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Since its inception in 2004, the St Jerome’s Laneway Festival has become synonymous, as they say, with hot summer days, awesome locations and diverse, forward-thinking line-ups filled to overflowing with vital, surprising bands. Favouring cutting edge talent over mainstream success, Laneway has consistently delivered compelling, boundary-pushing acts to discerning punters and next year's event will continue that tradition.
In 2011, Laneway returns to the disparate yet uniformly gorgeous metropolitan settings of Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and Auckland. Whether the backdrop is an historic sandstone courtyard, a riverbed overlooking the city or a tree-lined laneway a stone’s throw from the CBD, we guarantee a day of musical discovery and revelry that‘ll be as scenic as it will be memorable.
Next year’s event will also feature a stage co-programmed by our friends at The Windish Agency(Chicago) and Eat Your Own Ears (London). These two tastemakers are among the most respected in their territories and their involvement reflects both their close association with the Laneway Festival and our commitment to uncovering the freshest artists from every corner of the globe. Speaking of global, stay tuned for news on Laneway Festival's official launch into Asia later this year!
The Laneway Festival is pleased to announce that its association with Young Care, an organisation which works to provide choice in care and accommodation options for over 700,000 young Australians who need it. All gold coin donations made at the festival will go directly towards Young Care.
And now, for the line-up. The A-Z of the most important, exciting acts of this year and next. Behold:
Look, look, look, it’s !!! (Chk Chk Chk)! We’re really looking forward to hosting these brooding, dancefloor filling disco punks. With hookier hooks and solider grooves that are more instantly accessible than their critically acclaimed back catalogue, the Warp Records-endorsed collective’s long-awaited fourth LP, Strange Weather, Isn’t It? seem poised to find them a wider audience. The venerable live act are an absolute riot on stage so discard your inhibitions and we’ll see you down the front.
THE ANTLERS are garnering praise from all quarters (Pitchfork, NPR, The Guardian ) for their skyscraping, shape-shifting new album Hospice. It’s a solemn, wistful, gorgeous album with lashings of sweeping crescendos and the sense of drama that makes Arcade Fire so great. Singer Peter Silberman’s voice is something to write home about, at once warm, familiar and majestic in its reach. Expect to hear much more about the Brooklyn three-piece in the months to come.
Reclusive pop surrealist ARIEL PINK comes out of his shell and across the Pacific toting his full band, HAUNTED GRAFFITI. After a decade putting out a succession of woozy, tripped out lo-fi pop LPs for Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks imprint, this year Pink stepped out of the bedroom armed with Before Today, his thoroughly awesome hi-fi 4AD debut and our album of the year. A gloriously damaged, genre-hopping record, Before Today is as schizo as it is excellent, filled to the brim with immediate, surprising hooks and a cracked charm.
A BEACH HOUSE primer for you. FACT: Baltimore duo Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally are not a couple. FACT: They are utterly brilliant. FACT: Their third release (and first for Sub-Pop), Teen Dream, is classic, dreamy, timeless pop. At once exultant and melancholic, Teen Dream sets Legrand’s breathy vocals atop a rich, sparkling sonic bed of organ and guitar, that result in that rare kind of music for which the word magical truly applies. Live, the duo weaves a spell that you have to see to believe.
BEAR IN HEAVEN = Laneway in Heaven. The Brooklyn trio have been kicking around since 2003, which is possibly why their second album, the cinematic, sprawling Beast Rest Forth Mouth sounds so accomplished. Krautrock flourishes and towering choruses abound, urging you to not just listen but to feel, goddammit. Triple j’s Zan Rowe has been raving about the band's live show and she's not making it up: we saw them earlier this year and invited them to play Laneway then and there.
Over seventeen years, eight albums and countless EPs, alt-rock titans BLONDE REDHEAD have secured their place in the rock’n’roll firmament as one of the most consistently inventive and evocative acts of the past two decades. After beginning life as a No Wave inspired outfit, over the years the trio of Kazu Makino and twin brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace have pared back the squall while pushing their sound to ever more expansive places. This is proven by their wall-of-sound, break-out cut from a few years ago, 23. Their latest LP, the lush electro-dream pop outing Penny Sparkle, is pure narcotic summer bliss, the latest evolution of a band never afraid to try their hand.
Blue Mountains residents CLOUD CONTROL are just blazing through 2010 off the back of their J Award nominated debut Bliss Release (it really does deserve to win). Tours all over the country. Four-star reviews all over the shop. A record deal with UK indie Infectious Records. It’s sweet reward for this ‘overnight success story’, who have actually been toiling away at their nimble boy/girl harmonies, handclaps and so forth for several years now. Catch them at their last Australian shows before they pack up and relocate overseas.
