The Fresh 50: 10-2

Have you ever stopped to think just how awesomely exciting the Australian music scene is? No? Well we here at Rip It Up Digital certainly have, so much so that we just couldn’t keep it to ourselves. So we decided to make a list celebrating the very best in Australia’s emerging musical talent. We call it The Fresh 50.

The cultural cringe is a thing of the past as Aussie musos have proven time and again we’re a force to be reckoned with on the world stage. Whereas we were were once considered a gimmicky stereotype thanks to Men At Work or Olivia Newton John, now we’re producing some of the freshest music on the planet.

So what do we mean by fresh? Well fresh can mean a lot of things in music. It can refer to new and forward-thinking ideas, a cutting edge take on something old and stale, or simply being fresh meat on the market. We took all this into consideration when selecting our Fresh 50 talent, picking out the acts that we think are gonna be big wigs in the future. But we also thought we needed a couple of rules, so to be eligible for The Fresh 50, artists:

   - Had to be active in the past 12 months (1 July 2009 – 1 July 2010)
   - Had to still be active as at 1 July 2010
   - Could not have more than one full-length album to their name (EPs not included)

So with all this in mind, here are the next 10 lucky participants in Rip It Up Digital’s Fresh 50.

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#10   Miami Horror

In many ways, Miami Horror represent the band of the future. They’re a ‘band’ in the sense that there are four of them who play real, organic instruments live and record these real, organic instruments in the studio. But as well as the real, organic Miami Horror, we also have the electronic, somewhat imaginary version – the band that remixes, the band that DJs, the band doesn’t need the live arena to get exposure, but a laptop and internet connection. They’re at the exact crossroads between reality and cyberspace, making them some sort of an omnipotent musical spirit.

Of course they weren’t the first band to live such an existence, nor will they be the last. But what makes Miami Horror different is that they weren’t always like this. Benjamin Plant began life as a DJ under the Miami Horror guise and has gradually enlisted others to create a fully-fledged band. Like Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man, Miami Horror started life as something electronic, synthetic and robotic but has grown piece by piece into its macrobiotic skin. Now they have the best of both worlds, cred from both their DJ and rock band peers. Their infusion of new wave textures with echoes of disco beat and a healthy slathering of synth pop continues to earn praise in the blogosphere and is now starting to make headway in the charts as well.

Plant hasn’t put a foot wrong in his journey of sonic discovery. Where it’ll take him next is anyone’s guess, but with debut album Illumination slated for release in August, it could be a journey that takes him to the moon and back.

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#9   Jonathan Boulet

There’s this great scene in I Am Sam when Lucy realises for the first time that she’s smarter than her intellectually challenged father Sam. They’re reading a book together and she refuses to read aloud a word she knows Sam doesn’t recognise. It’s like she doesn’t want to embarrass her father with her obviously superior intellect and ability. It’s a situation I’m sure Jonathan Boulet has experienced once or twice in his life.

Not that what he’s done is that remarkable – I mean lots of people write, record and produce their own music these days. But at 21 years of age, you shouldn’t be THAT FREAKIN’ GOOD at it. He made his debut self-titled album in his bedroom, probably just for a laugh, something to do in between playing for all the other awesome bands he jams with. Yet it sounds like a studio-produced, million dollar record. Slap U2 in front of A Community Service Announcement and you’ve got yourself an international number one there, mister. But it doesn’t stop there. Jonathan’s music dips its toes far deeper into the creative pond than a moderately successful mainstream hit. That Jonathan Boulet didn’t reach the dizzying heights it might have shouldn’t detract from what a brilliant record it is. At times it’s an acoustic racket; at others it pushes the boundaries of modern electronica. It’s almost like there’s too much going on to take it all in at once. A similar situation is probably going on in Jonathan’s head – there are just too many ideas passing through his brain to remember them all so he has to jot them all down on tape. What a mess that could turn out to be! But it’s not, it’s the inspired and eclectic masterpiece contained within Jonathan Boulet.

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#8   Children Collide

Children Collide are a band with a fair amount of expectation on their shoulders. Not only do they have to appease the fickle tastemakers dissecting their every note, but they also have unit quotas laid out by their major label overlords to satisfy. Debut album The Long Now mostly trod this line superbly, with the right mix of edginess and accessibility endearing the Melbourne three-piece to a growing crowd of appreciators. Successful trips to the US have extended their fan base further afield and now, as they prepare to release follow-up album Theory Of Everything this August, Children Collide have the music industry, and the world, firmly in the palms of their hands.

