culture

On the latest Methyl Ethel album, Triage, Jake Webb’s extraordinary songwriting is on full display in pop music of unusual complexity.

Like her idol Madonna, French pop musician Héloïse Letissier is interested in transformation and reinvention. Her latest album finds her performing in a new persona as Chris, a celebration of her “macho-femininity”. She is, however, aware of the “danger of mainstreaming ‘queerness’… [that] it could invalidate the thing that ‘queer’ is important for. Queer is questioning a norm, questioning the system, subverting it, so if it’s digested and branded and [covered in] glossy plastic to appeal, then the essence of queer is lost.”

Whether singing about the bloody past of the country of her birth in metal band High Tension, or in the wordless growls and screams of Speechless, a new opera about the Forgotten Children, Karina Utomo finds catharsis in unleashing her powerful voice. Etched into her memory is the burning down of a music store, which sold cassettes because CDs remained a luxury item. The shop, she says, was targeted because it was owned by Chinese Indonesians, the long-time targets of racist scapegoating. “Buying music with my father was a treat. That was somewhere we had gone every week and it symbolised access to music, to engage in a culture with which I connected.”

Pharrell Williams thrust Maggie Rogers and her song ‘Alaska’ into the spotlight. Now, with her debut album, Heard It in a Past Life, she’s taking a more rootsy, spiritual and sedate path to long-lasting success.

In his final review for the year, Dave Faulkner looks back at the best Australian albums of 2018 that he missed along the way.

Bleeding Knees Club’s second album, Fade the Hammer, sees songwriter Alex Wall weave some far-flung influences into his bratty pop punk, from Lightnin’ Hopkins to doo-wop.