Closing out the main stage with a multimedia party to end all parties, Australia’s leading purveyors of electro-pop CUT COPY will launch their brand new album at the Laneway Festival. ‘Cut Copy will be changing the face of music faster than you can say “Kanye” say the NME. Indeed, the world’s press has been collectively breathless in their praise of the band as they have quietly become one of our most successful exports. We’re deeply impressed with the ebullient first single ‘Where I’m Going’ and the next single is expected to drop later this month. Those in the Cutters’ camp are sparkling with excitement about where the band has taken their sonics. We are thrilled that Laneway audiences will be the first to preview their new material this February!
Mixing woozy ambience, hypnotic Krautrock, art-damaged squall and classic, 60s-inspired pop into one wholly arresting package, Athens, Georgia four-piece DEERHUNTER have quickly cemented themselves as one of the most compelling and combustible bands of their era. Led by the magnetic presence of frontman Bradford Cox, Deerhunter’s live show has become the stuff of legend – an utterly immersive, noisy, gauzy, ecstatic, propulsive thing that the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O describes as ‘a religious experience’. Deerhunter return to Oz on the back of their fourth LP, the self-produced Halcyon Digest. An album of lush, elegant, nostalgic neo-psychedelia that manages to keep pushing forward even as it’s looking back.
FOALS’ new record – the impressive follow-up to Antidotes – Total Life Forever proves a bunch of things. 1) You can produce a perfectly danceable collection of songs without foresaking emotional depth. 2) Frontman Yannis Philippakis can sing. Really. 3) It’s possible to listen to an album approx. 1 million times without tiring of it. As punters of their recent sold-out Australian tour will attest, the Mercury-nominated band are a powerhouse on stage too: if they're not careful, they could end up on a similar trajectory as their Oxford neighbours, Radiohead.
Where in the world is Wally de Backer? GOTYE, as he is otherwise known, has been putting the finishing touches on his hotly, highly anticipated new album. The ARIA Award winning alt-pop-sample author of Like Drawing Blood returns with the masterful ‘Eyes Wide Open’, the first single from the forthcoming LP. Incorporating languid pedal steel guitar, whale-like cello moans and massive fence string blasts, ‘Eyes Wide Open’ is a sonic landscape unlike anything else Gotye has constructed before. GOTYE’s Laneway appearance marks his first live performance in two years.
Laneway Festival alumni THE HOLIDAYS began, by their own admission, as four friends from uni ‘making random noises and playing bad covers’. Soon enough, the four discovered they could actually write songs—catchy, sharp, sunny, instantly likeable songs drawing equally on vintage indie rock and a dancy tropicalia of their own invention. The quartet have just spent a year hunkering down recording their hotly anticipated, self-produced debut LP, the aptly titled Post Paradise. An album of considerable ambition, Post Paradise is full of breezy hooks and surprising blind turns, and its winsome, summery charms are already garnering the Sydney foursome some serious attention overseas.
Holy fuck, it’s HOLY FUCK . Sorry Mum, but profanities really are the only way to convey the chaotic, sonic muscle of the Ontario instrumental quartet’s particular take on intricate dance-y math-rock. Utterly compelling and completely unique, the band’s live performances have become the stuff of legend over the period of their six-year career. New album Latin is at once raw and disciplined and as visceral as anything we’ve heard recently. Apparently Thom Yorke and the terminally unimpressed Lou Reed are fans. This is vital stuff.
This year we brought out one flame-haired ingénue in the form of Florence Welch. In 2011, we are pleased to present another, the divine Jenny Lewis and her creative and real-life partner Johnathan Rice a la JENNY AND JOHNNY . Taking the best bits from their other enterprises (Rilo Kiley and um, Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice), the two have concocted the aptly-named ‘We’re Having Fun Now’. Jenny is in possession of the assurance, sparkle and vocal range of a proper star, while Johnny, sitting ably at the production helm, proves to be her perfect counterpoint for their classic, country-flavoured rock. The duo’s considerable chemistry is palpable in the group’s spellbinding live show. If this is P.D.A., then it’s okay!
LES SAVY FAV’s debut Laneway performance in 2006 was one of our All-Time Favourite festival performances anywhere in the world, ever. Tim Harrington and his gang of NYC rabble-rousers truly outdid even their own considerable reputation. Scaling walls and abseiling from them in Sydney, singing from the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in Melbourne – all in a comely pair of blue Bondi budgie smugglers. If anything defined the early Laneway Festival, it was Les Savy Fav: their flair for spontaneous magic and the DIY ethics they continue to live by. Last month the band released a new album, Root for Ruin, their fifth LP and first in three years. Do not miss this rare opportunity to see one of the wildest live bands on earth.
Here is our favourite press quote about LOCAL NATIVES , courtesy of the L.A. Times: ‘the Natives' crystalline harmonies could make a cookbook feel anthemic’. Widely acknowledged to be one of the standout acts at this year's Coachella and Bonnaroo festivals, the tautological five-piece back up their live rep on the triple j Feature Album Gorilla Manor: consistently surprising and carefully composed, it belies the group’s tender years. With soaring harmonies, crystal clear vocals, dreamy orchestral melodies, and throbbing tribal beats, LOCAL NATIVES pretty much define the phrase ‘life-affirming’.
