Table of contents for November 2016 in Rolling Stone Australia

“Ozzy says he’ll keep his fingers in the touring pie. Let’s not see him mumbling ‘Crazy Train’ when he’s 75.” Crazy Collab THANKS FOR THE GREAT Paul McCartney feature [RS 779]. I had to laugh when ol’ Macca said he made a deal with Kanye that if their collaboration “doesn’t work, we won’t tell anyone”. My question is: who broke their promise? That turkey of a song should have stayed in the “never to be released” vault, and the key thrown away for good measure! Pete Harrison, Bunbury, W.A. A Family Affair ZAPPA WAS SUCH A COOL, talented and before-his-time guy – and the family has gone on with that coolness, haven’t they? What a surprise to find out the children of the pioneering art rocker are locked in this…

Beck Title TBD Late spring TBC When he hit the road behind 2014’s Grammy-winning Morning Phase, Beck started noticing a lot of younger faces in the crowd. “It felt like starting over,” he says. That encouragement, along with listening to the music of Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper, inspired Beck to return to the beat-driven sound of his classic albums like Ode-lay and Midnite Vultures. He teamed up with his former bandmate Greg Kurstin (who’s worked with Adele and Tegan and Sara), shaping songs with big hooks and hazy harmonies, including “Seventh Heaven” and “Wow”. “We’d go off on a Talking Heads kick, and then we’d come back six months later listening to something else,” says Beck. “The record started to find an identity. My constant overriding thing…

THE BEACH BOYS saga has always haunted the American imagination because of the family bond at the heart of it: the three Wilson brothers – tortured genius Brian, shy Carl, madman drummer Dennis – and their abusive dad, thrown together in a surf band with their flashy cousin. Part of the poignancy is Brian Wilson versus Mike Love – two California boys who never should have been in the same room, much less trapped together for life. Wilson and Love both have excellent new memoirs, telling the story from opposite perspectives. Since Beach Boys fans are fiercely tribal – hardcore Brianistas dismiss Love as a mercenary clod riding his cousins’ coattails – both books are musts, not to mention guaranteed argument-starters. I Am Brian Wilson is soulful and earnest –…

SHAWN MENDES IS SITTING IN A DRESSING room in New York on a recent Saturday afternoon, feeling a little disoriented. This is partly because he just saw a guy’s leg get crushed in a traffic accident. But it’s also because the 18-year-old is about to headline Madison Square Garden for the first time. The show sold out in five minutes, and young girls with wide smiles are already lined up outside. “It’s nuts for it to be packed here for me,” says the singer-guitarist. “I don’t know what, how or why it’s happening, but I’m gonna do the best I can.” In three years, Mendes has gone from a hockey-loving kid in Pickering, Ontario, to a Vine star, to a chart-topper. Last year’s Handwritten hit Number One in the U.S.,…

The soul singer has spent the past year touring with his band the Night Sweats in support of their self-titled breakthrough album. Blake Mills “If I’m Unworthy” This is a bizarre, smooth song with a wild guitar solo that’s just gorgeous. It talks about relationships, which we can all relate to being on the road. C.W. Stoneking “On a Desert Isle” Sonically, this feels like it was made in the 1930s or 1940s. It sounds a little dirty and like everybody is in one room playing together. Damien Jurado “Museum of Flight” This is really rich and warm, with the perfect amount of flavour. Damien’s delivery is just impeccable. Delta Spirit “Bushwick Blues” A great love song. It’s about talking to a person and remembering a train trip they took…

LAURA JANE GRACE is lying on a plastic-covered bed in the back room of Mohan’s tattoo parlour in Queens. Outside, the No. 7 train rumbles overhead and tipsy drag queens in perilous heels totter past all-night taco stands. Inside, an artist named Kenji bends over Grace’s calf with the focus of a surgeon, inking an intricate geometric pattern around both legs. It’s well past one in the morning. They’ve been at this for more than 13 hours. Grace keeps dozing off despite the pain. She was up at 6 a.m. with a panic attack, which has not been uncommon since she came out as a trans woman – first drunkenly to a friend, then to her wife, Heather, then publicly in an article in this magazine four years ago –…

