The Fresh 50: 30-21

Have you ever stopped to think just how awesomely exciting the Australian music scene is? No? Well we here at Rip It Up Digital certainly have, so much so that we just couldn’t keep it to ourselves. So we decided to make a list celebrating the very best in Australia’s emerging musical talent. We call it The Fresh 50.

The cultural cringe is a thing of the past as Aussie musos have proven time and again we’re a force to be reckoned with on the world stage. Whereas we were were once considered a gimmicky stereotype thanks to Men At Work or Olivia Newton John, now we’re producing some of the freshest music on the planet.

So what do we mean by fresh? Well fresh can mean a lot of things in music. It can refer to new and forward-thinking ideas, a cutting edge take on something old and stale, or simply being fresh meat on the market. We took all this into consideration when selecting our Fresh 50 talent, picking out the acts that we think are gonna be big wigs in the future. But we also thought we needed a couple of rules, so to be eligible for The Fresh 50, artists:

   - Had to be active in the past 12 months (1 July 2009 – 1 July 2010)
   - Had to still be active as at 1 July 2010
   - Could not have more than one full-length album to their name (EPs not included)

So with all this in mind, here are the first 10 lucky participants in Rip It Up Digital’s Fresh 50.

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#30   City Riots

City Riots have achieved an awful lot for an unsigned band yet to release a debut album, not to mention one hailing from Adelaide. In 2007, after playing together for just over a year, they were invited by ephemeral buzz band The Academy Is to tour with them in the US. The following year they were hand-picked to play The Great Escape Festival in the UK after a stellar performance at our own Fuse Festival. And just a few months ago they returned triumphant from yet another American tour, this time taking in the sites of Austin, Texas at SXSW.

Many might have predicted them to ‘burn out’ after such dizzying heights but the City Riots star shine brightly well into 2010. She Never Wants To Dance, the first single from what we believe to be a forthcoming album, has dominated the airwaves since its release, brimming with indie energy and highlighted by Ricky Kradolfer’s idiosyncratically South Australian pronunciation of the word ‘dance’. That album, produced by Smashing Pumpkins’ and Dandy Warhols’ knob-tiddler Bjorn Thorsrud, just builds in hype the longer City Riots delay its release. In the meantime we’ll just have content ourselves with their grungy good looks and charming enunciation.

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#29   Last Dinosaurs

Some music can inspire, change lives or even change the world. Some music can catalyse social upheaval or topple governments. Some music can...well you get the idea. Music is about all sorts of things and stands for all sorts of causes. But sometimes you don’t want music with a message. Sometimes all you need is that next sugar rush to get you over the line.

That hit of unctuous, unrefined energy now comes in the form of four precocious young men from Brisbane town by the name of Last Dinosaurs. Although they may have been on the scene for as long as your average reality TV star, Last Dinosaurs have exploded in a storm of unrelenting indie pop prowess. Their Back From The Dead EP is a draft copy of things to come, a blueprint for their mountainous musical empire. In the space of a couple of roughly cut singles, the effervescent As Far As You’re Concerned and the unrelentingly cacthy Honolulu, Last Dinosaurs have made a statement for their hapless contemporaries to follow. Without even trying they’ve refreshed indie rock in this country, made sickly sweet guitar melodies cool again, and ensured there’ll be plenty more decent days and nights to come.

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#28   Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire!

One of the true marks of freshness is keeping up with the times. In the case of local six-piece Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire! it’s been more about staying ahead of the times. A band that has experienced a multitude of inventions and reinventions of themselves in their still bourgeoning careers, Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire! have for quite some time been setting the benchmark for indie music in this city. You’d hear about them in the university cloisters or the Grace Emily toilets, each and every time someone would need to have their name repeated. Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire!’s rise to national recognition is the result of increasing layers of buzz building up on top of their heads. They’ve resisted the urge to recamp in a Sydney or Melbourne, instead focussing on their music and keeping faith that the industry gods would one day smile upon them. For many Adelaideans, it’s a surprise this canonisation has taken so long.

Back in the carefree days of the mid-noughties, Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire! were the indie disco forebears cutting out a path for their subordinates to follow blindly. Not content with being pigeonholed, the band continued to twist and tweak their sound, often leaving the masses behind with the incongruous change of pace. Then earlier this year it all clicked, the world had finally caught up and it was time to unveil their debut album Sea Priest. Having worked so hard for so many years to get to this point, it’s only just the beginning for Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire!. Let them off the leash again and see where they take you.

