Port

Well, we’re two full months into 2017 and the world continues to burn like an avalanche of flaming biohazard material sliding down a mountain of used needles into a canyon full of rat feces. But hey, it’s not all bad: Portugal. The Man has a new album coming out called Woodstock.

PTM’s last album came out over three years ago—a long gap for a band who’ve dropped roughly an album a year since 2006. And in true, prolific band fashion, they’ve spent almost every minute since 2013 working on an album called Gloomin + Doomin. They created a shit-ton of individual songs, but as a whole, none of them hung together in a way that felt right. Then John Gourley, PTM’s lead singer, made a trip home to Wasilla, Alaska, (Home of Portugal. The Man’s biggest fan, Sarah Palin) and two things happened that completely changed the album’s trajectory.

First, John got some parental tough love from his old man, who called John on the proverbial carpet or dogsled or whatever you put people on when you want to yell at them in Alaska. “What’s taking so long to finish the album?” John’s dad said. “Isn’t that what bands do? Write songs and then put them out?” Like fathers and unlicensed therapists tend to do, John’s dad cut him deep. The whole thing started John thinking about why the band seemed to be stuck on a musical elliptical machine from hell and, more importantly, about how to get off of it.

Second, fate stuck its wiener in John’s ear again when he found his dad’s ticket stub from the original 1969 Woodstock music festival. It seems like a small thing, but talking to his dad about Woodstock ’69 knocked something loose in John’s head. He realized that, in the same tradition of bands from that era, Portugal. The Man needed to speak out about the world crumbling around them. With these two ideas converging, the band made a seemingly bat-shit-crazy decision: they took all of the work they had done for the three years prior and they threw it out.

It wasn’t easy and there was the constant threat that the band's record label might have them killed, but the totally insane decision paid off. With new, full-on, musical boners, the band went back to the studio—working with John Hill (In The Mountain In The Cloud), Danger Mouse (Evil Friends), Mike D (Everything Cool), and longtime collaborator Casey Bates (The one consistent producer since the first record). In this new-found creative territory, the album that became Woodstock rolled out naturally from there

Remember that mountain of burning needles we were talking about? Good. Because Woodstock is an album (Including the new single “Feel It Still”) that—with optimism and heart—points at the giant pile and says, “Hey, this pile is fucked up!” And if you think that pile is fucked up too, you owe it to yourself—hell, to all of us—to get out there and do something about it.

Muse

Muse is an English rock band from Teignmouth in Devon that formed in 1994

The Temper Trap

One night in a bar in Melbourne I found Dougy, born of Indonesian decent and bearing the trans-atlantic accent of a kid who grew up all over he world, but this isnt some fairytale connection story. He was looking to start a band and thought I looked like a muso. But I wasnt interested in joining another band, so I palmed him off to a friend and thought I was done with it. But you cant fight fate, and I kept running into Dougy around the city, he continued to ask me "Hey, do you want to start a band?". I guess I ran out of excuses and eventually found myself behind a borrowed set of drums, listening wide eyed, mesmorised by the sound coming from Dougy's stereo, the sound of Dougy's voice blowing like the QE2 on full steam heading into port. I was struck immediately by the power hidden in those songs and knew that I had to be a part of it. Jonny enters stage left about now. A jovial young idealistic kid with more dyslexic dreams than Marvin Gaye. He'd been friends with Dougy for years and was drafted in when someone didn't show. He'd never played the bass before and tried to strangle himself with the strap pulled tight, but he made up for any lack of practice with a raw energy that filled the room. From here we chewed through a couple of guitarists, before finding ourselves with Lorenzo, an old friend of mine who'd played in half the shitty garage bands I ever started, and in keeping with the theme of our story, the very person I'd palmed Dougie off to in the first place. It's been years of smiles and tears that's left The Temper Trap on the brink of something... A band whose connection with forces out of our control shimmers through every wall of melody, burns through every feedback loop and seeps out of every aching pore in the intense and provocative body of sound we create. I guess we're pushing for something beautiful, something we've felt in the music of Leonard Cohen or The Mars Volta or Echo And The Bunnymen. And so we stand, feet on the edge, head in the clouds, ready to take the leap of faith into the unknown. If you ask around, our standout tracks are usually pretty diverse. I like My Sun, it races out of the blocks, all crash and bash, while others point out Peter Parker's Alter Ego's pop sensibility, shrouded in a dark veil of melancholy. Another popular one, Sirens is an anthem that builds and builds. In our short lives, The Temper Trap have shared stages with internationals, Damo Suzuki (CAN) and Omar Rodriguez (Mars Volta), Modest Mouse, The Dears, and Spank Rock as well as being the only unsigned act invited to play both the Melbourne and Sydney Laneway Festivals.

Portugal. The Man

Well, we’re two full months into 2017 and the world continues to burn like an avalanche of flaming biohazard material sliding down a mountain of used needles into a canyon full of rat feces. But hey, it’s not all bad: Portugal. The Man has a new album coming out called Woodstock.

PTM’s last album came out over three years ago—a long gap for a band who’ve dropped roughly an album a year since 2006. And in true, prolific band fashion, they’ve spent almost every minute since 2013 working on an album called Gloomin + Doomin. They created a shit-ton of individual songs, but as a whole, none of them hung together in a way that felt right. Then John Gourley, PTM’s lead singer, made a trip home to Wasilla, Alaska, (Home of Portugal. The Man’s biggest fan, Sarah Palin) and two things happened that completely changed the album’s trajectory.

First, John got some parental tough love from his old man, who called John on the proverbial carpet or dogsled or whatever you put people on when you want to yell at them in Alaska. “What’s taking so long to finish the album?” John’s dad said. “Isn’t that what bands do? Write songs and then put them out?” Like fathers and unlicensed therapists tend to do, John’s dad cut him deep. The whole thing started John thinking about why the band seemed to be stuck on a musical elliptical machine from hell and, more importantly, about how to get off of it.

Second, fate stuck its wiener in John’s ear again when he found his dad’s ticket stub from the original 1969 Woodstock music festival. It seems like a small thing, but talking to his dad about Woodstock ’69 knocked something loose in John’s head. He realized that, in the same tradition of bands from that era, Portugal. The Man needed to speak out about the world crumbling around them. With these two ideas converging, the band made a seemingly bat-shit-crazy decision: they took all of the work they had done for the three years prior and they threw it out.

It wasn’t easy and there was the constant threat that the band's record label might have them killed, but the totally insane decision paid off. With new, full-on, musical boners, the band went back to the studio—working with John Hill (In The Mountain In The Cloud), Danger Mouse (Evil Friends), Mike D (Everything Cool), and longtime collaborator Casey Bates (The one consistent producer since the first record). In this new-found creative territory, the album that became Woodstock rolled out naturally from there

Remember that mountain of burning needles we were talking about? Good. Because Woodstock is an album (Including the new single “Feel It Still”) that—with optimism and heart—points at the giant pile and says, “Hey, this pile is fucked up!” And if you think that pile is fucked up too, you owe it to yourself—hell, to all of us—to get out there and do something about it.

Portugal. The Man

Flytjendur