March 2008

In the sequel to the #1 best selling 50 Cent: Bulletproof, players will be able to play as one of the world’s biggest hip-hop stars in an all out battle to protect 50 Cent’s assets and to collect payment from a crooked overlord.

The 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand video game features 50 Cent in a multi-player online drop-in and drop-out co-op world that allows him to call on his G-Unit pals to watch his back in intense gameplay action. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand will include interactive counter-kills that let’s the player take control of the finishing moves with a wide-selection of maneuvers to combat foes.

50 Cent, the video game hero, will for the first time find himself behind the wheel in a variety of driving missions and will also take to the sky in aerial combat.

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand will be packed with more exclusive unreleased music from 50 Cent and G-Unit, that provides a new arsenal of beats to listen to as the player battles to regain control of 50’s possession’s.

Available 4th Quarter 2008 on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3

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Over the weekend I bought a new film scanner, the Canon 8800f. It’s pretty awesome so far and to give it a test I dug through the cupboards at home and into my ‘archive’ of film negatives, slides, and medium format positives and negatives, and started scanning a bunch of stuff into Aperture.

I was pretty happy with the quality of the scan, specially considering that my ‘archive’ is just a cardboard box and most of the negs were just thrown into the box about 10 or so years ago. Bit by bit over the next few weeks I’m going to clean and scan the lot in an effort to digitise my library.

Here’s a couple of quickly thrown together photos from ‘back in the day’ that I’ve uploaded to my photography website Mathew Packer Photography.

Both photos were shot at Mona Vale on the northern beaches of Sydney, and the skater is Adam Luxford. Hopefully I’ll get more slides and what not scanned in tonight

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Back in ’93, before Ipods, Australian Idol, Big Brother and yes – way before the word ‘emo’ became a noun, five blokes put together a band that sent a polite ‘fuck you’ to the Australian music mainstream. The band was One Inch Punch, later known as Mid Youth Crisis (MYC). Their music was fast, muscular and sincere. Now, after a ten-year absence, three of its founding members, Steve Milligan, Heath McAnally and Adrian Lombardi, have re-banded as Coué Method.

In this new incarnation for the three, much of their earlier work has been retained; Milligan’s distinct vocals are powerful and melodic, the lyrics weave through dilemmas that are personal as much as they are political, and Lombardi and McAnally’s guitars sweep between the dissonant and uplifting.

There are fresh nuances too. With Ben Reichman (bass) and Sam Johnson (drums), the rhythm of the outfit drives like an escapee with the jacks giving chase. Regarding lyrics, Milligan himself attests, ‘I don’t feel hemmed in by political correctness anymore. I just say whatever I feel.’ Certainly, there is an accompanying sense of freedom that permeates the melodies. Society’s glaring imperfections are denounced, it’s direction questioned, but not without conceding one’s own inescapable flaws. The other end of the spectrum reveals love, hope and a faith in oneself to prevail.

The sonic landscape of Coué Method’s debut record, …to mock a vapid world, owes much of its shaping to Johnson, who took the job of drummer after mixing. ‘It was a role I had been itching to get back into after a few years out of the beat game. I knew and loved the material, so it was a very simple transition.’ Less metallic are the guitar tones in favour of more traditional and spacious sounds, but still provide a barrage that is unashamedly punk rock.

Originally, the Coué Method is the name given to a psychotherapeutic approach toward self-improvement. Wikipedia tells us Émile Coué’s unique discovery was that willpower is the biggest obstacle in any cure. A fitting name, then, for many musicians, these not the least, who overcome personal challenges everyday to continue what they love doing best.

Coue’ Method’s debut album “To Mock A Vapid World” is instores April 26. The band will be joining Against Me! and Crime In Stereo for the east coast dates of there upcoming Australian tour.

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Presented by Video Hits, Channel V, 3 Mobile, Myspace and Street Press Australia

Operator Please are heading back to Australian shores in April to play a string of shows to their home crowd with a run of dates that will take them across the country. And with a number of the dates ‘all ages’, everyone will get a chance to catch the Gold Coast favourites in the flesh.

The band will be coming fresh from the UK & Europe where they toured throughout France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands & the UK. Operator Please recently played the NME Night at London’s famous Koko club, supported Foals on a sold out tour of France and have been confirmed for a number of UK summer festivals including The Great Escape.

