Brisbane International Film Festival (BiFF) 2018

 

To summarise a festival is not an easy task. There were films at the Brisbane International Film Festival that could be described as unique, interesting, surprising, entertaining, daring or moving. However, there’s no one word that can capture a film, there are many. In the blink of an eye, every second, we witness twenty-five frames of film. Over the course of two hours, we have absorbed a massive amount of visual input that however we decide to process or interpret it is entirely up to us.

 

Matt Joe Gow: Break, Rattle And Roll

- Break, Rattle and Roll is the third album from alt-country artist Matt Joe Gow. Gow is based in Melbourne but originally from New Zealand. If country music isn’t the first cultural export we might associate with our Tasman neighbours, it’s worth remembering that Australia’s original country star Tex Morton made that same trip across the ditch many decades ago.

Bitumen: Discipline Reaction

-  It’s nice to hear a band differentiate themselves from the masses of post-punks out there these days, by pushing on over the red warning line and into the savagery of industrial. Melbourne’s Bitumen do exactly that. Fronted by Kate Binning, I first came across them a bit after they released their debut, self-titled full-length, back in 2016, when they followed it up, a year later, doing a split with No Sister.