajectory of their storied career.Focusing on one of Australia’s most enigmatic bands, This Is Serious Mum (better known as TISM), Tyler Jenke forms an in-depth analysis of the anonymous, pseudonymous Melbourne collective’s rise...

Kylie Minogue's Kylie self-titled debut album produced hits, controversy and a perfect mainstream storm. The then soap and children’s television star ‘crossed over’ to music with hit writer/producers SAW — and the shamelessly commercial approach of all involved saw the ‘real’ music industry get its back up. This book interrogates the way that commercial pop albums are remembered in both...

Revisits Australian rock band silverchair's globally successful debut album Frogstomp (1995) and asserts that the band is not an imitation of American grunge nor an emblem of Gen X angst. Frogstomp transformed Australian rockers silverchair from another unknown teen garage band to an internationally popular rock outfit. The album was released in 1995 and became a global sensation. Due to...

The Front Lawn is a multi-award-winning, much-loved New Zealand duo-turned-trio comprising Don McGlashan, Harry Sinclair, and, eventually, Jennifer Ward-Lealand. A 1980s variety act, The Front Lawn was part of an Aotearoa/New Zealand alternative tradition of duos that combine music, comedy, theatre, and film. Their debut album, Songs from The Front Lawn (1989), distilled McGlashan and Sinclair’s theatrical stage show and...

Intertextual, passionate and personal throughout, Crowded House’s Together Alone is a key addition to the surprisingly limited range of scholarship on one of Australasia’s most successful and adored bands. Fusing pop music with place and landscape, Crowded House’s Together Alone (1993) was unprecedented in its Australasian context, and in the process of making this album, the group’s sound transformed profoundly....

Michael Brown undertakes a thorough study of Eyeliner’s Buy Now, a vaporwave homage to the kitsch electronic sounds of the 1980s and 1990s. Eyeliner’s Buy Now (2015) belongs to a new genre for our times: vaporwave. Emerging in the early 2010s on the internet, vaporwave originated with a cohort of millennial artists who reimagined the musical soundtracks of 1980s-1990s consumerism...

The success of the Hip-Hop album The Calling (2003) by the Hilltop Hoods was a major event on the timeline of Hip-Hop in Australia. It launched a formerly ‘underground’ scene into the spotlight, radically transforming the group members’ lives and creating new opportunities for other Hip-Hop artists. This book analyses the impact of the album by drawing on original interviews...

A study of John Sangster’s jazz suite The Lord of the Rings contextualized with biographical and cultural studies of the composer in the 1970s.In three volumes and more than six LP recordings, The Lord of the Rings suite, produced during the 1970s, based on the Tolkien books, is the most ambitious, stylistically and emotionally wide-ranging compositional oeuvre ever undertaken in...

Here is an in-depth exploration of Robert Forster's debut solo album, Danger in the Past (1990). Dublin, Ireland. That World Cup summer of 1990. A 21-year-old poet listens, entranced, when his friend puts on an LP, The Go-Betweens: 1978–1990. As the city outside goes football crazy, the poet discovers his new favourite band and learns that he’ll never see them...

Saturday Night Fever is simultaneously one of the biggest-selling albums of all time and one of the most reviled. How can a record create such a polarising reaction? Australian writer Clinton Walker attempts to answer that question and finds that, among other things, a certain seemingly unlikely Australianness is part of the reason. Fever was a supernova for disco, for...

In this critical appraisal of The Clean's landmark release, Boodle Boodle Boodle, Geoff Stahl explores how it impacted the emergence of a new DIY scene alongside a retrospective on the role The Clean played in shaping New Zealand’s independent music industry. The Clean’s 1981 EP catalysed independent music in Aotearoa/New Zealand and defined what became known as the “Dunedin Sound”....

The Dead C’s Clyma est mort (1993) is the record of a live gig for one person. Tom Lax was running the Siltbreeze label in Philadelphia and had come to New Zealand to meet the artists he was releasing. He heard The Dead C at their noisy, improvised best, turning rock music on its head with a free-form style of...

David McComb, the driving force behind The Triffids, shaped one of Australia’s most revered albums, Born Sandy Devotional (1986). But after the band’s breakup, illness curtailed his solo career. He died in 1999, aged 36. Truckload of Sky: The Lost Songs of David McComb Vol. 1 (2020) revives his final, unrecorded songs through the efforts of longtime collaborators, friends, and...

Tame Impala’s psychedelic third album Currents (2015) is emblematic of a cultural shift in music production and consumption in the early days of streaming and a project that cemented its creator, Kevin Parker, as one of Australian music’s most unlikely success stories and influential exports. Currents marked a conscious shift in sound and attitude for its creator, West Australian polymath...

Released in 1986, Hunters and Collectors’ album Human Frailty is one of the most important Australian albums of the last two decades of the twentieth century. It was pivotal in the group’s career and marked the group’s move into pub rock. It is unashamedly concerned with love and desire. The album challenged traditional understandings of Australian masculinity while playing music...