This tour is a chance to catch the ARIA award winning five-some on this national Australian tour before they jet back to Europe via New Zealand & Japan.

Meanwhile ‘Leave It Alone’ – the third single from ‘Yes Yes Vindictive’ – has been released in Australia and is available now.

Taking to the road with Operator Please are Melbourne’s Little Red and Flamingo Crash*.

You can catch the tour on the following dates:

Wed April 9 Wollongong Uni Bar

Tix: Pre – $18 Door: $20 Venue: (02) 4221 8050 Bigtix: www.bigtix.com.au

Thurs April 10 Newcastle Uni Bar on the Hill

Tix: Pre – $18 Door: $20 Venue: (02) 4968 3845 Bigtix: www.bigtix.com.au

Fri April 11 Metro Theatre Sydney (all ages)

Tix: Pre – $20 Door: $25 Venue: (02) 9550 3666 Ticketek: 132 849 www.ticketek.com.au

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Words by Nick Milligan.

Having spent her early teenage years living in New York, Lucy Hearn returned to Australia with a sea of imagery and stories. Her debut album, under the guise of The Understudy, is a collection of songs that explore what it means to be in love – and to not be in love.

Lucy Hearn had a very clear idea of what she wanted her debut album to sound like, but it didn’t work out the way she had expected. Having stayed in contact with a close friend living in New York, whom she had formed a friendship with during her time spent in the Big Apple, he invited her back to the city to record.

“I had demoed all the songs at home with a little bit of instrumentation, but every time we went to record a song, everything went out the window,” explains Hearn, as she sits on the sofa at Reverb HQ. “I would tell Chris, who engineered [the album], ‘I really think this song should be on an acoustic guitar,’ and he’d say ‘Oh, ok,’ and hand me an electric. But we’d play it and it sounded really good. We had the album mixed professionally, but it was recorded in New York attics, basements and houses.”

Hearn is based in Newcastle now, but she has brought with her some inherent inspiration. Two of the albums tracks, including ‘Smoke & Strangers’, are specifically about New York as a city, both in its people and aesthetics. “I am much more interested in the shape and sound of the city, than I am of the country,” admits Hearn. “I’m synesthetic, because I hear music and see colour. So to me some songs represents certain colours. To me, a lot of the songs have green tones, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they would to anyone else.”

Hearn has called her album What Not To Think While In Love, and it will come as a big surprise to those who are most familiar with Hearn as a solo performer. There are diverse arrangements, from the gentle electric lull of the opener ‘Last Easy Day’, to more jaunty tunes like ‘Fine Young Folk’. Lyrically, Hearn has created a strong sense of place. In an odd way, there are echoes of The Whitlams, created not only by keyboards and piano, but also through laconic story-telling and rumination (“This could all be fixed with a stiff drink”). As a vocalist, Hearn shares the diverse nuances of The Howling Bells’ Juanita Stein, as certain songs call for poignancy and others a tongue-in-cheek sense of mischief.

Hearn explains that songs can come into her head at any time, often unexpectedly – and she doesn’t need to have an instrument in her hands. “Sometimes I write from the [vocal] melody up. When I wrote ‘Last Easy Day’, I was at work and I had an idea for a lyric come into my head. Then the melody came soon after. I didn’t want to forget it, so I sang it to myself for five hours until the end of my shift. I went home and finished the song,” says Hearn.

Originally Hearn had planned to call the album Monuments, but discovered that an Australian punk band had already used the title. During the production in New York, the final title occured to Hearn – and it stuck. “What Not To Think While In Love made sense, because I had just broken up from a relationship before I went over [to New York], and a lot of the songs took on a completely new meaning to me, in light of how the break-up occured,” reveals Hearn. “I couldn’t reconcile why I was writing songs with this subject matter if I was supposed to be loving somebody in a relationship.”

Lyric-writing provides a deeply personal interlude for Hearn, but the singer admits that she will often cut a lot of the truly revealing content, in favour of fenetically appealing material. “Some words look good to me and some words don’t. I’m really concerned about the aesthetics of the lyrics, as opposed to the meaning behind them. I think about the rhythm of the words and how they fall out of my mouth. That’s far more important than wearing my heart on my sleeve,” says Hearn. “Sometimes I sacrifice the deepest truth for more polished lyrics.”