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#27   Sugar Army

Sugar Army hail from that most interestingly prolific Australian city, Perth. A few sidenotes about Perth: it is the most isolated major city in the world, measuring some 2,000km away from the next metropolitan centre. It is one of Australia’s fastest growing cities, with Western Australia’s mining boom attracting many an opportunist in a modern-day gold rush of sorts. And in 2010, Perth was voted the ninth most liveable city in the world.

With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that the creative output of this city is one of the most unique and ecelctic in the world. No better can this observed than in the music of Sugar Army. Ostensibly a rock band, Sugar Army’s take on this tried and tested genre ties together so many of its frayed ends and creates a thick rope of rock & roll zeitgeist. Their debut album The Parallels Amongst Ourselves threaded this musical tapestry with the precision of a master weaver piecing together some epic battle for the king. Amidst extensive touring, knife fights and music videos that would make Stanley Kubrick cringe, Sugar Army currently find themselves hard at work on a muchly-anticipated follow-up. Born out of Perth’s turbulent creative winds, no doubt Sharmy’s second effort will offer up something equally, if not oppositely, impressive as their first.

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#26   Hungry Kids Of Hungary

Chastise them for their Vampire Weekend and Phoenix pastiches if you will, but if there’s one thing Hungry Kids Of Hungary have in common with these other bands it’s an ear for a killer melody. Apparently nowhere else in Australia is a band more able to command more uproariously gratifying guitar hooks than in Hungry Kids Of Hungary’s garage. Scattered Diamonds with its playful, ‘Oh my God, thank fuck the summer is here’ melody and Wristwatch’s bombastic coalescence of thumping drums and spasmodic vocals more than demonstrate Hungry Kids’ transcendent panache for everything pop.

But killer pop tunes are just the tip of the iceberg for this Brisbane four-piece. Truly they are a band with split personalities as smooth, soulful rock plays the Dr Jekyll to their Mr ‘indie pop’ Hyde. Tracks like Set It Right and Old Money might play second fiddle to the in-your-face accessibility of their upbeat tracks, but in tandem this slow-fast hybrid of indie rock rabble makes Hungry Kids Of Hungary one of the most bizarrely versatile bands in the country. With a slew of EPs and singles to their name, we all wait with bated breath for a long-playing release for us all to sink our teeth into. But will it be a case of bi-polarity keeping their personalities in check or will their insatiable, hedonistic lust end up murdering any last remnants of tranquillity in their souls?

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#25   Boy & Bear

This musical project seemed like an inevitability in retrospect. When frontman Dave Hosking was gallivanting as a solo artist around Sydney’s live music haunts, he would invite bands like Ovell and ACM to play with him. Little did he know these bands contained the future components of what would eventually become Boy & Bear. Funny how like-minded individuals seem to gravitate towards each other.

Funnier still is the meteoric rise to fame Boy & Bear have experienced. Just over a year ago they stood hopefully in front of their computer screen uploading debut single Mexican Mavis onto Triple J Unearthed. The response they got was as surprising as it was immediate. Months later they were playing to thousands at the Homebake Festival, willingly corralled into a major publishing deal with Universal, jetting off to the UK to play with (no, actually with) Laura Marling, before returning home to release debut EP With Emperor Antarctica and setting off on another tour with Lisa Mitchell – not a bad twelve months really. With a storm of hype unwittingly built up around them, Boy & Bear delivered on that EP. It’s like Mumford & Sons nu-folk jolted up the arse with a hypoderm of dirty guitars and heavy percussion. With elements of folk, country and rock, With Emperor Antarctica is a strong first impression for Boy & Bear’s onlookers. When Laura Marling returns to Australian shores for a tour later this month, take a guess who she’s bringing with her.

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#24   Calling All Cars

You only need to listen to about 30 seconds of Calling All Cars’ debut album Hold, Hold, Fire to realise why they were employed by AC/DC to warm up the crowds on their most recent come-back tour. At a time when so much guitar music is being neatly packaged and reprojected with some unsettling glossy sheen over the top it, this Melbournian three-piece still know how to rock out with a certain sexual appendage out.

