Cash Savage and the Last Drinks
Good Citizens
_{Reviewer: Jenny Valentish}

Back in September, music fans stuffed their fists into their mouths as a seasoned rock journo asked: where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Guardian Australia responded with gusto, and the fourth album from Cash Savage and the Last Drinks was among those on the list.

There’s an exhilarating confidence to Good Citizens, so titled because it lampoons mainstream Australia. (Litmus test: if they wake up with Sunrise they’re unlikely to be down with this.) It charges out of the shadow of the plebiscite and comes in swinging.

The unflinching single Pack Animals (which, fittingly, sounds like a punch-up in a beer barn) recalls unsolicited advice from men, but more irritating for Savage are the constant queries around her identity. “You can second-guess me all you like but I know what I’m doing,” she asserts in Better Than That. Savage also applies her deadpan wit to dysfunctional love. In the Bad Seeds-y Sunday she observes, “You took me to your favourite bar in your favourite city with your favourite crowd/ and they were more than a little hostile.” Savage indeed.

Paul Kelly
Nature
_{Reviewer: Nathan Jolly}

It’s to our country’s eternal shame that it took until last year for Paul Kelly to score the first Australian number one album of his career, with the buoyant and joyful Life is Fine. While Kelly refers to Nature as a companion piece of sorts to that record, explaining how the songs were discarded over the past four years of recording sessions, this indicates something much lesser, suggesting a victory lap or a stopgap, rather than what we are presented with: a towering achievement from our finest songsmith.

The songs on Nature are of the earth: “Full of moons, rain, rocks, rivers, seas, smells and lovers,” as Kelly explains. Considering his own seemingly endless stream of words, it’s surprising he has woven the work of classic poets throughout this album, with five of the 12 songs’ lyrics plucked from literary giants of the past. Then again, it makes perfect sense to see Kelly reaching back over the decades, collaborating with the likes of Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas. For in nature, everything is cyclical.

Troye Sivan
Bloom
_{Reviewer: Caitlin Welsh}

Aside from maybe Sia, Troye Sivan is our biggest pop export right now.

Sivan makes swoony, forward-looking pop for a generation that doesn’t bat an eyelid at boys singing love songs about boys, but Bloom, his second album, isn’t cute, chaste or safe. There’s warm physicality and eroticism threaded through the light-as-air production that goes beyond the generic “my body, your body” vagueness pop songwriting falls into too often.

“I’ve got my tongue between your teeth,” Sivan mutters on the sublime My My My; the central metaphor of Bloom is both sweetly coy and shockingly direct. The tug of butterflies and dread in the stomach even as he reckons with a doomed connection is “like bitter tangerine/like sirens in the streets”.

Sivan can borrow melancholy from Morrissey (What a Heavenly Way to Die) and sleek, quiet sweetness from guest Ariana Grande (Dance to This) and wear both like a second skin. It makes queerness, so long subtext in pop, something not to nod apologetically at or to defiantly celebrate, but to simply be, as big or small as you want.

Gurrumul Yunupingu
Djarimirri
_{Reviewer: Andrew Stafford}

At a time when cultural appropriation is a hot topic, Gurrumul’s Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow) showed how a cross-cultural collaboration could be done with respect and spectacular results. A fully sanctioned blend of traditional Yolngu songs set to string arrangements inspired by minimalist neoclassical composers Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt, Djarimirri drew upon the cyclic repetition of both musical traditions, with the pulse of the didgeridoo replaced mostly by cellos. The late singer’s angelic voice floats above it all. His friend, producer and arranger Michael Hohnen says that Gurrumul’s music was about bringing his culture to the world; his family broke with cultural tradition to allow his name and image to be used, to preserve his memory and giant legacy.

Camp Cope
How to Socialise and Make Friends
_{Reviewer: Andrew Stafford}

One of the best music stories of 2018 was the growing international acclaim for Melbourne’s Camp Cope, whose album How to Socialise and Make Friends was the perfect soundtrack for the MeToo moment it spoke to. Even before the album’s release, the single The Opener had lit the touch paper on the endemic sexism of the rock festival circuit and the Australian music industry generally. It’s not an easy listen – Georgia McDonald’s vocals are all over the place – but hers is a perfectly imperfect instrument for an unstable age, and the songs are unerringly direct, honest and true. Within a decade, I have no doubt that the next generation of female singer-songwriters will be coming to her with thanks.

Primitive Motion
House in the Wave
_{Reviewer: Kate Hennessy}

Once I lived with a person who played the piano. It would drift down the hall, and in and out of my dreams. House in the Wave has that same distant yet insistent tug, as though the Brisbane duo is playing in a room that, if you enter, will only be dust motes descending on diminuendos.

Sourced via a series of improvised sessions, Sandra Selig and Leighton Craig’s third album stirs saxophone, piano and voice together with garden noise, room rustles and birdsong. As the devotional drones of SBF ebb, Selig’s voice ascends, as if caught in the slipstream of a spirit. Entire songs evaporate on exit, leaving the residue of a melody you can only half recall. Though it’s not all vapour and haze. Small Orbit and Feed the Signals gesture at smooth jazz and most songs circle back to a piano or saxophone hook.

Curiously, songs fade in and fade out arbitrarily, as if being played before and after the record button was pressed; as if deciding on where the start and end should be were as blithe as pointing at a map while blindfolded. A comment on the deceit of recorded sound? Good for them. – Review from Music You Missed

Courtney Barnett
Tell Me How You Really Feel
_{Reviewer: Andrew Stafford}

The album following an artist’s first major flush of international success is often a challenge. But if anything, Courtney Barnett’s Tell Me How You Really Feel was better than its predecessor, Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit, and an even bigger advance on her earlier EPs. At a brisk 37 minutes, it sees Barnett curb her verbosity into 10 tightly written pop nuggets.

They’re all gold. An incredible four singles (Nameless, Faceless; City Looks Pretty; Need A Little Time and Sunday Roast) were pulled from the album before its release and the catchiest of the lot, Charity, was the fifth. But perhaps the best song of all was Walking On Eggshells, which lopes along like a lost Neil Young and Crazy Horse classic. Long may she run.

Gregor
Silver Drop
_{Reviewer: Kate Hennessy}

Solo Melbourne artist Gregor makes new-wave pop with a wan exterior and a warm heart. The Durutti Column’s bloodless guitar noodling is an influence but Gregor’s storytelling skill is innate, comparable to The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt – the minimalist miseries of 1995 record, Get Lost, in particular.

Despite at first feeling to be peering in on Gregor’s world – a place impervious to hearts so soft and sentimental – by the end I was glazed in Silver Drop’s sticky marinade of tragicomedy. Narrating from a bus window on Something Irrelevant, Gregor sings with a dryness that befits such objectively wet songs: “I see something irrelevant like a letterbox and a dog/But I force them to be relevant/From this point onwards a letterbox or a dog/Will always make me start to think of you.” Absurd, yes, but also true to the sinkhole of self-absorption that is young dumb love.

Elsewhere, he dissects moments via their dot points of awkwardness. On the pallid reggae of This Heat – during which the guitar perambulates the chorus in a moment of pure solo-act ingenuity – that moment is a romantic picnic on a day so grossly hot “the cheese was melting, the watermelon was soft”. I Look Devastated, meanwhile, documents the bummer of being the guy left bereft in bed when “you get up to pee but you never come back”. Then there’s the sad-core slowdance of A Song About Holding Hands and the nine-minute meander of Revise Me, which segues from Spanish guitar to a conspiratorial Morricone vibe. Go get hooked. – Kate Hennessy