gig guide

Kaki King (NYC) - Glow Album Launch Hailed by Rolling Stone as "genre unto herself," Kaki King is a true iconoclast, a visionary musician/artist whose singular work rightly stands out amongst the easily formatted. Over her decade-long career thus far, the Brooklyn-based guitarist/composer has recorded five extraordinarily diverse and distinctive LPs, performed with such icons as Foo Fighters, Timbaland, and The Mountain Goats, contributed to a variety of film and TV soundtracks (spanning Golden Globe-nominated work with Eddie Vedder and Michael Brook on Sean Penn's Into The Wild to teaming with Carter Burwell on his blockbuster Twilight score), and played to ever-growing audiences on innumerable world tours. Each twist and veer marked the turning of a page, another step forward on a truly exceptional musical path. Beginning with 2002's Everybody Loves You, King has expanded and reconceived the role of the solo instrumental artist, constantly kicking at the boundaries of what's expected. Glow, her groundbreaking new release, is both indescribable and definitive, an evocative, exuberant collection of genre agnostic soundscapes, rich with wit, theme, and inspired invention. From the chamberesque "Great Round Burn" through the propulsive, Celtic-colored "King Pizel," the album embraces a doggedly naturalist production ethos to showcase King's protean songwriting and mesmeric fret-board genius. www.kakiking.com

James Valentine THE POWER AND THE PASSION Standards from the Great Australian Songbook 1960 – 2000 Popular ABC Sydney radio host and musician James Valentine presents The Power and the Passion- a collection of instrumental versions of classic Australian pub rock songs, performed by the James Valentine Quartet. These are beautiful and evocative arrangements of tunes such as Flame Trees by Cold Chisel, Pleasure and Pain by the Divinyls and the title track by Midnight Oil. In this theatrical presentation the Quartet performs in front of a montage of stunning original photographs taken by Tony Mott of these great bands in their prime. Between each item, James talks, presenting a mix of anecdote, memoir, social history and critical observations in a kind of spoken word essay. “I decided to do Australian tunes from this period because I think we can now see that this was an extraordinary era. Bands were everywhere. And they focused on having their own sound and writing their own songs.… “In my versions, I wanted to highlight perhaps the least obvious element of Australian pub rock: a lot of it was very beautiful. There were achingly beautiful melodies, there was real emotion being invoked, and perhaps sometimes that was a little obscured in the hype of Countdown. “Combining our arrangements with Tony Mott's images and some talk that highlights the deep significance of this period of Australian popular culture creates a mood of reverie and reflection which is really quite powerful." From Johnny O’Keefe to Newcastle’s own Silverchair, if Aussie rock and pop has been a part of your life then this show will take you on a unique journey.

Mental As Anything A popular urban myth concerns a group of art students who passed themselves off as a band in order to con the local publican into giving them a gig in exchange for free beer. The deception worked better than intended, and the group came to be known as Mental as Anything. Nearly two decades later, they are still irritating the public with their highly listenable, idiosyncratic brand of garage pop. A self-explanatory single to reflect their success, The Nips Are Getting Bigger, rose through the charts as did their fundamental understanding of the old adage that "for every action there is a reaction". Ahead lay a very lengthy pub crawl which only the accomplished could survive. www.mentals.com.au