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Check Check, Melbourne (2026)

01/04/2026

“Bluetile Lounge appeared fully formed to me in a vision at the UWA Refectory sometime around mid 1993,” writes Guy Blackman.

“I was a 19 year old stripling in Perth, occasionally waking up in time to attend uni lectures, when this friendly guy from my English Lit class told me he was playing in a Battle Of the Bands at the Ref at lunch.

“I went along with no expectations, but then Bluetile Lounge took the stage, playing just two songs in their allotted 20 minutes. They were unassuming in dark flannel shirts and murmured vocals, but possessed a magical twin guitar interplay and performed the most languorous, slowed down country-rock ever heard.”

Bluetile Lounge will play their first show in a quarter century, and their first ever show outside Perth, at Melbourne’s Brunswick Ballroom on Thursday 2 April.

Read Guy’s chat with guitarist and singer Dan Erickson and guitarist Gabrielle Stokes via the link in the comments.

16/03/2026

The point of view that the world is in grave pain was voiced various times during this year's Golden Plains Festival. Water From Your Eyes, visiting from New York City, spoke about how the USA is a fu**ed up force of evil. During an unexpectedly furious performance, Obongjayar, from London via Nigeria, said that these are dark times, but that there is another way.

Derya Yıldırım spoke of her shame at being a German citizen at this moment in history, but, she said, after observing the Palestinian flags in the crowd, events like Golden Plains give her hope. The Sydney-based DEVAURA flipped the coin of rage to remind us that it’s a privilege to be alive.

Nobody articulated our shared responsibility more succinctly than Basement Jaxx’s Felix Buxton. At the conclusion of one of the most spectacularly entertaining live shows I’ve ever seen – which journeyed through jazzy, kitschy house, rave techno, a string of big beat anthems, and a cover of ROSALÍA’s “Berghain” – Buxton acknowledged how wonderful it is to be here, living together, on Earth.

“Let’s make it good,” he said.

Full review via the link in the comments

16/03/2026

Mike Skinner and The Streets' gig at Palace Foreshore, a full album performance of 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free, was more musical theatre than hip hop.

The stage backdrop featured the bus shelter from the album cover. There was no between-song chat from the usually verbose Mike Skinner. Backing vocalist Roo Savill intermittently stepped into the spotlight to play the role of the narrator’s girlfriend, Simone. There were genuine screams of delight during the album’s final song, “Empty Cans”, when (spoiler alert) Skinner located the thousand pounds that went missing in the album’s opening track, “It Was Supposed to Be So Easy”.

Songs like “Get Out of My House” and “Such a Twat” evoked the smell of a musty flatshare, half empty takeaways strewn across the place, several weeks since the electricity bill has been paid, and no one knows whose jacket potato it is in the fridge but everyone knows it’s covered with mould.

Full review via the link in the comments.

11/03/2026

Pulp's music feels more relevant now than it ever did. The rallying chorus of “Mis-Shapes” could be copied directly from the internal monologue of a burned out, embattled gen-Zer. “What’s the point in being rich / if you can’t think what to do with it? ‘Cause you’re so bleeding thick,” Cocker snarls on that song. Turns out he didn’t even know the half of it: our ruling class have spent the last three decades accumulating wealth and bleeding brain cells.

So, when Pulp emerged on the Opera House Forecourt for the Sydney leg of their much anticipated revival tour, it wasn’t in the form of a legacy band. Cocker spent the gig spasmodically dancing on the very cutting edge, whirling through a setlist of songs that could have been written yesterday. He achieved the unthinkable: summing up the spirit of the times while dressed like a substitute English teacher in blazer, jeans and spectacles.

Full review via the link in the comments.

05/03/2026

The last time Pulp played in Melbourne, in 2011, a feeling of temporariness surrounded the whole affair.

The Sheffield band, led by Jarvis Cocker, were back together for a one-off reunion tour. They hadn’t made music together in a decade, and they didn’t have any plans to do so. But 15 years later, as Pulp returned to Melbourne for their largest ever show in the city, the feeling of temporariness had been replaced by one of generosity.

For all their perceived artiness, one thing that Pulp, and Cocker in particular, have always excelled at is delivering maximum entertainment value. And so the bulk of the Melbourne show was devoted to the most lustrous pearls from Pulp’s peak period in the mid 90s and early 00s.

It was, in the words of a friend, literally a flawless show. And thank god that Jarvis Cocker still lives to drape himself over the floor and give it all with his dancing.

Full review via the link in the comments. Pic by Ian Laidlaw.

02/03/2026

Iconic, energetic and anarchic, such was the atmosphere at Grace Jones' gig on a beautiful moonlit night in the Harbour City.