The album examined in this book transformed the singer John Farnham from a faded teen pop star into the most popular solo rock performer in Australia, in a career that has lasted for more than 30 years. Whispering Jack remains the top-selling album by an Australian artist in Australia, and constitutes the turning point in Farnham’s bid to achieve credibility...

Melbourne, 1971: radical counterculture, hippies, opposition to the Vietnam War and consumerism. The birth of Oz blues rock. Influenced by American blues after Robert Johnson, parallel to developments with Paul Butterfield, the Bluesbreakers and Canned Heat, Chain’s music also developed in distinct ways, taking on a style later referred to as Oz blues, or Oz indigo. The emergence of prog...

Released in 1996, Kitten Licks catapulted Brisbane indie-rock three-piece Screamfeeder into the '90s alternative-rock boom alongside Powderfinger, silverchair, You Am I and Regurgitator. International tours, regular festival shows, and TV appearances followed. And yet, commercial success for Screamfeeder was comparatively short-lived. By the end of the decade, the band’s outlook was bleak: at a career standstill and unable to record...

Since I Left You captures the fraught moment in popular music history as reflected in and anticipated by the debut studio album from electronic music group The Avalanches. Since I Left You holds a reputation amongst its advocates that exceeds nearly all of its closest peers. Despite the inordinate amount of attention this album has received, it has never been...

From entering a high-school music competition to being honoured with the New Zealand Order of Merit, Bic Runga has an established place within contemporary popular music. Focusing on her iconic album, Drive, and including informative case studies of representative tracks on the album, this book provides not only an in-depth study of one album, but skilfully navigates Runga’s creative work...

Regurgitator’s second full-length album, Unit (1997), was produced in a DIY warehouse studio at a time when this was unusual for a major label band. The album went three times Platinum in Australia and won five esteemed ARIA Awards in 1998, including Album of the Year. The album’s success is indicative of a particular point in time in popular music...

After a string of commercial disappointments, in 1986 Australian rock band The Church were simultaneously dropped by Warner Brothers in the US and EMI in Australasia. The future looked bleak. Seemingly from nowhere, their next record, Starfish, became an unlikely global hit. Its alluring and pensive lead single, 'Under the Milky Way', stood in stark contrast to the synth pop...

Alastair Riddell’s band Space Waltz was a short-lived one-album New Zealand rock act who hit gold with a #1 hit single in October 1974 with the song ‘Out On The Street’, but thereafter failed to achieve anything even close to that feat. While relegated to one-hit-wonder status in the eyes of many, to this day Riddell and Space Waltz epitomise...

Ed Kuepper’s history as a rock pioneer with The Saints and Laughing Clowns means that his albums of the early 1990s represent a remapping of the singer-songwriter concept. His classic Honey Steel’s Gold shares a looseness with blues and folk recordings of the 1940s and 1950s, capturing performances that take detours, stretch and contract, wax and wane, such as the...

An in-depth look at the rise of enigmatic Australian rock band TISM, the unexpected success of their 1995 album, Machiavelli and the Four Seasons, and the continued trajectory of their storied career. Focusing on one of Australia’s most enigmatic bands, This Is Serious Mum (better known as TISM), Tyler Jenke forms an in-depth analysis of the anonymous, pseudonymous Melbourne collective’s...

This is the untold history of Oceania's 1960s lost psychedelic album, The Happy Prince. Recorded in Sydney by the La De Das, an Aotearoa/New Zealand band, this was the first LP in Australia that told a single story, creating an audio world. The La De Das were – and are – one of New Zealand’s most loved bands. By 1967...

This is the untold history of Oceania's 1960s lost psychedelic album, The Happy Prince. Recorded in Sydney by the La De Das, an Aotearoa/New Zealand band, this was the first LP in Australia that told a single story, creating an audio world. The La De Das were — and are — one of New Zealand’s most loved bands. By 1967...

This is the story of Australia’s most popular modern jazz group of the 1960s, and their best-selling debut album Move. The Three Out were Australia’s most popular modern jazz band. Their debut album Move was recorded just six weeks after the trio formed at Sydney’s famous El Rocco jazz club and sold over 3,000 copies upon its release in 1961....

This is the story of Australia’s most popular modern jazz group of the 1960s, and their best-selling debut album Move. The Three Out were Australia’s most popular modern jazz band. Their debut album Move was recorded just six weeks after the trio formed at Sydney’s famous El Rocco jazz club and sold over 3,000 copies upon its release in 1961....

The success of the Hip-Hop album The Calling (2003) by the Hilltop Hoods was a major event on the timeline of Hip-Hop in Australia. It launched a formerly ‘underground’ scene into the spotlight, radically transforming the group members’ lives and creating new opportunities for other Hip-Hop artists. This book analyses the impact of the album by drawing on original interviews...