The results place him among pop’s top futurists. Bon Iver 22, A Million Jagjaguwar/Inertia Who’d have thought that a bearded guy from the wilds of Wisconsin could help shape music from Chicago to London and beyond? But Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon has done just that. Since debuting with the forlorn indie folk of 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago, he’s carried on a rich conversation with modern pop, collaborating with Kanye West and James Blake while creating a new version of sensitive-guy Auto-Tune soul on 2011’s Bon Iver. With his long-awaited third album, Vernon completely breaks from his guitar--hugging persona, leaving it in the woods like a Coen brothers corpse as he flexes a mastery of processed vocals, samples, loops, beats, synths and noise, along with more familiar trappings. The results…

Banks The Altar EMI It’s easy to fall into Jillian Banks’ world. Since cresting with 2014 debut LP Goddess, the U.S. singer has owned her own lonesome corner of the dark R&B landscape, one now crowded with po-faced folks like Sohn, FKA twigs, and the Weeknd. That space can sometimes feel like a cloistered race to the confession booth, but on that front Banks excels. Again working with a crack team of smokey producers, including Goddess alumni Sohn and Al Shux, The Altar treads a maddening line between intoxicating interiors (“Lovesick”) and faceless, modular pop (“This Is Not About Us”). Banks really shines when her synth-heavy production leaves space for her words to crawl through the slick and down into your soul. “Ode to my two thighs/I still want you…

The Pixies Head Carrier Pixiesmusic/PIAS “It’s déjà vu, it’s not like I planned, looks like I’m goin’ where I’ve already been,” sings Frank Black on the title track. Sounds like he’s writing the review for us. And, sadly, he’s spot-on. The second Pixies album since their 2004 reformation comes across like some band imitating the Pixies. “Bel Esprit” appears to have been created entirely with DNA swabs taken from “Wave Of Mutilation”. It’s so obvious that you have to wonder if Black is just trolling at this point. The alternative explanation is that he has no new ideas. “All I Think About Now” is reportedly a tribute song to much-missed founding member Kim Deal, but as her replacement Paz Lenchantin (Zwan, A Perfect Circle) takes lead vocals and it shamelessly…

Temple of the Dog Temple of the Dog Universal Tied up for years in a legal stoush over ownership of the master tapes – the brother of deceased co-producer Rick Parasher claimed they belonged to the studio in which the LP was recorded – the rights to Temple of the Dog’s sole album were returned to the band earlier this year. Now, to mark its 25th anniversary (and the band’s first ever run of shows in November), it gets a new mix courtesy of producer Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Springsteen), and some additional extra tracks. Initially conceived as an outlet for the grief following the death of Mother Love Bone vocalist Andrew Wood, Soundgarden singer (and Wood’s one-time flatmate) Chris Cornell teamed with Wood’s former bandmates Stone Gossard and Jeff…

David Crosby Lighthouse October 21st Crosby wrote with bassist Michael League of the jazz group Snarky Puppy, who Crosby says brought him back to basics: acoustic guitars and stacked vocal harmonies. CRX New Skin October 28th Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi was the last remaining member of the group not to form a solo band – until now. With producer Josh Homme, he recorded a catchy power-pop set full of Strokes-y twin-guitar breakdowns. “That’s my bread-and-butter,” Valensi says. Leonard Cohen You Want It Darker October 21st The 82-year-old will release his third album in just four years, a nine-song set produced by his son Adam. A.B. Original Reclaim Australia Late spring “It was the right time politically for [this] to happen,” Briggs says…

Four years on from the guitar-driven psych-rock of their debut album Plains, the Laurels found inspiration in an unexpected place for their follow-up, Sonicology (due October 14th). “Hip-hop is all we listen to,” explains singer/guitarist Luke O’Farrell, who cites the sample-focused work of DJ Premier, Wu-Tang Clan and others from hip-hop’s Nineties golden era as the album’s underlying influence. “It was just a matter of finding how deep we could go.” “For the type of record we wanted to make we couldn’t all be in the room and play it live,” adds singer/guitarist Piers Cornelius. Instead they “just had to build it up from the demos”, with everything from saxophone to Indian strings layered alongside the usual guitar/drums/synth segments, creating a unique Beatles-meets-Dilla sound collage.…

Singer Dua Lipa still remembers being a young girl and discovering pop stars like Nelly Furtado and Pink: “Oh, my God,” she recalls thinking. “I want to be just like them!” Now she’s on her way. Lipa’s first hit, the post-breakup F.U. “Hotter Than Hell”, has drawn comparisons to Lana Del Rey, setting the table for a debut LP next year. Lipa, 21, was born in London and spent part of her childhood in her parents’ native Kosovo, where her dad fronted a rock band. After moving back to London at 15, she briefly did some modelling but quit after being told she had to lose weight. “You have to love yourself,” she says. “Fuck you to anyone who wants you to change.”…

