It’s a small world after all
One of my favorite bands of recent years has been Australian band Ninetynine, led by ex-Sleater-Kinney drummer Laura Macfarlane. I found their first two albums some years back, but had no luck finding more recent releases here in America. So last week, feeling like maybe I could actually spend a few bucks on records for a change, I went looking for the missing records. I couldn’t find a single source that had more than one of the three albums. Insound in NYC had one, Stickfigure Distro in Atlanta had another, and Chaos Music in Melbourne, Australia, had the most recent record, which the band’s label says is already deleted. So I placed orders at each. New York City and Melbourne must be about the same distance from New Jersey, because the orders from Insound and Chaos, placed on the same day, showed up in my mailbox on the same day, five days after ordering. Five days from the other side of the world; formidable. The world is getting smaller; even atoms take less time to travel than they used to, let alone bits.
The albums are great, for the most part. Ninetynine has become more of a band than it was for the first two albums, which is good musically, but not so good when the other band members sing. In particular, the momentum on The Process comes to a screeching halt when drummer Cameron Potts takes his two lead vocals. Pity, because it’s a really kick-ass record up to that point. I gather its the first one they’ve recorded in a real studio, and it sounds excellent. You can sample the title track in a great video on the band’s site, made up of what appears to be 1960s-vintage Super 8 film from China, southeast Asia and northern Africa.
Another of my recent faves, Winnipeg-based band Nathan, has some great news on their site; they’ve been signed to Nettwerk Records, which means their next album, to be released in May, will be coming out in the U.S. and U.K. in addition to Canada. That should make it a bit easier to get than the first one was. Maybe they’ll get some promotion, too. They got a fair amount of press within Canada for the first album, but I didn’t see anything here in the U.S. about them.
Posted at 10:50 PM