Rock Indie

This week’s PBS Feature Album is Little Rope by American rockers Sleater-Kinney.

Little Rope is one of the finest, most delicately layered records in the band’s nearly 30-year career. To call the album flawless feels like an insult to its intent – it careens headfirst into flaw, into brokenness, a meditation on what living in a world of perpetual crisis has done to us, and what we do to the world in return.

This week’s PBS Feature Album is Anywhere Here by instrumental psych jam band COMETS.

COMETS are back with another seemingly effortless number in Anywhere Here. It was recorded in a similar fashion to Rain Faces, out at Ghostriter, but this time the band sent word to a few friends to throw some sounds over the top and see what happened.

Naarm-based musician Lewis Coleman's latest offering Offline is a collection of songs grounded in a desire to generate a current within stagnant and hopeless waters. It marks a significant departure from Colemans' previous, more brooding and introverted record Method of Places, and as he leans into a more confident, outward-facing aspect of himself, so too does Offline. It’s music replete with playful arrangements and kinetic opportunity and, as Coleman states, “songs that are hot, warm, saturated and fun”.

It may come as no surprise that at PBS we passionately believe in music as a moral law. It is because, as Plato wrote all these centuries ago, music ‘gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.’  

If music is where one finds what is good in the world, then it is our moral duty to support the good work of our all-too-human music makers. In a world that is becoming increasingly inundated with artificial creations, we find ourselves more committed to celebrating human ingenuity than ever before.