When author (and Rolling Stone contributor) Jeff Apter was approached by his publisher to write a book on John Farnham, he wasn’t overly taken with the idea. But after agreeing to undertake some research, his mindset shifted. “To call his career a rollercoaster ride is a hefty understatement,” reflects Apter. “There’s a lot more to the man than mullets, Drizabones and cleaning women with ‘red detergent hands’.” Apter spent more than a year digging for information, but admits the subtle help of Farnham’s manager Glenn Wheatley was of most assistance. “He said upon reading it that it was the most honest and realistic portrait of John he’d ever read,” says Apter. “High praise from someone who knows John better than almost anyone.”…

“I lay in their spare bedroom listening to ‘Nevermind’ and just going nuts.” The Song That Reminds Me of Growing Up Skid Row “I Remember You”, 1989 “I just remember being in sixth grade and liking this guy named Jimi Valvo. He listened to heavy metal so I tried to listen to it too, but all I could really get into were power ballads, so I made a mixtape of them instead. I definitely get a wave of nostalgia when I hear this song.” My Sunday Morning Song Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds “Breathless”, 2004 “When I lived in L.A. for a few months while making my last record, I danced around the sunny kitchen and made many a breakfast taco to that song. It…

“IN GLASGOW WE DIDN’T GET BOTTLED. THERE WAS PLENTY OF ABUSE . . . BUT THAT WAS AN ARTISTIC SUCCESS.” THE FIRST THING KIM SALMON does is slide his new CD across the table. Maybe the new Scientists box set, A Place Called Bad, is bigger news. Maybe a return to the Beasts of Bourbon (no chance) or the Surrealists (inevitable) would ping hotter nostalgia neurons. But from hushed sweetness to strangled angst and tape-loop weirdness, My Script is just what the doctor ordered for the erstwhile grunge pioneer in 2016. The Melbourne café waitress might read his jeans, leather biker jacket and wild explosion of hair as allegiance to some mythic punk ideal, but his sneakers only stop tapping when we get to talking about here and now. A…

Sticky Fingers Westway (The Glitter & the Slums) Sureshaker Music Sticky Fingers’ 2014 album, Land of Pleasure, was an entrancing meld of psyche, reggae and indie weirdness, managing the usually immensely difficult aspect of incorporating dub and reggae into indie rock with an air of heady irreverence. (Though, considering their offstage behaviour, perhaps it was simply blissful ignorance.) Westway is a more focused entry into their application to be Australia’s premier procurers of summer jams, as they pull back on the experimentation and pare down the production. There’s plenty to like: the echo-chamber chanting of “Sad Songs” mixes a woozily melodic hook and a deft psyche swell to hit a euphoric endpoint, easing into the gentle, piano-led “Angel”. There are moments that lack impact – “No Divide” takes a worrying…

Green Day Revolution Radio Warner “My name is Billie and I’m freaking out,” sings Billie Joe Armstrong on “Forever Now”, the most ambitious song on Green Day’s 12th album. Indeed, in the wake of two concept LPs and, in 2012’s ¡Uno! ¡Dos! ¡Tré!, a trilogy of records all released at once, Revolution Radio is Green Day’s leanest, most focused statement since 2000’s Warning. Save, that is, for the aforementioned “Forever Now”, a near-seven-minute opus that calls to mind some of 21st Century Breakdown’s grander moments and, in lyrics such as “If this is what you call the good life/I want a better way to die”, alludes to Armstrong’s alcohol-fuelled breakdown in 2012. Self-produced and recorded in relative secrecy, Revolution Radio marks something of a back to basics approach for Green…

Phantogram Three Caroline Phantogram have always existed on the fringes of the mainstream, in part because their unique brand of indie-pop/R&B is so hard to categorise, and also because particularity should not be confused with greatness – their sound is admirably original, but often curiously unsatisfying. Their third LP opens promisingly enough. “Funeral Pyre” marries foreboding synths with spindly guitar lines in a skittish electro-folk elegy; “Same Old Blues” fuses samples, blues, rock and Sarah Barthel’s seductive coo into something compelling; and album highlight “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore” continues in the same vein, switching from pretty, high-pitched vocals to crashing dark percussion in a comment on the fleeting pleasures of, well, everything. But hereafter the album starts to lose its way; “Barking Dog”, on which guitarist Josh Carter…