From their rough and ready beginnings, to emotively powerful singles like Not Like Anybody and Animal, and now onto an accomplished debut full-length, Calling All Cars are a band that refuses to stand still for very long. These days it can be so easy to sort bands into preordained genre boxes, but Calling All Cars embrace so many different styles that this task has become rather difficult. They’re punkier than most rock outfits yet they’re too melodic for hardcore. No, Calling All Cars sit at a happy crossroads on the heavy rock highway, hitchhiking their way to a musical promised land. Let’s hope they don’t lose their way and find themselves on the highway to hell.

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#23   Oh Mercy

Ever since Bowie donned his first dress and glammed himself up for the masses, androgyny has been about the freshest thing a musician can associate with. That whole gender confusion thing has lived through countless generations of music, turning the manliest of men and most feminine of ladies into transsexualised rock icons.

Oh Mercy are like the laziest and probably most oblivious androgynous band going around. Just check out the photo above: there’s no blouse, lip-stick or mascara smudge in sight. And yet, and YET, Alexander Gow continues to bamboozle radio listeners around the world with his bemusing high-pitched voice. Of course Gow’s uncanny vocal resemblance to a sultry chanteuse barely begins to tell the Oh Mercy story. Together with writing partner Thomas Savage, Gow crafted one of the most critically lauded albums of 2009 in Privileged Woes. Gracefully bending to the whims of its creators, Privileged Woes encapsulates a world of carefree pop ditties, rekindling everyone from The Go-Betweens to that most underappreciated of British bands, Belle and Sebastian.  In 2010 things are looking bright for this Melbournian two-piece (four when they play live). An AMP ‘Outstanding Potential’ Award earned them a trip stateside where Gow and co. returned to the studio for album number two. Who knows where their shape shifting ways will take them next?

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#22   The John Steel Singers

Juxtaposition – it’s a tool of the art world that makes consumers reconsider what they thought they knew about a certain issue or thing. For example, painting Saddam Hussein in a tutu or Julia Gillard with brown hair would achieve this as it would make them both seem far less scary.

The John Steel Singers, I'm sure through no design of their own, craft a strange sort of musical juxtaposition in their live performance: there’s just something really unnerving about flannelette-clad, bearded indie men singing in falsetto. But unnerving or not, The John Steel Singers continue to astound with an increasingly impressive body of work. They blitzed the field in 2008 to take out Triple J’s Unearthed J Award of that year. A succession of singles has followed, each one remarkably eclipsing the last. It’s as if they keep reaching for some impossibly high bar they’ve set for themselves and have to keep raising it higher the closer they get. Meanwhile they’re compiling a dense back-catalogue of forward-thinking and weirdly danceable indie tunes. Think about it – Rainbow Kraut, Masochist, Evolution and Strawberry Wine have all enjoyed lengthy stays on radio rotation and we’ve yet to see an album drop yet, making The John Steel Singers a dormant volcano about to catch everyone off guard. So watch out for them as they explode in a cloud of confetti and spew toe-tapping rhythms into the atmosphere.

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#21   Bridezilla

Celebrity endorsements are usually nothing more than flattering, though ultimately innocuous expressions that get forgotten as quickly as they become viral on Twitter. Usually...

In Januray 2009 little-known Sydney outfit Bridezilla received the ultimate celebrity endorsement when Nick Cave invited them to play at Australia’s inaugural All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival. To be handpicked by one of the country’s greatest living songwriters to play a festival knee-deep in a pool of international trendiness is a rather complimentary accolade indeed. In the months following, and as we’ve gotten to know these five waif-like figures who make up the Bridezilla body, it’s not hard to see why Mr Cave took such an interest in them.

Fronted by lead waif Holiday Sidewinder, Bridezilla caress your heart with ghostly fingers in a gentle breeze of breathy vocals, delicate strings and nostalgic guitars. Listing a thousand bands you’ve never heard of as influences and touting just as long a list of newly-acquired fans, Bridezilla have stolen the hearts of many overseas, where their names continue to spread far and wide. In a time-honoured tradition, it will likely take significant international praise heaped upon them before tastemakers in this country begin to take notice. If this is the case, chances are we’ll be hearing more about Bridezilla sooner rather than later. Extensive international touring off the back of debut album The First Dance is making Bridezilla the first name in Australian underground music in the UK and USA. If only the same were true in their own country....

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