Opening with “Nightclubbing,” the 77-year-old singer hasn’t lost any of her moxie, teasing the crowd with her ever-more revealing costume changes – the hats and head gear that only Jones can pull off – and cheeky comments, while downing multiple glasses of red wine during the 90 minute show.

Highlights included “This Is,” “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango),” and “Love is the Drug.” But the ultimate treat came when Jones twirled a hula hoop around her waist for the duration of “Slave to the Rhythm,” closing the night with a big smile on her face.

full review via the link in the comments.

28/02/2026

Australian music media is h***y for Spotify.

Spotify's new AI-generated prompted playlist feature has a bunch of Australian music media outlets very excited.

You tell the AI what you want from a playlist, and it’ll make it for you. No further effort necessary. It reminds me of something Liz Pelly, author of the Spotify exposé Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, said when she was in Melbourne last year.

“There’s this former employee who I interviewed who told me that the whole goal of the Spotify recommendation apparatus is to help reduce the cognitive work that someone has to do when they open this app,” Pelly said.

“It seems like at some point there was some sort of convention where a lot of these music tech start-up guys decided that deciding what music you want to listen to is the worst thing you could possibly ever do.”

It sounds unequivocally gross, right? Well, there are plenty of Australian music media pundits who seem to agree with this Spotify ethos.

Read more via the link in the comments.

24/02/2026

There are gigs, and then there are small pilgrimages.

On Saturday night at the Anita’s Theatre in Thirroul, Ben Folds delivered the latter: a solo show that felt less like a concert and more like being invited into the lounge room of a man who has spent three decades quietly building one of the great modern American songbooks.

Each song arrived wrapped in anecdote – childhood memories, awkward ambitions, the long arc of becoming. The music was contextualised in a way that made you feel less like a consumer of content and more like a co-conspirator. It was generous. Intimate. Occasionally rambling. Entirely compelling.

full review via the link in the comments

23/02/2026

POiSON GiRL FRiEND is coming to Melbourne for a performance at NTS Naarm on Saturday 28 February. It’s the Japanese electronic musician’s only show on her debut visit to Australia.

POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s 1992 mini album, Melting Moment, has become a cult favourite in recent years, particularly as the definition of trip hop has expanded beyond a handful of acts from Bristol.

POiSON GiRL FRiEND followed Melting Moment with the albums Shyness (1993) and Love Me (1994). Across the three releases, PGF’s Noriko Sekiguchi enacts an ambitious and deeply evocative exploration of love, longing, eroticism and shared humanity.

POiSON GiRL FRiEND’s dialogic lyrics work in tandem with a broad sweep of songwriting and production styles. Melting Moment draws on UK acid house and industrial but also features gorgeous string arrangements and covers of Jane Birkin’s “Quoi” and “Those Were the Days” by late-60s Welsh singer Mary Hopkins.

Love Is places the Balearic chugger “Slave to the Computer” next to the SAW-style ambient techno of “Histoire d’O”, the baggy beat optimism of “Communication Breakdown”, and a gliding, downtempo cover of “Love Me, Please Love Me” by 1960s French singer-songwriter Michel Polnareff.

Read more via the link in bio, and catch POiSON GiRL FRiEND perform her first ever Australian show exclusively at NTS Naarm this Saturday.

18/02/2026

The first Spasta of 2026 took place on Valentine's Day in the Heritage Gardens at Abbotsford Convent, perhaps the loveliest setting for a day party anywhere on Wurundjeri Country.

At 24 degrees, with bright blue skies and only the teeniest bit of wind, it felt like the first day of spring. At least, that’s what I kept telling everyone. But perhaps it was just the buzz of flowering romance in the air. New connections pollinating. Friends and flames bumping hips. Everyone feeling freaky.

Egyptian Lover’s 90-minute headline set certainly emphasised the latter. The Los Angeles musician, a self-described “freak” and “freak-a-holic,” split his time between old-school toasting, using a vocoder to send his voice up to a cartoonishly high pitch, and activating video game sound effects with child-like glee. Programmed 808 beats motored every track.

On multiple occasions during his no-frills and loopily eccentric set, Egyptian Lover asked the thousand-ish people at Spasta to join him in saluting his cherished Roland drum machine.

“Eight-oh-motherf**king-eight," we sang.

Full review via the link in the comments.

17/02/2026

Strip Cameron Winter's career of its endless buzz – the meteoric rise to fame assisted by not one but two of the most talked-about records of the last couple years – and what’s left is the outrageous talent of an unsettlingly-young man who spits poetry in one long stream.

His Sydney Opera House show reduced material from Heavy Metal so severely that such poetry was impossible to ignore.

Full review via the link in the comments

Check Check

01/04/2026

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