Jagwar Ma Every Now & Then Future Classic The second record from psych-dance revivalists Jagwar Ma sounds like it was recorded on a dilapidated sunflower farm in the French countryside, and that’s because it was – natch – and all of the sunshine, vintage filters, vacillating bliss and melancholia and Van Gogh landscapes that conjures can be heard here. It also sounds as though the band might’ve been rifling through Andrew Weatherall’s vinyl collection (they were; it was partly recorded in a studio shared with Weather-all in London). This is to take nothing away from Jono Ma (production, synths) and Gabriel Winter-field (vocals, guitars), though, who spike the mix with the Sydney Future Classic sound of now. Aided by producer Ewan Pearson, the result is a familiarity that feels fresh,…

Café Society Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Steve Carell Directed by Woody Allen IN AN AGE OF VFX CROWD- pleasers, it’s a kick to find Woody Allen out there working with flesh-and-blood actors who deal with emotions that aren’t computer generated. Café Society isn’t peak Allen, in the manner of such recent high points as Midnight in Paris (2011) and Blue Jasmine (2013), but the film – which could be helpfully subtitled Manhattan vs Hollywood – feels lively, lived-in and fallibly human. The time is the 1930s, the decade of Allen’s birth. At a Tinseltown pool party, lit with old-school glamour by camera legend Vittorio Storaro, power agent Phil Stern (a terrific Steve Carell, in for the originally cast Bruce Willis) is confronted with an irritating reminder of his New York…

Summer’s Last Bash For the fifth time, the Budweiser Made in America festival invaded Philly’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway. This year featured big sets by Coldplay, Rihanna and more. But the real show was backstage, where Bill Clinton mingled with fest founder Jay Z, along with Alex Ebert, and Malia Obama hung with Beyoncé and Chance the Rapper. Katy’s Desert Trip Last year, Katy Perry made news for falling off a Segway scooter at Burning Man. This year went off without a hitch: “Alive!” she wrote from the Nevada festival, where other big names included Cara Delevigne and Diplo. VMAs 2016: Beyoncé Slays, Everybody Else OK Britney returned, Kanye rambled and Beyoncé put everyone else to shame with her middle-fingers-up Lemonade set as the Video Music Awards headed back east to…

COREY TAYLOR IS CALLING from Iowa, the birthplace of the band through which he first found fame, Slipknot. It’s also the state after which they named their 2001 album, easily the heaviest, darkest LP to ever debut in the Top 5 in countries such as Australia, England and the U.S. In honour of its 15th anniversary, the band will, by the time this is printed, have performed Iowa live in its entirety during their headlining set at their own festival, Knotfest. As is typical of Taylor, though, there’s much more going on in his life than merely re-learning old songs – since March the 42-year-old has helmed his own weekly radio show on Beats 1, the accurately titled A Series of Bleeps, a vehicle for him to vent, tell stories…

Jordie Lane gets nervous when it comes to making albums. His 2009 debut, Sleeping Patterns, was a long time coming, and once he’d briefly toured it, he literally fled the country. Two hard years passed before the follow-up, 2011’s sublime Blood Thinner, and since then he’s issued an EP (Not Built To Last) and a live set (Live At the Wheaty). The wait for his third long player is finally over, thanks to the release of Glassellland (out now). True to form, it didn’t come easily. “It took a long time to get in the head space and actively start writing,” he concurs. “But it did finally feel like we had something new to say, something we were passionate about.” Glassellland is the result of Lane coming together with collaborator…

“I’ve never had a plan,” says Brooklyn rapper Young M.A, who has watched her single “OOOUUU” grow from a New York anthem to a national hit in America. The song, an ode to smoking blunts, drinking Henny and sexting other women, is at 17 million YouTube views and counting; Nicki Minaj remixed it, and Beyoncé even used it in an Instagram video. Last year, the MC was offered the role of Freda Gatz on Empire, but turned it down. “I didn’t want to be known as a character from Empire before I was known as Young M.A,” says the rapper, who plans to release her debut next year. “But everything they wrote for the [character] was written for me.”…

ON OCTOBER 6TH, nearly six months after Prince’s death from an accidental overdose of the opioid fentanyl, his fabled Paisley Park compound in Chanhassen, Minnesota, will open its doors for public tours. In preparation, workers digging through its rooms have found an array of treasures: from vintage outfits (including the one he wore at the Super Bowl halftime show in 2007) to a book with 40 to 50 pages of handwritten lyrics and a secret room that hid unreleased video footage. “Everywhere I turn,” says a source close to the project, “it’s, ‘Holy crap.’” Even more surprising are the detailed guidelines Prince left behind for turning Paisley Park into a museum after his death – including a wall-mounted timeline of his life through the mid-1990s and messages and texts sent…