Hearn wrote her first song when she was 12 and learned guitar when she was 14. Her parents weren’t particularly musical, but when the burgeoning musician picked up a guitar, she had discovered the perfect instrument to write songs with.

The Understudy’s music will soon be released digitally and has already received airplay across Australia on Triple J. Upon adding her music to the station’s Unearthed website, the response has been immediately noticeable. It won’t be long before The Understudy finds herself in a leading role.

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By Hugh Milligan

When Super Mario 64 was released in 1996, it turned the gaming world upside-down. True 3D graphics were an innovation the likes of which had never been seen, and Mario, already an international icon, finally leapt beyond the confines of his wafer-thin world to roam free in expansive environments.

It was perfect timing. The game appeared just as platformers were reaching their climax – simply getting from A to B with a series of well-timed jumps was still an immensely enjoyable endeavour. Mario 64 eventually sold over eleven million copies and went on to become one of the most influential games of all time.

It’s been over a decade since then, and Mario, despite his enormous popularity, is having a hard time of it. Gamers are growing up – survival horror games and first-person shooters have shown us the joy of killing zombies, aliens and Nazis, the Dead or Alive series has developed a physics engine devoted entirely to animating enormous jiggling breasts and World of Warcraft is soon to become a major world religion. Most true platformers have either mated with other genres to produce bastard offspring or died out entirely.

Mario’s last major platform title was released over five years ago, and since then he’s kept his hand in by playing golf and tennis, racing go-karts and competing in the Olympics, but it’s been a long time since he returned to his roots. Thankfully, Super Mario Galaxy is here, and it’s every bit as awe-inspiring as its ancestors.

As its title suggests, Galaxy is set in space. There’s a brief introductory sequence that leads to this, and as usual it involves Bowser kidnapping a terrified Princess Peach with the intention of making her his trophy wife. This time, however, her entire castle is ripped from the ground and whisked into the heavens, and Mario is sent hurtling into the far reaches of the space.

Soon he encounters cosmic princess Rosalina, whose spaceship has just been ransacked. Bowser has stolen its power stars (though, despite his proclivity for ditzy blonde royalty, left Rosalina herself behind) and, just as in Super Mario 64, Mario will have to recover them all if he is to restore the ship’s functionality and rescue Peach.

The premise of collecting 120 power stars, the exact amount collectible in Mario 64, is the first of many overt references to previous titles. Mario mainstays such as warp pipes and goombas make re-appearances, his original array of long jumps, back flips and somersaults is much the same as it was and many of the levels serve as obvious allusions to those of past Mario games.

Galaxy is a game that draws upon the very best elements of its predecessors and takes them in a whole new direction – or, more appropriately, every direction. Mario is no longer restricted to a dozen planar ‘worlds’, but is instead launched into forty wildly diverse galaxies, each a collection of smaller planetoids with their own gravity and physics.

This allows for almost limitless creativity, as Mario is alternately pulled and propelled by sling stars and gravitational fields, walks on walls and ceilings, and swims and surfs over turbulent water flumes floating in space. Many planets are completely spherical or have a strong gravitational pull so that every available angle and surface is traversable. Every puzzle is both utterly ridiculous and fiendishly logical.

The camera system has been finely tuned to follow such bizarre fields of movement as efficiently as possible, but there are naturally some instances where this becomes difficult. The whole galaxy spins upside-down when Mario leaps onto a planet’s underside so that he remains visible, but those of you particularly susceptible to motion sickness may not appreciate your point of view being skewed so suddenly. The movements of the nunchuk’s analog stick are also relative to Mario and not the player, so that if he is standing upside down, pushing the stick to the left will make him run to your right and so on. This can be awkward and takes a little getting used to.

The game’s learning curve is fairly gradual – only 60 power stars are actually required to finally confront Bowser and it’s not difficult to collect these. The bosses and mini-bosses are also fairly simple to defeat and even Bowser himself is a pretty cheap date – it’s easy to get him on his back.

The real challenge that extends Galaxy’s playability is in collecting every single star, a far more comprehensive effort that involves some nightmarish tasks and is rewarded with a handful of unlockable features. The game thus has something to offer both casual and veteran gamers alike.