It’s a situation they’re clearly hoping to capitalise on. If new single Jellylegs is anything to go by, Children Collide’s sophomore effort will be meatier, ballsier and rockier than their first. The children have grown into men.  They sound like they’ve shed any last indie skin left on them and will be doing things without too much concern for public approval from now on. It’s a definite change for the better, as parts of The Long Now felt a bit contrived and angling for some sort of commercial recognition. But the new and improved Children Collide seem more like the dangerous rock & roll band they always should’ve been, and always have been when they take to the stage. When these abrasive new songs get put to their anarchic live show, Children Collide will be taking no prisoners. Forget everything you thought you knew about Children Collide, with Theory Of Everything they’re about to tear the world apart.

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#7   Philadelphia Grand Jury

At a time when most bands employ some ridiculous business marketing strategy to gain the attention of the masses, Philadelphia Grand Jury do it the old fashioned way: by playing as many shows as they possibly can, and then a few more. It was kind of funny to see them support just about every single guitar band in Australia last year, but then again, it made a lot of sense too. After all it’s not that hard to land yourself a tour support when you’re one of the best live bands in the country. For those who haven’t experienced the Philly Jays live show (and there can’t be many left out there), picture yourself in year 10 at high school and all the boys are wrestling on the oval. It’s violent yet playful, a release of pent-up frustration on all your best mates. Couple this with some bizarrely pre-recorded crowd banter and a bass player who looks like he could kill someone at any moment and there you have it, quite simply one of the best live bands going around.

It’s really not a complex formula: write simple, catchy songs and be prepared to play them many times over. It seems an obvious plan to follow and one that’s surely easier said than done, but it’s what has delivered the Philly Jays to this point in their careers. Their recent move to the UK has seen nothing change: they’ve got maybe a million shows booked before the end of the year and there’s almost no doubt that British audiences will soon be submitting to the Philly Jays juggernaut. Who’d have thought simplicity could be so effing effective and sound so effing awesome?

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#6   Art Vs Science

It’s a story that would leave plenty of aspiring musicians out there white-knuckled and grating their teeth. After playing literally a handful of club shows Art Vs Science were snapped up and on the main stage at Splendour in the Grass playing to thousands. How could this happen? When paying your dues is the cornerstone of the music industry, how does one band bypass it all and end up playing festivals before anyone’s even heard of them? The answer lies in the instant attainability of Art Vs Science’s music. No other band could have so quickly captured the hearts of Australia’s music-consuming public than Art Vs Science did. They have this incredible flair for writing ultra-catchy, unpretentious pop music that injects dance fever in anyone brave enough to listen to it. It’s not something that can be easily put down to luck or bring in the right place at the right time. Sooner or later the Art Vs Science bubble was destined to burst, and now they’re primed for a lengthy stay at the top.

Nothing this Sydney three-piece do seems to affect their popularity, and if you needed proof of that just look at new single Magic Fountain. It’s big, bold, deliberately divisive and yet it’s still ubiquitous on the airwaves. It’s as if they’re testing the Australian public to see how ridiculous they can get before people start switching off. But it hasn’t happened yet and in all likelihood it won’t happen before they release a highly anticipated debut album. Art Vs Science really know how to play the game and by the time LP number one hits the shelves the hype around them will be as uncontrollable as a ruptured underwater oil pipeline. Whether they were fortuitous or not in their beginnings, every move they’ve made since then has been like a well-played game of chess. So if you’re sick of these guys by now, strap yourselves in ‘cos they won’t be going away anytime soon.

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#5   The Middle East

The Middle East drift so peacefully in the wind it’s almost too easy to miss them. They just go about their business so humbly and quietly, you really couldn’t blame anyone for not realising all the marvellous things they’ve already managed to achieve in such a short space of time. First, and certainly foremost, is the utterly jaw-dropping music they penned on their abridged eponymous debut EP. It’s so delicate, so subtle and so irrepressibly heart-warming - when you hear a song like Blood all your innermost fears and worries seem to leave your body, if only for the duration of its rousing melody. Then take into consideration the fact they split up before they had any success but somehow managed to re-form all the stronger for it. No, The Middle East aren’t your ordinary acoustic indie-folk band, they’re some sort of fabled collective of bards from a bygone era.

It should come as no surprise that The Middle East won’t be Australia’s best-kept secret for long. 2010 has seen the Townsville natives travel far and wide, spreading their humbled message of hope to audiences all around the world. They’ve hopped on tour buses with Laura Maring, Mumford & Son and Frightened Rabbit. They did the whole SXSW thing, only to get picked up to play Coachella a couple of months later, followed by Glastonbury a few weeks ago. They’re the toast of all the important tastemakers in the US and UK, a love affair which began so innocuously on the blogosphere. And yet they go through it all without so much as a peep of boastfulness or bravado, it’s a wonder anyone’s taken any notice of them at all. The Middle East are the anti-heroes of the music world, defeating villains in a velvet revolution of softly-strummed indie whispers. They are Australia’s quiet-achievers, with a host of loud-voiced spruikers singing their praises after them.