If there is any justice in Rock, Portland trio MENOMENA (pronunciation tip: emphasis on the ‘nom’) may well be the most important band of the next decade. Arriving in Australia for the first time in their four-album career, the band will air tracks from their exceptional new album Mines. Prepare yourself. Their previous effort, the almost-classic Friend and Foe, was much adored in indie circles but Mines steps it up, particularly in the melody stakes. Rolling piano lines, dirty guitar sounds and inventive percussion with sometimes stressed, sometimes delicate and sometimes soaring vocals coming together in perfect balance. It’s an achievement made all the more impressive by the fact it was composed largely over email.
Sydney/London three-piece PVT’s first release, O Soundtrack My Heart earned them plaudits from around the world and at home (including the title of FBI Radio’s Album of the Decade), and their follow-up, this year’s Church With No Magic is a stunner. Building upon the anthemic synth-driven instrumental movements for which PVT is renowned, their Warp Records debut fully captures the power of their visceral live shows. The sound has been brilliantly tempered and expanded by the trio into brooding, melancholic experimental pop - an amalgam of rock synthesis, propulsive rhythms and huge melodic strength.
Mixing tribal rhythms, communal chanting and technicolour melodies into an intoxicating brew all their own, Melbourne experimental pop quintet RAT VS POSSUM have made a name for themselves by doing things entirely their own way: doing shows in living rooms and galleries, playing live film scores, bubble-wrapping entire venues. But this ain’t no wilfully obscure art band: RAT VS POSSUM ’s love of pop’s immediacy and knack for off-kilter rhythm shines through even their most left-field excursions, the emphasis always on dancing like no one’s watching. Theirs is a celebratory, ecstatic, vibrant music, and we can’t wait to see what they’ll do on the Laneway stage.
STORNOWAY, who share lineage with Dirty Projectors and Fleet Foxes, are just so...likeable. Niceness doesn’t always equate with talent, it’s true, but the Oxford four-piece are that charming you’ll be lining up to bring them home to your mothers. Their erudite debut Beachcomberʼs Windowsill (4AD) is a collection of literate/literary pastoral pop, replete with choirboy harmonies and anchored by cello, keyboards, trumpets, and violins. It’s delicate, nuanced and impossibly beautiful.
TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB have been dominating the airwaves all year. No wonder - the appeal of their bright, breezy guitar pop is instant. Tourist History is the name of the Northern Irish threesome’s sparkling debut and chances are that by now you’ll be familiar with the delirious ‘Something Good Can Work ’ and ‘I Can Talk’. We refuse to call it ‘irresistible’ but it is un-apologetically optimistic and really, really fun. The boys kill it live too and seem to be growing in worldwide stature by the second.
Brisvegas lads VIOLENT SOHO first roared onto the radar in 2004, boasting a ferocious sound that didn’t so much reinvent the classic, ear-splitting indie rock of yore as it re-energised it for a new, slightly less hairy era. Live, the band is truly something to behold: in the words of indie rock founding father Thurston Moore, whose label Ecstatic Peace signed the lads and sent them to the Welsh countryside to record with legendary producer Gil Norton (The Pixies, The Foo Fighters): ‘A make-out session with the devil’s daughter. In other words: good times!’ High praise indeed. Those if of you who saw their combustible Laneway debut a couple of years back haven’t likely forgotten it. If you haven’t experienced them yet, well, you know what to do.
WARPAINT were our pick of SXSW 2010. We saw them, like, 5 times. Three Californians and an Australian, Stella Mozgawa, on the sticks. Four immeasurably talented girls, all droning guitars and pulsing bass lines. Don’t be deceived by the heaven-high harmonies of songs like ‘Billie Holiday’; these girls can kick the wind out of you. Their Rough Trade/Remote Control released debut album The Fool (due out 22.10.10) weaves between psychedelic jams and hazy moments so intimate you can practically feel the breath in your ear. Ones to Watch
If you like cosmic disco, you’ll love WORLD’S END PRESS . Already selling out shows in their native Melbourne, the band are fast developing a rep for their exhilarating live show. Onstage, John Parkinson (vocals / guitar), Rhys Richards (synthesizers / electronics), Sashi Dharann (bass) and Tom Gould (drums) literally bounce off the walls, off the stage and wherever else they happen to find themselves. Bloody hell, it’s fun. With triple j and community radio supporting singles ‘Faithful’ and ‘Golden Child’, and having supported acts as diverse as diverse as Delphic (UK), Miami Horror, Temper Trap, Art vs Science, Regurgitator and Pikelet, this is a band on the rise.
Everyone in favour of a good time say ‘YEA…SAYER’. Our favourite prog-pop proponents return to get the party started with wares from the remarkable Odd Blood and its equally inventive predecessor All Hour Cymbals. If tracks like ‘Ambling Alp’ and ‘O.N.E.’ don’t make you all kinds of happy, then we can’t be your friend. Having quickly sold out all the shows on their recent visit, YEASAYER are A-Listed.
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