“I think Chapman should spend the rest of his life in prison.” JOHN LENNON WAS BORN ON October 9th, 1940. This month he’d have been 76. His life ended in New York City on December 8th, 1980, outside his apartment building, when he was murdered by Mark David Chapman, who shot at Lennon’s back, putting four bullets into him. Chapman had been waiting for Lennon. Chapman had actually met Lennon earlier that day and gotten his autograph. I have never seen such a level of grief displayed by so many people all over the world for any other single person. The images of people standing on the streets of NYC crying, looking so utterly defeated, stays with me to this day. When Lennon was killed, I was well into punk…

‘REVOLUTION RADIO’ “Give me cherry bombs and gasoline!” sings Armstrong on this hard-charging anthem. He says he got the idea for it in New York two years ago when he came across a Black Lives Matter protest; before he knew it, Armstrong had gotten out of his car and was walking up Eighth Avenue with the throng. “I was screaming, ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’,” he says. “I felt like I was on the right side of history.” ‘BANG BANG’ The fastest, most aggressive song on the album is also the first single. Armstrong sings from the perspective of a psychotic mass shooter (“I am a semiautomatic lonely boy/ You’re dead/I’m well fed”). “The scary thing was when I went into the character’s head,” says Armstrong. “I started getting dizzy.” ‘STILL…

“THIS DUDE JUMPS OUT OF A TRUCK WITH ONE OF THOSE RPG ROCKET LAUNCHERS,” REDUS SAYS, “HE WAS 20 FEET FROM ME. AND I JUST UNLOADED ON HIM,MAN.” IN THE ORANGE LIGHT OF LATE afternoon, a one-and-a-half-kilometre-long Army convoy of 33 heavily loaded trucks ccrossed a bridge over the Tigris River into the dusty, rubbish-strewn streets of Al Amarah, Iraq. Sgt. Stuart Redus was at the wheel of a boxy old big-rig, 28th in line, with Staff Sgt. Fernando Torres in the passenger seat. Plates of rusty steel were bolted to the doors, a kind of homemade armour, but the truck, hauling a shipping container full of weapons, was otherwise unprotected. They had no radio or satellite phone in the cab, just a store-bought walkie-talkie hanging from a bungee cord.…

Bruce Springsteen Chapter and Verse Columbia Bruce Springsteen’s passion for storytelling has taken countless forms over the years – he called his early songs “twisted autobiographies”. Chapter and Verse is the companion album to his memoir, Born to Run, following the tale from his garage-band youth to his current glory days, with five tunes he’s never released before. He’s chosen a revelatory mix of classics and obscurities – he leans hard on the hard-luck tales in his songbook, as the Jersey romance of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” gives way to the dashed dreams of “The River” or “Brilliant Disguise”. For the previously unheard gems, he reaches all the way back to 1966, to his teen garage band the Castiles (“Baby I”) and his pre-E Street group Steel Mill,…

St. Paul and the Broken Bones Sea of Noise Records LLC From Frank Ocean to Blood Orange, we’re in a golden age of expansive R&B – meaning the bar is high, even for old-school revivalists like Alabama’s St. Paul and the Broken Bones. So it’s gratifying to hear them step up their vision on their second LP. “We’re just crumbling light . . . in a sea of noise,” pleads leader Paul Janeway in the album’s opening moments, cryptically riffing off Winston Churchill over electronic swirls, hallucinated harp arpeggios and heavenly choirs. The song “Crumbling Light Posts” functions as a recurring theme throughout a record that otherwise sticks to more traditional rock & soul territory. It makes a convincing pitch for the enduring power of a classic sound, which the…

 The last time I said, “Don’t you know who I am?” “The whole Manson family story has always intrigued me.” I can safely say that I have never said that. I have said, I’m so-and-so from Placebo, will you let me in, please? And that’s worked. But when it hasn’t worked, I’ve never uttered the dreaded phrase. I’d much rather walk away. The last time I went on a blind date Maybe three years ago. I went on a blind date with a lady who worked for a madam who runs an exclusive escort service for extremely rich businessmen. It was an absolute disaster. One of the girls that her company hired had agreed to do a job and was now causing a fuss and saying she didn’t want to…