#ben salter

[lottalovin]

[dougwallen]

Ben Salter review for The Australian

[horseypope-blog]

Listening to Ben Salter - Back yourself Not much to it, so it either works or falls on its face. 6/10

[13thfloornz]

Ben Salter Returns To Aotearoa This February

Ben Salter Returns To Aotearoa This February

Ben Salter’s love affair with Aotearoa continues this summer with his third trip over the ditch in four years. (more…)

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[undertheradarnz]

Ben Salter and Dan Kelly Announce Nationwide Tour Australian solo artists Ben Salter and Dan Kelly are pairing up to cross the ditch for a nine-date tour of New Zealand kicking off this Wednesday. For his part Salter (who has played with The Gin Club, The Young Liberals, Giants Of Science) will be ... read more: http://www.undertheradar.co.nz/news/11369/Ben-Salter-and-Dan-Kelly-Announce-Nationwide-Tour.utr

[axver]

Ben Salter - 2016-02-12, Corner Hotel, Richmond, VIC

You can’t quite read it fully, but Ben’s wearing a great shirt, “I am making noise to end violence against women”:

Yep, that’s Seja Vogel on keys (I wish she’d busted out “I’ll Get to You”, one of the best Aussie songs of the last ten years):

Brief review: Ben Salter made some good discussion with the audience. It’s safe to say he achieved a big dream in supporting Built to Spill, based on his speech about how much Perfect From Now On meant to him. He also joked about what to call his currently nameless backing band : he had considered “The Pre-Christians” but discarded it as too pretentious, and one of the other band members reminded him the original name was “Hot Piss” – but he didn’t think “Ben Salter’s Hot Piss” would’ve gone down too well. As for the set itself? It took me a couple of songs to warm up to it, but from a track introduced as “Dark Forces” I found myself tapping my foot to his reasonably atmospheric, sometimes bluesy rock.

[listening-through-the-lens]

Melbourne Zoo Twilight Concerts 2016

Melbourne Zoo Twilight Concerts 2016

The Melbourne Zoo has announced another season of twilight concerts for this coming summer.

(more…)

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[reallygoodpartsofsongs]

The part where his voice lifts in the second chorus and he sings, “I’m gonna take off, I’ll hit the road one night” | Appears 02:52

There’s something so comforting about how Ben Salter delivers his musings. It’s impossibly earnest, making you feel deeply connected to music that demands you to actually feel stuff. Like, ugh. I am feeling a lot of things from this. It’s hard not to feel things when someone is this sincere though. It’s like when someone who really loves folk music is telling you about it for ages, you’re not really into folk music but because they are, you are just really interested in their feelings about folk music. It’s kind of like that.

The lyric may seem so obvious and almost cliche. Or at least it does to me. The amount of times I’ve thought this lyric borders on insane. Surely it’s a thought you’ve had too? Right? Lying awake in bed, overwhelmed by problems, and you think “fuck this, I just wanna run away from all my problems”. Normal bed thinking stuff. Or maybe me and Ben Salter are just really on the same wave-length in terms of mental problems.

The first time he delivers this lyric, you feel it a little bit. But the second time, when his voice lifts into an almost-yell and is tinged with hopelessness - you really feel it. It’s a gut punch. A confirmation of those feelings you’ve been having, and a reminder that you’re not the only idiot feeling like this. It’s comforting in its desperation.

His voice doesn’t work in isolation though; it’s carried by the steady rhythm beneath. The plodding bass, those galactic keys, they work to create a strange sense of loneliness and otherness. People love to say that guitars are dead. But sometimes you forget the feelings that acoustic guitar, matched with appropriate musical friends, can give you. Timeless and emotional, just as powerful music should be.