- I’m strongly considering changing my writing name for the rest of this review to either Rip Van Winkle or the Purple Wiggle because Christ mate, I’ve been sleeping so incredibly hard on the glorious pomp of Protomartyr. I’ll need to astral project like in that one episode of The X-Files to give myself a different perspective on how the fuck this band could have possibly missed my orbit. It is everything I love and then some when it comes to janky post-punk, instrumentals droning and ramping tension.

- Jerome Blazé is just a young fella, he made his first moves on the Sydney music scene when he was only sixteen, in 2015 I think. That makes him, now, a very fresh-faced twenty-year-old. You can tell he’s just bursting with young-person energy and enthusiasm, because it’s right there in his new EP (which is certainly not his first one - that was back in 2015). Open, A Home.

<span><span>- Leanne Tennant is a bit of a quiet achiever?!

<span><span>- There aren't many positives to be gleaned from the current pandemic, least of all for the musical community. One small upside has been the number of bands releasing recordings that have been sitting on the shelf for a number of years. With not much else to do there's been time to put the finishing touches on these records, and – with further encouragement from Bandcamp's monthly fee-free Fridays – finally put them out for public consumption.

- I shouldn’t say this, but I kinda decided I was going to like this record long before I pressed play. Natalie Slade’s latest full length outing, Control, has already been getting love from BBC1Extra, New York Times, NME etc, but I didn’t know that yet.

- I don’t know about you but I was under the impression I’d uncovered all the tops music my old man was listening to by the time high school had come and gone but boy howdy, having said sentiment proved wrong was a right proper delight and it was when the evidence to the contrary was The Beths. Hailing from off of New Zealand, the three-turned-four-piece power pop crew are following up on 2018’s Future Me Hates Me with this new effort Jump Rope Gazers.

<p><span>- The phrase “Ethio-jazz” is one occasionally used by music journalists. But when it comes to describing the music of that East African country, the term is about as specific as if a Western writer might refer to “20th century Ethiopian Emperors”, or “world religions which have turned the colours of the Ethiopian flag into a fashion statement”. Ethio-jazz, generally, means the creative muse of legendary arranger and vibraphone player </span><strong>Mulatu Astatke</strong><span>.</span></p>