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#4   Lisa Mitchell

When you’re talking about unlikely success stories, Lisa Mitchell ranks fairly high among them. Putting aside the fact that she’s this incredibly sensitive, introverted little soul for a minute, her rise to indie stardom came through an utterly impossible channel: the now-defunct Idol franchise. This is a failed reality talent star who has somehow managed to resurrect her career and launch it to a much higher point than could have ever been realised had she won the damn contest in the first place! How’s the irony? And all this at the tender age of 20. That someone of her limited experience could even manage to write an album’s worth of material is remarkable enough in itself, but add to that an international recording contract, appearances at Glastonbury and Big Day Out, and a voice that could crush the heart of any willing suitor, and you’ve got one of the greatest and most unusual success stories of recent times. Christ, at this rate she’ll probably succumb to a drug addiction, publicly break down on TV, begin a relationship with a Hollywood bad boy and make a stunning comeback by the time she’s 25!

So where to from here? Where do you go once you’ve most of your life’s ambitions before your 21st birthday? I suppose there are incremental improvements that can be made. After all, her debut album Wonder only came in at a paltry 6 in the charts and of her three ARIA nominations last year, not one of them yielded anything shiny. But you get the feeling Lisa’s not the kind of artist who concerns herself with such accolades. She’s probably still counting her lucky stars she’s even got a career in music given the start she had to it. Instead of wondering what could have been, Lisa would be focussing on what comes next. And we’re all dying to find out with her.

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#3   The Temper Trap

From little things big things grow, or so the saying goes. Like many others on this list, The Temper Trap emerged from fairly humble beginnings, but unlike the rest they had stars in their eyes bigger than any night sky could contain. You could tell this simply from the music they were crafting at the time: big riffs, big choruses, big crescendos, big everything! It’s like their ambitions were cast out onto a supergiant rock & roll nebula spanning to all new reaches of the universe. Most would have expected these impossibly grand expectations to remain unfulfilled. Most would have expected them to burn away like some failed star that never quite exploded. But they hadn’t heard Dougy sing yet.

Such a brilliant, untainted and naturally powerful voice is so hard to find in music these days, not to mention one that requires almost no digital augmentation. In a world of auto-tuned pop divas and shouty rock stars, it’s almost like the ability to sing is a dying art in the contemporary music world. But Dougy Mandagi puts such notions to the sword. His beaming falsettos soar higher than any celestial body in an almost arrogant showing off of his gift. The Temper Trap can throw the most epic of guitar lines and thunderous percussion fills into as many songs as they like, but without the guiding light of Dougy’s vocals they’d nothing but a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. This is what has made The Temper Trap such a transcendent musical force: massively, almost unrealistically high ambitions paired with the talent to match. That’s why in the current state of play all but two musical acts coming from this country eclipse their immense potential. That’s why, as they march on, their insatiable thirst for success will only continue to grow amidst an increasing storm of rapturous praise. That’s why they won’t be number three forever.

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#2   Empire Of The Sun 

Only a project as conceptually grandiose as Empire Of The Sun could have the back story to match. When two of Australian music’s most eccentric personalities teamed up with one of its most absurdly talented behind-the-scenes men, there was always a chance things could get ugly. But probably no one could have realised just how out of hand things eventually became. Copyright lawsuits, band fissures and public mudslinging has marred what is otherwise one of the most innovative ideas in modern pop music.

Empire Of The Sun are about so much more than their music. At Parklife last year a version of Empire Of The Sun that lacked original members Nick Littlemore and Donnie Sloan took their conceptual wonderland to the live arena for the very first time. And while we all knew it’d be good, what they delivered exceeded the expectations of even the most unflappable optimist. Luke Steele took centre stage dressed as some silvered overlord, flanked by crab-like land monsters and scaly fish women. For that short time onstage, Luke Steele was not a man, he was a guitar-wielding mythical rock god. This was a live show that put all others to shame with its vivid sensual stimulation and sycophantic aural gratification.

This is what makes the probable disintegration of Empire Of The Sun such a shame. Like The Sex Pistols before them, EOTS are likely to suffer from the fate of getting too big too quickly, of becoming more than their collective wills could handle and so they had to implode in on themselves. The future remains unclear for this collective of brilliant minds. With so much discontent running between its three core members, it would take a miracle of biblical proportions to bring them back together. But if anyone’s capable of such a seemingly impossible feat, it’s Empire Of The Sun.

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