There’s no multi-player to speak of – the ‘co-star mode’ feature is negligible to say the least – but you can revisit any of the game’s galaxies at any time to replay your favourite moments.

In addition to its solid gameplay, Galaxy is also exceptionally well polished. The galaxies are brimming with character and the effects, be it amorphous columns of water, volcanic eruptions or glittering ice, look gorgeous. Mario’s adventure is also heightened by a stunning full orchestral score.

Super Mario Galaxy is a monumental achievement and proof that Mario is still the undisputed king of platformers. It’s the Wii’s finest title to date – buy it, and party like it’s 1996.

4.75 out of 5

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The term ‘math-rock’ is appearing more often in the musings of rock journalists and Foals are the latest group to be branded. But listen closely and you’ll realise that there’s nothing mathematical about Foals – when they add two and two, the result is five.

This five-piece from Oxford, England, combine drum and bass-oritentated dance-grooves with stark, chanted vocals. It’s Minus The Bear meets Tokyo Police Club, with a slight dash of Bloc Party. But none of those comparisons account for the brass section that sneaks in and out of Antidotes. Nor does it explain why the guitar parts seemingly skulk behind the robust drums and bass, following their lead.

Antidotes proves to be a healthy formula.

4 / 5

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“Fook it!… this band from the edge of the world is stonkin!, Lets go to Oz and make a record with them” said Nick Terry to Alan Brey sitting in a pub in London in late 2006. Who are Nick and Alan? Besides lovers of Guinness and East End dives, Nick produced the Mercury Prize winning Klaxons, The Liberteens, Ian Brown and many others as well as mixing Attack Decay Sustain Release for Simian Mobile Disco. Alan is a Canadian producer based in Tokyo who has worked with the likes of Loomis and Dead Star.

So on a whim and a prayer Nick and Alan set off to meet the band and all together they begged and borrowed some dosh as well as some of the most sort after antique analog recording gear known to man and started tracking the record in Perth Western Australia in early 2007.

In July 2007 the first fruits were released to the airwaves of community radio and triple j Australia wide. “Five Feet of Snow” was the sound of the future for Australian rock. With a ton of airplay and an Australian tour with OKGO, The Dirty Secrets had started to make their presence felt.

Industry interest was now heating up and they were offered showcases on two of the most prestigious new music seminars, CMJ New York and In The City Manchester. So in October 2007 the band released a new single “My Heart Is On Fire” to community radio and triple j and set out on their first world tour. Lasting 22 days, performing live in Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, Manchester and London culminating in a solid show at the 100 Club where everyone from the Stones to the Sex Pistols cut their teeth.

In December 2007 The Dirty Secrets returned to Australia to open for MUSE in front of a 10000 strong crowd who surged when the band came on and broke the punter barrier 4 songs in. This brought the whole show to a grinding halt. The Muse camp were so impressed with how the band handled the melee that they let the boys back on the stage once the barrier was repaired to finish off the set.

January 2008 and The Dirty Secrets hit the festival circuit playing Glouster Park, Southbound, and Big Day Out. A third track from the forthcoming coming album “Lighthouse” was released to community radio and triple j and within 5 weeks became the most played track on triple j.

So when is this album being released? March 22, 2008 will see the self titled debut album finally released in Australia on MGM Distribution via the bands own Vagabond Records. The release coincides with the start of a relentless touring schedule beginning in NSW the weekend of March 28, 2008.

The Dirty Secrets will come to Newcastle for the first time as headline act for The Surfest All Age Classic, a massive all aged concert event running in conjunction with Surfest. Joining them will be an eclectic collection of fine bands including two young acts The General Managers & Checkered Fist who earned their slot on the bill through the Loft Band Competition. Initially one slot was held on the bill for the winner, but with competition so tight that the two bands were tied at the end of the final, Surfest All Age Classic organizers came to the party and squeezed both onto an already huge line-up!

The Surfest All Age Classic

Newcastle Panthers, Saturday 29th March featuring:

The Dirty Secrets, Sleight of Hand, Light Noise, Rubix Cuba, Powerage, Very Unique Existence, Checkered Fist, The General Managers

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