Dec 9, 2020
Ivy Street from Beaufort Street
1900
seen from United States
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seen from United States
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Ivy Street from Beaufort Street
1900
How many faces do you see?
Ivy St - Courting for the morning
Now it is time for Augustralia to provide you with some rock music that is slightly harder and more challenging but totally rewarding and for this we travel back to Hobart as I introduce IVY ST. So after knowing nothing about the music of Tasmania we have managed to throw three different bands your way in under 3 weeks. God, I love this month. Here is a Tasmanian 3 piece post-punk with maybe a little post-rock but all class for you.
How can you not like a song title like 'Nearest Container'? This is the closing track of IVY ST's album of this year, Courting, and possibly one of the least challenging from the album. The thing about this track is just as you are ready for the track to explode, well, it just doesn't. Maybe IVY ST need to think about having the odd part explode in the future. Unresolved tension is no good for anyone, let alone a bunch of post-punks from Hobart. It doesn't really matter because I still like this song and its off-kilter nature. Get your post nature out and whatever post this is.
DECEMBER 4 2013
By WILL COX.
A shorter version of this was originally published over on Broadsheet.
Ivy St.: “A bass player that can actually play bass and sensible drumming, all swimming in a dead sea of guitar and vocals.” - Jonathan McCarthy.
One weekend this December, a dozen or so of Hobart’s brightest (and most together) musicians will descend on Carlton’s John Curtin Hotel, along with a significant number of Melbourners and dedicated Tasmanian ex-pats. They’re converging for the inaugural Hobart + Melbourne = Yeah, a celebration of the diversity of the Hobart music scene and its ongoing, love-hate relationship with Melbourne.
Hobart is not widely known for a unique concentration of fantastic bands. But they exist. They’re focused around only a handful of venues, one or two record shops and a relatively new record label, Rough Skies; often only seen by an audience of friends and other local bands. It’s possible that this lack of attention is about to change.
Heart Beach: "Boy/girl unison vocals laid over a bare bones swoony pop songs. Nuanced and assured. It's fucking great.” - Thomas Hyland.
Hobart + Melbourne = Yeah is an event I want to call a microfestival. Melbourne-based organiser Thomas Hyland tentatively agrees, though he and the other organisers resist calling it any one thing in particular. Initially spurred by a trip to New Zealand’s cult festival Camp A Low Hum, their events have been running on and off in Hobart for years, drawing attention for being held in various lounge rooms and church halls around the city, with punters ferried between venues by carpool. “It was this really fantastic… ‘microfestival’ as you put it,” says Hyland. “It went really well. It wasn’t like a proper festival, it didn’t have the pressures and some of the organisational structures that others have. It felt more organic—and people loved it.”
The whole thing is run by a loose collection of driven Tasmanians with an air of the slacker about them, all closely engaged with the music scene, and all working day jobs to pour money into events like this. Hyland tells me they each put about $50 into a bank account every week for a few months to payroll the events—“It doesn’t feel like a loss,” he shrugs, “we’re just excited to be doing the thing.”
The Native Cats: “Self proclaimed ‘electronic pub-rock’. A croony wordsmith, 8-bit effects and a real live bass player. Effortlessly incredible.” - Hyland.
This is par for the course in the DIY world of Hobart music, where industry help is paltry. “Doing it all yourself, it feels like you’re more involved with the end product,” says Hyland. “You can almost see yourself in it. The more you can do yourself the better.”
Hyland is now a Melbourne resident himself, having made the trip a few years ago with the other members of the band Ivy St. But despite several years and seven hundred kilometres, Hyland says, “I don’t feel like I’ve actually moved because I’m still so interested in it. That and a lot of my friends are there,” he says. “I’m constantly reminded of it, and I want to be. I think the day that I consider myself a Melbourner, I’d probably move back to Hobart.”
Catsuit: “A sludgy shoegaze three-piece that’s unafraid to sing. Angelic downer punk-rock.” - Hyland.
In any given month of the year representatives of Hobart make at least one pilgrimage to Melbourne for shows in the city’s pubs—though usually on a smaller scale. Posters remain on walls and telegraph poles for months after, with lingering band names like Naked, Small Black Lambs and Heart Beach. They edge their way into familiarity for those who keep an eye out for such things and camouflage themselves effortlessly with Melbourne’s own innumerable kids-with-guitars groups. But there’s a darker edge. Hobart bands have the market cornered in the ironic mingling of sharp cynicism and pop hooks, if such a market can be said to exist. Everything that comes off the island sounds like its been dragged breathlessly through the dirt.
Needless to say, they’ve gathered something of a following. Festival joint-organiser Jonathan McCarthy summarises the H + M = Y! ethos as simply “some really good, not necessarily prominent, local bands.”
Treehouse: “A sludgy shoegaze three-piece that can’t sing and don’t want to.” - Hyland.
“The kind of music I always wanted to play. Carefree, in your face, young, high-pitched, exciting music. Whenever I tried to have that carefree party attitude, I always ended up too drunk to play.” - McCarthy.
They are the kings of the understatement. The very name of the festival is a typically ambivalent declaration from the shambolic veneer of Hobart’s tight-knit indie scene—simultaneously blasé and enthusiastic—it is, like everything in that scene, composed of equal amounts ire and enthusiasm. Perhaps deliberately, the name is inconsistently styled both with and without the exclamation point, leaving it characteristically unclear if it’s ‘Yeah…’ or ‘Yeah!’
McCarthy speaks with ceaseless enthusiasm about the line-up for the show and the DIY philosophy. He would have it as ‘Yeah!’ “There’s all this talk that freedom of information in music is killing the industry, but I think the opposite,” he tells me. “You don’t have this situation where you have to go through a manager or a label who hold all the keys. Now, you can be a bad band, email a bunch of people you’ll get a bunch of shows. It’s easy to produce a record. It’s easy to get international notice.”
Hobart’s indie scene has something of a knack for being ‘discovered’. It has, on occasion, been identified as one of the most interesting little music hotspots in the country, if not the world, but as Hyland says, Hobart has something of an underdog complex. “I really don’t think it needs to feel like that. I actually think it’s fantastic. A lot of people do. But still there’s this younger sibling thing going on.”
Terrible Truths: “It was going to be an all-Tasmanian line-up, but that’s not necessarily interesting to someone who doesn’t know these bands. Terrible Truths are a looping sun stroked guitar/drum/bass thingy. Head-bopping and cool as fuck.” - Hyland.
There’s been a steady stream of musicians from Hobart to Melbourne for years—and they don’t always return. McCarthy has lived in Hobart for a decade and has seen it happen. “The relationship with Melbourne is really personal in a lot of ways,” he says. “A lot of your best friends move there. It’s something that everyone has in common from this state.”
“I think there’s a lot of comparable traits about the underground music scenes of Hobart and Melbourne,” says Hyland by way of explanation. “There’s also a lot of things that are very, very different.” Hyland concludes that “there’s a conquering desire. I think if you’re in that scene in Hobart, you tend to know everyone, which is great, but you want to test yourself.”
“And Melbourne’s closest.”
Hobart + Melbourne = Yeah is held at the John Curtin Hotel on December 7.
Peter Escott - Kick to the Leg (Ivy St. cover)
IVY ST & PETER ESCOTT PLAY EACH OTHER'S SONGS
For a bit of fun, last year we recorded a cover of Peter Escott's 'A Way Out of Your Time' to be released as part of a split covers release. You can download both tracks over here. You really, really should take a listen to Peter's version 'Kick to the Leg'.
Ivy St. / Tape/Off 2012.04.20 Victoria Hotel Brunswick
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