Muss Blues at Repressed

 The new Hot Palms compilation CD Muss Blues: Songs & Instrumentals, 2012-14 is available from Repressed Records in Sydney, as well as Franks Wild Years in Thirroul and Music Farmers in Wollongong.  Mitch from Repressed wrote some words about the release below. If you can't make it to one of these shops, buy it on BANDCAMP

Towards the end of high school someone showed me Emma Russack’s debut album on Spunk Records; a collection of songs that struck me for their honesty, bluntness, and their crystalline lead guitar lines played by this blonde mop-haired guy called Alec Marshall. I learnt those guitar parts by heart (and cribbed them in basically every band I’ve played in since) while starting to link together this constellation of artists playing in Melbourne and beyond: Soda Eaves, The Ocean Party and associated side projects (eg. Ciggie Witch), the splinter groups and solo projects of The Middle East (namely Stolen Violin and Rohin Jones’ solo material etc).

With each new link in this constellation came another reminder that this group called Hot Palms provided some sort of connective tissue between them. Although living in Sydney meant that I missed out on basically every release of theirs and was often relying on listening to Bandcamp streams to get an idea of what they were about.

This new collection of released songs and instrumentals finally gives an overview of their released output. Initially led by the duo of Marshall and Russack with a loose band of drop in drop out collaborators from this world before Marshall took over the reins on his own, Muss Blues CD captures everything from the open-ended and poetic songs sung by Russack (including a Pip Proud cover and others that would wind up on Soda Eaves’ debut album) to dreamy and drifting instrumental meditations that dip into the psychedelic and lightly dubby in a direct pre-cursor to Marshall’s later Blue Divers project.

Abstract music that draws upon rock traditions but splinters it (some would say, post-rock, but that comes with a lot of annoying baggage!), for fans of Primitive Motion, Tenniscoats, Wilson Tanner, Nagisa Ni Te, and Love Chants!
-Mitch

Comes with great little zine-liner notes from the one and only Nathan Roche!